Japan and Serbia: Two Different Worlds in Confronting Criminal Regimes

By Haris Ljevo

Japan today marked the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which killed more than 75,000 people.

Just three days earlier, the Japanese also paid tribute to the victims of the first atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima. Due to radiation and severe illnesses that developed, the number of people who died from the effects of the atomic bombs reached 450,000, of whom 292,325 were victims from Hiroshima and 165,409 from Nagasaki.

On August 9, 1945, at 11:02 AM, the explosion of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki destroyed 80 percent of the buildings, including the famous Urakami Cathedral.  

The two attacks forced Japan to surrender, which it did on August 15, 1945, by signing the capitulation, thus ending World War II.

The commemoration of the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is taking place in the days when the anniversary of the military operation Storm in Croatia is also being marked, which is an ideal opportunity to see how people in the civilized world and we in the Balkans confront the past.

Unlike the Japanese, who have learned lessons from their dark past, political leaders in these regions, primarily in Serbia, whose regime is most responsible for the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, still lack the courage to face past mistakes, so they try to shift all blame onto others.

Although the Serbian regime is most responsible for the suffering of Serbs in Croatia and their expulsion to Serbia, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and RS President Milorad Dodik sent highly inflammatory messages from the commemoration of the anniversary of the expulsion of Krajina Serbs in Veternik near Novi Sad, stating that "no one will ever humiliate Serbs again."

If anyone humiliated Serbs, it was the policy advocated and still advocated by Vučić and Dodik. Empty promises of all Serbs living in one state cost over 200,000 Krajina Serbs their expulsion from their own country, and such a policy also led to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of citizens in these regions, culminating in the genocide in Srebrenica.

In World War II, Japan was on the side of fascism, and the dropping of atomic bombs and the suffering of Japanese civilians were the price paid by Japanese citizens for the mistakes of their regime at the time.

Today's Japanese policy, despite so many victims, does not shift blame to the rest of the world but learns the lesson that such a fate should never happen again.

- As the only country in the world to have suffered atomic bombing during wartime, I urge the Japanese government to reconsider its policy of relying on the nuclear umbrella and to join the treaty banning nuclear weapons as soon as possible - said Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue at the commemoration.

The Mayor of Nagasaki is not threatening anyone and is not blaming anyone else for the suffering of his fellow citizens; he has only one goal – the prohibition of nuclear weapons. Taue knows that the continued development of nuclear weapons in the future could only bring suffering to someone, again the Japanese or someone else. It doesn't matter.

- As a country that was an aggressor against its neighbors and whose regime committed genocide against our neighbors, we want to say from this place that we have learned something from our past and that we will do everything in the future to ensure that such things never happen again.

Perhaps one day we will witness a Serbian president or prime minister addressing a gathering in a similar manner.

We are far from Japan, but perhaps that moment will come someday.