Biserko: Political elites in Serbia must abandon the idea of unification with Republika Srpska

BELGRADE, (Patria) - The European Union should focus on Serbia and its political elites treating the wars of the 1990s truthfully, rather than relativizing and rejecting them, said Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. 

“This is disastrous for the younger generations who will be the bearers of policies here, and they have adopted this narrative which has become, I would say, official,” Biserko said, stating that any reversal of the first-instance verdict against Radovan Karadžić would be a fiasco.
 
“At the very least, I expect the first-instance verdict to be confirmed, and it would be encouraging if other municipalities were also declared to have experienced genocide. That war was genocidal. The international community did not muster the courage to see this story through to the end, and it is absurd that the Army of Republika Srpska is responsible for genocide and is not linked to any other institution,” Biserko said. 

She believes that it was not enough for Serbia to be found guilty of failing to prevent genocide, as its involvement is much deeper. She emphasizes the importance of understanding the context of that war, its causes, and consequences, and that the Dayton Agreement merely marked the end of the war. 
 
Biserko states that the EU must also exert certain pressures on Belgrade, as it is difficult to join a community like the EU without resolving relations between the countries of the region. 

“Serbian elites have a big task ahead of them, to turn to reality, rather than calling Republika Srpska western Serbia, naming schools after convicted war criminals, and falsifying the history of the 1990s. We have the promotion of radical ideologies from World War II, and this distorts the history not only in Serbia but also of what happened in World War II.” 

There are deniers and falsifiers on the Serbian side, and there is enough evidence of what happened in Bosnia, and what is needed here is the will of political elites, but now we have denial, Biserko points out for N1.

She said that Serbia's ambition to complete “its project” is still alive, and in that regard, the international community should focus on defeating that ideology, which is still active when it comes to the unification of the Republic of Serbia and the Republika Srpska, Biserko concluded.