14 January 2009 | Residents and visitors of Montenegro’s town of Sutomore now have the opportunity to try some rakija, or brandy, from a bottle adorned by the face of the indicted war criminal Ratko Mladić.

The special-issue bottles are offered in restaurants in the small coastal town of Sutomore, the Macedonian Makfax news agency reported today. The brandy’s unknown producer has managed to distribute the beverage quite well, according to the report, and some restaurant clients already order ‘Ratko Mladić’s grape rakija’ without being prompted.

It is most likely that the brandy is being made by an unregistered company from Crmnica, a region close to Sutomore, the national newspaper Dan reported.

Mladić served as the Chief of Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb Army, during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. There has been an outstanding international arrest warrant against him, after he was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1995 and accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and numerous war crimes, including the alleged sniping campaign against civilians in Sarajevo and the attack on the United Nations-declared safe area of Srebrenica in 1995.

Today’s publications do not clarify what the purpose of the bottles adorned with Mladić’s image is: whether it is just one of the latest attempts on the part of a Balkan country to use its recent war-torn history as an attraction to tourists, which BalkanTravellers.com wrote about, or whether it copies the concept that gained popularity in the US in the 1980s of putting faces of missing or kidnapped children on milk cartons, in an attempt to attract wide attention and get people to notice and report the person who had abducted the child (or in this case, the alleged war criminal).

Whatever the aim, the unlicensed rakija bottles are likely to become another of the Balkans’ unlikely souvenirs, managing as they do to combine two images that are discordant and at the same quite symbolic of the region: that of the indicted war criminal and the well-loved rakija.

Although known under different names - raki in Albanian, Greek and Turkish, rakija in Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian and rachiu in Romanian, the drink made of fermented fruits – most commonly grapes or plums, enjoys immense popularity in the entire Balkans region.

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