The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia
strongly condemns the campaign staged to rehabilitate key actors of
Serbia’s warring policy in the 1990s. The launch of Borisav Jović’s
latest book, interviews with and statements given by convicted war
criminal Šainović and the newest offensive by a group of SANU
academicians been testifying of a single goal: to have all the key
actors of the pan-Serbian and nationalistic policy freed from any
responsibility. One cannot but be concerned with the fact that by
far lauder than the voice advocating rehabilitation of the war
masterminds and scandalously extremist stories and feuilletons run
by chauvinist pro-governmental papers is the silence of the entire
society, its turning a deaf ear to this dangerous tendency. And all
this leads to the conclusion that Serbia, the same as it once
consensually entered the war for the Greater Serbia project -
meeting marginal resistance of some individuals and groups - is now
consensually accepting the rehabilitation of the masterminds of the
policy of crime.
The Helsinki Committee also reminds the SANU
President and his colleagues that the discourse about whether or not
the infamous Memorandum has been authorized is senseless – given
that almost all academicians had “authorized” it in hundreds of
interviews with the state-controlled media of that time. SANU’s
activities in preparing the terrain for the war and in the war
propaganda are not things to be now seen as the freedom of
expression as they are historical facts. Not only many proofs,
testimonies and documents testifying of SANU’s role in wartime have
appeared before the International Criminal Court for the Former
Yugoslavia but this role has been also thoroughly reconstructed in
as many – if not more - studies and doctorate theses in Serbia and
worldwide. However, rather than distance SANU clearly from its once
fatal policy and speak openly about this dark side of its history
the President of SANU opted for sweeping facts under the carpet,
fabrication of history and reproduction of the ‘street politics’
narrative as substitutes for facts and interpretations deriving from
scholarly studies.
Instead of breaking up with the project of war and
territorial expansion, the present regime, servile and extremely
nationalistic media under its control and SANU’s elite decided to
rehabilitate and reaffirm all this – and this is what practically
sets a stage for another war in the Balkan. All these revisionist
and revanchist tendencies have been foreboding new conflicts and
indicating that the mainstream Serbia prefers a follow-up to the
nationalistic policy of the 1990s to a clear breakup with it. The
international community, if acting responsibly, should never hint at
any support to dangerous intentions as such and never be an
accomplice in a systematic rehabilitation of all those it had itself
brought to justice.
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