Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, N o 12 (2014): 77-104. The Arrest of Ratko Mladić Online: Tracing Memory Models across Digital Genres MARIJETA BOŽOVIĆ, BOGDAN TRIFUNOVIĆ, ALEKSANDAR BOŠKOVIĆ Yale University, University of Warsaw, Columbia University Abstract: This paper explores the digital rhetoric triggered by a ‘memory event’ – the May 26, 2011 arrest of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić, a fugitive convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague (ICTY) for war crimes in Bosnia. Surveying the verbal and visual rhetoric used across online genres and platforms to describe Mladić after his arrest, the authors focus on the most oppositional and historically fraught viewpoints: a dominant anti- Mladić narrative and the fierce, if fringe, pro-Mladić narrative that emerged in response. Our primary goal is to examine a memory event captured and created by digital culture, and to map the emergent rhetorical models across an overview of digital genres by tracing cul- tural associations. The second level of research is comparative, as we find that the depiction and perhaps even understanding of Mladić’s arrest shifts according to genre, medium and plat- form. As we are studying a perpetually shifting digital terrain, our methods are experimental and heuristic; we hope our overview may suggest new directions for research to other scholars of digital rhetoric, historical memory models and the rise of twenty-first century nationalism. Keywords: Ratko Mladić, arrest, memory models, digital genres, social media, nationalism. he arrest of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić on 26 May 2011 was at once a historical, media, and memory event. 1 Mass media worldwide and across the former Yugoslav spaces reported that ‘one of the world’s most wanted men’ had finally been apprehended by the Serbian police (‘As It Happened’ 2011). The elusive fugitive of nearly sixteen years, ‘wanted for the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims’, was at last to be turned over to the Hague International Criminal Tribunal (‘Ratko Mladic Arrested’ 2011). Online, the news triggered wide-ranging responses across genres, media, and platforms: a series of secondary 1 We follow Alexander Etkind’s definition of a memory event as ‘a re-discovery of the past that creates a rupture with its accepted cultural meaning. Memory events are secondary to the historical events that they interpret, usually taking place many years or decades later’ (Etkind 2010: 4). T