Writes: Davor Đenero
A decent document, without a word too much or too little, by which the Parliament of Montenegro formally condemned the genocide in Srebrenica and politically defined that the denial of genocide in Montenegro is politically unacceptable, caused an unprecedented storm in official Belgrade. If you want to know what the authoritarian ruler of Serbia really thinks, you should usually not read political declarations, but Belgrade newspaper tabloids. They immediately, unmistakably, defined how a knife was stabbed in the back of Serbia in Podgorica, and that the crime against Serbia was so great and so severe that everyone who participated in it should be banned from entering Serbia.
This time, however, the regime thought it was not a clear enough message to their supporters and subjects, so the former darling of Mira Markovic and his wife's aunt (who bought him an apartment) jumped in first, and now Vucic's pet has been assigned to the post of interior minister. a conspirator of the concept of the Serbian Galaxy, the Serbian Universe, the Serbian World, or as the concept of a Greater Serbia is popularly called today, a certain Aleksandar Vulin, who repeated what the Ruler had whispered to the tabloids the day before – namely that Podgorica traitors should be banned from entering Serbia.
Of course, Vulin and the tabloids only serve to create a pretext for the “wise” performance of the Ruler, and he said the following in brief; we will not make reckless moves, in other words, the government will not be as hot-headed as the duty officer Vulin, we do not blame the Serbian people in Montenegro, which is part of the integral imagined Serbian universe, only currently separated from the reach of wise government in Belgrade, we will punish the political class in Montenegro, which betrayed the good Serbian people there, when the time comes. Of course, this is a somewhat free translation of Vučić's phrases, uttered in his legendary style of passive aggression, but the meaning is not touched.
Why so much anger of official Belgrade
The story is a bit paradoxical, because formally it is not clear why so much anger of official and more than official Belgrade on the move of the majority in the parliament (but not the parliamentary majority) in Podgorica. After all, for twelve years now, since March 2010, Serbia has had a parliamentary resolution condemning the genocide of 8,000 Bosniaks in Srebrenica. The resolution, formally called the Srebrenica Declaration, refers to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling condemning the Srebrenica genocide, although it does not formally mention the word genocide, but it is de facto covered by a text that, as a matter of fact, the Tadic administration succeeded. conducted through the Serbian Parliament, after a heated debate, but with a formally convincing majority of 127 votes in favor, with only 27 votes against.
Therefore, the political class in Belgrade knew exactly 12 years ago that genocide took place in Srebrenica and that the recognition of that genocide is something that Serbia must do.
Of course, the then administration, a bargaining power composed of the soft wing of the anti-Milosevic movement and the soft wing of Milosevic's government, felt less directly responsible for the Srebrenica genocide than the current neo-radical government, whose only policy planner is more open and naive than anyone else in the Serbian Parliament, threatened to repeat the genocide only 11 days after the genocide in Srebrenica, and at a time when Mladic's (but also Martic's) hordes were besieging Bihac and Western Bosnia with the words: “Well, you bomb, kill one Serb, we will kill a hundred Muslims. So let's see if the international community or anyone else can strike at Serb positions, if it can behave like that with the Serbian people. ” The attitude of passive aggression, which is today a trademark of his “rhetorical style”, developed, as we see, even then, but then he was young and naive and openly left traces.
Vučić was then part of Milošević's ruling alliance, and at a time when the Milošević regime was preparing and trying to carry out genocide against Albanians in Kosovo, he rose in the hierarchy to the position of Minister of Information, a place that exists only in authoritarian regimes. only “the most ideologically proven.”
All expectations of Belgrade from the new government
The behavior of the regime of Aleksandar Vučić towards Montenegro, after the parliamentary resolution condemning the genocide in Srebrenica, but also forbidding denial, is, of course, not only a reaction to the decisions of the Montenegrin parliament. True, there was a glimmer of hope in Belgrade that with the creation of a coalition dominated by the Greater Serbia and clerical political option, Montenegro would begin to meet Belgrade's old expectations, withdraw from NATO, withdraw Kosovo's international recognition and side with Milorad Dodik in Vucic-Vulin copies of the Russian project of Greater Russia / Russian world (as it is now called Greater Serbia for the naive). It is a great disappointment that Montenegro has not done more than some obstruction of data protection within the NATO alliance, that it has not withdrawn the recognition of Kosovo and that it has not declared itself as a formal part of the Serbian Constellation project.
The bigger problem is something else. Vučić put all his cards on another term of Donald Trump and on the hope that in the second term, Trump will completely destroy the mechanisms of multilateralism and all democratic principles in international relations. It happened to him that an administration similar to Obama's multilateralist, but more experienced, even wiser and with even more knowledge, returned to the scene. Vučić is not the only authoritarian ruler who wakes up at night from a nightmare in which he dreamed that a gentleman who looks very benevolent, just to him, as he did to the false Russian Tsar Vladimir Mali, says in his face that he considers him a criminal and ends with a legendary statement: you know me, I know you. Joe Biden will never tell Vučić what he said to Putin in public, because Vučić is simply too important and too little powerful. But if Biden knew him, he knew him as well.
Vučić and his Vulin are unimaginative when they want to ban the Montenegrin political class, ie those members who recognize and do not tolerate the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica, from entering Serbia. Biden has already announced such a ban on entering America and freezing the property of those who, among other things, deny the Srebrenica genocide, as a kind of litmus test on the crimes of the Milosevic regime during the aggression in the former Yugoslavia.
Vučić did not only decide to violate the acquis communautaire of the Serbian Parliament, which condemned the Srebrenica genocide, which he, like Seselj and Milosevic “small”, praised and advocated for its repetition in the Assembly Hall in the summer of 1995.
Due to an agreement between the Milosevic regime and ICTY Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte, who was “a little carried away by the political power of the time” and who represented only the interests of the victims, Bosnia and Herzegovina failed to prove to the ICJ that Milosevic's The regime was directly involved in the preparations, implementation and cover-up of the Srebrenica genocide, although it was clear to anyone serious that Mladic's warriors, who were unable to maintain the level of military organization left to BiH by the Milosevic regime in 1992, recognition of BiH, they could not even conceive an operation of systematic genocide. Genocide is an industrialized, impersonal crime, it is not committed by “individuals who have lost control”. Dodik and his associates, who compiled a list of 22,000 people who participated in various ways in carrying out and covering up the Srebrenica genocide, once showed how meticulously designed the crime was. Ratko Mladic, with his character and intellectual abilities at the level of a semi-retarded ensign and the probisvijeti, which he gathered around him, could not have conceived without the help of their creators from Milosevic's circle.
In the White House, there is a man who knows who the perpetrators of genocide are
When, from documents that clearly showed this, Bosnia and Herzegovina could reopen the proceedings before the ICJ and prove it, Dodik effectively prevented that thanks to the results of the Dayton Agreement. But his efforts were quite in vain. Today, when a man sits in the White House who knows who the perpetrators of genocide are and who does not intend to pretend to be acceptable partners to the democratic world, and when Montenegro commemorates the genocide in Srebrenica and bans its denial, Vucic cannot help himself. By threatening decent people in the Parliament of Montenegro, the authoritarian ruler of Serbia only admits – yes, the regime in which I was a small wheel, encouraged, helped organize and carry out, and eventually covered up, the genocide in Srebrenica.
As for Montenegro, the Greater Serbia ideologue Matija Bećković said last fall: “If Dritan Abazović came to Belgrade, the Serbian youth would carry him in their arms.” Today, Abazović is on the list of those who would be banned from entering Belgrade by Vučić's Vulin and Vučić's “seventh force”, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the wise Belgrade professor was right even then, warning that they would probably take him on their shoulders to the same refrigerators. in which the Milosevic (and Vucic) regime in 1999 put his compatriots from Kosovo.