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.

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In the municipality of Zvečan, in northern Kosovo, messages glorifying convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić have been spotted.

Images published in Serbian groups on the Telegram platform show a mural featuring his portrait, accompanied by the inscriptions “Zvečan forever grateful” and “May your mother be thanked.”

Another piece of graffiti is dedicated to Mladić, referring to him by the title “general.” The photographs were posted on Telegram with the call “Save Kosovo,” while one of the posts clearly identifies Zvečan as the location.

“General, the final salute. A message to the terrorists: we are all Ratko’s soldiers,” read one of the posts.

Ratko Mladić, the former commander of the Army of Republika Srpska, was sentenced to life imprisonment by international courts for the genocide in Srebrenica, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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Kosovo’s acting Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, said that the glorification in Serbia of former Republika Srpska Army commander Ratko Mladić demonstrates a lack of sincere reckoning with the legacy of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Kurti made the remarks during a scholarly roundtable titled “The SANU Memorandum: The role of Serbian academic discourse in fueling conflicts and violence in the former Yugoslavia,” organized by the Institute for Crimes Committed During the War in Kosovo and the “Ali Hadri” Institute of History.

Referring to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, he stressed that even four decades after its publication, the document remains important to analyze, particularly because of its influence on Serbia’s political and social discourse.

According to Kurti, in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, claims that Serbs in Kosovo were under threat were turned into an instrument of political mobilization. This, he said, was followed by the revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy, the exclusion of Albanians from institutions, discrimination and state repression.

He noted that historical developments in the former Yugoslavia show that narratives formulated and supported by political and academic circles can create the conditions for the normalization of discrimination and the acceptance of violence as a political mechanism.

Kurti also devoted part of his speech to Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide and war crimes. He criticized the fact that Mladić was received with honors in Serbia after his death.

“When a society publicly honors someone convicted of genocide, it is difficult to speak of confronting the past, showing remorse or distancing itself from the policies that produced those crimes,” Kurti said.

The acting prime minister emphasized that democratic societies must have independent academic institutions, accessible archives and fact-based scholarly discussion so that the past is documented and not distorted.

He also described the documentation of war crimes in Kosovo and the preservation of evidence for future generations as essential.

Kurti concluded his speech by saying that Kosovo has a responsibility to document accurately, analyze seriously and defend historical truth through facts.

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The Kosovo Liberation Army War Veterans’ Organization has reacted to the funeral ceremony of former Serbian commander Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of war crimes.

OVL-UÇK described Serbia’s attempt to elevate Mladić to the status of a national hero and present his burial as a ceremony of state honor as condemnable.

According to the organization, “portraying a convicted war criminal as a national hero insults every one of his victims and constitutes an open rehabilitation of the ideology that produced genocide.”

In its reaction, OVL-UÇK accused Belgrade of continuing to avoid confronting the past. The organization warned that this approach, in its view, poses a threat to peace in the region.

“The memory and dignity of the victims are not negotiable. Not now, and never,” the statement said.

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