Europe once understood that a war criminal’s grave can become a shrine. Serbia is building one anyway, and Brussels is paying the rent.
by Albatros Rexhaj | 1 September 2026
Europe knows why war criminals are denied a grave. It established the precedent itself. After the Nuremberg executions in October 1946, the Allies cremated the bodies, Göring's among them, and scattered the ashes in a tributary of the Isar so that no one would ever stand anywhere and say, here he lies. Israel scattered Eichmann's ashes at sea, outside its own waters, for the same reason. Yugoslavia, in its last years, did the same in its own fashion: it tried Andrija Artuković at 86, sentenced him, let him die in a prison hospital, and passed a law so that even his children would never learn where the body went. His son is still asking. Nenad Čanak reminded us of it this week and gave it the Roman name, damnatio memoriae. The logic is not cruelty for its own sake. A grave teaches. Deny the grave and you deny the lesson.
Serbia has read the same history and is doing the reverse, with the precision I have come to expect of Aleksandar Vučić. The justice minister announces the highest state honours within hours of the death. The regime tabloid, citing the Presidency, reports that the procedure for a plot at Topčider has already begun. Vučić then steps out, says the press got it wrong, promises a funeral "dignified and proper," calls the Hague "uncivilised" and adds that he never believed in its justice. Nothing is denied and nothing is signed. The honours exist and do not exist, depending on who is asking, and meanwhile the churches of Srebrenica ring their bells for "the liberator of Srebrenica," a bishop calls the convict a knight of the Serbian people, and in Pale a queue forms to kiss his portrait. The state supplies the grave. The church supplies the halo. The president supplies the deniability.
I want to be exact about what is being built, because it is not nostalgia and it is not grief. It is an iconography. In it the commander of the genocide is a saint in waiting. His officers, arrested this summer in Zubin Potok on war crimes charges, are martyrs suffering "terror" and "persecution," which is the vocabulary Belgrade's ministries actually used. And the victims are the villains: the dead of Potočari were, in a patriarch's words, mostly soldiers, so the cemetery is really a military one, and the town they were marched out of was "liberated." Saint, martyrs, villains. That is a complete political religion, and it is being assembled from the top, by ministers, bishops and a president, not by a mob.
I have seen this before, and so has anyone my age from Kosovo. In 1988 and 1989 the relics of Prince Lazar were carried from monastery to monastery across Serbia and Bosnia, drawing crowds, and arrived at Gračanica in time for Vidovdan 1989. In 1988 I was fourteen. I had grown up believing in Brotherhood and Unity, and I could not understand where all that hatred was coming from. On 28 July 1998, in the village of Hade, I stood in front of an execution squad and survived it. Ten years, from the relics to the rifles. Iconography comes first. It teaches a people what it is owed and by whom. The army comes when the lesson has settled, and Serbia is currently buying its army faster than at any time since that lesson was last taught.
And Europe? Europe's Commission was asked about the funeral and answered that it was for the Belgrade authorities to decide what role they would play in it, adding that glorifying war criminals had "no place" in the Union or among candidates. That is the whole response. The continent that scattered Göring's ashes in a river so that no shrine could ever grow there now watches a candidate for membership choose the shrine's address and files the matter under domestic affairs. The money keeps flowing. Nothing in the pre-accession instrument makes a state funeral for a genocide convict cost a single euro. Germany's reckoning began under occupation, when others took from the defeated regime every symbol, institution and grave it might have used to teach its own version. Nobody is offering Serbia that lesson now.
So the memory of Ratko Mladić will have an address, honours, bells and a saint's vocabulary, and it will have them with Europe's money in the same budget year. Yugoslavia, no democracy and no model, understood the one thing Brussels has forgotten: you do not let atrocity keep a grave, because the grave is where the next war is taught. Serbia is building the classroom. Europe is paying the rent.
Albatros Rexhaj is an author, playwright, and analyst with a background in national security studies and nearly three decades of experience in political and security affairs.
