Kurti: Belgrade turned denial of genocide into official honors for Mladić

Acting Prime Minister Albin Kurti has reacted to the funeral ceremony of former Serbian commander Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of war crimes, accusing Serbia of the institutional glorification of perpetrators of crimes.

According to Kurti, while Kosovo was commemorating the anniversaries of the establishment of the Kosovo Police, the passing of Mother Teresa and the Kaçanik Constitution, Serbia accorded state honors to Mladić, whom he described as responsible for the genocide in Srebrenica.

“Serbia has moved on to state worship of genocide,” Kurti wrote, denouncing the way Belgrade is elevating figures linked to war crimes.

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The day before yesterday, we marked the 27th anniversary of the establishment of the Kosovo Police. On Saturday, we commemorated the 29th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s passing, as well as the 10th anniversary of her canonization by Pope Francis. Yesterday, meanwhile, we marked Constitution Day of the Republic of Kosovo’s first constitution, adopted in 1990 and widely known as the Kaçanik Constitution.

Meanwhile, Serbia spent the weekend preparing for what it carried out yesterday: high state honors for the war criminal, Serbian General Ratko Mladić, responsible for the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where 8,372 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys, were killed in July 1995.

The Srebrenica genocide is neither a historical interpretation nor a political accusation, but a documented fact established through mass graves, the forensic identification of thousands of victims, survivors’ testimonies and detailed evidence of the operation to kill the victims and conceal their bodies. Bosniak men and boys were separated from their families, systematically executed and placed in mass graves. Later, many of the bodies were exhumed and transferred to secondary and tertiary graves in an effort to conceal traces of the crime. Ratko Mladić was the commander of this killing machine, not a witness to it.

Slobodan Milošević has rightly been described as the butcher of the Balkans. He had many killing instruments, but Ratko Mladić was his main axe, and now official Belgrade is glorifying him.

In 2007, the International Court of Justice found that Serbia had violated its obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent the genocide in Srebrenica. The Court also found that, by failing to surrender Mladić for trial, Serbia had failed to cooperate fully with the Tribunal. The state that for years did not bring him to justice yesterday transported his body on a government aircraft, draped it in a flag and escorted it with soldiers, ministers, senior clergy and an orchestra. In this way, denial of genocide was transformed from a political position into a state liturgy.

From the burial of Serbian priest Nikolaj Velimirović in May 1991 to the burial of Ratko Mladić in September 2026, Serbia has organized morbid spectacles that foreshadow future bloodshed.

Through yesterday’s religious service, accompanied by the tears of Patriarch Porfirije beside Ratko Mladić’s coffin, Serbia is demonstrating that it is turning into a militaristic theocracy, where its politicians are summoned to cheerleading by different clubs, but clubs in the same league.

After yesterday, the word “denial” is no longer enough. Serbia has moved on to state worship of genocide.