Serbia No Longer Wants to Listen to What Šešelj Says

Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, said in an interview for the BH News Agency Patria (NAP) that the image of only 200 people gathered today to welcome Vojislav Šešelj in Belgrade, a Hague indictee for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, indicates that the Serbian public is no longer interested in either Šešelj or the reasons for his appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The current government, Biserko says, has succeeded in normalizing the past. In Serbia, no one writes about why he (Šešelj) was in The Hague, how he harassed the court; there is no mention of that in Serbia, Biserko says.

When asked if Šešelj could threaten the President of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić, and the Prime Minister of this country, Aleksandar Vučić, a possibility that Biserko had already announced, and which Šešelj himself announced today upon landing at Belgrade Airport, Biserko says that it seems to her that this will not happen.

- Šešelj knows the biographies of Vučić and Nikolić, he knows things from the ground, but the question is how much Šešelj's story will be accepted in the media, and how much the public here wants to listen more about the past – Biserko believes. She adds that it seems to her that the Serbian public is more interested in other issues than listening to what Šešelj has to say.

In her opinion, this whole story around Šešelj will not last more than two or three days.