Serbia Archives

Serbian Party leader: Real genocide was committed by Turks against Armenians

August 11, 2015 By administrator

Real genocide was committed by Turks against Armenians, president of the Serbian radical party Vojislav Šešelj wrote on his Twitter page. “Turkey’s PM Davutoglu claims that what happened in Srebrenica was a genocide. That’s tragicomic! Real genocide was committed by Turks against Armenians,” Šešelj wrote.

Šešelj has been tried by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) since 2003. He was discharged on parole only in 2014 for health concerns. Actually none of the Serbian extermination participants, regardless of whether from Croatian, Bosnian or Albanian side, has been put on trial. Šešelj continues to deny the murder of the civilians in Srebrenica and claims that those killed there were military criminals who were responsible for the killings of the peaceful Serbs.

Armenian, Serbian FMs ink cooperation deal

June 3, 2015 By administrator

The foreign ministers of Armenia and Serbia have signed a memorandum of understanding on bolstering cooperation.

The deal was concluded on Monday as Ivica Dačić, who now serves as the OSCE chairman-in-office, met with FM Edward Nalbandian for bilateral talks to discuss agenda issues, reports the Foreign Ministry’s press service.

The document envisages periodical political dialogues between the two countries.

Serbia President: Do we have the right not to honor Armenian Genocide victims?

April 26, 2015 By administrator

The President of Serbia

YEREVAN. – The Serbian people realize what happened to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (PHOTOS).

The President of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić, stated the above-said Friday at the Armenian Genocide Memorial in capital city Yerevan.

In his words, monstrous genocide occurred with the Armenians.

“Do we have the right not to pay tribute to the collective memory of the Armenian Genocide victims? The denial of historical truth adversely affects the level of awareness,” the Serbian president stressed, and added: “We have not come here to be against or for someone, but to honor the memory of the victims of the people of Armenia.”

Nikolić also noted that the term “genocide” is very often manipulated.

“Could we have not been present here today and betrayed those who believe that only the truth will save us from the bloody past? No, we could not and we would not dare not to be present [here].

“We will not allow the imposed political correctness to cause pain to the people of the world. We are the citizens of the world (…), and we need to join forces to address the global challenges,” the Serbian president specifically said.

Tomislav Nikolić stressed that Serbia believes solely in this meaning of politics, and there is no alternative to respect for human life.

$100bn NATO claim: Serbian NGOs seek compensation for Yugoslavia bombing

March 24, 2015 By administrator

Two non-governmental organizations have said NATO should be required to pay compensation for the massive damage inflicted during the 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

A meeting of the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals and the Club of Generals and Admirals in Belgrade presented an initiative to hold 28-member NATO financially accountable for the damage that Yugoslavia sustained in the attacks.

Serbian experts put the price tag of the devastation between $60 and $100 billion.

Retired General Jovo Milanovic said that NATO’s military offensive, which was unsanctioned by the United Nations, represented “a violation of all norms of international law that caused enormous material damage to Yugoslavia and huge human casualties,” Tass quoted him as saying.

The participants supported Milanovic’s proposal to pursue the legal options involving financial compensation, as well as the possibility of opening criminal proceedings against western leaders who expressed their support for the aerial attacks.

Sixteen years ago, between March 24, 1999, and June 10, 1999, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions in Yugoslavia, mostly concentrated on the capital Belgrade and in Kosovo, the flashpoint of the conflict.

Using fighter jets as well as long-range cruise missiles from warships in the Adriatic Sea, NATO destroyed vital strategic infrastructure, including bridges, government buildings and factories. The NATO campaign also targeted critical civil infrastructure, including power plants and water-processing facilities, causing substantial environmental and economic damage to the country.

On May 7, NATO forces bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists. Washington and NATO apologized for the bombing, blaming it on an “outdated map” provided by the CIA.

The NATO campaign resulted not just in the destruction of infrastructure but the death of hundreds of civilians as well.

Human Rights Watch reported that “as few as 489 and as many as 528 Yugoslav civilians were killed in the 90 separate incidents” in the US-led NATO campaign.

Serbian sources report a much higher fatality rate, saying more than 2,000 civilians and 1,000 servicemen were killed in the NATO bombardments, while more than 5,000 people were wounded and over a thousand went missing.

Serbia makes first arrests in 1995 Srebrenica massacre

March 18, 2015 By administrator

Serbian authorities on Wednesday arrested eight people in connection with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed at a UN safe haven when the shelter fell to Bosnian Serb forces.

“This is the first such case involving people directly suspected of taking part in the Srebrenica massacre,” Bruno Vekaric, Serbia’s deputy war crimes prosecutor, told Reuters.

Arrested at multiple locations across Serbia, the men are accused of killing more than 1,000 Bosnian Muslims at the Kravica warehouse just outside Srebrenica and in the process committing “war crimes against the civilian population”, the prosecutor said in a statement.

Vekaric said seven suspects were arrested early on Wednesday while an eighth was detained later in the northern city of Novi Sad. Other suspects remain at large.

“He (the eighth suspect) is on his way to Belgrade … There are another five suspects still at large in the region, we are after them as well,” he said.

The accused are former members of a Bosnian Serb special wartime police unit that operated under the interior ministry.

An official involved in the investigation said those detained included unit commander Nedeljko Milidragovic, known as “Nedjo the Butcher”, who became a successful businessman in Serbia after the war.

“He and others are suspected of bringing some 15 busloads of men from a prison camp in Srebrenica to Kravica, where they were summarily executed,” the official said.

Peacekeepers overrun

The tiny Muslim enclave of Srebrenica was under UN protection until July 11, 1995, when it was seized by ethnic Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic, who is currently on trial for genocide and war crimes at The Hague in connection with the war in Bosnia.

Mladic’s troops overran the lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers guarding the safe area, where thousands of Muslims from surrounding villages had gathered to seek UN protection.

The bodies of the 7,000 to 8,000 victims were dumped in mass graves. Nearly 90 percent of the victims have so far been exhumed and identified through DNA analysis.

Serbia arrested Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic in 2008 near Belgrade, where he was working as a doctor during more than a decade on the run. Mladic, his military commander, was arrested in 2011 after more than 16 years of evading capture.

Both are currently facing trial at the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague for war crimes, including those that occurred at Srebrenica.

The arrests of Karadzic and Mladic were key to unblocking Serbia’s bid to join the European Union. But Belgrade remains under pressure to go after those responsible for war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 collapse of Yugoslavia, when some 100,000 people – most of them Bosnian Muslims – were killed.

Dutch ruled liable

An ICTY trial chamber issued the tribunal’s first genocide conviction in August of 2001 in ruling that the Srebrenica massacre constituted genocide, which refers to acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

In 2007 the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, concurred in ruling that the acts committed at Srebrenica were genocide.

The suspects will most likely stand trial in Serbia and not at the ICTY in The Hague, where Serbia’s late president, Slobodan Milosevic, faced trial.

July will mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre, which the ICTY says was Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

The Dutch Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the Netherlands was liable for the deaths of three Bosnian Muslim men during the Srebrenica massacre, even though its forces there were part of a UN peacekeeping mission. The decision upheld a 2011 appeals court judgment that was seen as setting a worrying precedent because it held the Dutch state responsible for events that happened during a multinational UN mission.

A Dutch court ruled last year that the Netherlands was also liable for the deaths of more than 300 others at Srebrenica. The families of those killed had filed suit against the Dutch government, accusing the nation’s UN peacekeepers of failing to protect the victims.

The Mothers of Srebrenica group, representing some 6,000 widows and other victims’ relatives, have been seeking justice for years for the massacre.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP and REUTERS)

Serbia, Russia’s position on Kosovo “firm and reliable”

December 3, 2014 By administrator

Source: Beta, Tanjug

BELGRADE — Russian Ambassador Aleksandr Chepurin has said that his country’s position not to recognize Kosovo as independent was “firm and reliable.”

“It’s a firm and reliable position and we have proved that many times,” he said during a panel dubbed, “From Kosovo to Crimea: Unilateralism and Manipulations of the Right to Self-Determination.”

Chepurin added that “here Russia supports the Serbs,” and would continue to do so.

“Russia’s stance is clear and firm and that is a tradition that does not change,” he said, when asked “under which circumstances” his country would recognize Kosovo.

“There is UN Security Council Resolution 1244, legally binding for everyone in the world, and its essence is that Kosovo is under the sovereignty of the Republic of Serbia,” he added.

“In line with all valid international documents, Kosovo is a part of Serbia,” the Russian diplomat said, and added that “the relationship between Belgrade and Priština represents a completely different issue.”

He argued that, conversely, no such resolution regulates the status of Crimea – a peninsula gifted to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, when both Russia and Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union. Chepurin added that the move was not line with the Soviet Constitution.

“Kosovo never before the Second World War had the territory that it has today. Crimea has a statehood tradition going back to the 15th century,” he said.

Chepurin also stated that a coup took place in Kiev and that the new authorities did not receive the backing from all regions of Ukraine.

“The new authorities undertook unilateral steps that diminished Crimea’s autonomy. Later 96 percent of the population of Crimea voted in favor of independence,” he said.

Speaking about the Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Center in the southern Serbian town of Nis, Chepurin stressed that it was “neither a military base nor an espionage center of any kind.”

“The agreement on the center was signed a long time ago and this is not about signing something new, but about signing annexes,” he explained, and added that Russia will earmark USD 102 million by 2017 for humanitarian assistance to Serbia.

He asked “why the personnel at the center would not be offered some kind of paper, a document,” but rejected that it would mean giving the Russian experts stationed there diplomatic status.

“Why is the Russian humanitarian center being shown in a negative light,” he wondered, and noted that Russia previously helped Serbia clear its territory of bombs left over from NATO’s attacks in 1999, and also provided assistance during natural disasters.

The ambassador announced that a report on the work of the center will be presented on December 13, and that the equipment that has been acquired for it will be shown then.

“Everything is transparent at the center, I have invited many ambassadors to come and see for themselves,” Chepurin concluded.

Serbia, Accused war criminal Seselj draws thousands at Serbia rally

November 16, 2014 By administrator

By Jovan Matic

Belgrade (AFP) – Some 10,000 supporters of the Serb ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj, released by a UN war crimes court for cancer therapy, joined him Saturday at a rally in protest at his country’s shift towards Europe.

The gathering was seen as a test of Seselj’s influence at home, where he returned this week after almost 12 years in detention at the court in The Hague, yet to issue a verdict in his trial for crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

“Serbia has to decide should it go towards the East (Russia) or towards the West, where all its enemies are,” the 60-year-old firebrand told a euphoric crowd in downtown Belgrade.

“We will not wait for the end of this government’s mandate. Already next year we will have elections that the Serb Radical Party (SRS) will win,” Seselj vowed from the stage.

Waving the flags of Serbia and Russia, the Balkan country’s traditional ally, his supporters carried portraits of President Vladimir Putin and the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and banners reading “No to EU and NATO”.

Serbia opened membership talks with the European Union this year.

Seselj has vowed to unseat from power his former closest collaborators — President Tomislav Nikolic and Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic — who both left his party in 2008 and founded their own pro-European SNS movement.

Immediately upon his arrival in Belgrade, Seselj labelled the two “traitors” who “sold our honour and gave up Serb nationalism to become servants of the West”.

“He will liberate us from those pro-European bootlickers,” Petar Radojkovic, a 47-year-old construction worker who joined the rally told AFP, in a reference to the government.

Milanka Stupljanin, a 29-year-old saleswoman, said the ultranationalist was the “only one who can revive Serbia.”

To achieve his aims, Seselj said he planned to “revitalise and reorganise” his Serb Radical Party (SRS) and attract new members among “all those who are dissatisfied”.

– Nine counts including murder –

“We should turn towards Russia. Joining the European Union would be a real disaster for Serbian people,” he said.

“However, we do not want a conflict with the EU; if the Union accepts to cooperate with us on equal grounds, why not?”

But Seselj has returned to a country that has greatly changed since he voluntarily surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2003, going on trial four years later.

The groups which once helped whip up murderous fervour as the former Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s are on a steady slide into oblivion.

Today none are even represented in the Serbian parliament, including Seselj’s party.

Political analyst Dusan Janjic was expecting more people at Saturday’s rally “since the radical (Seselj’s) party is a well organised grouping.”

But the “public clearly did not show much interest for Seselj’s comeback. Serbia changed a lot during his absence,” he told AFP.

His return will not threaten the government, agreed the analyst Djordje Vukadinovic.

“To topple the government is too ambitious a goal, especially if he does not change the rhetoric he has been using in the 1990s,” he said.

Seselj is accused of leading ethnic Serb volunteers in persecuting Croats, Muslims and other non-Serbs during the brutal 1990s wars in Croatia and Bosnia.

His trial wrapped up in March 2012, with a verdict still to be handed down.

During the trial, Seselj pleaded not guilty to nine counts including murder, torture, cruel treatment and wanton destruction of villages.

Seselj’s return has sparked outrage among victims’ groups in neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia.

On Saturday, Croatian Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic said she could only “voice condolences to Serbia for having a mad war criminal on its streets, instead of him being where he was and where he should have remained”, referring to the UN tribunal.

Russia, Serbia To Hold Joint Military Drills

November 7, 2014 By administrator

By RFE/RL’s Balkan Service

November 06, 2014

BELGRADE — Russia and Serbia are preparing to hold their first-ever joint antiterrorist exercises on Serbian territory.

RFE/RL’s correspondent in Belgrade reports that six IL-76 aircraft from Russia arrived at a Belgrade airport on November 6.

Russian media quoted Defense Ministry officials in Moscow on November 5 as saying units from paratroopers in Tula will take part in the joint maneuvers, which are scheduled in the coming days.

The exercises will be held near the city of Nikinci in the northern province of Vojvodina.

Serbian military analyst Ljubodrag Stojadinovic told RFE/RL that joint maneuvers with Russian troops on this scale have never been held in Serbia.

He added that in holding the maneuvers, Moscow is trying to demonstrate that it has allies in Europe.

Albania, Serbia Postpone Visit After Soccer Brawl

October 19, 2014 By administrator

BELGRADE, Serbia — Oct 19, 2014, 1:41 PM ET

(AP) A planned visit this week by Albania’s prime minister to Serbia, the first in nearly 70 years, has been postponed for next month, authorities said Sunday, after political tensions soared between the two Balkan rivals following a soccer brawl.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic and Albanian counterpart Edi Rama spoke on the phone and agreed to meet on Nov. 10 instead of Wednesday, according to a statement issued by the Serbian premier’s office.

“The two prime ministers agreed that they must and will not let go of the opportunity to meet and work for regional stability and to turn a new page regarding the political and economic relations between the two countries,” the statement added.

Belgrade and Tirana have had strained relations for decades, mostly over the status of the former Serbian province of Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008 following a war. Serbia has refused to acknowledge the split, but both Serbia and Albania must work to improve ties to advance in their efforts to join the European Union.

Last Wednesday’s Serbia-Albania European Championship soccer qualifying match was suspended after a drone carrying an Albanian nationalist flag ignited clashes between players and fans, fueling ethnic and political unrest.

Serbia accused Albania of a deliberate provocation, while Albania said its players were insulted and attacked. Several ethnic Albanian businesses in Serbia were attacked by extremists in the wake of the match, in a sign of mounting tensions.

Putin visits Serbia for Belgrade liberation military parade

October 16, 2014 By administrator

Russian President Vladimir Putin has flown into Belgrade where he is to be guest of honour at a Serbian military parade loaded with symbolism, BBC News reported.

It marks 70 years since Soviet troops helped liberate the city from Nazi occupation and is the first to be held in nearly 30 years.

Serbia’s historic ties with Russia sit awkwardly with its EU ambitions, especially since the Ukraine crisis, BBC News said.

On the eve of his arrival, Putin accused the U.S. of “hostility”. In an interview with Serbian newspaper Politika, he accused America of trying to blackmail Russia with sanctions over Ukraine but warned that would be futile.

He is due to meet a number of foreign leaders at an Asia-Europe summit in the Italian city of Milan later on Thursday, Oct 16.

They include Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, amid pressure on Russia to implement a peace plan for eastern Ukraine.

One of the key issues that Putin is set to discuss with his Ukrainian counterpart is a possible deal for Ukraine to pay its gas debts in return for a resumption of Russian gas supplies.