By Daria Sito-Sucic
SARAJEVO, Sept 8 (Reuters) – Bosnia expelled two Serbian diplomats on Tuesday and suspended plans to sign a regional cooperation accord in protest over Belgrade’s decision to hold a lavish public funeral for former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic.
Mladic died on August 27 in The Hague, where he had been serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica.
Thousands of people attended his funeral in Belgrade on Monday, in a demonstration of how Mladic remains revered among many in Serbia and Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic. Government officials were among the mourners at the funeral, which was presided over by the head of Serbia’s Orthodox Church.
Bosnia’s Foreign Minister Elmedin Konakovic said two people at Serbia’s embassy in Sarajevo, military attache Milan Dulanovic and intelligence adviser Danko Maksimovic, had 48 hours to leave the country. He did not elaborate.
Konakovic said Bosnia would also abstain from signing a memorandum on good neighbourly relations and cooperation of the Western Balkan countries, which is due to be signed in Montenegro on October 1.
“With such a Serbia we will not sign documents on good neighbourly relations,” he told a press conference, adding that Serbia had “crossed all red lines” with its handling of Mladic’s death and funeral.
Konakovic said on Monday that Bosnia would withdraw most staff from its embassy in Belgrade in protest at Serbia’s handling of Mladic’s funeral.
On Tuesday, Konakovic criticised a lack of response from the Serbian government after supporters displayed a gigantic picture of Mladic at a soccer match in Belgrade at the weekend, with his finger pointing “Direction Potocari,” the site of the 1995 massacre near the town of Srebrenica.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described on Tuesday the images of Mladic’s funeral as “shocking” and said the presence of some senior Serbian officials there “demonstrate a failure to confront a dark chapter in Europe’s recent history” and could undermine Belgrade’s plans to join the EU.
In New York, U.N. Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Chaloka Beyani said he was “following with concern the public expressions of genocide denial and glorification of convicted war criminal, the deceased Ratko Mladic, in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
“The large-scale public commemoration of Mladić, including the participation of political figures and official ceremonial elements, is both deeply inappropriate and profoundly disturbing,” he said in a statement.
Beyani said the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice had “determined conclusively that a genocide was committed in Srebrenica in 1995.”
He noted that Mladic was convicted by the ICTY in 2017 of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence upheld on appeal in 2021.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic in Sarajevo and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Editing by Gareth Jones and Mark Porter)
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