A Western official who sat across a table from Ratko Mladić in July 1995 spoke last week. Read him before you hear the men at the grave.
By Albatros Rexhaj | 7 September 2026
The coffin has been in the Church of Saint Luke since seven this morning. This afternoon it goes to Topčider. Between now and then a great deal will be said about the man inside it, and all of it will be said by people who knew him as a comrade or a patron, or who were told about him. We would like to put one other voice on the record first, because it belongs to someone who knew him a different way.
Edward P. Joseph is a senior fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington. Kosovo knows him from a later chapter: as the US-nominated deputy head of the OSCE mission, he negotiated an end to a confrontation between Belgrade and Prishtina in April 2012, and his 2022 report "From Crisis to Convergence," published with the Wilson Center, is the fullest case yet made for breaking the non-recognition deadlock. He has argued for bringing Serbia into NATO. None of that is the reason we are quoting him today. In July 1995, as a UN civilian, he and one colleague coordinated the evacuation of women, children and wounded from Žepa as the enclave was falling, in the same weeks that Srebrenica, roughly twenty kilometres away as the crow flies, was being emptied of its men. That required negotiating with Mladić and his command in person, unarmed, in a war. He speaks Serbian. He later testified for the prosecution in two Hague trials that ended in convictions, and SAIS describes that testimony as instrumental in a landmark verdict on the 1995 massacres. This weekend he appeared on TRT World's "Across the Balkans," in an interview with the programme's host Nadja Muftić recorded from Washington, and described what the man was like across a table. He posted the interview on his own X account with a note that his segment begins at the fifth minute.
Two things he said matter today.
The first is a sentence. The Žepa soldiers were still in the woods; a prisoner exchange was being negotiated in Sarajevo that would have let them leave. Joseph asked Mladić directly whether he would let the men go if the exchange was agreed. He told Muftić he will never forget the answer: "Yes, I will let the men go, except for the war criminals."
Joseph did not know, that week, what had happened to the men of Srebrenica. He says so. He and his colleague did not have the facts. But he had spent three years in the war, he had seen the terror of the Srebrenica women about their men, and he says he understood the sentence for what it was: the general reserving for himself the right to decide who counted as a war criminal, and therefore who would not be leaving. The witness's limit is real, and it is the point. He did not need the intelligence. The definition told him.
The second is a judgment he has clearly carried for thirty-one years and put to the same programme without being asked. The Dutch battalion at Srebrenica was armed. He and his colleague at Žepa were not. He does not accept that the Dutch could do nothing because the air strikes did not come. The men who had fled to Dutch protection could have been kept inside a perimeter, Mladić's assurances refused, the general told to his face that he was not getting them. In Joseph's judgment they could have stood eye to eye with him and said no, and they did not.
Hold the sentence and the judgment and then listen to what Belgrade rehearsed on Saturday.
At the Dom Vojske commemoration, as reported by Sputnik Srbija, the retired general Ninković told the hall that he never heard from Mladić, or received from him in writing, an order to kill, expel or exterminate anyone, only an order that not a hair on a prisoner's head should be harmed, and that the Srebrenica genocide was "a plan agreed in advance to impose on the Serbian people the mortgage of genocide." He said that on the day a poem about Ratko Mladić appears on the first page of the primer, "only then will we be a free people." Serbia's justice minister, Nenad Vujić, sat in the audience. He is the same official who told ATV on 28 August that "General Mladić is a general and the protocols are known."
So the comrade says he never heard an order to kill, expel or exterminate. The witness says he heard something else: Mladić reserving to himself the category that decided which men would not be allowed to leave. One is now offered as exculpation. The other was understood at the time as a warning. What followed is no longer a matter of testimony. The Hague court settled that evidence in 2017 and again on appeal in 2021; what it could not settle is who gets to speak over the coffin.
We will concede the eulogists one thing. They are consistent. Belgrade has chosen to bury him as a general, not as a convicted war criminal, and it is applying that choice with the same confidence the man himself applied at Žepa. The category has simply changed hands. In July 1995 it was the general who sorted the men. Today Belgrade is sorting the general. This is the state the International Court of Justice found, in 2007, to have violated its obligation to prevent the Srebrenica genocide and its obligations under the Genocide Convention by failing to hand Mladić over to The Hague.
That leaves Joseph's second point, and it is the one addressed to us rather than to them. There will be statements tonight, from Brussels and from capitals. They will note. Some will regret. One consequence has already been imposed: on Friday Marta Kos cancelled a Belgrade visit planned for the following week, writing that the glorification surrounding his death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built, and that those values are not subject to negotiation. Serbia's president called the explanation stupid. So a perimeter exists. The question Joseph's Dutch example puts is whether it ends at a cancelled flight. Serbia is an accession state, and the instruments have changed since 1995: chapters, money, meetings, access. A perimeter is still a decision with a price attached. In 1995 the price was judged too high by men who were armed and had a mandate. Thirty-one years later it is a line in a Council conclusion, and we will see whether anyone writes it.
By this evening we will know which of the two versions of the man at that table Belgrade chose to bury. The general said his sentence in July 1995. The rest of us have had thirty-one years to answer it.
