Mladic’s funeral: Were no lessons learned?

Today, thousands gathered in the Serbian capital Belgrade to pay their respects to Ratko Mladic, the head of the Bosnian Serb army, who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Anyone glorifying Mladic is approving mass murder of thousands of innocent people. What should we then make of the Serbian state that organised a funeral with state honours for him? Or of the Serbs from Serbia proper and the Bosnian Serbs who attended it?

Does the glorification, I have been asked, reflect the limits of international justice by showing that international law has failed to stop wars and whatever else can stick with the criminality of war?

First, the highly restricted ability of international justice to teach us anything has been proven by the wars started by the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, to name but two.

With about three decades of international humanitarian law in action at international courts and tribunals from which to learn, they picked up nothing, it seems. Not even that their citizens mostly abhor wars and have no desire to be in them.

Putin’s war was never justified, but he has no qualms about feeding hundreds of thousands of his own people into killing machines to kill blameless Ukrainians. Trump’s wars are no different.

In comparison, the 1990s wars in the Western Balkans were comparatively less significant and historic, as Balkan conflicts usually are.

Lessons may yet come from the Russian, US, Israeli, Iranian and other major conflicts and wars.