Morgan Freeman, Serbia's Public Enemy Number One

By Haris Ljevo

The National Geographic television channel aired a report on the Srebrenica genocide in its documentary series "The Story of Us," filmed a few months ago by one of the world's best actors, Morgan Freeman.

Immediately after the broadcast, media in Serbia launched an attack on the 80-year-old Oscar winner, calling him an ignoramus who made a documentary in which he portrayed Serbs as the bad guys responsible for the genocide and the main culprits for the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Freeman is criticized for not giving the other (Serbian) side a chance to tell their version of the events of the 1990s war, given that it was a documentary.

- For fifty years, Bosnia was part of communist Yugoslavia, but in the early 1990s, Yugoslavia broke up into five different states. Serbian President Slobodan Milošević saw the breakup as an opportunity to take territory from Bosnia. Milošević spread anti-Muslim and anti-Croatian propaganda through the media. He incited Serbs in Bosnia to turn against their neighbors. The ensuing war killed 100,000 people.

With these words, Freeman began his story. It is clear from his words that Freeman does not blame the Serbian people for the war, but the regime of Slobodan Milošević, and the fact that right-wing Serbian media consciously want to label the entire nation as a criminal nation is not Morgan Freeman's problem, but their own.

Freeman is also criticized for mentioning Kosovo as an independent state when listing the countries that emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia. Apparently, he was expected to ignore the fact that Kosovo has been recognized by more than a hundred leading countries in the world, and to accept only what the journalists of Kurir or Informer consider the truth as the sole and absolute truth.

Lawyer Toma Fila went so far as to believe that the entire story was served to Freeman.

- Freeman is an African American, and he was probably served a story that what happened in Srebrenica is the same as what America did to black people for years. Let's just remember how Hillary Clinton said she landed in Sarajevo under Serbian bullets, only to later discover that it was a month after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Dogs bark as they are paid - Fila said.

Freeman is a man who has earned hundreds of millions of dollars through his long acting career, but Fila expects the citizens of Serbia to believe the story that Freeman is some kind of mercenary ready to do a show for ten thousand dollars in which he would blame Serbs for genocide.

- I am surprised that a respected artist like Morgan Freeman allowed himself to participate in such a project and speak about our people in this way. It is a stereotype that has existed in the Western media landscape about the war in Bosnia since August 1995. The story of Serbian responsibility and alleged genocide is being pushed. Negative stereotypes about us are nothing new, but I am surprised that in 2018 some people are still speaking the language of wartime propaganda from the 1990s - believes historian Bojan Dimitrijević, who is also a great advocate for the rehabilitation of Draža Mihailović and Milan Nedić, individuals responsible for the worst war crimes during World War II.

Morgan Freeman's greatest sin is that he created a story about the Srebrenica genocide, which was broadcast on one of the world's leading television channels, and that hundreds of millions of people will be able to watch the show. In addition, it is about Freeman himself, as it is not irrelevant that he is one of the world's leading stars whose every spoken word carries immense weight.

The hysteria surrounding the documentary clearly shows that Serbia, as a society, has not yet come close to the level of confronting its past and admitting responsibility for war crimes during the 1990s.