Natasa Kandic: Military Leaders attempt to Check Democracy in Serbia
The Ljubisa Dikovic File, which the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) published on January 23, 2012, has re-opened the issue of war crimes in Serbia. War crimes became a public topic in Serbia after Slobodan Milosevic’s arrest and extradition to the Hague Tribunal. In order to justify its decision to hand Milosevic over to an ‘anti-Serb’ court, the then new government revealed the existence of mass graves in the police training field in Batajnica near Belgrade. There was no public debate about this issue – instead, the official explanation about Milosevic’s extradition being the condition for international loans was insistently reiterated. A video recording of the execution of six Muslims, first revealed the by the HLC in June 2005, caused a strong emotional reaction among ordinary people in Serbia, who sided with the victims and against the perpetrators who came from ‘their own national community’. The government hastened to explain that the crime had been committed by an isolated group of criminals, who would be tried, and that Serbian state institutions had nothing to do with the crime itself. And this is when we missed the opportunity to broach the question of our own responsibility, to start thinking in a new way, and to build a new attitude toward the victims from the ‘other side’.
