Europe Opinion: Life sentence for 'Butcher of Bosnia' upheld, but will it change Serbia's nationalist narrative? The Hague has upheld Ratko Mladic's life sentence. But that's unlikely to make Serbia admit responsibility for its own role in the Yugoslav Wars, says human rights activist Sonja Biserko. Ratko Mladic had appealed the life sentence handed down in 2017 The Serbian General Ratko Mladic is infamous — not only for his crimes in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, for which he was given a life sentence in 2017, but also because he was able to hide and escape justice for 16 years thanks to the support of various democratic governments of Serbia.