Men age and die, but in the Balkans, time stands still and is stuck. General Ratko Mladić, who died in prison in The Hague on Thursday aged 84, remains a hero in the Republika Srpska statelet – the Serbian half of dismembered Bosnia that he carved out with a hurricane of violence between 1992 and 1995 – and in Serbia itself.
Too many Serbs in whose name Mladić carried out his mass murder of other ethnicities – mainly Muslim Bošniak and Roman Catholic Croats – adore him and mourn his passing.
