POLITICS-SERBIA: The Right Rises Now in Serbia

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Apr 23 2002 (IPS) - The new law to extradite Serbs suspected of war crimes to an international war crime tribunal at The Hague has provoked strong nationalist and rightist sentiments.

The suicide of Vlajko Stojiljkovic, the former interior minister who was indicted along with former president Slobodan Milosevic, has added fire to new nationalist passions.

Stojiljkovic shot himself April 11 within hours of the passing of the new bill in the Serb parliament. He died two days later.

Almost immediately after his death Belgrade was plastered with posters of Radovan Karadzic, also indicted for war crimes. “Every Serb is Radovan”, the posters said. They called for a national defence of Karadzic. Radovan Karadzic is accused of mass killing of Muslims in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

The poster was signed by the ultra-nationalist movement Obraz (Cheek). The whereabouts of Kardzic are not known.

Stojiljkovic was on a list of 23 Serbs wanted for war crimes in the 90s. Karadzic is on the same list. The wars in former Yugoslavia left more than 200,000 dead, mostly innocent civilians, and mostly non-Serbs.

The Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) described the suicide by Stojiljkovic as an “act of heroism”. The SPS, a re-styled communist party, ran the country from 1945 until October 2000, when party leader Slobodan Milosevic lost the elections after a decade of rule.

The party calls the adoption of the new extradition law “national treason”.

The new law has provoked anger against the West in public discussions. Many popular TV stations invited ultra-nationalists to air their views. For days it seemed the wars of the 90s were back.

The response of the new administration to this eruption of new nationalism was mild. Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic said “everyone has the right to express their opinion in public.”

Analysts say such responses are only bringing the nationalists right back into the spotlight, and threatening to ruin the new path the country set out to follow.

“It all comes to admitting that Serbs did commit war crimes in the wars of the 90s,” says analyst Ivan Torov. “The biased attitude of the new administration towards this problem only encourages nationalists, who want to continue manipulating the public.”

The new extradition law was adopted by the federal parliament under pressure from Western countries who threatened to cut off badly needed financial aid if the bill was not passed.

“This society is in a state of total confusion and panic after four lost wars, ten years of isolation, and a quick transition process in which many people are losing their jobs,” says Belgrade sociologist Vladimir Ilic.

“The new administration has done little to explain all these things,” Ilic says. “They say we have to make up for the lost decade (when Milosevic ruled), without going into many details, but leaving skeletons of the past in the closets can not help much in such a situation.”

Milanka Saponja of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights says “this country completely depends on foreign aid and cannot expect to be re-built without it.” The new authorities must bear in mind their own responsibility towards pulling the country out of the mud, she says. “The revival of ultra-nationalism is not the way to do that and it can not be tolerated.”

The new rise of the right means “poking a finger in the eye of the international community we want to re-join after a decade of isolation,” says Saponja.

A leading Belgrade human rights organisation, the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC), has asked for firm steps against Obraz, which it called “an organisation that incites ethnic, racial and religious hate.”