The funeral of Ratko Mladic in this form is something we all expected. It would have been strange if it had taken place in a family, private setting. By giving him a state funeral with military honours, Serbia acknowledged its participation in the war of the 1990s and put to rest any talk of the war in Bosnia and Croatia having been purely civil in character. For those of us who remember when and how the conflicts began, and who have a fairly good understanding of what triggered them, this is nothing new.
Nor is it news why Mladic is loved and celebrated. Certainly not because of what he defended, but because of what he did in Srebrenica, more precisely in Potocari. Hence the banner at Marakana. For Patriarch Porfirije, Mladic is a hero, which puts the Serbian patriarch in the same camp as Kirill of Russia, who called Russia’s criminal assault on Ukraine a holy war. It is obvious that, for the Orthodox churches of Russia and Serbia, what is happening in Ukraine now and what happened in Bosnia in the 1990s amounts to an Orthodox jihad—or, better put, a crusade, a kind of Reconquista arriving six centuries late. It was with that story, or rather that narrative, that Ratko Mladic cleansed the Drina Valley. You remember whom he was taking revenge on, “from the dahijas (*renegade Ottoman rulers) to this very day.”
The European Commission has managed to write itself into the shameful pages of history through its writing and erasing, and yet another rescue of Vucic. A man whom the EU and the West keep pulling out of a hole every so often, like that sheep in the GIF, only for him immediately to find an opportunity to bury himself headfirst in the very same hole again. Stadiums, streets, the media, and the overwhelming majority of Serbian public opinion saw the general off in tears. Those same overpasses above the motorway in the New Belgrade blocks, from which flowers were once thrown onto tanks heading towards Vukovar, have now welcomed a state funeral cortege carrying Ratko Mladic’s coffin.
And none of this is solely the result of Vucic’s rule. Vucic has certainly made a mess of Serbia’s media landscape. But his media cannot mobilise people to take to the streets. The problem runs much deeper. Elites can gently steer public opinion, but this is not simply a matter of supply. A large part of it is demand. And the masses are demanding revenge. The masses are looking for a remedy for their national and ethnic fractures and scars. Those scars are not imaginary. Serbia today is full of refugees and their descendants from all those places where the plan to expand its territory failed. Those people see victory in Mladic. In Bosnia, Serbia won the war. It conquered half the territory. It ethnically cleansed its Lebensraum.
The problem is structural by nature. Much deeper than the media and politicians. Institutional, if you will. This resentment is not cultivated by the media, nor by some Informer or Alo; it is the product of decades of indoctrination in Serbia’s schools and churches, and throughout the Serbian World.
There is a vibrant and healthy civil society in Serbia. There are journalists. Their space is becoming increasingly restricted, but they are still there. There are people in Serbia who tear down posters of Ratko Mladic, who publicly speak out against this kind of funeral, against the behaviour of fans and intellectuals. It is interesting that among Serbs in Montenegro, no one has come forward to do the same. And there were many who publicly mourned the general; some even dared to attend the funeral. What does this tell us about Serbian politics in Montenegro?
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect those of the CdM editorial board)
