Ratko Mladi, the face of Serbian nationalism in the 1990s and one of the primary architects of the Srebrenica genocide, died in a UN prison in The Hague on August 27, 2026. Evil would be an understatement to describe the military leader who was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of thousands of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) between 1992 and 1995.

A general in the Yugoslav People’s Army, Mladi aimed to create a greater Serbia by consolidating all Serb-majority zones in lands he perceived as historically belonging to Serbs. The Greater Serbia project predated Mladi; it began under the rule of chauvinistic nationalist Serbian president Slobodan Miloševi. It persisted with the establishment of Republika Srpska, a self-proclaimed Serb entity created in January 1992, which became the primary belligerent in the Bosnian War. The region was led by Radovan Karadži, under whose authority Mladi operated and carried out the killing of Bosniaks.

Examining this ideological project, one finds striking parallels between the violence towards Bosniaks 30 years ago and the settler violence happening in Gaza and the occupied West Bank today — although one can argue settler violence has been a feature of Zionism since its founding. The leaders and their apartheid regimes possess uncanny similarities.

Serbian general Ratko Mladic died in prison, convicted and condemned at The Hague for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Another man accused of and wanted by the International Criminal Court for similar crimes in Palestine, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, however, continues to roam free, though the similarities between the two are uncanny…

THE GENOCIDAL PLAYBOOK

In much the same way that Mladi planned to form an enlarged Serbian state, comprising Serb-populated areas of Croatia and Bosnia and all of Kosovo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attempted to push the Zionist idea of a Greater Israel — a Jewish state that encompasses modern-day Israel, all of the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan and parts of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The ultra-nationalist Zionist project holds that it is the biblical birthright of Jews to establish a Jewish homeland.

In both cases, territorial expansion is framed as the restoring of an imagined historic birthright. Drawing on long-standing enmity toward the region’s Ottoman Muslim past, Mladi instilled in Serbs an irrational fear of Muslims, claiming that a larger Muslim population would mean the establishment of a holy Islamic land. In the same manner, Netanyahu’s atrocities against Palestinians have garnered support at home by casting an entire religious population as an existential enemy.

During the Yugoslav wars (1991-2001), stories of rape, torture and the expulsion of thousands of non-Serbs from large areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina were rampant. A similar dynamic plays out in Palestinian territories every day, where targeted killings, dispossession and forced evictions are routinely carried out.

No heed is paid to international court rulings, ceasefires and humanitarian directives. Despite UN directives, the Israeli military has bombarded the civilian population of Palestine in hospitals, medical facilities and schools. In February 2024, Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians queuing for food aid — one of many such incidents — in violation of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) order from the previous month requiring humanitarian access to Gaza.

During a 2014 hearing against him at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Mladi refused to recognise the court, denying their legitimacy to try him, because he saw them as a political instrument of the powers that had defeated Serbia.

Netanyahu’s response to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants against him follows a similar move: before the warrant was issued, Israel formally challenged the ICC’s jurisdiction, arguing the court had no authority over Israeli nationals, since Israel isn’t a Rome Statute member state.

THE MACHINERY BEHIND THE MEN

Although a large part of the West has failed to denounce Netanyahu’s actions as carrying genocidal intent, Mladi, on the other hand, was convicted by the ICTY in 2017. Germany, Israel’s staunchest defender today, ironically applied the broadest legal definition of genocide when its local court convicted another Bosnian Serb, paramilitary soldier Nikola Jorgi, in 1997.

Over the years, Ratko Mladi came to be known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” — a label that is now contested by scholars and historians on the premise that it individualises blame and erases the role of the military apparatus that supported his crimes. Indeed, an undeniable part of the legacy of such leaders is the vast military infrastructure surrounding them.

Mladi could not have committed all the war crimes alone. He had an army of people who supported his decisions and followed his orders. And for a significant share of the Serbian population today, Mladi is still revered as a war hero. At his funeral, he received all the military and state honours. Fans of at least two Serbian football clubs, including Red Star Belgrade, held banners and chanted slogans in his favour.

Similarly, Netanyahu’s cabinet of ministers and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have been instrumental in fulfilling his nefarious goals of mass-murdering the civilian population of Gaza and the West Bank. Figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have been central to Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign, as they openly advocate for annexation and the erasure of Palestinian statehood.

WEAPONISING THE NARRATIVE

The use of media to promote propaganda and construct hyper-nationalist narratives also emerges as a common thread between the two eras.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Serb nationalist media revived and exaggerated historical atrocity narratives from the Ottoman era to paint Muslims as inherently violent toward Serbs, which helped justify what followed. The Ottoman Empire, which had controlled much of former Yugoslavia, Southeastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa, had profoundly shaped the culture of the Balkan nations.

To build a heightened sense of national identity and portray Bosniaks as other/alien, the media portrayed the Ottoman period as a dystopian era. When the genocide of Bosniaks culminated in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, Mladi famously said that their “revenge on the Turks” had been taken. This happened after thousands of Bosniaks, who had gathered in the mountain village of Srebrenica under UN protection, were ordered to be killed by the ruthless Mladi. It resulted in the murder of over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys — the deadliest massacre in Europe since World War II.

In today’s AI-powered era, where propaganda has taken new forms, different forms of media representations are being leveraged to draw support for the settler-colonial state of Israel. Israeli ministers have especially anchored their election campaigns on AI-generated videos of suffering Palestinian prisoners and packaged their misery as a political achievement.

When he was finally convicted of war crimes at The Hague, Mladi was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017. On the other hand, despite arrest warrants being issued for Netanyahu, he is welcomed by the premiers of European nations and, less surprisingly, remains the beloved leader of the world’s hegemon, the United States.

Indeed, the capitalist West was quick to label Mladi’s atrocities — committed under a communist government — as genocide, yet has been far more hesitant to apply the same term to the war crimes committed against Palestinians.

The writer recently completed her postgraduation from the Free University of Berlin in Germany.
She can be reached at zoyanazir56@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, September 13th, 2026