The other day I happened to come across a clip of Mr. Dzevdet Pepic appearing on a television programme in which he, probably not out of any ill intent, relativised the genocide in Srebrenica. That, however, does not excuse him in the slightest.
There was nothing in it that was inhuman. It seems to me that his intention was simply, and rather naively, to make his views more palatable to people from the political milieu he belongs to today, without causing any harm.
That is why I would not talk about Pepic today. What interests me much more is the pattern I recognised in his appearance.
Montenegro has no shortage of such wrong turns.
Perhaps it all began with the splits within the Liberal Alliance. The People’s Concord was a noble idea of reconciliation, but it also produced a dangerous political logic: the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. Slavko Perovic never fully embraced the ideas he had fought against, but some people who emerged from his political circle eventually ended up very far from the values with which they had started out. Slavko himself ended up where we saw him in his final interviews.
Nebojsa Medojevic went down a similar road. From civic, pro-independence and reformist politics, he moved towards alliances in which his former political identity became almost unrecognisable. The Movement for Changes did not remain frozen in place like the Liberal Alliance. It was chewed up and spat out like gum that loses its taste after fifteen seconds.
We can draw a similar lesson from the experience of Dritan Abazovic and URA.
The problem is not only coalitions. The problem is gravity.
When you spend enough time in the political company of people who do not share your core values—and who vastly outnumber you—it rarely happens that they all start to resemble you. It is far more likely that, little by little, you will start to resemble them.
First, you adjust your vocabulary. Then you start avoiding certain subjects. Then you begin relativising things you once clearly condemned. Eventually, you start repeating other people’s arguments, convinced that you arrived at them independently and that they are genuinely your own.
Remember Dritan’s story about Skanderbeg and his supposedly Serbian parents. He later apologised for that statement. But the episode showed quite clearly how easily someone can adopt the language of the environment in which they are trying to survive politically.
That is why Pepic’s framing of Srebrenica also caught my attention: reducing the genocide to some group of criminals gathered around Ratko Mladic, while insisting that people of different ethnicities were among them. It may sound benign. But that is precisely how relativisation works: it does not have to deny the crime. It is enough to blur its political and institutional context.
In Montenegro, there is a political demand for a different reading of the 1990s. For a narrative in which responsibility is spread so thin that, in the end, no one is responsible for anything. And so, we keep getting comparisons, “but they did it to us too,” alternative versions of history, and endless explanations that nothing is quite as it seems.
Some people approach this out of opportunism. Others with the best of intentions. Some simply want to be accepted by their new circle.
A wrong turn does not have to be taken with bad intentions to lead you to the wrong place.
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect those of the CdM editorial team)