Original article (in Serbian) was published on 28/05/2023
After the gathering organized by SNS on Friday and after the “Against Violence” protest on Saturday, the dispute between the representatives of the government and its sympathizers with politicians and individuals from the opposition and certain media does not stop. Yesterday on Twitter, the Vice President of the National Assembly, Sandra Bozic, accused oppositionist Marinika Tepic of wanting to declare the Serbs a genocidal nation, referring to the seven-year-old Proposal for a Resolution on the Srebrenica genocide, which does not state such a thing.
The Vice-President of the National Assembly and a member of the Serbian Progressive Party, Sandra Bozic, shared a post on Twitter yesterday in which she claims that Marinika Tepic, the Vice-President of the Freedom and Justice Party, wants to “declare the Serbian people genocidal”. This is just part of the intensified campaign that government representatives are conducting these days against those who support and invite citizens to go to the protests that followed the mass murders in Serbia at the beginning of May.
Among other things, Bozic wrote on Twitter yesterday: “I don’t have a problem with Marinika Tepic’s national declaration, it bothers me that she wants to declare Serbian people genocidal! And she put her signature on such a declaration!”
In the next tweet, she posted the alleged “evidence” and wrote: “Here are the signatures on the proposed resolution to declare the Serbs a genocidal nation. Signed by Marinika Tepic”. She also published the first page of the aforementioned document, which does show the signature of the vice president of the Freedom and Justice Party.
It is a document from June 27, 2016, that is, the Proposal for a resolution on the genocide in Srebrenica that 11 deputies then submitted to the National Assembly, which was not adopted. Among the signatories was Marinika Tepic, who was then part of the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina.
The text of this document, which can be found on the website of the National Assembly, shows that Sandra Bozic’s claims are not true because the text does not mention that the Serbs be declared a genocidal nation.
The proposed Resolution has 11 points in which, among other things, the genocide in Srebrenica and “any denial of this genocide” are “condemned in the strongest terms”.
“Compassion is expressed for all the victims of the wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, as well as for their families, and all neighbouring countries are invited to continue to provide justice and long-term support to the survivors, including, if necessary, those who were victims of sexual violence”, states the mentioned document.
It is estimated that the recognition of the genocide in Srebrenica is a “civilizational step” that Serbia needs to do in order to “confirm the seriousness of the intention to build dialogue, cooperation, trust and lasting peace in the region based on the acceptance of actions from the past”.
This resolution, as stated in the proposal, respects the decisions of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In 2007, the aforementioned court acquitted Serbia of charges of genocide, stating that there was individual responsibility of the war generals, that Serbia did not participate officially or directly in these events, but also that the authorities in Belgrade did nothing to prevent the genocide or punish those responsible for it.
Claims that Marinika Tepic wants to declare Serbs a “genocidal nation” based on a proposal from 2016 are not new – pro-regime media such as Pink and Informer have already made them referring to her speech in the Serbian Parliament from 2017 in which she called for a ban denial of all genocides, which Raskrinkavanje.me wrote about last year.
Two years ago, similar inaccurate claims about the declaration of the entire nation as genocidal were spread by the domestic media at the expense of Montenegro – that the Assembly of this country declared the Serbs a genocidal nation in the Resolution on the Srebrenica genocide (which was adopted on June 17, 2021). In the text of the aforementioned resolution, however, it is explicitly stated the opposite – that no nation can be declared genocidal, which Raskrikavanje wrote about at the time.
Otherwise, despite the strong denials of the genocide by a large part of the public in Serbia and the Republic of Srpska, the genocide in Srebrenica is an established fact for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. You can read more about it here.
The campaign of the authorities and their “analysts”
Members of the Serbian Progressive Party, its sympathizers and the media that are sympathetic to the SNS are currently leading an intensified campaign against opposition politicians and individuals who support the “Against Violence” protests.
For example, the singer Jelena Karleusa, who openly supports SNS, wrote on her Instagram story about the nationality of Marinika Tepic, dealing with her origins.
“How do you declare yourself and how do you feel? You are Romanian by birth, that is not debatable, but a direct question – do you declare yourself and feel as Serbian? When they ask you, what do you say, what are you?”, asked Karleusa. “Are you saying I’m Serbian? If the answer is YES, I rest my case. (…) if the answer is “no”, you can’t insult the Serbian people, to whom you don’t belong ideologically”, Karleusa stated in the announcement.
Also, Nebojsa Krstic, a frequent guest of Special shows on Pink, after the third “Against Violence” protest, accused N1 and Nova S on Twitter of being, nothing less than “organizers of the Gazela blockade”.
On Friday, MP Nebojsa Bakarec made serious accusations against these media when a journalist from N1 approached him and asked a question. He, among other things, addressing the elderly gentleman who was with him, said that he “does not give interviews for the tycoon, anti-Serb media”, and that the journalists “insult and satanize” them.
“Highly professional standards” of the newspaper Politika
Yesterday, Politika also tried to discredit the protests by sharing the text of the web portal 24sedam, in which numerous unfounded accusations were made against the opposition and protest participants. The text is titled “Who is Lazar Pavlovic who wore the “vulture dad” T-shirt”, and in it, they deal with an LGBT activist who came to the protests with his wife and child, and whose photo in the striking T-shirts went viral on Twitter over the weekend.
“What the pro-Western media did not report to the public is that the man in the photo is a long-time activist of the Gay-Straight Alliance”, states Politika. “In addition to these photos, Pavlovic also points out his admiration for the organization “Resistance”, which was heavily financed by the West before the colour revolution of 2000. At that time, millions of dollars were invested in this movement to weaken Serbia and bring Western followers to power, which unfortunately happened in the end, according to 24sedam.
They also state that “at one protest there was a member of the LGBT community, at another he was a resister, at the third he was a friend of a NATO lobbyist who is seeking the independence of the so-called state of Kosovo, on the fourth he appears as a family man and a father who uses his child to spread political propaganda”.
And while they convey the obscure claims and speculations of the tabloid web portal, in the section “About us” on the web portal of this paper, otherwise the oldest in the Balkans, it is stated that it is a reputable media, “a daily political newspaper that adheres to highly professional journalistic standards, nurtures a culture of dialogue and freedom of expression”.
The text was updated on May 29, 2023, at 10:43 p.m. The first version of the text contained incorrect information – that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague acquitted Serbia of responsibility for genocide. The updated version contains the correct information – that the International Court of Justice in The Hague acquitted Serbia of charges of genocide. We apologize to our readers for the error.