Ana Mladic was 23 when she took her own life, after discovering the atrocities committed by her father. Ratko Mladic never accepted that she had killed herself, insisting to the end that she had been murdered. Her death would later be linked by writer Clara Usón to the destruction of Gorazde — and, she argues, to the massacre at Srebrenica
Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who orchestrated the massacre at Srebrenica, died on August 27 at the age of 84. He was serving a life sentence for genocide. This is the story of his daughter Ana.
“Daddy’s heart. The light of my eyes. My life.”
Even men capable of terrible crimes can speak to their children with tenderness. Mladic said such things to Ana, his eldest and favourite child. He called her “my son”, a common expression in the Krajina region, where treating a firstborn daughter as a boy could be seen as the ultimate expression of a father’s affection.
For years, there was an intimate bond between the general and his daughter. Mladic would let Ana take apart and clean his Zastava pistol, the weapon he had received at military academy. He told her that one day it would be hers, and that she would eventually give it to her own son.
Ana happily followed his instructions, cleaning the weapon with the enthusiasm of a military orderly.
Then she grew up.
The more she learned about her father, the less she saw him as the hero she had once believed him to be. The cheerful girl became withdrawn. Her understanding of the man she adored changed, as did her view of the war around her.
Ana had dreamed of becoming a surgeon, a profession her father himself had once hoped to pursue before abandoning the ambition. But in March 1994, when she was 23, her life came to a devastating end.
She opened the cupboard at home, took out the Zastava her father had given her and shot herself in the head.
The reasons behind Ana’s suicide have remained the subject of speculation. But there was no shortage of possible explanations.
Her transformation began, according to Clara Usón, after a trip to Moscow with friends. Ana heard accounts of torture and rape and began discussing what she was learning. The man she had regarded as a hero was suddenly impossible to see in the same light.
She returned home changed and increasingly withdrawn, without telling anyone what she was thinking.
One interpretation is that Ana was, in some sense, trying to kill her father through her own death. Another is that she felt overwhelmed by the guilt associated with his crimes and could no longer live with it. There is also the possibility that her suicide was a final attempt to make him understand the suffering he had inflicted on others.
“I am killing myself so that you understand,” is one way of interpreting the message: if she was the person he loved most, perhaps her death could force him to confront the consequences of his actions.
Usón, a former lawyer who later became a writer, became fascinated by Ana’s story after reading about it in The Times. She spent years researching the Mladic family and turned the story into her novel La hija, which was widely acclaimed in Spain.
What drew her to the story was not simply the relationship between a father and daughter, but the darkness that came between them.
One of the most striking images is preserved in a video showing Mladic and Ana joking together during a picnic. The screen then goes dark, before cutting to the general grieving over a coffin.
“That was the darkness I wanted to explore,” Usón has said.
In Belgrade, Ana’s grave has never been a secret. During the 16 years he spent as a fugitive, Mladic reportedly visited it in secret. On the day of his arrest, before being taken to The Hague to face trial, he insisted on placing six roses on her grave.
He was eventually convicted over his role in the siege of Sarajevo, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the Srebrenica genocide.
Yet he never accepted his daughter’s death as suicide.
He continued to claim that Ana had been murdered and suggested that a conspiracy was behind her death. He also argued that she would never have used the Zastava because she knew how important the weapon was to him.
There is perhaps a bitter irony in that. The pistol Mladic had imagined as a symbol of family lineage became the instrument that ended it.
Ana’s story belongs to a wider and painful history of children struggling with the legacy of notorious parents.
The children of Joseph Goebbels died with their mother in the final days of Nazi Germany, while Bettina Göring, a relative of Hermann Göring, chose sterilisation because she did not want to pass the family lineage on to future generations.
Other descendants have dealt with their inheritance in different ways. Some have openly rejected their parents’ beliefs; others have spent their lives trying to understand or explain them.
The burden can be particularly difficult when the parent is responsible for mass violence. As Usón has argued, children can find themselves trapped between denial and rejection: if the person who raised you is also the monster described by the outside world, there is no easy way to reconcile the two.
History offers other examples of that conflict. Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili, captured by German forces during the Second World War, died in a prisoner-of-war camp after Stalin refused an offer to exchange him for German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, reportedly saying he would not trade a field marshal for an ordinary lieutenant.
Some descendants have responded by publicly condemning their families, while others have attempted to understand the historical forces that shaped them.
Ana’s brother Darko survived by rejecting his father’s legacy. He disliked Usón’s book and refused permission for the publisher to use family photographs.
The struggle over Mladic’s legacy remains particularly sensitive in Serbia, where views of the Bosnian war and Srebrenica remain deeply divided. Despite the existence of many voices willing to confront the past, denial of atrocities committed during the conflict has persisted.
For Usón, the tragedy of Ratko and Ana cannot be separated from the bloodshed that consumed Bosnia.
Ana died in March 1994. Only weeks later, Mladic launched the operation that destroyed much of Gorazde, reportedly using “Operation Stella” as its code name — Stella being the name he had given his daughter.
A year later came Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in July 1995.
Usón sees a profound connection between the two events. In her interpretation, there was a different Mladic before and after Ana’s death: a man consumed by grief and rage.
She argues that Srebrenica had no meaningful military logic and may instead have represented a form of revenge against the world.
Today, Mladic’s legacy remains tied to his crimes and to the bitter arguments surrounding them. His trial is over, and he spent his final years imprisoned in the Netherlands.
During his proceedings, he continued to speak about a Europe under threat and the need to confront Islam by any means necessary.
Those arguments continue to resonate beyond the courtroom.
Usón has warned that Europe may not be seeing new figures like Mladic, but that some of the ideas that once fuelled such violence are returning — xenophobia, ethnic nationalism and fears about demographic change.
She points to the resurgence of political rhetoric portraying minorities as threats to national identity, recalling how similar arguments were once used in relation to Albanians in Kosovo.
Ana, in this interpretation, saw the darkness surrounding her father — but she saw it too late, and could not bear what she had discovered.
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