Hundreds of people marched through the streets of Zvornik, a city in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, chanting the name of Ratko Mladić — the former Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of genocide and war crimes — following his death in custody. Similar scenes were reported in Višegrad and other towns across Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina, where a cult of personality around Mladić has persisted long after his 2017 conviction by an international tribunal.

Mladić commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992–95 Bosnian War, a conflict that left over 100,000 people dead and displaced millions. He was found guilty of orchestrating the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed — the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II. He died in a UN detention facility, having never expressed remorse. Authorities in Belgrade are reported to be preparing a state funeral in his honour, with little organised resistance to the plan emerging within Serbia.

Strikingly, many of those who took part in the Zvornik march were young men who may not even have been born when the war was fought. "This is Zvornik, the city of the mass graves of my people," wrote Camil Durakovic, a Bosniak politician and vice president of Republika Srpska, in a shocked response to footage of the procession. For nationalist and far-right segments of Serbian society, Mladić is cast in an almost mythological light — compared by some of his admirers to medieval Serbian ruler Lazar, who died resisting Ottoman conquest in 1389.

Human rights advocates warn that the glorification reflects a deeper failure of reckoning. Sonja Biserko, one of Serbia's most prominent human rights defenders, says the state is effectively rehabilitating Mladić's role in the Bosnian War, erasing rather than confronting the historical record. Educated, liberal circles in Serbia have long been uncomfortable with such nationalism, but analysts note that civic pushback has weakened significantly since the assassination of reformist Prime Minister Zoran Djindjić in 2003.

The scenes matter well beyond the region's borders. Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a fragile, ethnically divided state, and the open veneration of a man convicted of genocide deepens wounds that have never fully healed. For survivors of the war and the families of victims, the marches and the prospect of a state funeral represent not merely an insult, but a signal that the political conditions which made the atrocities possible have not been dismantled.