Srebrenica war criminal Ratko Mladić dies in The Hague

Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general convicted of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, has died aged 84 in the United Nations detention unit in The Hague, a UN official has confirmed.

It was Mladić’s forces who overran Srebrenica – a UN “safe area” guarded by lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers known as Dutchbat – and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in July 1995. It was the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War.

Mladić had been held in the UN detention unit in Scheveningen since his arrest in Serbia in 2011, after 16 years on the run. Known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, he had been in poor health for years and reportedly suffered another stroke over the summer.

An international tribunal convicted him in 2017 of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and jailed him for life; the verdict was upheld on appeal in 2021. He showed no remorse during his trial.

His death comes days after the tribunal rejected a request from his defence team, backed by the Serbian government, to release him on humanitarian grounds so he could spend his final days in Serbia.

Dutch guilt and apologies
For the Netherlands, the memory of Srebrenica is an open wound. Dutchbat’s failure to protect the victims led to a 2002 inquiry whose findings pushed the government at the time to resign, and to years of court action by survivors against the state.

Prime minister Mark Rutte apologised to Dutchbat veterans in 2022, saying they had been sent on an impossible mission and unfairly blamed for the killings. The government also repeated its “deepest apologies” to survivors in 2025.

Thousands gathered in Srebrenica to mark 30 years since the genocide last year. In the Netherlands, campaigners are still pressing for a national monument to the victims in The Hague.