If you did not give a second though when Ratko Mladić was sentenced to life prison for war crimes, you are either not Serb enough or you do not support Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party. Or at least that was a message sent by the Serbian Parliament last week.
When President Vučić stated that the sentencing of Mladić would be difficult for the Serbian people, that became a given topic for the MPs, regardless of the fact that the fight against terrorism and new duties of Srbijagas were on the agenda. The MPs of the ruling coalition did not say – everyone must pay for one’s wrongdoings – they actually tried to make the whole nation feel punished.
“It was a particularly vexatious day yesterday for the Serbian people. The shameful verdict against General Mladić is just proof that The Hague Tribunal is a political court, a court created to review history and accuse the Serbian people of committing crimes, while everyone else was acquitted.”
“Yesterday’s verdict against Ratko Mladić affirms that only Serbs will be tried in The Hague. Such a verdict was expected, because it is a political court, not a court of justice, and all those who were once judges are now lawyers and defend the Kosovo Albanians.”
“Who was The Hague targeting? Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. They are winners [although] the goal was to embarrass Serbia in that way.”
“One simply can’t understand the behaviour of some media in Serbia and some individuals who were literally happy, literally happy and gloated over the shameful verdict of The Hague Tribunal. And it is no coincidence that these are the same media and the same individuals who run a daily campaign against Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party.”
“I would ask a question to those who want to come to power, say, to Boris Tadić. So, if general Mladić had had to go to The Hague (let’s not broaden this debate now), couldn’t he have gone like a general, wearing a general’s uniform? I can see his image in my head, he went there wearing a baseball hat, a worker’s uniform, he had no diagnosis, some say he was hungry. That’s a shame. That speaks of those who were in power.”
Only the opposition parliamentary group consisting of Albanians and Bosnians submitted a proposal to the Assembly to adopt the Declaration on Srebrenica. The fact that they presented their proposal at a press conference in the Assembly Hall, instead of in the Plenum Hall, speaks best about the atmosphere in the Serbian Assembly.
Incidentally, the same parliamentary majority made an important decision two days earlier that the Constitution of Serbia should be changed in the part on justice, with the explanation that the European Union asked us to do that, and that Serbia would not give up the European path.
For the Open Parliament, Mirjana Nikolić.