Rachiotis Yiannis | Aug 28, 2026
Ratko BLADIĆ died yesterday after years of health problems, in the infirmary of the Scheveningen prison in The Hague. Until his very last moment, he was denied hospitalization in a hospital. In recent years, through his lawyers, he had repeatedly submitted requests for hospital care, all of which were rejected. In practice, he was without medical care—like all Yugoslav political prisoners who were tried by the victors because they kept their oath and defended their country.
Seven to eight years ago, his lawyers, faced with the refusal to grant him access to hospital care, appealed to the competent “court”—that is, a kind of “residual” judicial mechanism invented after the dissolution of the rigged tribunals of the victors of the 1990s. This “court” upheld, in both the first and second instance, the prison administration’s refusal to allow him hospital care. At that time, he was already 75 years old. Now they have announced that they will launch… an investigation into the causes of his death…
He is not the first Yugoslav prisoner to be executed by the “civilized world” through the denial of medical care. Slobodan Milošević was driven to death in 2006 in the same manner. Milan Kovačević, a Bosnian doctor, died under similar conditions in the same prison in 1998. The same happened to Zdravko Tolimir in 2016. Slavko Dokmanović, a Serb-Croat and former mayor of Vukovar, and Milan Babić, the president of the Serb-Bosnian Republic, were driven to suicide under similar conditions in the same prison.
The detention conditions of the surviving Yugoslav political prisoners held in British prisons or in the Baltic protectorates are even worse than those of the detainees in The Hague. Their fate is designed to arrive swiftly, and unfortunately, there are no longer any reactions.
Ratko BLADIĆ, of Bosnian origin, son of a Yugoslav partisan, was a career military officer who served for 27 years in all ranks of the Yugoslav People’s Army before becoming chief of staff of the Serb-Bosnian army during the first war imposed by the Germans and the USA for the dissolution of Yugoslavia—the greatest federal achievement of the Balkan peoples throughout their liberation struggle that began in the early 19th century.
In a Facebook post, it is of course impossible to describe either the actions and talent of the military leader of the resistance to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, or the courage and dignity he displayed after the defeat—which did not come on the battlefield but because the Milošević government succumbed to US blackmail and promises, with the well-known disastrous consequences for the region that followed.
Nor is it possible to respond to the sewer of slander unleashed against him by the West and their local collaborators, in order to justify their own crime—the dissolution of a state that stood as proof that the peoples of the Balkans can coexist on a federal basis within a strong, independent state.
However, we must point out that the charges brought against him—of genocide and the like—were never substantiated by the rigged and controlled court that tried him, practically without any counterargument. On the contrary, the “court,” in order to justify his conviction and legitimize the transformation of Bosnia-Herzegovina into the first—constitutionally—protectorate on European soil since WWII, resorted to improbable interpretive constructions that constitute an insult to the very concept of justice.
We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible.