By Enver Robelli
Serbian students want to see Aleksandar Vučić gone, but not the propaganda machine of his regime. This much is evident from their reactions on social media on the anniversary of NATO’s intervention on March 24, 1999. Not once did they mention the horrifying crimes committed by Serbian forces against the Albanian population in Kosovo.
They do not want to know anything about the mass grave in Batajnica, just outside Belgrade—where nearly 1,000 Kosovars, massacred or executed, were buried. They do not want to know the truth about the truckload of civilian corpses dumped into the Danube. They do not want to know about the nearly one million Albanians expelled from Kosovo. They do not want to know about Serbia’s apartheid policies in Kosovo throughout the 1990s.
They also seem to have no interest in learning about the siege of Sarajevo by their fellow Serbs and the killing of over 10,000 people. Nor about the genocide in Srebrenica. Nor the prison camp in Omarska, the mass rapes and executions in Višegrad and elsewhere in Bosnia. Nor the destruction of Vukovar and the killing of hospital patients there. Nor the atrocities in Prijedor.
Today at 3:00 PM, the students plan to gather in front of the General Staff headquarters and the Ministry of Defense in Belgrade to “commemorate the Serbian victims of NATO aggression.” With this stance, the students show they are against Vučić, but not against the manipulation of history.
But can the future be built by distorting the past?