Vujic: Article 185 Doesn't Strip Mladic's Rank

Justice Minister Nenad Vujic said, ahead of General Ratko Mladic’s funeral set for Monday, September 7, that Article 185 of the Army Law provides no basis for stripping the late commander of the Army of Republika Srpska’s Main Staff of his rank. Vujic made the statement to Informer, and the Tanjug news agency relayed it at 9:56 p.m. on September 5.

In doing so, Vujic rejects claims from part of the public that Mladic should have lost his military rank, and every honor that comes with it, after the Hague Tribunal handed down its final verdict against him.

“Article 185 of the Army Law does not apply to General Mladic. That article applies to active-duty military personnel or reservists at the moment a final verdict is handed down,” Vujic told Informer.

The minister laid out the timeline on which he builds his reading. Mladic left active military service in 2002, when he retired. The obligation to serve in the reserves, he added, ends once a person turns 60, and Mladic’s obligation lapsed in that same year, 2002. The final verdict, however, was not handed down until 2021, meaning that, by the minister’s reading, the general was by then neither on active duty nor in the reserves.

“Every person who turns 60 is released from the obligation to serve in the reserves, and that obligation ended for General Mladic in 2002 as well,” Vujic said.

A day earlier, on September 4, the minister had addressed the same subject from a different angle at a press conference: a family’s right to bury its own.

“Global standards and the law bind all of us. Once someone dies, all discussion of when and where they will be buried ends, that is for the family to decide. Serbia respects the rulings of international courts, we meet our international obligations, and everything else is a matter for the domestic laws of the Republic of Serbia to settle. Organizations’ opinions are just that, opinions, and we can discuss them, but when we talk about a family’s right to bury its member peacefully and with dignity, that is not up for debate. There’s a fine line from the mayor of Stuttgart: once someone dies, the dignity of their burial is not up for debate. I agree with him on that. A punishment cannot turn into revenge,” Vujic said.

The Humanitarian Law Center reads the same law the opposite way. Jovana Kolaric of that organization told N1 on August 28 that the Army Law currently in force, adopted in 2007, calls for an entirely different outcome.

“Paying honors in that way is itself a violation of the law, given that the Army Law in force states that a person sentenced to more than a year in prison is stripped of their rank and of every honor that comes with it,” Kolaric told N1.

The two sides, then, are not disputing the text of the law itself but which article, and which moment in time, should govern. The minister builds his argument on Article 185 and on Mladic’s status at the moment the verdict was handed down; the Humanitarian Law Center builds its case on the general provision stripping rank after a sentence of more than a year.

Serbian News has previously reported on the memorial service held for General Mladic, which both Vujic and Bishop Jovan Karan attended. The funeral is set for Monday, September 7: the casket will lie in state from 7 a.m. to noon at the Church of St. Luke in Kosutnjak, and burial at Topcider Cemetery is set to begin around 2 p.m.

General Ratko Mladic died on August 27, at age 83, in the United Nations detention unit in The Hague.