Ratko Mladic

June 2021 was an unusually busy month for coverage of war crimes in the Serbian media, which doesn't usually report on the subject very often. Just a few weeks apart, two major verdicts were announced in The Hague that were highly uncomfortable for Serbia.

The referee of a match on Sunday evening between Novi Pazar FC and Belgrade club Partizan FC temporarily halted play because Partizan fans were chanting Ratko Mladic's name and a slogan celebrating the 1995 mass killings of Bosniaks from Srebrenica.

That is a problem for a far bigger set of actors in Bosnia than the reactionary and secessionist Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, of Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the state presidency.

Activists from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights and other anti-war groups gathered in front of the Serbian presidency building on Sunday evening to light candles to commemorate victims of the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.

The activists also held up a banner with the slogan "It shouldn't happen to anyone again".

The decision by the UN court in The Hague last month to uphold the life sentence handed down to former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic takes the number of life terms imposed for involvement in the Srebrenica genocide to five.

The protesters' slogan actually reflects the official stance of Serbia, which is to deny that the killings of more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995 and the expulsions of some 4,000 women, children and elderly people was genocide.

Midhat Poturovic's exhibition 'Soul of Srebrenica' opened on Saturday at the EndzioHub gallery in central Belgrade, unaffected by a small demonstration outside by supporters of jailed Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague will hand down its verdict on Wednesday in the retrial of former Serbian State Security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, who are accused of controlling Serb fighters who committed crimes during the Croatian and Bosnian wars.

"Milosevic's men on the ground" was the most common description of these two leading Serbian state security officials - Jovica Stanisic, chief of the interior ministry's State Security Service and his right-hand man, Franko 'Frenki' Simatovic, commander of the service's Special Operations Unit.

After the ICTY shut down at the end of 2017, its remaining cases, including the appeals in the landmark trials of Bosnian Serb political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were taken over by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, MICT.