No synod has canonized Ratko Mladić. For thirty-two years the church has done nearly everything that comes before.
by Ngadhnjim Brovina | 1 September 2026
On 28 August, in the square in Pale, people stood in line to reach a framed photograph propped against a wall beneath the flag. Candles had been piled at its foot. When their turn came, they bent to the glass and kissed it. In an Orthodox town there is nothing improvised about that movement. It is celivanje, the veneration owed to an icon, and it was being performed on the portrait of a man who had died the previous morning in a prison hospital in The Hague under a life sentence for genocide.
How does a man get from that cell to that wall? How does a convicted commander of the Srebrenica killings arrive, within a day of his death, at the point where Christians put their lips to his image? The answer is not spontaneous grief. It is a procedure, and the Serbian Orthodox Church has been performing it on this man since the summer of 1994, in the same town.
It began with a blessing. On 14 August 1994, as Belgrade pressed the Bosnian Serbs to accept the Contact Group's peace plan, Patriarch Pavle came to Pale, celebrated the liturgy, broke bread with Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, blessed them both, and urged them to reject any settlement that drew a border between Serbs on either side of the Drina. Eleven months later, on footage shown at Mladić's own trial, Bishop Vasilije Kačavenda smiled at the news that the minaret in Srebrenica had been levelled and sent his congratulations to "the brave general." Six weeks after Srebrenica, with the indictment already issued, the patriarch's signature and the general's appeared on the same state document at Dobanovci. The church had received him before the world had finished counting the dead.
It did not break with him when he ran. One of its bishops, Filaret of Mileševa, was barred from Montenegro and several European states on suspicion of belonging to the network that hid him, and his Synod never sanctioned him. And for sixteen years, while the tribunal's warrant stood, the church that had blessed him in Pale did not, on the record we can find, call on him once to face the court. It answered the flight with silence; in sixteen years the man it had blessed heard from it no summons he needed to obey.
When he was convicted, the patriarch attacked the judgment and not the crime. On the day of the verdict in November 2017, Patriarch Irinej said that another Serb had been convicted in The Hague, that the mighty of this world were doing the devil's deeds and Serbs were paying for them, and that only Serbian generals were being tried. He called the memorial at Potočari, in essence, a military cemetery. Seven years later Patriarch Porfirije gave Serbia's president his blessing before the fight against the Srebrenica Resolution at the United Nations. Three patriarchs, one continuous posture: the church received the man in 1994, did not break with him during the flight, contested the verdict, blessed the denial, and was waiting when he died.
It reached him before the state did. Within hours of the death the priest Boris Topić described the general's last morning: confession, communion, and a cross placed in his hand by the priest himself. The world knew Ratko Mladić's hands from the things armies put in them. The last thing put in them was placed by a priest, and it was a cross. That is the transaction the whole procedure exists to perform, the moment the commander's hand becomes a penitent's, and the church announced it to the world while the Mechanism was still deciding when to release the body.
Then the bells. On the day of the death Aleksandar Mlađenović, the parish priest of Srebrenica, announced that they had rung in all six churches of the parish for "the tormented soul of general Ratko Mladić," and he named the dead man, in English, "liberator of Srebrenica." Stay with those three words, because they do more than mourn. Liberation requires someone the town was liberated from, and everyone in Srebrenica knows who lies at Potočari. The phrase does not add Mladić to the town's story; it rewrites the story so that the eight thousand are what he freed it of. A place the world recognizes as the site of a genocide is re-founded, from its own pulpit, as the site of a deliverance, with the convicted commander as its deliverer. The formula has a genealogy: a ruling-party parliamentarian's tweet in 2019, and seven years later the parish of Srebrenica itself, speaking it from the site.
Then the bishop. At the Piva Monastery, after a memorial for "the newly reposed servant of God General Ratko Mladić," Bishop Metodije of Budimlja and Nikšić told the faithful that the Lord had deemed him worthy to join "the great and glorious spiritual knights of our Serbian people," and that with the verdict the world had condemned the whole Serbian people in order to break it. In one week the priest had made him a liberator and the bishop had made him a knight. The calendar was the only rank left.
And then the square, where the cross in the hand became the lips on the glass.
The reader in Kosovo will recognize the template, because it was cut from our ground. The saint-hero of Serbian Orthodoxy is Prince Lazar, who in the church's telling chose the heavenly kingdom over the earthly one and made a defeat at Kosovo the founding sanctity of the nation. Novi Lazar is the name the crowds have given Mladić this week, and it is doing exact theological work: the life sentence becomes persecution, the prisoner becomes a martyr, the genocide becomes a cross borne for the people. It is the same theology that underwrites the church's claim on Kosovo, and the church has already shown what its highest body is willing to ratify. In May 2005 the Holy Assembly of Bishops, presided over by Patriarch Pavle, the same patriarch who had blessed Mladić in Pale, canonized Milorad Vukojičić, a Chetnik priest executed in 1945 whom Montenegro's state commission had found responsible for the killing of ten civilians in Pljevlja, mostly women. The families of the dead protested. The church replied that it was an internal matter. The square kisses the portrait, the parish serves the pomen, the bishop names the knight, and only later can a synod ratify what believers already practice. Which raises the question the title is really asking: whether the synod's act still matters, once the people are already on their knees.
Above all of it the Patriarchate has said nothing about the general, and no one in Kosovo should mistake the nothing for hesitation. In six days its official channel posted feasts, a tonsure, a parish slava and the patriarch's Sunday homily, and did not once name the man. But it had spoken in June. On 30 June Porfirije personally conferred the Order of Saint Sava on Danica Marinković, the Milošević-era judge who ruled the dead of Reçak were combatants, with a citation honoring her for exposing an "invented massacre of Albanian civilians" laid "on the Serbian people's account." A patriarch who hangs a medal on the denial of one massacre in June is not withholding judgment on the man convicted of another in August. He has given it.
The church has an answer to all this, and it deserves to be heard as its canonists would give it. The Orthodox Church prays for every dead sinner. A pomen is a prayer, not a verdict. Sainthood is a formal act of the Holy Synod, and no synod has spoken. All of that is true. And all of it describes an institution that has been free, at every station since 1994, to stop, and has not. It could have withheld the blessing in Pale. It could have asked him once in sixteen years to go to The Hague. It could have left the bells silent in the one town where their meaning was unambiguous, or the word knight unsaid at Piva. It could have said, in six days of daily posts, that a genocide is a genocide.
Every station so far, it has passed.
The next is scheduled, and the church chose the place. On 26 September Patriarch Porfirije will stand in Pale, in the town where Pavle blessed the general in August 1994, in the square that kissed his portrait in August 2026. Whether he says the name, whether a memorial is arranged around his visit, whether the entity's leadership stands beside him: those are the observable facts of the next station, and we will report them. But no one who has read the citation he signed in June should expect him to interrupt a procedure his predecessor began. Pale is not where his silence will be tested. It is where it will be performed.
Ngadhnjim Brovina teaches political science at UBT in Prishtina. He writes on enlargement, conditionality, and the institutional politics of the Western Balkans.
