Good morning! Yesterday we wrote about Serbia and mentioned the crimes committed by the Serbian army and police in Kosovo. Murders of unborn children and the elderly. A few comments made me realize that people have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s why I think it’s time to rebuild, build and talk about the conflicts of the 1990s and the role of Serbia and our country in them.
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Why is Serbia most responsible for the 1990s?
Whatever they tell you, neither Slovenia, nor Croatia or Bosnia disintegrated Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was disintegrated by Serbia, that is, the Serbian government at that time. This is not to deny the fact that in every state there was a movement and tendency towards independence, that in every society there was the potential of ethno-nationalism. Here we clearly state who did the job for both of them, in a more difficult and bloody way.
After Tito’s death and the bankruptcy of self-governing socialism and the overly expensive and unsustainable Yugoslav welfare state, which was financed by loans from abroad, there was an economic and social crisis in Yugoslavia, which ignited with protests in Kosovo. The response of the Serbian communist elite to the Kosovo protests gave birth to Milosevic. Serbia and its intellectual elite (SANU) decided that the Yugoslavia of 1974 did not correspond to Serbian national interests. There was a coup in the Serbian Communist Party. Milosevic deposed Stambolic, whom he would kill a couple of decades later, and took over the leadership of the Serbian communists. With coups in Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro, he took over the local party organizations and set out to conquer Yugoslavia. Where he could not dismiss party leaders, they would be dismissed in the first parliamentary elections, when the ethno-nationalist spirits that Milosevic awakened, took over the leadership of the newly emerging independent states. The war could begin. Milosevic kept the army in his hands and the rebel Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia were armed. While the arms embargo kept the Bosnians and Croats in a handicap, the Serbian military endeavors seemed unstoppable. War machinery and war profiteering, combined with smuggling, fed the Serbian economy. Milosevic’s authoritarianism was unstoppable. While there were wars, there was no concern for him.
Montenegro has always been a client-state of the Milosevic regime. Co-aggressor, just like Belarus now in Ukraine. We were what Austria was to Germany. Taken over and occupied territory, regardless of formal autonomy. Unlike Austria, we also had a department of foreign affairs in the FRY.
At the end of the 1990s, Montenegrins went through a small catharsis. Djukanovic’s distancing from Milosevic started discussions about “detours” and crimes. On state television, we could watch documentaries about the crimes of our reservists and the Ministry of the Interior in Croatia. Documentaries without narration, pure material, which our propagandists recorded themselves, were the best means of de-Nazification of Montenegrin society. Because it was really nazified in the early 1990s. Only Nazism had a different name, and was less technologically equipped and less potent.
Fate wanted the Yugoslav war cycle to end where it all began. At Kosovo. Since someone, probably a young commentator yesterday, upon my remark that the biggest enemies of the Serbian police and the army in Kosovo were unborn children and the elderly, was amazed and said that I was exaggerating, I will remind you here which case I specifically meant.
I meant Suva Reka and the Berisha family – 48 of them. Their crime was that their houses in this place were rented to the OSCE mission until the beginning of the bombing. All 48 of them were locked in the pizzeria and Serbian policemen started throwing grenades through the windows. In the end, they finished them off. All 48 of them. Fourteen of them were under 15 years old. One woman was pregnant. The corpses were then picked up and placed in coolers, which were later found buried in Batajnica. Some others from some other places surfaced in the waters of Serbia. Organized state effort to hide the crimes. How did we find out about the crime? First, one woman survived, wriggled between the bodies of those closest to her and ran away. Two children also survived. Then someone in the cover-up chain in Serbia spoke up. People were convicted for this case. It happened at the time framework from the end of Milosevic’s rule to Tadic’s reconciliation with Dacic, when it was possible to subject war criminals to trial in Serbia. Do you think any of that would be known today?
The Suva Reka massacre is just one of the numerous crimes committed by Serbian official state units throughout the former Yugoslavia. The biggest that happened was the genocide in Srebrenica. As long as Serbia does not face this past and we in Montenegro do not recall the lessons that caused us to leave the embrace of our northern neighbors, we risk that all these mistakes may be repeated.
That’s it for today. We wish you a pleasant rest of the day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
