25 July 2022 09:47
In February, Informer, Serbia’s most popular tabloid, headlined “Ukraine attacks Russia!”. Its owner and director has been a close friend of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić for decades. This surreal title is no exception in the journalistic depiction of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, it is a clear sign of Putin’s fascination with Serbia for many years. Unlike the rest of the world, which condemned the aggression of Ukraine by Russia, the media under the control of Aleksandar Vučić have switched to the unbridled glorification of those crimes.
Tabloids, web portals, newspapers, weeklies and national television channels celebrate the destruction of Ukrainian cities and ensure unconditional support for the Russian military to persevere in their campaign against the neighboring country. The directors and journalists of these mass media devoted to disinformation have fallen into a profound state of ecstasy: the killing of civilians, the razed cities and the destruction of churches and monuments fill them with enthusiasm.
Demonstrations in support of the Ukrainians were held in numerous cities around the world, while mass rallies were organized in Belgrade with the crowd cheering Vladimir Putin and drawing the letter Z on the asphalt (echoing the one present on Russian military vehicles). The whole world shudders in front of the reports showing the corpses live on the streets of Buča, the burning buildings in Kiev and Kharkiv, the hospitals and schools demolished, the cars burned, the civilians sheltering from the Russian bullets in the stations of the metro and the millions of Ukrainian refugees leaving their country, but the hearts of Putin’s Serbian supporters jump for joy. Instead of compassion for innocent victims, there is widespread indulgence for criminals.
Impossible neutrality
While his minions in the media celebrate death and destruction, Aleksandar Vučić pretends to be politically neutral. Serbia reluctantly voted for the UN General Assembly resolution which condemns Russian aggression in the strongest terms and calls on the Kremlin to immediately cease the use of force against Ukraine, but persists in refusing to impose sanctions against Russia. Plenty of European officials, US senators and several diplomats met Vučić, making it clear that the time had come to choose: would Serbia be on the side of Europe or would it support Russia? Despite all these pressures, Vučić keeps Serbia in limbo, neither in heaven nor on earth. Obviously, one cannot remain neutral in the face of Russia’s atrocious campaign against Ukraine. To remain neutral when an executioner massacres a victim is to take the side of the executioner.
The Belgrade government has never given up on the nationalist ideology of “Greater Serbia”,
Serbia’s attitude towards the war in Ukraine needs further clarification. The Russian news agency Sputnik and the satellite TV channel Russia Today are involved in spreading the Kremlin’s propaganda in other countries, while in Serbia most of the national newspapers move as if they were part of the Russian apparatus under the direct command of Vladimir Putin and Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal agency for media supervision and communications monitoring.
The problem, however, does not only concern the information sphere, which is already the product of disastrous policies. The Belgrade government has never renounced the nationalist ideology of “Greater Serbia”, whose goal is to unite all the Serbian-populated regions in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia in a single state, and which led to wars in the former Yugoslavia. The only exception was the brief premiership of Zoran Đinđić, but this attempt to return to civilization was interrupted by his assassination on March 12, 2003, by the same forces that started the wars and tried to create a great Serbia.
The current Serbian political leaders actively participated in the common criminal enterprise (as it was defined by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) in the wars of the 1990s. President Vučić was a senior official of Vojislav Šešelj’s Serbian Radical Party, convicted of war crimes. His coalition partner Ivica Dačić, leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia, was the spokesperson for Slobodan Milošević, Serbian president from 1989 to 1997, accused of crimes against humanity for ethnic cleansing carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo . One of Vučić’s closest collaborators, Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin, began his career as an official of the Yugoslav Left, the party founded by Milošević’s wife, Mirjana Marković. The current Minister for European Integration, Jadranka Joksimović, was editor of the press organ of the Serbian Radical Party Velika Srbija (Greater Serbia), whose name speaks for itself.
A provisional peace
No political official in Serbia has ever admitted that genocide was committed in Srebrenica (where the army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina massacred 8,000 Muslim Bosnians in July 1995). At the state level there was no comparison with the past. On the contrary, all political, media, cultural, ecclesiastical and social elites deny Serbia’s responsibility for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Recent history has been falsified: the official version is that Serbs have always been victims, never executioners. After serving their sentence, the war criminals return to their homeland, are greeted by the highest dignitaries of the state, enter the central committees of the parties in power and obtain well-paid representative positions and space in the mass media to expose their truth, a truth remained incomprehensible to the International Criminal Court.
For more than twenty years, nationalists have been waiting for Russia to engage in a decisive confrontation with the “new world order”
In cities throughout Serbia, countless murals depict Ratko Mladić (Bosnian Serb general nicknamed the butcher of Bosnia and the executioner of Srebrenica) with the slogan “Serbian hero”. Anyone who talks about Serbian crimes is branded a traitor and the most daring are immediately attacked with smear campaigns and lynchings in newspapers and social media. At the Belgrade War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office, there have been 2,500 cases in the preliminary investigation phase for years, with the obvious intention of covering them up. According to estimates by the Humanitarian Law Center, an NGO with offices in Belgrade and Pristina, Kosovo, at least six thousand war criminals walk quietly in the streets of Serbian cities without ever having been convicted.
For Serbian nationalists, the current period of peace is temporary, just like the borders in the Balkans. Nationalists still dream of a large Serbian state encompassing Kosovo, Montenegro, the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and part of Croatia. Today it is impossible to realize such a dream, but the nationalists are patient. After the defeat in the Balkan wars, they retreated to their lairs to lick their wounds and feed hatred towards neighboring countries through a media offensive aimed at keeping the population always alert and ready to fight. They have to wait for the right moment, when international circumstances change: this is one of the main narratives that Russian propaganda has prepared for the Serbian market, repeated a thousand times in articles and public appearances in recent decades.
The showdown
For more than twenty years, nationalists have been waiting for Russia to engage in a decisive confrontation with the “new world order” (conspiracy theory according to which there is a group of power aiming to control the entire planet), to enter the war against the western antichrist, defeating Europe and the unbelieving United States and establishing a different order on the planet. They have placed their trust in Putin as the messiah of new heavens and lands. They imagine the Russian president as an improved version of Slobodan Milošević: the ruler of a powerful empire with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is equivalent to the moment of the final showdown in the eyes of the Serbs in love with Putin: according to them, the great upheaval has begun which will raze the old order and which will give rise from its ruins a world in which sovereignty, borders and international treaties will not matter. Instead of international law and other Western nonsense, the law of the jungle will prevail, as the authoritarian tradition dictates. And the states that enjoy the favor of the world ruler who dominates the Kremlin – including Serbia – will have the right to carry out what they began three decades ago: the extermination and expulsion of other nations and religions to finally create the extended state they have dreamed of for centuries and satisfy their desire for imaginary grandeur. After all, Serbian nationalist doctrine regards most of the neighboring nations as inventions of communism, much as Putin’s propaganda claims that the Ukrainians were invented by Lenin. They are all Serbs, or rather Russians, on the wrong track: only they refuse to admit it and therefore deserve to be punished.
The euphoria of Russia’s criminal aggression against a sovereign state may seem strange to the uninformed, but for those living in the heart of darkness it is logical and predictable. In a country where the heroes are Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, it is obvious that Vladimir Putin or one of his butchers who kill civilians in Irpin, Mariupol and Kharkiv are also considered heroes. Serbian public opinion, mostly convinced that the two massacres in the Sarajevo market in 1994 and 1995 were staged and that the dismembered corpses were actually dummies, will easily believe the same kind of propaganda about massacred civilians. in Buča. If media hyenas routinely mock the victims of the Srebrenica genocide on prime time television shows, why shouldn’t they rejoice in seeing the victims of Putin’s crimes? As the great Serbian writer and thinker Radomir Konstantinović said three decades ago: “We live (if that is to live) in a world where the monstrous is becoming natural, and the natural monstrous”. Even today, unfortunately, his diagnosis is more precise than ever.
(Translation by Davide Musso)