Mladic is Dead, and My Serb Grandfather Was Right About His Fate

“You will answer for this disgrace and make the entire Serbian people bear the blame,” my grandfather said, punctuating the sentence with a curse as he walked out of the house to calm himself down in the yard. On the television screen, Ratko Mladic was handing out sweets to children gathered in Srebrenica as cameras from the wartime Serb television station SRNA filmed him. I could not quite understand what the problem was. I had just turned 15. I had grown up in a Serb family and a predominantly Serb community. Mladic was a hero and a liberator. A source of national pride. Fortunately, I had grown up with a grandfather for whom truth and facts mattered more than any other identity. Especially the national one. At the beginning of the war, my grandfather was subject to military conscription. He did everything he could to avoid taking part in the aggression. We lived in the hills above Sarajevo, and every day and every night we watched shells falling on the city. My grandfather kept repeating that they would be held to account. I did not give it much thought. Not until I turned 20, returned to Sarajevo, enrolled at the Media Plan School of Journalism and saw footage of Eduard Limonov, the Russian poet, and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, firing a machine gun from Zlatiste, near Mount Trebevic. During pauses, they passed a bottle of rakija from hand to hand, sharing it with the soldiers and taking swigs.