Ratko Mladić, the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army who became known around the world as the “Butcher of Srebrenica" and was considered one of the most notorious war criminals since World War II, has died at the age of 83 while serving a life sentence at the United Nations detention facility in The Hague.
Mladić commanded the Bosnian Serb Army during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War and was one of those chiefly responsible for the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, in which more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered within a matter of days, in what international courts recognized as the worst act of genocide committed in Europe since the Holocaust. He was also convicted of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Muslims and Croats during the war.
Following the end of the war, Mladić managed to evade capture for 16 years while wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He was arrested in Serbia in 2011 and extradited to The Hague. In 2017, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. His appeal was rejected in 2021, making the sentence final.
In recent years, his health deteriorated after he suffered several strokes and heart attacks. His family repeatedly sought his release on humanitarian grounds so that he could receive treatment in Serbia, but their requests were rejected by the court, which ruled that he was receiving adequate medical care at the UN detention facility.