Spasojević: Are there acceptable crimes?
For the last 26 years, every 4 August brings new celebrations from the Croatian side and new wounds and sufferings on the Serbian side. On that day, Croatia celebrates "Liberation Day", while the Serbian people remember with sadness their homes from which they were expelled, mourn their dead and look to heaven for justice.
The military-police operation "Storm" ended the civil war on the territory of today's Croatia, but it left over 220 thousand innocent Serb civilians homeless and without memories. On that day, almost 200,000 members of the Croatian armed forces attacked the UN protected zone, known as the Republic of Serbian Krajina, in which there were about 30,000 Serb fighters. After an unequal struggle that lasted for several days, the Serbian people, who had lived in that area for centuries, formed an endless column, fleeing towards the Republic of Srpska and further towards Serbia. Over 220,000 civilians fled their homes in the largest ethnic cleansing in Europe since the Second World War. More than 2,000 civilians have been killed, and many are still missing. The so-called "garden pits", graves into which the bodies of killed civilians were thrown, which are located wherever the Croatian army passed, have never been investigated.
The result of this operation is devastating. Members of the Serbian people, who made up over 12 percent of Croatia's population, have been reduced to 2 percent. Serb villages were burned, property looted, and 80 Orthodox churches destroyed. Everything was done in accordance with the eerie concept of Mile Budak, one of the ideologues of the Nazi, Ustasha movement, according to which "the Serbian issue in Croatia should be solved by killing one third, evicting one third, and converting one third of them (to Catholicism)".
These days in Croatia, a member of the EU and NATO, there is an atmosphere of celebration and glorification of persecution. The choreography present is remembered by evil from the Second World War, when the only camp in Europe for children, mostly Serbian, was located in Croatia. Over the bones of over half a million killed in the system of concentration camps in Jasenovac, the flags of those who invented the "Serbosek", a special device for killing Orthodox Serbs, are fluttering again.
On the other hand, the voice of the exiled Serbs is not heard. For the crimes during the "Storm", the commanders of the Croatian army were first convicted in the Hague, but in the second instance, in a magical way and by a re-vote in the court panel, they were legally released. Croatia is a member of the EU, and many in Europe do not mind the fact that unburied bones from the Second World War and the "Storm" still lie all over that country. Ignoring the above, the question arises whether the non-existence of the return of the exiled is acceptable, as well as the failure to resolve the issues of private property of Serbs, even though private property is the foundation of today's Europe. They close their eyes to the Nazi symbols, and representatives of the system based on anti-fascism come to the parade celebrating the persecution of civilians as respected and welcome guests.
Today, Serbia does not impose on anyone what they should do and what to celebrate, but only asks the civilized world to show respect for the victims. We appeal to our neighbours not to celebrate and rejoice over exiled people, over killed old people and children. Peace in the region is not built by pouring salt into a wound, in this case the wound of the Serbian people. For that reason, on 5 August, Serbia and the Republic of Srpska mark the Remembrance Day of those that were exiled. A day in which we all bow our heads before the fates of those who, for the second time in the 20th century, were forced to flee their homes to save their lives. Today, Serbia and the Republic of Srpska are loudly seeking justice, seeking humanity, seeking what Europe is based on – respect for basic human rights. The right to justice. The right to life on one's own land. The right to enjoy one's property, the right to one's language and the use of one's alphabet. The right to be baptized, married and buried in Orthodox churches, in villages where we have always lived. Respecting other people's victims, seeking justice for its own victims, Serbia is today the only country in the former Yugoslavia that sincerely works for reconciliation in the region, reconciliation based primarily on the determination that all victims deserve reverence.
The answer to the question from the first sentence of this text is "yes". It is enough to satanize one nation, as was the case with the Serbian people at the beginning of the last decade of the last century, and then everything is allowed. Killing, persecution, ethnic cleansing. Then the sentence "we should inflict such blows so that Serbs practically disappear", which was uttered by the President of Croatia at the time, Franjo Tuđman, in the preparation of the "Storm", is not enough to provoke at least a moral condemnation of the civilized world. When you satanize a nation, then even the streets named after Nazi "heroes", like Mile Budak and Andrija Artuković, are not an obstacle in one EU member state.
Recently, news appeared that the Croatian euro coin will feature an image of a Serb, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest, Nikola Tesla, who was born on the territory of today's Croatia. It is not mentioned that the family of the famous scientist was massacred in the Second World War by the Croatian Ustashas, and that the monument in his native village, Smiljan, was blown up at the beginning of the conflict in Croatia in 1992, because his Serbianness bothered those who today proudly want to put him on the euro coin.