PRESS RELEASE

PAGE 2/6

 

ALL PRESS RELEASE

PAGE 2 ::: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

INFO   :::  Press Release - PAGE 2 > A Campaign Staged to Rehabilitate Key Actors of the Warring Policy

 

A Campaign Staged to Rehabilitate Key Actors of the Warring Policy

Belgrade, September 18, 2016

 

 

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.

 

ALL PRESS RELEASE

PAGE 2 ::: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright * Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia - 2008

Web Design * Eksperiment