Ratko Mladić

The first is that the student movement themselves were all over the map.

They covered the full spectrum of views about Ratko Mladic and the war, from full-on nationalists who deny there were any war crimes to people who are supportive of the ICTY and reconciliation and everything in between.

So it really is a very heterogeneous opposition movement that was focused on the things that they agreed on rather than what they disagreed on.

The other thing that is interesting is that this is really ancient history for a lot of the people in the student movement.

He was somebody from the right who had made the most disgusting statements ever.

as Milosevic, his propaganda chief, and the guy that was almost working as your opposite number during the Kosovo campaign, who was on record saying that he thought that, I think it was that 100 Bosnians should die for every Serb, which he later said was just a figure of speech, whose government, although he kept a little distance, but not much distance from it, essentially took back Ratko Mladic, the war criminal who was responsible for the Srebrenica genocide to something pretty close to a state funeral when he returned a few weeks ago.

A man who dominated the media so that when we were in Serbia doing that election, someone from the British embassy had basically got themselves caught up in a horrible situation in a provincial town.

And the control that Vucic's team seemed to be able to have over the media and the way that they were able to replay the bits of our interview that seemed positive to him right across the national media were unbelievable.

First of all, with the fall of the canopy, the focus was the corruption and the responsibility of the people in power who dealt with this project, who killed practically the 16 people under this canopy.

This, from the beginning, I think that the students understood that this is not the question, do we want socialism or we want something else, or we want Ratko Mladic.

This was simply the matter that all our lives are suddenly under this canopy.

I think that the oppositional leaders, even though some of them are good in general, were largely damaged by the manipulation of the pro-regime media, so they really, really had a bad reputation, and it was simply not possible to have them with the student movement.

You're listening to Randal Wallace Presents, formerly Bridging the Political Gap, the number one American history podcast of 2024 by feedspot.com.

[metal door closing] On July 11th, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladić began a systematic killing of nearly 10,000 Bosnian Muslim, sometimes referred to as Bosniaks, men and boys in the area of Srebrenica, a small town located about halfway between the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and the Serbian capital of Belgrade.

Widespread ethnic violence in what had been Yugoslavia led to the outbreak of the largest armed conflict in Europe since the end of World War II, since eclipsed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The horrific images beamed worldwide on news programs, newspapers, and magazines shocked the world, bringing back memories of the Holocaust and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, which began in the same region.

Little did they know this decision would ignite a powder keg of ethnic tensions.

The response was swift and violent.

Bosnian Serb forces, backed by the JNA and led by the controversial duo of Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić, seized key territories.

Their ultimate goal, the creation of a greater Serbia by annexing predominantly Serb areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina and linking them to Serbia proper.

Mm

... position is on, you know, the recent funeral of the genocidaire Ratko Mladić.

What their position is on the broader sort of question of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the origins of the RS and the context of the aggression and genocide of Bosnia.

So this is, I think this is in many ways indicative of, of a, of a much bigger problem that you're gesturing at, which is that Serbia has not gone through the kind of catharsis that other societies which have had, shall we say, similar trajectories in their histories have gone through.

Um, in this framework, the funeral of, uh, of Mladić, which is, uh, uh, confirmed, uh, genocidal with the Srebrenica massacre, is already sending a message that violence can return and is justified in the region.

Yeah, I mean, look, um, I think what we saw in the context of the Mladić funeral in Serbia is deeply troubling for a number of reasons.

The first, uh, and the one that's sort of directly related to what we've been speaking about here, is that the Serbian state remains institutionally wedded to the political project of Ratko Mladić, of Radovan Karadžić, of Slobodan Milošević, right? This goes back to what I was saying as Vučić, the ultra-nationalist.

This is, this is the same cabal.