Ratko Mladić Is Dead. I Am Still Here.
Srebrenica survivor Emir Suljagić reflects on Ratko Mladić’s death, the failure of his genocidal project and why memory, agency and the refusal to disappear must shape Bosnia and Herzegovina’s future.
Yesterday, I received dozens of phone calls.
Friends called. Fellow survivors called. Journalists called. People wanted to know what I thought, what I felt, what I would say about the death of Ratko Mladić.
The truth is, I don't know.
And, more importantly, I don't particularly care to say anything about the abomination that died yesterday in the United Nations detention unit in Scheveningen.
I have spent too much of my life talking about Ratko Mladić already.
I saw him in Potočari on July 11, 1995. I was there while the men and boys around me were being separated from their families. I heard him speak. I watched his soldiers. I knew people who were taken away and murdered.
For me, Mladić was never an abstraction. He was never simply a name in a judgment, a photograph in a history book or a figure in a documentary.
He was a man I saw with my own eyes.
He was also a man who failed.
That matters.
He wanted to destroy a world and the people who inhabited it. He wanted to make us disappear from the places where we had lived for generations. He wanted to determine not only who would live and who would die, but who would have the right to return, to remember, to speak and to belong.
He did not succeed.
Yesterday, while journalists were asking me to reflect on his death, I was doing something far more important.
I was at home with my daughters.
I helped them make "jewellery" out of little bits and bobs. We did some bedtime reading. I put them both to sleep.
That is my answer to Ratko Mladić.
My life has moved on.
My children will not grow up in the same shadows I did.
They will not grow up believing that someone else has the right to decide whether they belong somewhere. They will not grow up thinking that survival requires permission from the people who would prefer them gone.
This is what the men who planned and carried out the genocide failed to understand.
They thought they were determining the future.
They were not.
They were only determining what they could destroy.
The future belonged to those who survived.
And survival, in the end, is not simply continuing to breathe. It is refusing to let the people who tried to destroy you define the terms of your life.
That is why I have little interest in the mythology surrounding Mladić's death.
I don't care whether he died peacefully. I don't care what his final thoughts were. I don't care whether he considered himself a hero, a patriot or a victim.
He was convicted of genocide and other crimes. He died in prison.
The men and boys he sent to their deaths did not get to grow old.
That is enough.
But there is another reason why his death matters.
It removes one of the last great living symbols of the Bosnian war from the political stage. And that creates a temptation — for journalists, politicians and historians alike — to turn him into a historical character, safely contained in the past.
We should resist that temptation.
Ratko Mladić did not emerge from nowhere.
He was not an inexplicable monster who appeared in Bosnia and Herzegovina and disappeared again three decades later. He was the military instrument of a political project. He operated within institutions. He commanded soldiers. He had political superiors. He had supporters. He had a system of propaganda, logistics and power behind him.
The genocide was not the work of one man.
And the fact that one of its principal perpetrators is now dead does not mean that everything associated with the political project he served has disappeared.
This is where Bosnia and Herzegovina remains different from the comfortable version of history that many people in Europe would prefer.
The war did not end with a clean moral settlement.
The perpetrators were defeated militarily, but the political order created by the war survived in significant part.
The territory was transformed.
The population was displaced.
The dead were buried.
And then the international community called the result peace.
We have spent thirty years living inside that contradiction.
That is why memory matters.
Not because the past needs us.
Because the future does.
Every time genocide is denied, every time a convicted war criminal is celebrated, every time the victims are asked to be quiet for the sake of political stability, the same basic proposition is being tested again: whether the people who survived are entitled to define what happened to them.
I believe the answer has to be yes.
That is what the Srebrenica Memorial Center is ultimately about.
It is not a shrine to victimhood.
It is an institution of memory, evidence and agency.
It exists because there are people who would prefer Srebrenica to become an uncomfortable historical footnote rather than a permanent fact of European history.
We cannot allow that.
Nor can we allow the next generation to inherit our fear.
My daughters deserve something different from what I had.
They deserve to grow up knowing what happened without having to live inside it.
They deserve to know the names of the dead without being defined by their deaths.
They deserve to understand genocide without believing that genocide is their destiny.
And they deserve to know that when history places a threat on the horizon, they do not have to wait for somebody else to save them.
That may be the most important lesson I have learned from surviving Srebrenica.
The international community failed us.
Institutions failed us.
People with power made decisions about our lives while we were left with almost no power over our own.
I have no intention of teaching my children that this is how the world works.
The next time someone like Ratko Mladić appears on the horizon, we will recognize him.
We will recognize the language.
We will recognize the machinery.
We will recognize the moment when dehumanization becomes policy.
And we will not wait for permission to defend ourselves, our rights, our institutions, our history and our future.
Not through revenge.
Through agency.
Through organization.
Through memory.
Through law.
Through politics.
Through the stubborn refusal to disappear.
Ratko Mladić is dead.
I am still here.
My daughters are here.
And that is the part of his story that matters most to me.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion column. The views expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Clash Report.
Emir Suljagić
Dr. Emir Suljagić has served as director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center since 2019. He survived the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995 while working as an interpreter for UN forces. A journalist, political scientist and genocide scholar, he reported on war-crimes trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg and previously held several government positions.
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