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Bosnia Just Cut Ties With Serbia to "The Lowest Possible Level." It Took a War Criminal's Funeral to Get There

Bosnia and Herzegovina announced Monday it is recalling its embassy staff from Belgrade and suspending nearly all bilateral contact with Serbia, a day after tens of thousands of mourners packed the streets of the Serbian capital to bury convicted genocidaire Ratko Mladić with a military honor guard and a three-volley salute. Foreign Minister Elmedin Konakovic says he wanted to sever ties completely. His own country's postwar constitution won't let him go that far — and that gap between what Sarajevo wants to do and what it's actually able to do is, in miniature, the whole unfinished story of the Balkans.

By Gustavo Henrique · About the author

SARAJEVO, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA · SEP 8 ~7 MIN READ

Updated on September 8, 2026 · Editorial update: source review, context and clarity.

Elmedin Konakovic did not sound like a diplomat trying to sound calm. Standing before reporters in Sarajevo on Monday, Bosnia and Herzegovina's foreign minister announced that his country would recall embassy staff from Belgrade, shut down consular operations there, suspend every scheduled bilateral meeting with Serbia, and reduce communication between the two neighbors to what he called "the lowest possible level." It was a striking step for two countries that share a border, a language family, and a war that ended barely three decades ago — and it was, by Konakovic's own admission, not the step he actually wanted to take. He wanted to cut ties entirely. He can't. Not alone, anyway.

At a Glance

Bosnia and Herzegovina announced Monday it is recalling its embassy staff from Belgrade and suspending nearly all bilateral contact with Serbia, a day after tens of thousands of mourners packed the streets of the Serbian capital to bury convicted genocidaire Ratko Mladić with a military honor guard and a three-volley salute.
Foreign Minister Elmedin Konakovic says he wanted to sever ties completely.
His own country's postwar constitution won't let him go that far — and that gap between what Sarajevo wants to do and what it's actually able to do is, in miniature, the whole unfinished story of the Balkans.

What Sarajevo actually did

The mechanics of Monday's announcement were specific. Every staff member at Bosnia's embassy in Belgrade whom the foreign ministry has the legal authority to recall will be withdrawn, Konakovic said, with consular services for Bosnian citizens transferred to the country's embassies in Zagreb and Podgorica and its consulate general in the Serbian city of Novi Pazar. All bilateral meetings are suspended indefinitely. "There will be no more talks on economic cooperation with Serbia while I am here," he told reporters, a line aimed squarely at trade and infrastructure discussions that had continued, however awkwardly, even as relations soured over the preceding two weeks. In place of Belgrade, Konakovic said Bosnia would intensify its diplomatic outreach to the European Union and its member states, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — and that draft letters laying out Sarajevo's objections had already been prepared for Washington, Brussels and London.

A funeral with a three-volley salute for a convicted genocidaire

What pushed Bosnia to this point happened the day before, in Belgrade. Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb wartime general convicted by a UN tribunal of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity — including command responsibility for the 1995 massacre of roughly 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica — died on August 27 while serving a life sentence at The Hague. On Monday, his coffin, draped in the flags of Serbia and Republika Srpska, was carried from the Church of St. Luke to Topcider Cemetery in Belgrade behind a military honor guard, as Patriarch Porfirije of the Serbian Orthodox Church told the crowd that Mladić's name would "remain deeply woven into the memory and prayers" of the Serbian people. Serbian troops fired a ceremonial three-volley salute as the coffin was lowered into the ground next to Mladić's daughter Ana, who died by suicide in 1994. Thousands of mourners, some wearing T-shirts printed with Mladić's image, shouted "Long live Ratko Mladić" as his son Darko thanked the crowd for what he called "a magnificent farewell" and asked them, pointedly, to "decide whether my father is a hero or a criminal."

Serbia's defense minister, two other government ministers, and Bosnia's own Serb-run entity sent its top officials to the funeral, including Milorad Dodik, head of Republika Srpska's ruling coalition, and Zeljka Cvijanovic, the Serb member of Bosnia's own tripartite presidency. Russia's ambassador to Serbia came to pay his respects to the family. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić did not attend, citing a scheduling conflict with Uzbekistan's visiting president — an absence Konakovic dismissed within hours.

Konakovic said Serbia had given "a war criminal" full military honors, and that Vučić's absence didn't change who he believes bears ultimate responsibility: "he is the organiser, implementer and personally the most responsible person."Elmedin Konakovic, Bosnia and Herzegovina's Foreign Minister

Why Bosnia can't actually sever ties — and the answer is its own constitution

What the headlines tend to skip over is this: Konakovic cannot unilaterally break diplomatic relations with Serbia, no matter how furious he is, because Bosnia and Herzegovina doesn't have a normal, single foreign policy chain of command. The 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war built the country around a tripartite presidency — one Bosniak, one Croat, one Serb member, rotating the chair — precisely so that no single ethnic bloc could be steamrolled by the other two. The catch is that the same structure lets Republika Srpska's representative block moves it doesn't like. And the Serb member of that presidency, Zeljka Cvijanovic, spent Monday in Belgrade paying tribute to the man Konakovic was, hours later, citing as the reason to isolate her own country's largest neighbor. A full break in relations would have to go through that presidency. It would never survive the vote. So Konakovic did what a foreign minister can do on his own authority — recall staff, freeze meetings, downgrade contact to a trickle — and said out loud that he'd have gone further if the system allowed it.

Brussels has a Vučić problem, too

The European Union's response arrived before the funeral even started. EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos canceled a planned visit to Serbia days earlier, writing that "the glorification surrounding his death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built." Croatia's foreign minister, Gordan Grlic Radman, went further on Monday, warning that the commemorations in Belgrade "are truly incompatible with European values" and could affect Serbia's EU accession bid directly — a warning he extended to Montenegro as well, where Mladić has also been publicly mourned. But warnings are close to the only lever Brussels has left. Serbia has spent years balancing its EU candidacy against a parallel relationship with Moscow, and the presence of Russia's ambassador at Mladić's graveside on Monday was not an accident of scheduling; it was a message about which patron Belgrade still keeps close when European pressure builds. The EU can slow Serbia's accession timeline. It cannot make Vučić choose, and on Monday, he didn't have to — he simply wasn't there to be asked.

What happens now

Bosnia and Herzegovina is, inconveniently, also in the middle of a general election campaign, and Balkan analysts have already noted that Mladić's death entered that campaign almost immediately — reviving the same arguments over war crimes, memory and national identity that Dayton's power-sharing structure was designed to paper over, not resolve. Konakovic's downgrade will play well domestically among Bosniak voters who watched their neighbor bury a convicted war criminal with military honors. It will do essentially nothing to Milorad Dodik or Republika Srpska, who face no consequence from Sarajevo they haven't already priced in. And it leaves the actual test sitting where it has sat for years: not in Sarajevo, where the anger is genuine but the institutional levers are short, but in Brussels, where the leverage exists and the will to use it, so far, does not.

Additional reporting drawn from Anadolu Agency, Balkan Insight, Euronews, and Human Rights Watch.

Gustavo Henrique's Take

Darko Mladić's line at the graveside — “decide whether my father is a hero or a criminal” — sticks with me, but not because it's an open question. A tribunal spent years establishing, on the evidence, that it's both: a war criminal, convicted on appeal, full stop. What Monday's funeral did wasn't reopen that verdict. It demonstrated, in the most visible way possible, that a verdict and a national mood can occupy the same country without ever touching each other. Thousands of people didn't show up in Belgrade because they doubted the Hague Tribunal's findings; they showed up because they've decided the findings don't matter as much as the story they'd rather tell about who defended whom in 1995. That's the part Bosnia's diplomatic downgrade can't fix, and I don't think Konakovic thinks it can either — he said as much himself, admitting he wanted to go further and couldn't. The real obstacle here wasn't Belgrade. It was Sarajevo's own presidency, where the very peace agreement that stopped the killing in 1995 now guarantees that Bosnia can be outraged and constitutionally powerless in the same breath. Dayton kept the peace. Thirty years on, it's also the reason Bosnia's loudest objection to a war criminal's state funeral amounts to fewer staff at one embassy.

REPORTING & VERIFICATION

Our newsroom wrote and fact-checked this article independently. For a full breakdown of how we verify claims and separate fact from opinion, see our editorial methodology.