Serbia looks to disperse and deflate guilt for war crimes

On streets of Belgrade, Serbia – Photo: Marko Drobnjakovic/AP

According to article published in Vecernji List, Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor is currently undertaking preliminary investigations against unknown persons, journalists and editors of some media in Serbia, for inciting war crimes and calling upon people to perpetrate them during 1990’s. A letter by Serbia’s chief prosecutor for war crimes, Vladimir Vukcevic, reportedly says: “that the opening of the question about the promoters of disallowed propaganda is not in contradiction with realisation of the human rights to freedom of thought and commitment.”

The Prosecution’s goal in this, Vukcevic claims, is not in jeopardising the freedom and rights of journalists guaranteed by the Serbian and international laws, but in checking whether the abuse of these rights brought threats to the right to life civilian population had, and whether it contains elements of war crimes.

Vukcevic said that media propaganda under Slobodan Milosevic’s regime was not allowed (Can you believe this rubbish!) and that it often threatened the right to life, that it’s goal was to dehumanise the opponent, stripping its victim from its status as a human being and added that media propaganda in the 1990’s on the territory of former Yugoslavia was a prelude to war.

Here goes yet another wicked plan to reduce the guilt of Serbia’s regime for the aggression and genocide and ethnic cleansing that occurred in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during 1990’s. Here goes another road to burying the truth about why the war started and who the aggressor was.

The truth can only be one: Serbs, encouraged by Milosevic’s regime, did not want former Yugoslavia to break off into independent states of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina … they only wanted Yugoslavia within which they could rule and exert power and supremacy.

Serbia’s media propaganda under Milosevic’s regime did not go out brandishing incitement to hatred and violence against Croatians or Bosnians on its own bat. Serbia’s leadership and Yugoslav Peoples Army leadership fed the media and Serb media picked up the messages, spread them like wildfire and the result was: Serb nationals living in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina heard the message from Belgrade and started pounding mercilessly against their non-Serb neighbours or anyone that wanted to secede from Yugoslavia. Media did not supply guns, knives, batons, logs … to Serb civilians who initially terrorised people of non-Serb ethnicity.

According to the UK Guardian portal Serbia’s prosecutor for war crimes is on another similar mission these days:  they’ve been investigating and are “about to expose the role played by the Serbian elite in harbouring war criminals such as Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic,” and Goran Hadzic – all of whom had been hiding in Serbia from ICTY for years and years and are currently before the international criminal tribunal in the Hague, charged with war crimes.

“There is a new kind of nationalism (in Serbia), a defensiveness in which the man in the street likes to see Serbs as victims,” the Guardian article states.

There’s nothing new about this, Serbs had, from the beginning, planned ahead to appear as victims if their aggressive war efforts in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina went sour on them and they lost the war they started. That is why they planned and executed their own mass exodus from Croatia when Operation Storm liberated Krajina as Croatian territory in 1995. The sad and unfortunate reality for humanity is that certain members of the European Union picked up on this Serbian evil ploy, perhaps unawares of the evilness of it, and the process of equating the victim with the aggressor grew legs all over the place, including with the ICTY prosecutor.

Serbia’s new president Tomislav Nikolic  has always had dreams and actions for a Greater Serbia just like Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic masterminded ethnic cleansing at the time when Nikolic’s occupied a deputy’s position with the National Assembly of Serbia (parliament). Nikolic had recently stated that there was no genocide in Srebrenica (July 1995, when Serbs massacred more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys) and that Croatians need not return to Vukovar because Vukovar is a Serb city! (Vukovar, a Croatian city destroyed by Serbs in 1991/1992, ethnically cleansed of Croatians and Non-Serbs, left with mass graves of Croatian victims, left in ruins…)

It is in Nikolic’s interests that blame for incitement to war and aggression, to war crimes, is shifted away from Serbia’s parliament where he served and from Milosevic’s regime. Serbian prosecutor for war crimes may say that it’s investigating the media and Serbian “elite” for complicity in war crimes and harbouring war criminals despite Nikolic, but I believe it’s for the benefit of Nikolic and his renewed nationalistic vigour which attempts to justify the unjustifiable Serb crimes on the territory of former Yugoslavia during 1990’s. The fact that he said last month that Vukovar is a Serb city speaks volumes about the fact that much of Serbia is nowhere close to dealing with its guilt of aggression and war crimes against neighbouring nations. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)