General Mladić: The Defender of Serbs from Radical Islam

The death of General Ratko Mladić in the prison hospital of the Hague Tribunal is not just news about the passing of one man. It marks the end of a chapter in which the fate of the Christian population in the Balkans and the security future of Europe itself were being decided.

To understand the role of General Mladić, one must start from the ideological and historical context. As early as 1990, the then leader of the SDA, Alija Izetbegović, openly promoted the vision of an Islamic state and society in his book The Islamic Declaration, in which Islam would have a dominant role. For the Serbian people in BiH, that message was not abstract. The memory of the genocide that Serbs suffered at the hands of Bosnian Muslims during World War II — in Jasenovac, Prijedor, Kozara, and throughout Podrinje — was still alive.

Photo: Reuters

When the SFRY collapsed in 1992, and when the Muslim and Croatian sides, with international support, formed their own national armies, the Serbs in BiH were faced with the same choice: submission or defense. On May 12, 1992, the Assembly of the Serbian People established the Army of Republika Srpska, and appointed Lieutenant General Ratko Mladić as its commander.

The war that followed was seen by Serbs as a defensive one. The 1,200-kilometer front line held by the VRS under General Mladić’s command was not a line of conquest. It was a line of survival for Serbian villages in Podrinje, Romanija, Krajina, and Semberija. These were places where, during 1992 and 1993, the scenario of civilian persecution and killings was repeated.

But the context was broader than Bosnia. Within the ranks of the Army of BiH, the first mujahedin from Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and North Africa appeared as early as 1992. They came with the ideology of global jihad and with the goal of turning Bosnia into a stronghold of radical Islam in the heart of Europe. In such circumstances, halting the advance of the VRS was not just a military decision. It was a political decision made under international pressure.

Had the Army of Republika Srpska been defeated at that time, Bosnia and Herzegovina would very likely have become what Afghanistan was in the 1990s: a breeding ground for radical Islam and an exporter of terrorism to European soil. General Mladić, through his military organization and persistence, prevented that scenario. He preserved Republika Srpska as an entity in which Serbs, Christians, could remain on their land. In doing so, he objectively protected Europe as well from the creation of a jihadist enclave on its borders.

After the war came the process in The Hague. Seven years of trial and a life sentence were handed down to a man who was already seriously ill. Even in the appeals process, the presiding judge, Prisca Matimba Nyambe, issued a dissenting opinion stating that the verdict was based on "constructed assumptions and vague analyses," rather than on solid evidence.

Today, when drawing the final line, history will remember General Ratko Mladić differently from the verdict in The Hague. For the Serbian people, he was the commander who, at the moment of greatest danger, stood at the head of the defense. He defended his people from a repeat of genocide. And he defended Europe from the emergence of a new state in its heart founded on the principles of radical Islam.

His death in captivity, without the right to treatment in Serbia, shows only one thing: that the price he paid for that defense was enormous.