By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
For those with poor memories and an excellent capacity for forgetting, here’s a reminder. Bosnia and Herzegovina sued the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before the Hague court, and later the ‘State Union’ of Serbia and Montenegro. The proceedings lasted 14 years. In the end, the Court ruled that Serbia was responsible for failing to do anything to prevent the genocide in Srebrenica.
This is what the Court found: “Having in mind all the international activities about what was going to happen in Srebrenica, in view of Milosevic’s own observations to Mladic, which made it clear that the dangers were known to him, there must have been a serious risk that genocide would be committed in Srebrenica. Yet the Respondent has not shown that it took any initiative to prevent what happened. It must therefore be concluded that institutions of the responsible side did nothing to prevent the Srebrenica massacres, claiming they were powerless to do so, which does not tally with their well-known influence over the Army of Republika Srpska.”
Montenegro was excluded from the judgment as it was handed down in February 2007, while Montenegro had restored its independence in 2006. Serbia became the legal successor to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and later to the State Union. Along with that inheritance came the judgment for failing to prevent genocide. Had the ruling been delivered just one year earlier, before May 2006, Montenegro would have had the same thing in its historical record as Serbia: a judgment stating that it could have acted to prevent genocide, but didn’t.
That this is so is also borne out by the following: “At the very beginning of the delivery of the verdict, the President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, stated Montenegro was not a party to the dispute, but that it shared responsibility with Serbia as a signatory to the Genocide Convention.”
Therefore: to avoid any misunderstanding, the President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague – whose judgments Montenegro, presumably, respects and does not dispute – stated that Montenegro, although it couldn’t be convicted, shared responsibility. Not guilt, but responsibility. And had there been no May 21, it would’ve shared the guilt with Serbia – a point worth repeating.
Do you understand where Greater Serbia politics and complicity in the attempt to create a Greater Serbia took this country? Not merely to the disgrace of Dubrovnik, but all the way to a courtroom in The Hague, over the failure to prevent genocide, something for which it would’ve been found liable had the judgment been delivered only a year earlier.
What happened later, we all know: Montenegro subsequently pursued a proper policy regarding Srebrenica. But was it really necessary for the Greater Serbia project first to collapse, for everything to be over, before Montenegro finally “turned back to itself”? Do we know, do we understand what kind of fascist cesspit this country would be today had Momir Bulatovic’s faction prevailed in 1997? Do we understand how profoundly Montenegro’s position has been weakened, ethically first and politically second, by its complicity in the Greater Serbia wars of the 1990s? For instance: how much more difficult does that make today’s negotiations with Croatia?
Are we aware that Montenegro as a whole has been ethically hitching a ride to this very day, ethically parasitising – on the backs of that anti-war minority of the 1990s, that handful of people who attended the magnificent anti-war rallies in Cetinje, those people who were beaten, detained and spat on as “traitors”? Well, those “traitors” are the ones who saved your honour.
Enter Andrija Mandic. He and his political group voted against every resolution condemning the genocide in Srebrenica. That man never opposed the DPS because the once-united DPS had brought Montenegro to the brink of the greatest disgrace in its history, but because, after 1997, the DPS had supposedly “betrayed” the cause. Even if there were nothing else, those two facts alone should have disqualified Andrija Mandić from ever becoming Speaker of the Parliament of Montenegro. He is unworthy of that office, and he has debased it.
What today’s majority regards as “pragmatic” in defending Mandic and his position will, from the perspective of history, become their disgrace. The united DPS also thought it was “pragmatic” to follow Milosevic – and that ended up before the Hague court.
And all those miserable games and manoeuvres, these petty tricks of day-to-day political cunning… Mandic should be dismissed, Vranes should be dismissed, and so should the councillors from Budva’s governing coalition who went to Mladic’s funeral. Not tolerate one because of another, and the second because of a third, simply because doing so is “pragmatic”. Once again: the fact that the Budva councillors went to Mladic’s funeral is not a reason not to overthrow Mandic. It’s a reason to remove both them and Mandic. As for the opposition, good luck to them: they’re obviously happy with their “pragmatic” coalition in Budva. But the price they’re paying is serious disgrace and serious inconsistency, both of which are doing them serious political damage. Budva is proof that, despite the fairy tales it tells itself, Montenegro has never had a truly honest relation with the Srebrenica genocide and the 1990s war crimes.
What on earth are we even talking about here? Have we completely lost our minds? Do we realize how deranged the debate over Mandic and Mladic has become?
Do we realise how shameful it is that, at one point, by the will of the majority, Montenegro stood on the same side as Mladic? Do we realise how shameful it is that Montenegro’s president negotiated at Dayton to ensure that Mladic and Karadzic retained as much territory as possible – territories on which forces under their control had raped, slaughtered, ethnically cleansed and ultimately committed genocide? What are we going to do with that part of our history?
Ed Gein is one of the most notorious serial killers in history. His crimes inspired some of the most horrifying characters in cinematic history – including those in The Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Ed Gein killed people and butchered their bodies. Among other things, he also mutilated the bodies of the dead, which he dug up from their graves.
Ratko Mladic did the same. Apart from killing women, children, the elderly and civilians, in addition to commanding snipers and artillery crews who killed babies in their mothers’ arms, Ratko Mladic, in an effort to conceal the evidence of his crimes, had the bodies of those he had killed dug up, dismembered and then reburied in second and third locations, the so-called secondary and tertiary mass graves.
Do you realize that the families of those killed in the Srebrenica genocide had to gather the remains of their dead from several different graves, piecing their bones together like a jigsaw puzzle? Do you realizee that, in order to bury their loved ones, those people had to separate their bones from the bones of other victims? And you have the nerve to talk about Mladic’s right to a dignified burial? You have the nerve to talk about his family’s pain? That’s so disgusting.
Do you realize how sick it is to support Ratko Mladic? Do you realize how sick it is to call Mladic a “general”, as Mandic did? Do you realize how much Mandic has disgraced this country by doing so?
Had Mandic offered his condolences to the family of Ed Gein, a man who dug up and butchered corpses, you would say he was out of his mind and remove him from office immediately. But everything is apparently fine, and you won’t dismiss him, when he offers condolences to the family of Ratko Mladic, who dug up corpses and butchered them. Why? Because Mladic was a patriot? Ah. I didn’t know there was such a thing as patriotic necrophilia.
Ratko Mladic is another Ed Gein, only a thousand times worse, because he left behind thousands of times more victims. Ratko Mladic is no “general”, no “hero”, no “knight” – he’s a psychotic, sadistic mass murderer driven by a psychotic, sadistic ideology that regards genocide and ethnic cleansing as legitimate means of achieving its goals.
Why frowning? Why the outrage? What else is he? Is Ed Gein a psychopath, while Mladic is a patriot?
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
