Balkan warlords – from criminals to heroes

Moreover, these days a group of young people who tried to tackle this problem are fined by the court after disrupting the public speech of one of the war criminals.

It has been 23 years since the Dayton Peace Accord concluded (November 21, 1995) by Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, ending the war that broke out in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Since then, peace has endured, but today’s discourse is often far from peaceful.

On November 20, eight activists from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR) in Serbia began raising funds to pay a fine amounting to 450,000 Serbian dinars (approximately 4,000 euros); they were fined for disturbing public order by demonstrating against war criminal Veselin Šljivančanin, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY – Hague Tribunal).

This happened in January 2017 during a public event organized by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party in Beška, a small town in northern Serbia. When it was Šljivančanin’s turn to speak, activists unveiled a banner reading “War criminals must be silent so victims can be heard.”

“By protesting against Veselin Šljivančanin, we have drawn public attention to the problematic promotions of convicted war criminals and the political legitimization of their crimes. Crime must never be the norm, and those who commit it and deny it must not be glorified,” the YIHR said in its statement.

Several other events occurred this fall: Ratko Mladić, a war criminal sentenced to life in prison, spoke live on a Serbian television channel. The Serbian Orthodox Patriarch said the Hague court’s verdict on Mladić was “the work of the devil.” Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabić denied the Srebrenica genocide in an interview with Deutsche Welle journalist Tim Sebastian, despite the fact that the crime was qualified as an act of genocide by the International Court of Justice as well as the ICTY. Serbian Defense Ministry Aleksandar Vulin promoted a book by Nebojša Pavković, a convicted war criminal serving a 22-year prison sentence.

“The focus should be on the victims. Can you imagine how the victims of war crimes felt when they heard Mladić on a nationally covered TV show? State policy must not promote war criminals. This certainly cannot ease tensions in the region,” Milan Antonijević, director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights YUCOM in Belgrade, told Serbian media.

This time last year, Vladimir Lazarevic was appointed professor at Serbia’s military academy after serving two-thirds of his sentence for war crimes. Vojislav Šešelj was convicted of persecuting Croats in northern Serbia. However, he remains a deputy, contrary to Serbian law which stipulates that his mandate must end in the event of conviction. The ruling Socialist Party of Serbia appointed Nikola Šainović as a member of its board of directors immediately after returning to Belgrade after serving two-thirds of his sentence for war crimes.

As in Serbia, those protesting against the rehabilitation of war criminals from the 1990s, against a backdrop of increasing state repression in Bosnia and Croatia as well, where war criminals have been glorified and put in the spotlight also in space audience.

Bosnian Serb officials named a student dormitory in Pale, near Sarajevo, after warlord Radovan Karadžić. A former Bosnian Serb leader, Karadžić is the highest-ranking official convicted by the United Nations war tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison and is now appealing the verdict.

The leader of the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, Vukota Govedarica told his audience that he wanted to “be like” Radovan Karadžić. Govedarica was a candidate for president of Republika Srpska, a Bosnian Serb-dominated entity, in general elections held in October. Another SDS official, Miroslav Kraljević, mayor of Vlasenica municipality, placed a billboard with images of himself with Ratko Mladić who is appealing a life sentence. In response to this, the head of the OSCE mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bruce Berton, wrote on Twitter: “Glorifying war criminals? Promote revenge rather than justice? How will this help the economy, health or education? Come on candidates, you can do better! Let’s talk about the real problems! »

In Croatia and areas of Bosnia inhabited primarily by Croats, the population did not welcome the final judgment handed down against six wartime Bosnian Croat leaders, whose prison sentences were upheld by the ICTY. Among them, Slobodan Praljak, sentenced to 20 years in prison, committed suicide by swallowing potassium cyanide after the court rejected his appeal. He was hailed as a martyr and a hero in his homeland.

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic denounced the verdict as a “profound moral injustice” against the convicts and rejected the conclusion that the Croatian state was complicit in war crimes. Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarović said that “Praljak’s act deeply affected the Croatian people” and added: “No one, not even the Criminal Court in The Hague, will write our history. We will fight with all our legal and political tools for truth and justice.” She also refused the Croatian Youth Initiative for Human Rights’ demand that convicted war criminals be stripped of their military decorations.

Politicians across the Balkans, who base their campaigns on chauvinism, often deny the war crimes committed by “ours” and accuse other camps of those committed by “theirs”.