It’s rather appropriate that General Ratko Mladic, the 84-year-old former commander in chief of the Bosnian Serb army, ‘Butcher of the Balkans’ died in the same week as Dolly Parton – he was the ultimate Serb hillbilly hero.  

Shortly after his arrest, in the summer of 2011, I drove with my husband through his hometown of Gacko in the rocky hinterlands of Herzegovina. Mladic had finally been arrested, a month earlier, 15 years after the end of the war, by Serb special forces, masked, without insignia, to give them anonymity from possible reprisals from any sentimental Serb loyalties. He put up no resistance when he was arrested – he’d been on the run since 1996, and his Praetorian guard had long retired to their pig farms or were in prison for drugs. 

When I first met Mladic, in 1992, he was high on the fumes from his bloody scourge of eastern Bosnia

When I first met Mladic, in 1992, he was high on the fumes from his bloody scourge of eastern Bosnia

The news was full of Mladic’s blood-soaked domination of the Bosnian war – his future convictions for genocide and crimes against humanity at the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague were hardly in doubt. Yet in Gacko, on a billboard the size of a several buses, was his photograph, azure eyes gazing grimly down, under the banner ‘Nas Heroj! (Our Hero!)’. For the Bosnian Serbs, he was their kind of warlord but had finally been arrested as part of Serbia’s bid to join the EU. The songs about him, however, had started back in the war: Serb turbo-folk singer Roki Vulovic’s Generale Generale (‘You defended our doorstep… far from the mountains of Vietnam’) came out in 1995. And as recently as 2019, the Russian band Spermacum released the song ‘Ratko Mladic’.

I met first Mladic in the summer of 1992 at the Bosnian Serb HQ in Pale, a former Royal Ski resort outside Sarajevo, after a press trip to the concentration camps full of Muslims. Mladic was bulging in his........

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