Karen Pierce, the United Kingdom’s Special Envoy to the Western Balkans, has once again taken the opportunity to deliver lectures and condemnations that, by any standard, are not hers to give, Milorad Dodik said.
“A woman who for years boasted about the Bonn Powers and a colonial approach in the very heart of Europe is the last person who should lecture anyone on principles, international law or morality. Members of the current U.S. administration told her that they would never boast about the Bonn Powers, either privately or publicly,” Dodik wrote on X.
He said the time had come for lectures from the United Kingdom to stop.
“Especially when we remember that the most recent British engagement was aimed at preserving and strengthening Christian Schmidt, while the ultimate goal was to turn BiH into a dumping ground for migrants it wants to expel from its own territory. It is even sadder, and almost cynical, when Karen Pierce invokes the Second World War while condemning Serbia,” Dodik said.
He argued that no one from the United Kingdom had condemned the 2008 burial of Dinko Šakić in a Ustaša uniform.
“Silence then, moralizing now. That is not principle. It is selective political instrumentalization,” Dodik said.
Dodik also argued that the idea of prohibiting or restricting an entire people and free individuals from attending a funeral borders on what he described as “monstrous.”
“The Serb people, like any other people, have the right to sincere emotions toward a period that, for them, represented a struggle for survival and a struggle to prevent the past from repeating itself – a past about which Karen Pierce did not consider it necessary to lecture others when they buried criminals in Ustaša uniforms,” Dodik said.
He added that what Pierce, in his view, describes with offensive labels was in fact a gathering at which Serbs freely attended a funeral and expressed their emotions toward the deceased.
“They did so without a single word or gesture that went beyond the bounds of reverence and basic human respect,” Dodik said.
He concluded that while Pierce continues to deliver lectures, people in the Balkans will continue to die, be buried, and be remembered.
“The right to remember is not a crime. The right to a funeral is not a threat. And the right to resist colonial moralizing is a right that no one, not even Karen Pierce, can take away,” Dodik said.
Source: RTRS
