EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos on Monday criticized Serbia's plans to bury former Bosnian Serb military leader and convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic with state honors. Mladic died on Thursday while serving a life jail term in The Hague for war crimes committed during the 1990s Bosnian war. "Regarding Ratko Mladic, the glorification of war criminals is contrary to fundamental European values and has no place in the European Union or in countries that aspire to become members," Kos told reporters. Serbia's justice minister Nenad Vujic said Friday that Mladic "will receive all the military and state honors to which he is entitled". Serbian officials were awaiting details on when authorities in The Hague would release the body, he said. Serbia is among Balkan countries seeking EU accession. Kos said she would travel to Serbia on September 9. "Ratko Mladic was a convicted war criminal, serving a life sentence for the genocide in Srebrenica and for crimes against humanity. And this will be the basis on which we will also assess developments," Kos added, speaking on the sidelines of the Bled Strategic Forum, a regional conference, taking place at the Bled lake resort in Slovenia. Mladic, who had suffered several strokes in recent months, was serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian war, including for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst act of bloodshed since World War II. His conviction for the wartime killings as the former Yugoslavia descended into carnage after the fall of communism led the international press to dub him the "Butcher of Bosnia". The 1992-1995 war left around 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million displaced. Mladic was the military face of a brutal trio, led on the political side by ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
