Kosovo’s acting Prime Minister Albin Kurti today accused Serbia of state glorification of genocide.

His remarks came after the state funeral with full military honors for convicted war criminal General Ratko Mladic, who was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where 8,372 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys, were killed in July 1995.

“With yesterday’s tearful religious service by Patriarch Porfirije at the body of Ratko Mladic, Serbia is confirming itself as a militaristic theocracy where its politicians are invited to act as supporters of different clubs in the same league,” Kurti wrote on his official Facebook account.

“As of yesterday, denial is no longer an adequate word. Serbia has moved to state glorification of genocide.”

According to Kurti, the Srebrenica genocide is a “historical fact documented by mass graves, forensic identification of thousands of victims, survivors’ testimonies, and detailed documentation of the operation to kill the victims and conceal their bodies, not a historical interpretation or political accusation. Bosniak men and boys were separated from their families, systematically executed and buried in mass graves; many of their bodies were later exhumed and moved to secondary and tertiary graves to conceal the traces of the crime. Ratko Mladic was the commander of this killing machine, not its witness.”

Kurti further said that while “Slobodan Milosevic was rightly called the butcher of the Balkans, who had many knives, Ratko Mladic was his main axe, whom official Belgrade is now glorifying.”

He recalled that in 2007, the International Court of Justice found that Serbia had violated its obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent the genocide in Srebrenica and that, by failing at the time to transfer Mladic for trial, it had failed to fully cooperate with the Tribunal. The state that for years refused to hand him over to justice yesterday transported his body on a government aircraft, wrapped it in the national flag and accompanied it with the military, ministers, senior clergy and an orchestra. Thus, according to Kurti, denial of genocide has moved from political statements to a state religious ceremony.

Kurti therefore said that from the burial of Serbian priest Nikolaj Velimirovic in May 1991 to the burial of Ratko Mladic in September 2026, Serbia has organized morbid spectacles for future bloodshed.

He said the entire ceremony was prepared in Serbia during days when Kosovo marked the 27th anniversary of the establishment of the Kosovo Police, the 29th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa and the 10th anniversary of her canonization by Pope Francis, as well as the anniversary of the Constitution of the First Republic of Kosovo from 1990, popularly known as the Kaçanik Constitution.