‘The butcher may be gone, but to many he is a hero’: victims condemn glorification of Mladić

Architect of Srebrenica genocide is dead but those scarred by his atrocities say his ideology is still shockingly pervasive

T o most of the world, he was and will always be the “Butcher of Bosnia”, a grim epithet but one that still fails to fully convey the evil and horror inflicted on its people by Gen Ratko Mladić, who died in prison on Thursday .

As commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, Mladić was responsible for the killing of an estimated 100,000 men, women and children during the savage breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He was most notoriously the architect of ethnic cleansing and the genocide at Srebrenica in which at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered.

Today, 31 years after the Dayton agreement ended the Bosnian conflict and the 1,425-day siege of Sarajevo – the longest in modern warfare – Mladić is dead, but his legacy still divides the Balkans.

Džemil Hodžić was 12 when his brother Amel, 16, was killed by a sniper while playing tennis in Sarajevo in May 1995. “As kids, Mladić was a kind of horror creature. Everyone knew him and his name. We were very well aware that he was responsible for our situation and the suffering we were going through,” Hodžić, now 43 and founder of the Sniper Alley photo project in Sarajevo, told the Guardian.

“Perhaps we were too young to comprehend everything, but children living through the Sarajevo siege knew the shootings by snipers, the shelling of our schools, the killing of our friends and family … all of that was down to him.”

Zoran Kusovać, a Croatian journalist and geopolitical analyst who reported from the Balkan wars, met Mladić several times, once on a mountain plateau overlooking Sarajevo where Bosnian Serb forces surrounding the city had installed heavy artillery. During the siege of the Bosnian capital they killed more than 11,000 people, including 2,000 children, in a terrifying daily campaign of shelling, bombing and sniping.

“We were up on the mountain overlooking the city and Mladić said to me: ‘Look, I have Sarajevo in the palm of my hand. I can either destroy it or take it whenever I want,’” Kusovać said.

“He was a bully and nobody, not even his superiors, had the guts to tell him he was wrong. He also kept meticulous notes of what he did … he wrote everything down with the absolute confidence of a man who believed he would never be held responsible for it.”

As well as those killed in Bosnia in the 1992-94 conflict, 20,000-50,000 women and girls were raped and 2.7 million people were displaced.

Srebrenica is remembered as one of the most shameful failures of the international community. The Bosnian town, its mainly Muslim population swollen by refugees, was declared a UN “safe haven” and residents were ordered to hand over all weapons to international peacekeepers.

The UN then abandoned Srebrenica to a bloody fate.