Murals And Memories: How Bosnian Serbs Revere War Criminal Mladic

The triumphant face of war criminal Ratko Mladic stares out of a roadside mural in his hometown with a caption hailing him simply as a "hero" -- a view still shared by most Bosnian Serbs

Kalinovik, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 4 (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Jun, 2021 ) :The triumphant face of war criminal Ratko Mladic stares out of a roadside mural in his hometown with a caption hailing him simply as a "hero" -- a view still shared by most Bosnian Serbs.

Mladic, who will hear the decision of his final appeal against his conviction next Tuesday, prosecuted Bosnia's 1992-1995 civil war with ferocity against civilians and soldiers alike.

A tribunal based in The Hague jailed the 78-year-old former general for life in 2017 for war crimes including the 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, the only incident in the war classed as genocide.

But Radosav Zmukic, head of a local veterans' group in Mladic's hometown of Kalinovik, believes that this judgment could not be further from the truth.

"Everyone is proud that he is from here," Zmukic says, recalling that he had met Mladic two or three times during the 1992-1995 war and was impressed by his "boldness".

"Crimes were committed by all sides. But such a soldier was not capable of ordering the killing of people, especially not civilians," Zmukic tells AFP from his small dark office in the town hall.

For the Muslim survivors, the continued denial of wartime atrocities, embodied in the hero-worship of men like Mladic, is the main obstacle in the path to reconciliation in a country still deeply divided along ethnic lines.