Merchants of Crimes

Political circles leading the systemic denial of genocide and institutional glorification of war criminals are facing a severe test. Letters sent to thousands of addresses of the highest world officials by 12 associations of war victims, demanding an end to the increasingly widespread practice of denying crimes and glorifying criminals, have already sparked reactions across the planet. What has been whispered in diplomatic circles for several months could very soon become reality – many international doors will be closed to deniers of genocide and war crimes. 

Denying the genocide in Srebrenica, the most horrific crime in Europe after World War II, is not only a civilizational shame and a vile anti-civilizational act, but also conscious complicity in the crime. Attempts to minimize crimes and their denial by definition constitute active participation in their execution, even decades after they were committed. Who in the modern world, in their right mind, would even want or need to accept as interlocutors people who deny crimes?  

It is precisely these people, who under the guise of concern for „their“ victims have developed an entire strategy of trading in human tragedies, that represent an obstacle to the healing of severe war wounds. These political circles, through their constant incitement, actually prevent victims on all sides from finding their peace. Without their destructive actions, ordinary people who have suffered terrible losses would somehow find a way to live the rest of their lives with as little pain as possible. After all, they, on all sides, seek only two things – that criminals be held accountable and that the secret of where so many missing persons, still being searched for today, are located be finally revealed. 

Merchants of victims and human tragedies, however, do not allow wounds to heal and arrogate to themselves the right to be the supposed leaders of those who have truly lost their loved ones. In this endeavor, they do not limit themselves only to the last war in which Yugoslavia bloodily disappeared, but go further back into the past, to their favorite time  - the era of World War II. 

In the last few days, we have witnessed various commemorations where all the absurdity of their trading in human suffering can be observed. What moral credibility do people who deny some victims have to pay tribute to others? With what credibility does, for example, Milorad Dodik, while denying the victims of the Srebrenica genocide, appear at a gathering commemorating the victims of Jasenovac in Donja Gradina?  His very appearance is a desecration of the memory of those same victims of the terrible crimes in Jasenovac, because how is it possible to pay tribute to the victims of one crime while not recognizing victims killed in the same brutal manner, in an equally terrible crime in another place? This mockery of both sets of victims is clear proof that such people do not appear at commemorations and gatherings to pay tribute to the victims, but to politically monetize them as efficiently as possible. 

The case of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić is even more absurd. He readily accepted participation in erecting a memorial for the victims of the terrible Ustasha crimes in Donja Gradina, while completely ignoring the truth that such a place exists in the center of Belgrade – the former concentration camp at Sajmište, the only concentration camp in a capital city during World War II, where tens of thousands of people were also killed, including fifteen thousand Jews. This area formally belonged to the so-called Independent State of Croatia, but in reality – and Vučić knows this well – it was an SS camp where people arrested by the regime of Milan Nedić were brought and killed, the same regime that various pseudo-scholars, with the full assistance of the current authorities, are trying to rehabilitate based on horrific forgeries. At the same time, in Belgrade, at the execution site in Jajinci, more than 80 thousand people, women and children, mostly Serbs from Partisan families, were killed. There too, just as in the Banjica camp, where anti-fascist Serbs were killed in waves, the masters were Nedić's police and state guard. 

What is the difference between the victims of the terrible crimes in Jasenovac and those at Sajmište and Jajinci? It lies in the fact that some were killed by Croatian fascists, and others by Serbian fascists, members of Nedić's regime, which was in the same system of dependence on the occupying Nazi authorities as Pavelić's in Croatia!    

Why would Vučić feel the need to build a memorial in one place while leaving another to oblivion and weeds? In both places, Jews, Roma, and Serbs were brutally killed as victims of the most heinous crimes, according to the same recipe, in the same way, and from the same fascist kitchen. So what is the difference?

The difference is that Jews, Roma, and Serbs who are victims of Serbian fascism cannot be monetized!!! 

The tragedy of victims in the Balkan region lies not only in the fact that they are victims of crimes, but that years and decades later they are turned into victims of merchants trading in their suffering. These political circles, which constantly, whenever they need to, awaken the ghosts of the past, are today very recognizable. Perhaps this major action by 12 victims' associations will finally mark them as an uncivilized moral plague and close the doors of modern civilizational currents to them. Only then will ordinary people on all sides, who are merely seeking the truth, get the chance to find peace and somehow survive the rest of their lives in their pain.