“Straight to Potocari!”, ordered General Ratko Mladic to his troops on July 11, 1995. Potocari is a town north of Srebrenica where thousands of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) had taken refuge from Mladic’s Serbian troops, as there was a United Nations Blue Helmets base there. However, they did not protect them and Mladic’s troops entered Potocari, where they separated the men and women and executed more than 8,000 people. Today, in Potocari, thousands of white headstones rise in the cemetery next to the museum dedicated to the Srebrenica crimes. Mladic was arrested in 2011 in Serbia, where he had been hiding for 15 years, and sent to The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal. During the trial, he confronted the judges and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017. Last week he died in prison at 84 years old.

When Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic died two weeks ago while serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Serbian government announced that it would hold a state funeral for him. But faced with criticism from the European Union – such as enlargement commissioner Marta Kos, who cancelled her official visit to Belgrade in protest – President Aleksandar Vucic nuanced his official position: it would be a ceremony organized by the family.

It has been a while since they became fashionable on television, the cairns creative and humorous in tone, following in the wake of programs like Pieces, but what is not acceptable is to cross the line of lighthearted programs and use the formula for news. Last Thursday on La Sexta, a particularly unfortunate one was seen related to the death in prison of war criminal Ratko Mladic: "The butcher of Bosnia, cold cuts". I always tell my journalism students to avoid wordplay in headlines at all costs, as it is a distortion that distracts from their primary function. In this case, I understand that the writer thought they could afford this presumably ingenious formula to provoke a smile from the viewer. But in this case, the writer must always, and first and foremost, put themselves in the shoes of the victims of a bloodthirsty figure like Mladic, who coldly planned and executed the murder of 8,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica, the largest massacre to occur in Europe since World War II.