A HARD NUT TO CRACK: Vucic may have got a ticket for the 'Serbian world' in Podgorica, but he fears Sarajevo!

By: Delvin Kovač

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"I never criticise or attack my country's government when I am abroad. That's why I make up for it abundantly when I return." This is how the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, once spoke.

It is not exactly that the current Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has fully emulated this prominent British statesman, who marked the forties and fifties of the last century. Back then, as Prime Minister of Serbia, Vučić once admired Churchill in mid-2016:

"Brutal interference of BiH"

"Winston Churchill's key ideology was the progress, betterment and freedom of his country, Great Britain, and everything else was subordinated to that. It is good that there are those who want to learn from Churchill, which means that love for the homeland as a key idea is closer to them than achieving their own interests."

And what could and should Vučić have learned from Churchill? The answer lies in the first two sentences of this text. Vučić should not have criticised his own country, and certainly not some other or third country, for events in a fourth. It sounds a bit complicated, but in the Balkans nothing can surprise us anymore.

- Look at the brutal interference of BiH in the internal affairs of Montenegro, but no one said that, no one said that it was done by Priština and almost all countries of the Western Balkans. That is the story of how Serbia always has to be guilty in order to create a balance, but in reality an imbalance is created, because Serbia is always guilty for everything even though it has nothing to do with it. Serbia is guilty, even when it is silent - Vučić said from Verona.

"We want the best possible relations with Bosnia and Herzegovina and peace in the region", are words that have come out of Vučić's mouth on several occasions so far. He would usually utter them most often in the company of his 'great friend' Milorad Dodik, even while the latter held the position of member of the BiH Presidency. There were those meetings every now and then, but there aren't many anymore...

Now in the best of relations - it is even questionable whether they are in any relations at all - Vučić is no longer even with Dodik, who fortunately no longer has the opportunity as a member of the collective head of state to continue tarnishing the reputation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with his inarticulate and uncontrolled outbursts, especially those on the international stage (we are used to those on the domestic front!) such as, for example, the one during his video address to representatives of the United Nations Security Council.

Vučić should - presumably - know that with his immoderate, unfounded and even extremely stupid statements about Bosnia and Herzegovina (like the one from Verona) he cannot maintain good relations even with that same Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he so "sincerely" several times "swore", that one would apply his "oaths" like a balm to a wound without any premeditation.

There were no poisonous arrows from Belgrade for a long time. Actually, there were, but from Vučić's ventriloquists Ivica Dačić and Aleksandar Vulin. They usually say what Vučić thinks. However, a conciliatory tone is what Vučić has recently focused on instilling in the ears of patriots of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Vučić is trying with his sycophantic rhetoric to win over those who might think that besides its fur, a wolf also changes its nature. But there are few such people.

Thoughtless statement from Italy

Vučić is aware that he will never be able to "smooth over" his status in the eyes of Bosnians and Herzegovinians, because everyone who is even remotely familiar with everything that happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina knows well what happened during the war in the 1990s on the hills above Sarajevo, which were patrolled by Vučić's political father and leader of the Radicals, Vojislav Šešelj, in whose company Vučić was with a gun, pardon, an umbrella on his shoulder.

And then all that wannabe conciliatory rhetoric goes down the drain because of the aforementioned thoughtless statement from Italy yesterday. However, this time we will not turn a blind eye thinking that alcohol spoke through him, given that when uttering such nonsense and completely unfounded accusations, he might have been "under the influence", because he was at a wine fair in Verona at the time.

With the brutal interference of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the internal affairs of Montenegro, Vučić presumably sees messages of verbal and moral support from a handful of Bosnian-Herzegovinian politicians and intellectuals for - as it will turn out - the losing candidate in the second round of presidential elections, Milo Đukanović. If words of support for Đukanović truly are brutal interference of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the electoral process in Montenegro, how is it that no one from that same Montenegro has complained about it? How is it that this brutal interference only bothers someone who has nothing, or at least should have nothing, to do with the elections in Montenegro? Well, it bothered him because he feared that his player in the "final", Jakov Milatović, could be threatened by the "brutal" verbal support for the pro-Western, pro-European and pro-NATO oriented candidate Milo Đukanović.

Vučić apparently did not follow the post on the Twitter profile (on which he is far less active than on other social networks like Facebook or Instagram) of his not-so-dear compatriot Nenad Čanak, who warned about the mysterious shutdown of cameras at border crossings in Montenegro on the night before the elections.

"The Police Administration of Montenegro turned off the cameras at all border crossings in the country last night," Čanak wrote on the morning of April 2, the day the second round of presidential elections was held in Montenegro. The police later issued a statement saying it was a "overload".

How is it possible that cameras at all border crossings in Montenegro stopped working exactly on the night before the elections? In the dark, anything can happen...

And darkness can apparently also be at the border crossings between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Let us just recall the dozens, even hundreds, of cases of electoral engineering in Srebrenica. Namely, in the register of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, under an expedited procedure, in just one day, hundreds of people who have nothing to do with Srebrenica would be registered, thus obtaining BiH ID cards and being able to vote in elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, thereby distorting the electoral will of Bosnians and Herzegovinians. Is that not brutal interference of Serbia in the internal affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mr. Vučić?

The Serbian president is now probably very convinced that with the victory of Milatović in Montenegro, he has installed his project "Serbian world" through the front door. If Montenegro, i.e. the overthrow of Milo Đukanović, was the last obstacle for Vučić in creating the "Serbian world", in Belgrade they must be aware that this role will proudly be taken on by the larger, more normal part of Bosnia and Herzegovina of 51 percent, but, of course, in the name of all on 51,209 km². Vučić, Dačić, Vulin, Milatović and other little Vučićs will eventually have to understand that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a hard nut. That nut with which not even one of the smartest birds - the crow - knows how to cope. A nut that breaks teeth!