Serbia No Shame on War Crimes

Helping and supporting a war crime, including mass atrocities against women and children, is it something you should be ashamed of? Not according to Aleksandar Vulin, Serbia's defence minister.

Volin has written that in a very clear way he told a group of Yugoslav Army veterans last week. “The era of shame has ended”, Vulin said, addressing veterans of the southern city of Nis. “It's time to restore self-respect”, he said.

The minister referred to the group's most honoured guest, retired General Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of the Third Army during the war in Kosovo. Vulin and other personalities praised the general for <x0 courageous standing against NATO aggressors” in 1999.

However, Lazarevic was also sentenced to 14 years in prison by the International War Crimes Court, I CTY, The Hague. More than 10,000 Albanian civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands were expelled from members of the Third Army and the Allied police forces. Some of the victims were later found in mass graves hidden in Serbia, including one in Belgrade's suburbs. Many of the victims are still missing.

When Lazarus was released from prison two years ago after holding two thirds of his sentence, a government plane was sent to take him and bring him home where he was welcomed as a hero. Volin was there, among other state officials and the high clergy of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

There are even more, Nikola Sainovic, deputy prime minister in Slobodan Milosevic's government, was among the convicts along with Lazarevic, and he was sentenced to 18 years in prison. His welcome was less attractive, but immediately took a top position in the Serbian Socialist Party, a small member of the ruling coalition.

And then there's Colonel Veselin Sljivancanin, who took more than 200 Croatian patients from a hospital in Vukovar in 1991 and handed them over to Serbian paramilitaries to be tortured and killed. Initially, he was sentenced to five years in prison before The Hague Tribunal, which was later established in 17 years and was eventually reduced to ten years in the final decision. He was released in 2011.

Sljivancanin, who is now a proud member of Serbia's Progressive Party, led by President Aleksandar Vuciq, was among those who gathered to welcome the president to the opening of a food processing plant in Ruma.

When reporters asked about his presence, Vuciq angrily replied that “Sljivancanin is a free man who has served his sentence. What do you want me to do, tie him to a pole and shoot him?

While Sljivancanin's shooting probably seems a good idea for some of those who lost relatives and friends in Vukovar, almost no one in Serbia, except for some human rights groups, has protested the involvement of war criminals convicted among Serbia's political elite.

There were some mild criticisms in the European Commission's 2015 Progress Report for Serbia, but nothing since.

In Brussels, they still see Vuciqi as a pro-European state man, oriented towards reform, mainly because of his commitment to “talks on normalising relations” with EU-backed Kosovo. But what kind of normalisation could result from the relief of war criminals?

In a strict legal manner, Vuchic was right: Sljivancanin, Lazarevic and Saiinovic are all free men and have all rights and benefits like other citizens, including the right to engage in politics. But the question is, what does it mean for Serbia's ruling coalition if its leadership is so eager to have war criminals in their ranks?

And what does it mean for Serbian society if you're a war criminal, or at least a suspect, it doesn't make you refuse, but it can help you start a political career?

Answers to these questions go beyond my ability. But I noticed one thing, the confession under which Serbia did nothing wrong in Yugoslav wars is now even more widespread than it was 18 years ago when the latest conflict [for Kosovo] ended.

The same narrator who describes Serbia as a victim of the Western plot, and war crimes attributed to them to being organised by Serbs, are overburdened by Serbia's enemies.

That is exactly the opposite of what happened in Germany after 1945. At first, most Germans were unwilling to accept Nazi war crimes, and the court in Nuremberg was widely viewed as the Kangaroo Court.

But the generations that later came the yoke to make a clear break with the past. In today's Serbia, young men wearing shirts wearing the face of General Ratko Mladic, architect of the Srebrenica genocide, is a common sight.

I am not comforted that the same backward process has affected Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovars, and that they also glorify their war criminals as heroes. But that gives me a frightening feeling that Yugoslav wars are not really over, but they're just taking a break. / BIRN/