Banja Luka: Trg Krajine Packed for Ratko Mladic Memorial
A large crowd gathered at Trg Krajine in Banja Luka after the Army of Republika Srpska and a group of citizens called for a memorial walk to the Central Memorial Site in honor of General Ratko Mladic.
Trg Krajine in Banja Luka was packed on the evening of September 1 with people who answered a call to honor General Ratko Mladic, the former commander of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska. According to available reports, the gathering was the largest public assembly of its kind in Republika Srpska, and the reaction such commemorations routinely draw outside the entity’s borders was being watched from Belgrade as well, since Mladic remains, nearly three decades after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a figure around whom regional disputes refuse to die down.
The call to gather was posted on the Facebook page of the Army of Republika Srpska, with a message specifically inviting fighters who had served under Mladic’s command during the war, as well as war veterans. “This is how it should be done, honorably and with dignity,” the post read. The Glas Srpske news portal carried the story at 9:56 a.m. on September 1, several hours ahead of the planned gathering.
Two Calls, One Message
Alongside the announcement from the Army of Republika Srpska, an informal group of Banja Luka citizens issued its own call to gather, titled “Farewell to the General.” Its wording differed from the military post in tone and origin, though not in purpose:
“Dear fellow citizens, we invite you to come to Trg Krajine on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, so that together, through a memorial walk to the Central Memorial Site, we may pay tribute to a man who, in the hardest and most painful of times, stood at the head of his people.”
The citizens’ call was also addressed specifically to those who had served under Mladic’s command during the war, and it closed with the line: “Banja Luka will forever remember its hero!”
Both calls announced the same plan: a gathering at Trg Krajine at 8 p.m., followed by a joint memorial walk to the Central Memorial Site in Banja Luka. According to reports from the scene, people began arriving about half an hour ahead of the announced time, and by 8 p.m. the square was full. That two separate calls, one military and one civilian, produced the same outcome shows that organizing a gathering of this kind in Banja Luka does not depend on a single source. The message about the memorial spreads through multiple channels at once and still brings the same number of people to the same place at the same time.
How the Gathering Was Described Outside Republika Srpska
Ratko Mladic, commander of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was convicted in a final ruling by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals and sentenced to life in prison for genocide in Srebrenica and other crimes committed in the 1990s. That conviction is the reason any public gathering held in his honor is read in an entirely different way on the other side of the Drina than it is in Banja Luka.
That was evident again on this occasion. While the local calls spoke of “honoring the general” and “a farewell to a hero,” the Sarajevo-based portal Klix.ba described the same gathering as paying tribute to a convicted war criminal. The gap between the two descriptions is not a matter of style but of substance, and it shows how much Mladic’s name still marks a dividing line in the region, with no shared vocabulary for discussing him on either side of the border.
For Banja Luka, where a single social media post was enough to fill the city’s central square, the gathering unfolded as announced: peacefully, and without any incidents noted in the available reports. What such gatherings will mean for how the region reads its wartime legacy going forward, and whether they will recur every year in the same form, remains an open question that political figures in Banja Luka and beyond will keep returning to long after this evening’s memorial.
