When residents of a block in Belgrade’s city center woke up to the news last week, they were confronted with a mural celebrating a war criminal, painted overnight. Furious, they plotted a “night action” to destroy this latest tribute to Ratko Mladić with improvised defacement tactics. While the war criminal’s face is ever present across the Serbian capital, this was the first time a mural several meters long and about one meter high had appeared on the building surrounding their park.

The news of Mladić’s death, while in detention at The Hague, came in the middle of a campaign for parliamentary elections that have not yet been called but according to President Aleksandar Vučić are expected any day now. What a popular slogan calls the “students who are winning” (after a series of recent mass protests) are campaigning for the vote, as are the current head of state Vučić and his SNS (the Serbian Progressive Party, in name only). The justice minister hastily announced that “the protocols are known” and that Mladić, being a general, would be buried accordingly, with military and state honors. Still, Vučić, the all-powerful president, backed away while pointing to “family wishes” and suggesting there might be no state-sponsored funeral.

A few opposition leaders issued statements firmly distancing themselves from Mladić’s legacy and emphasizing the need not to forget or relativize the truth about his victims and the genocide. The European Commission, which is not exactly a moral or political authority here, said there is no room for an EU candidate country to celebrate a convicted war criminal. In Republika Srpska — the Bosnian Serb entity within neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Mladić commanded atrocities — numerous vigils were held, often featuring well-known football hooligan iconography. In a professionally produced video, students from Republika Srpska in Belgrade held up a huge poster over the Branko Bridge depicting Mladić, bearing the words “From your struggle, our freedom lives.”