Ratko Mladić is still viewed as a hero by many Bosnian Serbs. It’s a reminder how divided my country remains today

I was a 19-year-old living in Banja Luka, the second-largest city in Bosnia, when Yugoslavia began falling apart.

What I remember most is the shock and speed with which my normal life and that of my friends abruptly ended.

At the time, I wasn’t following politics or watching the news much, so I had no idea what was to come – a full-blown war and genocide of the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim people), led by Ratko Mladić , the Bosnian Serbian general and convicted war criminal, who died this week in a prison in The Hague.

Ethnicity was not something my friends and I ever talked about growing up.

Two of my best friends were non-Serbs, which I only realised when they suddenly left Bosnia in April and May of 1992.

Soon after, I learned I was to be drafted into the Serbian territorial defence, not knowing what that even was.

I went to pick up my uniform and boots, and that’s when my parents put me on the bus to leave the country.

I didn’t know where I was going.

This was how I left my country, on my own, for the first time in my life: in haste, without goodbyes, not knowing if or when I would see my family again.

I was not the only one.

Almost two million Bosnians were displaced during the war.

Now, with Mladić’s death, these memories of the war are flooding back, juxtaposed with the disheartening scenes of Mladić being celebrated by Serbs in Bosnia as a hero.

He was not a hero; nor is it helpful to refer to him simply as a “madman” or a “butcher”.

Mladić is a symbolic reminder of the unresolved legacies of the war – the continued divisions among Bosnians and selective memories that many have about the atrocities that occurred.