Ratko Mladic was the ultimate Serb hillbilly hero
It’s rather appropriate that General Ratko Mladic, the 84-year-old former commander in chief of the Bosnian Serb army, “Butcher of the Balkans” died in the same week as Dolly Parton – he was the ultimate Serb hillbilly hero. Shortly after his arrest, in the summer of 2011, I drove with my husband through the rocky hinterlands of Herzegovina. Mladic had finally been arrested, a month earlier, 15 years after the end of the war, by Serb special forces, masked, without insignia, to give them anonymity from possible reprisals from any sentimental Serb loyalties. He put up no resistance when he was arrested – he’d been on the run since 1996, and his Praetorian guard had long retired to their pig farms or were in prison for drugs.
