Croatian President Says Mladic State Funeral Would Close Door to EU For Serbia

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Aug. 31 that if Serbia holds a state funeral for convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic—who died last week—it would close the doors to Belgrade joining the European Union.

Mladic was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 after being convicted of genocide at Srebrenica— where 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed—crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed during Bosnia’s 1992–95 war.

He died in United Nations custody in The Hague, Netherlands, on Aug. 27, at age 83.

On Aug. 28, Serbian Justice Minister Nenad Vujic suggested Mladic would be offered a state funeral.

“It is certain that General Mladic will receive all the military and state honors to which he is entitled, as far as the state is concerned,” Vujic told Serbia’s K1 broadcaster.

Plenkovic, speaking on the sidelines of the Bled Strategic Forum in Slovenia on Aug. 31, said he understood Serbia had not made a final decision about the Mladic funeral, but he said if they gave him full state honors it would not help Belgrade’s chances of joining the EU, of which Croatia is already a member.

“It is as if they are closing the doors to the European Union for themselves,” Plenkovic said, according to Croatia’s state-owned HRT media outlet.

As well as the crimes he committed against Bosnia’s Muslim population, Mladic was also responsible for crimes against Bosnian Croats and was the commander in Knin, a Bosnian Serb-majority town in Croatia which tried to secede.

EU Commissioner Warns Belgrade

On Sept. 1, EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos, speaking at the same summit in Slovenia, also warned Serbia against honoring Mladic.

“The glorification of war criminals has no place … in an EU member country, nor in a candidate country,” Kos said, according to German news agency DPA. “I hope that the government in Belgrade knows what is at stake.”

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, criticized the war crimes court on Aug. 28 ‌for refusing a request from Mladic last month to allow him to be released so he could die in Serbia.

“We have seen now that The Hague wanted Mladic’s death behind bars,” Vucic said. “They did not allow the general to die in Serbia, where he ‌wanted to die. ⁠That is uncivilized behavior, without precedent or justification.”

Vucic, a former nationalist who served as a ⁠minister under former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic—who died of a heart attack in March 2006 before a ruling in his genocide trial—has sought to join the EU but has maintained good relations with both Russia and China.

Women watch a live broadcast from the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, as former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic (pictured) is found guilty of war crimes, in Potocari, near Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, on June 8, 2021. Darko Bandic/AP

He also said the U.N. authorities in The Hague had not provided any information on when the body would be returned to Belgrade.

“We have received nothing from The Hague,” Vucic told reporters, saying the Serbian government wanted to arrange a dignified burial for ⁠Mladic.

On Aug. 20, Vucic called a snap election for October.

Mladic Compared to Hitler

U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) has added his voice to the outrage in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina about Mladic potentially being honored by Serbia.

“It is unconscionable that Vucic should plan to bury war criminal Mladic with honors,” Wilson wrote in an Aug. 31 post on X. “This is like Germany giving state honors to Hitler.”

Yugoslavia, a socialist state made up of multiple ethnicities, collapsed during the 1990s when first Slovenia and then Croatia broke away to become independent nations.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is a patchwork of ethnic Serbs, Croats, and Bosniak Muslims, was consumed by civil war between 1992 and 1995, during which Mladic, the military leader, and his political ally Radovan Karadzic committed ethnic cleansing, particularly against the Bosniaks.

The war killed 100,000 people on all sides and was brought to an end by the Dayton peace accords, which divided the country into the ethnic Serb Republic—Republika Srpska—and a Muslim-Croat-populated Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Slovenia and Croatia joined the EU in 2004 and 2013 respectively, and four other former Yugoslav republics have been granted EU candidate status—Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia—as well as Kosovo, which did not exist as a separate state in the 1990s.

In December 2025, after the Western Balkans summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised the region’s economic potential and said that six billion euros had been invested through EU grants.

“These investments are making the region more competitive and better connected to our Single Market,” von der Leyen said in a statement.

“Take AI: we are setting up a network of AI Factories across the EU, and we are opening them to the Western Balkans, with AI Factory Antennas in Serbia and North Macedonia.”

But eight EU countries—Croatia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands—are officially opposed to Serbia joining the bloc.

Reuters contributed to this report.