There are deaths that close a chapter, and there are deaths that reopen the book. The funeral of Ratko Mladić in Belgrade belonged firmly to the second category. Mladić died as a convicted war criminal, serving a life sentence for genocide and other crimes committed during the Bosnian war. Yet in death he was transformed, for thousands of mourners, into something quite different: a military hero, a Serbian patriot, a man deserving ceremony rather than shame. The spectacle was not merely disturbing. It was politically revealing.
The most poisonous element was not that ordinary people attended. Democracies, unlike dictatorships, cannot legislate grief. Families mourn their dead; societies argue about history; even monsters have relatives and admirers. The real scandal was the presence of senior political figures, including Serbia’s justice minister, at a funeral staged with military honours. When the state lends its dignity to a convicted architect of mass murder, it is no longer simply tolerating historical revisionism. It is participating in it.
That distinction matters. Mladić was not condemned because he lost a war or because his politics became unpopular. He was convicted because a court established his responsibility for some of the gravest crimes committed in Europe since the Second World War. Srebrenica was not a battlefield misunderstanding, a tragic footnote or another episode in the endless Balkan catalogue of competing grievances. It was genocide.
And yet Serbia continues to struggle with the elementary moral arithmetic of the past. The dead are counted according to nationality, while the perpetrators are measured according to political usefulness. History becomes a supermarket in which governments select whichever facts fit the day's shopping list.
This is where Serbia's European ambitions collide with its domestic politics. Joining the European Union is not simply an economic membership card. It is supposed to represent acceptance of a political culture in which courts matter, minorities possess rights, borders are not sacred excuses for aggression, and historical crimes cannot be repackaged as patriotic achievements whenever elections approach.
Brussels can negotiate chapters, regulations and accession benchmarks. It cannot manufacture historical honesty. Ursula von der Leyen was therefore right to describe the scenes as deeply regrettable. But regret is a rather weak word for what happened. Europe has spent decades insisting that the Balkans must confront the ghosts of the 1990s. Every time those ghosts are dressed in uniforms and greeted as heroes, the European project discovers that the past has not disappeared at all. It has merely been waiting for another political procession.
There is also something profoundly cynical about celebrating Mladić now. The general is safely dead. He cannot embarrass anyone with new revelations. He cannot contradict the mythology being constructed around him. He has become politically convenient precisely because he can no longer speak.
The danger is not that Serbia will suddenly become a dictatorship because thousands attended one funeral. The danger is subtler: that democratic institutions slowly become compatible with the glorification of people those institutions have already judged responsible for atrocities.
Europe should not humiliate Serbia or punish an entire population for the sins of its nationalist extremists. But neither should it pretend that membership negotiations can proceed as though this were merely another disagreement over agricultural subsidies or customs regulations.
A country seeking to join a political union built partly from the ruins of Europe's twentieth-century catastrophes must understand one uncomfortable principle: reconciliation begins where hero worship ends.
Mladić's funeral was supposed to bury a man. Instead, it exposed a country still arguing over whether he deserves to be remembered as a criminal or a hero. That argument is not ancient history. It is Serbia's European test.
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