On this August 4th, Serbia and the entirety of its political class and public commentators are celebra…oops, I mean commemorating the anniversary of Operation Storm, which in 1995 ended the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. We have been subjected to even more amplified agitation about the Serbian “suffering” for weeks now. Ever since the 1980s, the nationalists here, with glee, dig up the specters of World War II and parade the Ustasha and Axis crimes committed against the Serbs as an excuse for the local imperialist project of Greater Serbia, now called The Serbian World.
The regular, televised and very public spectacles commemorating the Storm, attended also by the Serbian Orthodox Church dignitaries and the indispensable Milorad Dodik, are bizarre sights where the gathered crowd applauds in ecstasy whenever some WW2 crime is recounted in gruesome detail. The more they hear about Serbian throats being slit by the Ustaši, the louder the Serbian audience applause gets – they finally found their excuse for being vicious jackasses, because someone’s grandfather was killed 80 years ago by people long dead by now.
What a perfectly good reason to take revenge. And rob the place blind, while we’re at it. Can’t fight for ancestral Serbian lands without a Maserati and an all-inclusive at the Maldives resort, now can you?
Now we are stuck in that loop of end-times fascism for four decades. We can’t see past it. We are couch jihadists, looking for new causes to be offended by all these enemies of the Serbian people – the Collective West, NATO, EU, domestic fifth column, and NGOs (labelled as “second Serbians” and “auto-chauvinists”), Catholic Church, Muslims, Jews, atheists, Big Pharma, you name it.
RFE and N1 reported that Kosovo’s acting Interior Minister, Xhelal Svecla, said on Sunday that another mass grave has been discovered in the Zubin Potok municipality in northern Kosovo. Last week, the Kosovo government announced the discovery of a mass grave in Mala Kaludra. It is suspected to contain the remains of 23 ethnic Albanian civilians from Mitrovica. The minister further claimed that Serbia is threatening and arresting Serbs who cooperate in the search for mass graves.
In Kraljevo, in central Serbia, R.T. (1980) from Istok in Kosovo, an ethnic Serb, was arrested on suspicion of espionage. Kosovo Minister of Labor, Family, Social Welfare and Values of the Liberation War, Andin Hoti, assessed that the arrest of a person whom he claims helped in the discovery of an alleged mass grave in Kosovo is “an attempt to murder the truth.”
The Humanitarian Law Center of Kosovo and the Humanitarian Law Center of Serbia announced that verification of information about the mass grave in Mali Kaludjer has been ongoing for more than two decades. They stated that information about a possible mass grave in the village had been publicly available since January 7, 2013, after a statement by R.T. about the murder of 23 Albanian civilians and the secret burial of their bodies in the valley of the village of Mali Kaludjer. There is no official confirmation whether this is the same person from RT who was arrested in Kraljevo and the witness about the grave in northern Kosovo.
Serbian and international media are reporting that an additional mass grave site might be in Jabuka, near Zubin Potok, with four bodies already exhumed at that location.
Reprisals against people who discovered mass burial sites in the former Yugoslavia are not unheard of. In 2001, Borka Ožegović from Gornji Ratkovo, Bosnia, an ethnic Serb, a few months after she told investigators where to look for remains of Bosniak civilians, was found brutally murdered in her home. No suspects were named in connection with this crime.
On the other hand, the Serbian media, both the government and student-affiliated and both tribes of the public commentariat, are pushing the narrative about persecution of Serbs in Kosovo, using the demolishing of an illegally built motel in Gazivode as a pretext. To them, demolishing an 800.000 Euro motel…
…is just as bad as a bunch of mass graves dotting Serbia and Kosovo. Those interested in locations in Serbia where the remains of Albanian civilians were found can be found on the War In Serbia online platform. That website aims to dispel the illusion that during the Yugoslav Wars, no war crimes ever happened on the territory of Serbia.
This LinkedIn comment is a good example of how the Serbian public at large responds to allegations about war crimes committed in Kosovo – by perpetuating the conspiracy theory about organs harvested from kidnapped Serbs, the idea of Kosovo being run by narco-cartels, and parroting the line about the erasure of Serbian cultural heritage in Kosovo.
Serbian dominant pro-government discourse maintains that the international community (as in, Westerners) is enabling the Kosovo authorities to wiggle out of the obligations that they accepted by signing the Brussels Agreement in 2013, and by that keeping the Serbian population in Kosovo disenfranchised and discriminated against. “The West tricked us into signing the Brussels Agreement!”, many a politician will cry out, lambasting the perfidious shenanigans of the EU, US and the UK, claiming that Serbia performed every possible obligation from the agreement, while Kosovo got the preferential treatment from what dominant Serbian ideology sees as “Western overlords and sponsors” keeping it from fulfilling their end of the bargain.
The opposition parties, especially those on the right and the student movement (now officially registered as an organization – in the Serbian business registry), keep insisting that the Serbian government’s inaction regarding Kosovo and what they perceive as giving in to Priština’s demands constitutes nothing less than an act of treason.
The X post by one of the Serbian student accounts reads, “Gazivode is a textbook example of the actions of this government. There is no public interest, there is [only] the interest of individuals. There is no security, there is only servility that ensures it. This treasonous regime must come to an end, that’s why you will have one clear task ahead of you in the upcoming elections: Either Serbia or the mafia.“
It should be noted that the Yugoslav Wars started with the agitprop campaign from Serbia about the discrimination and persecution of ethnic Serbs outside of Serbia proper and the need to intervene on their behalf, while also unearthing the specters of crimes committed during World War 2. If that sounds familiar, you are right – protection of “Russian speakers” outside Russia is also the Russian excuse for waging war against their neighbours. As for the difference in the state of internal political affairs between Serbia and Kosovo, take a look at this X post, and you can draw your own conclusions.
[Caption: “Kosovo is Serbia” graffiti in Čukarica, Belgrade (Facebook)]
Serbianism 