Historically, the right of a convicted person’s family to take possession of and bury their remains was not always granted. Some Yugoslav penal institutions during the first decades after the Second World War had a practice that today seems almost grotesque: the death of a prisoner did not necessarily mean the end of their sentence. At prisons in Zenica and Sremska Mitrovica, there were cases where the body of a prisoner who died before completing their sentence was buried in the prison cemetery and not handed over to the family until their sentence was over. As if, through an administrative fiction, even in death they still had to “serve” the remainder of their sentence.
With executed war criminals and perpetrators of mass atrocities, however, we encounter an entirely different logic. Here, it is no longer a matter of symbolically extending punishment beyond death, but rather of what might be called an anti-memorial policy: the state deliberately prevents an identifiable grave so that it cannot become a site of pilgrimage, political cult, heroization, or propaganda. In this sense, the Nuremberg trials and the case of Adolf Eichmann went even further and deliberately eliminated any possibility for a grave to exist.
Nuremberg is the paradigmatic case. Ten leading Nazis sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal were hanged on 16 October 1946. Several hours earlier, Hermann Göring had committed suicide. The bodies of those executed, as well as Göring’s, were subsequently cremated and the ashes scattered so that no burial site remained that could be marked or turned into a Nazi cult site. In Adolf Eichmann’s case, the intention was even more explicit. Following his execution at Ramla Prison on the night of May 31st 1962, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered over the Mediterranean Sea, outside Israeli territorial waters. This didn’t only deny him of a grave; symbolically, Eichmann’s remains were also denied any place within the territory of the state of his victims.
A similar pattern can be seen following the Tokyo Trial. Seven of Japan’s highest-ranking wartime leaders, including wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, were executed on December 23rd 1948. Their bodies were cremated, and the US military took the ashes by plane and scattered them over the Pacific. American documentation shows that this was not simply an improvised solution for a handful of particularly notorious individuals, but part of a broader approach to handling the remains of executed Japanese war criminals.
Perhaps the case of Rudolf Hess demonstrates even more clearly how a grave can become a political site. Hess was not executed; he died in Spandau Prison in 1987 and, in accordance with his family’s wishes, was buried in the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel. Precisely what the Allies had sought to prevent in the case of the Nuremberg convicts happened: his grave became a gathering place and pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. For this reason, in 2011, with the consent of his family, his remains were exhumed and cremated, the gravestone was removed, and his ashes were scattered at sea.
It is easy to see several interconnected reasons behind such practices: preventing the creation of a site of political cult and martyrdom; preventing propaganda gatherings by extremist organisations; denying symbolic space for the subsequent heroization of the perpetrator; and, in some cases, symbolically removing the perpetrator from the territory of the community that suffered from their crimes.
This is fundamentally different from the logic encountered in the post-war prisons of Zenica and Sremska Mitrovica. There, the dead body, at least within an administrative fiction, still belonged to the penal system because the sentence had not formally expired. In the cases of Nuremberg, Eichmann, or Tojo, punishment ends with death. What follows is not its continuation, but a politics of memory. The analogy with the Roman damnatio memoriae readily comes to mind, although it should be used with caution.
Yugoslav history is not without such examples either. The exact location of the remains of Dragoljub Draža Mihailović has never been reliably established. A commission formed by the Serbian government concluded that he was most likely executed and initially buried near the former prison on Ada Ciganlija, but even after years of investigation his remains were not located. Milan Nedić’s case is different: he never stood trial but, according to the official account, committed suicide in detention in February 1946. His grave is also unknown. A former OZNA officer testified that Nedić was secretly buried at Belgrade’s Central Cemetery, but cemetery records didn’t confirm this.
Even more illustrative is the case of three members of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood belonging to the so-called Bugojno Group, which entered Yugoslavia from abroad in 1972 with the aim of launching an armed uprising and carrying out terrorist attacks. Thirteen members of the Yugoslav People’s Army, police, and Territorial Defence were killed in clashes with the group. Four members of the group were captured and brought to trial; three were sentenced to death and executed by firing squad on March 17th 1973, while Ludvig Pavlović’s death sentence was commuted to a lengthy prison term. Following the executions, the bodies were buried, but the terrain was arranged so that no visible traces of either the executions or the burials remained. Here, therefore, it was not merely a matter of denying the dead a monument. The grave site itself was deliberately rendered unrecognisable.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and its successor, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, did not establish any special protocol for handling the remains of persons finally convicted of genocide and other grave international crimes. Ratko Mladić will therefore, according to the announced programme, be buried on September 7th at Topčider Cemetery in Belgrade, while a commemoration at the Serbian Armed Forces Hall is scheduled for September 5th.
Comparing this with Nuremberg, Eichmann, or Tojo does not mean that Serbia today should cremate Ratko Mladić’s body and scatter his ashes over the sea. Nor should a democratic state resort to the secret burial practices used by socialist Yugoslavia. A family has the right to bury its dead. The problem is not the family burial. The problem arises when the private funeral of a person convicted of war crimes turns into a public ceremony, particularly when an institution carrying the symbolic authority of the state and its armed forces is made available for his commemoration.
Ratko Mladić did not die as an unconvicted general and military commander whose historical role remains for posterity to judge. He died as a man convicted of committing genocide in Srebrenica, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. In Srebrenica in July 1995, more than eight thousand Bosniak men and boys were killed. The bodies of many victims were subsequently moved by bulldozers from primary to secondary graves, and from secondary to tertiary graves, in order to conceal evidence of the crimes; as a result, the remains of some individuals were found at several different locations. It is precisely for this reason that the contrast could hardly be more brutal, and it has already been recognised as such in our public discourse. The victims ended up in mass graves, without names and without graves of their own, and their remains were subsequently moved in order to conceal what had been done to them. On the other hand, a man convicted of genocide will be buried in a family grave, preceded by honours and public commemoration at the Serbian Armed Forces Hall.
We should be precise: the mere fact that the commemoration is being held at the Armed Forces Hall does not (at least for now) mean that it is being organised by the Serbian Armed Forces, nor that Mladić will receive formal state military honours. But the very choice of venue carries symbolic weight that cannot be neutralised by an administrative explanation of who booked the hall and under what conditions. The Armed Forces Hall is not a wedding venue. Its name, its history, and its institutional affiliation give every event held there a certain public significance.
It is therefore legitimate to ask: what exactly is being commemorated at the Serbian Armed Forces Hall? Mladić’s career as an officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army up to 1992? His subsequent role as Commander of the Army of Republika Srpska? Official and unofficial ties between the Bosnian Serb army and the Army of Yugoslavia? Or is the public expected to believe that these two or three biographies can simply be separated by the doors of the hall in which the commemoration will take place?
The question is all the more uncomfortable because the Serbian Armed Forces regard themselves as heirs to a military tradition far older than the wars of the 1990s. With regard to the treatment of prisoners, for example, it is worth recalling that after the Battle of Kolubara in 1914, tens of thousands of Austro-Hungarian soldiers found themselves in Serbian captivity. The treatment of prisoners of war was at the time an important issue for Serbia’s international reputation and was subject to oversight by foreign missions and commissions. A state whose army was incomparably weaker than its enemy proved capable of ensuring respect for the rules of warfare and of treating an enemy who had surrendered with consideration and care.
Eighty years later, after the fall of Srebrenica, captured Bosniak men and boys were not treated as prisoners of war who ceased to be enemy targets once they had fallen into their opponents’ hands. They were systematically separated, detained, taken to execution sites, and killed. The Hague Tribunal finally determined that these events constituted genocide and established Mladić’s criminal responsibility. Mladić himself was fond of the iconography of Serbia’s military tradition. In wartime photographs, he also appeared wearing a stylised šajkača, intended to evoke the image of the Serbian army of the First World War.
Military tradition, however, is not transmitted through a hat. In this case, it is also measured by the way a disarmed and captured enemy is treated. There remains, admittedly, the possibility that Mladić’s cap was meant to invoke a different tradition of the Serbian army – that of the Balkan Wars, during which there were considerably more violations of the laws and customs of war, particularly against the Muslim population of so-called Old Serbia. In the European and Balkan political imagination of the time, the “Orient” was often treated as a space in which the standards governing permissible violence were not the same as in a war against a European army. The rules that were applied far more consistently to Austro-Hungarian prisoners several years later, were therefore not always applied in the same way to the population of the conquered Ottoman territories.
After the war, Mladić spent years hiding from international and domestic justice. In court, he shifted blame onto others for crimes of which he was ultimately convicted. Nevertheless, he remained a hero to a significant part of the Serbian public. That is precisely why the question of his funeral is not entirely a private matter. No one needs to dispute his family’s right to a burial place, a religious funeral service, and mourning in order to ask why a person convicted of genocide is being given a public space in which private grief can turn into a political commemoration. The cemetery belongs to the dead and their families. The Armed Forces Hall belongs to the living and to their state. And through its choice of the spaces in which it commemorates its dead, a state always makes a statement about whom it wishes to remember and how.
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 07.09.2026.