Timeline: Life of Ratko Mladic, general turned ‘Butcher of Bosnia’

Ratko Mladic, a war criminal convicted for his role in orchestrating the Srebrenica Genocide in 1995 – the first genocide on European soil since the second world war – died in prison in The Hague at the age of 84.

⁠He had been serving a life sentence for ‌genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity – crimes whose “seriousness” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres restated after his death on Thursday.

“The Secretary-General stands in solidarity with the victims, survivors and ⁠their families who suffered the crimes for which Mr Mladic was found guilty … [and] reiterates his call on all ‌those in position of power to refrain from denying the seriousness of the crimes that have been adjudicated,” Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.

On Friday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic accused the UN war crimes court of “uncivilised behaviour” for not allowing Mladic early release, which would have seen him die in Serbia. Earlier this year, Belgrade requested he be allowed to receive medical treatment outside prison, saying his health condition was “serious”.

Known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, Mladic was one of the most notorious military commanders of the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Under his command, Bosnian Serb forces seized Srebrenica, near the Serbian border, in July 1995, despite the UN declaring the municipality a “safe area”. In the following days, the forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys.

Here is a timeline of the major events of Mladic’s life, leading up to his death in detention this week:

Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb, was born in March 1942 in the village of Bozanovici in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina). His father was a member of a communist-led resistance to the Axis powers in World War II.

In 1966, Mladic married Bosiljka Jedic and later had two children, Darko and Ana.