Serbia backs war criminals and condemns their critics

In November 1991 in Vukovar in Croatia, about 260 people were killed in what is known as the Ovcara massacre. On Tuesday, we who raised our voices against the perpetrators of this crime were fined by a Serbian court.

I was one of eight activists from Serbia's Youth Initiative for Human Rights, who were fined 50,000 dinars each (about 420 euros), that we protested against promoting a book by convicted war criminal Veselin Sljivanckan in January last year.

The eight of us who were fined were born in the 1990s and all our lives were negatively affected by the war, while those who committed terrible crimes and mass crimes are now welcomed and appreciated by Serbian institutions and the general public.

Sljivancian, a former officer in the Yugoslav People's Army, was one of four officers charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes committed in Ovcara. His indictment was based on the fact that he was on the direct command of Yugoslav People's Army forces who took over the Vukovar hospital, from which not Serbs were sent to Ovcara and were later executed.

In the end, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the ICTY for assisting and promotion in torturing prisoners.

But after Sljivancan suffered the sentence, he returned to Serbia, where he once and still perceived as a national hero.

Very soon, he began to engage in politics by supporting the ruling Serbian Progressive Party. In January 2017, during the presidential election campaign, the Progressive Party organised a public promotion of Sljivancan's book in Beska, a village near Indja in northern Serbia.

The event was organised at a municipal cultural centre, a public space funded by all citizens of Serbia. Even before that, representatives of Serbian institutions already had a rich history of supporting convicted war criminals and organising official welcomes following their release from prison, as in the cases of Vladimir Lazarevic and Nikola Sainovici.

During the public event in Beska, activists of the Belgrade-based Youth Initiative for Human Rights, an NGO, came to protest the promotion of a war criminal convicted by the ruling party.

We breathed the whistles and unveiled a banner that said: “War Criminals must remain silent, in order to talk about victims”, after which a group of Progressive Party supporters and local government representatives removed the banner and attacked us physically. Two of us ended up in the hospital, and our car was damaged.
After the event, a government-organised campaign against us began. The pro regime's Tabloids called us “fasists” and “juligana” and extremist right-wing groups came to the Office of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights.

Finally, we were sentenced by the court for wrongdoing in the city of Ruma for breaking the law by ruining the Sljivancan book event.

Let us remember that Serbia adopted the Co-operation Law with The Hague in 2002, five years after Sljivancian was convicted, so his decision is legally recognised by the Republic of Serbia. So the question is, why can't a man convicted of war crimes be called a war criminal?

Unfortunately, Sljivancani's example is only one of many similar cases showing the strong support of Serbian war crimes institutions and their authors.

Currently, one of them has even sat down as deputy in the Serbian Parliament (Vojislav Ssheeli), while the defence ministry is publishing another's war journals (Nebojsa Pavkovic) and publicly promotes them at the Belgrade Book Fair.
Seselj was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to 10 years in prison, while Pavkovic was convicted of persecution, murder and deportation of Kosovo Albanians and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Also noteworthy is the case of Vladimir Lazarevic, who was invited to be a legal lecturer at the Serbian Army Military Academy several months ago. Lazarevic was sentenced to 14 years in prison for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war in Kosovo.

So exactly when the fact that a crime was committed during the war became a comforting circumstance? There is public outrage for individual crimes, but there is no public sensitivity for war crimes victims killed by people behind the Serbian flag.
Somehow, along the way, it turned out that patriotism and love for your country means supporting war criminals and praising them as heroes as long as they are “tans”, of course.

As we went to Beska to protest the public promotion of war crimes authors, we were sentenced within a year, but some of the ongoing war crimes trials in Serbia have continued for more than a decade, with no sign of outcome. The evidence is being lost and victims are getting tired, and more and more do not want to participate in legal processes that will clearly not bring any satisfaction.

Our convictions of wrongdoing sent a clear message that war criminals are not only tolerated but also desirable in public life. Those who were legally found responsible for the killings, deportations, and other mass atrocities are supported by our officials and welcomed by our institutions, and anyone who does not accept it is called a traitor or a foreign agent.

That is why the Youth Initiative for Human Rights is urging the Serbian public to participate in a protest Thursday in Belgrade to show that there are still people who disagree.