When, at the dawn of Serb liberation—in 1805, to be precise—Sultan Selim III issued a firman ordering that Serbs from Sarajevo and its surroundings were no longer to be hanged or impaled in the churchyard or at the gate of the Old Church in Sarajevo, this was not because the Sharia judiciary of the Ottoman Empire had afforded legal protection to Christian Serbs. It was a direct consequence of the First Serb Uprising of 1804.
Some fifty years later, in 1858, during the Posavina–Trebava Uprising, more than 600 Serb insurgents and heroes laid down their lives in the fighting at Obudovac against a Turkish occupier overwhelmingly superior in both numbers and weaponry. The Turkish aggressor, in addition to burning the church, the school and homes while expelling the population, refused to allow the bodies of these Christian martyrs – who had died for the freedom of their land and people – to be buried. Their martyred bones remained scattered throughout the centre and surrounding areas of the village, and continue to be uncovered and found to this day.
Then, as now, enemies, occupiers and their servants from among our own people unscrupulously seek to deny us even the right to bury those closest to us – who gave their lives for their people and its freedom – and especially to bear witness to the fact they defended and preserved us.
Those who fail to name their own truth are condemned to live within a foreign and hostile interpretation of reality. Freedom in history is not a gift. It is the result of personal and national endeavor and responsibility. The freedom of a people derives from its ability to name what happened to it, to preserve institutionally the memory of what it endured, and to translate that memory into national policies.
Our centuries-long experience of subjugation under political Islam and Sharia law, as well as decades of suffering under radical left-wing—that is, communist—and later globalist terror, unquestionably impose upon us a personal and institutional imperative to remember: to become conscious of these experiences and to name them, so that we may live in freedom rather than like rayah, serfs, or in some new and contemporary form of bondage.
We remember that, before the beginning of the Defensive-Patriotic War, we were systematically criminalized and dehumanized in the leading media of the political West and the Islamic world. We were then divided among several small states, deprived of our constituent status, reduced to the position of citizens outside the law, and collectively branded enemies of the state, terrorists and aggressors in our own homes and in places where we had lived for centuries. What followed, logically, was expulsion, killing and destruction, after which those same hostile structures abroad and in our immediate surroundings blamed us for our own suffering and destruction.
The instrumentalization of the judiciary – through the ad hoc Tribunal in The Hague – assumed forms and produced effects unprecedented until that time. Yet it seems that, in the eyes of our foes, the greatest crime of all is committed when Serbs allow themselves the freedom to articulate and publicly name their own historical experience outside the interpretations of history and the present imposed upon them by their direct enemies.
We remember that Alija Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration – a pan-Islamist manifesto par excellence, in full or substantial accordance with al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Maududi, among others – states clearly that the instruments of mass influence should be in the hands of people whose Islamic – read, pan-Islamist – authority is beyond dispute, because what can one expect if the mosque and the television tower are sending contradictory messages?! If, as Alija’s Islamic Declaration states, the establishment of the Islamic order is an inviolable objective that cannot be subjected to any vote, then it becomes entirely clear why such a state and order leave no room for consociational democracy or constituent status for other or non-Muslim peoples. In Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration, however, this is resolved through the proposition that non-Muslim minorities in an Islamic order enjoy protection on condition of loyalty.
We also remember that the reduction of the Serb constituent people in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the status of a loyal minority – through the fraudulent annulment of their constituent status in the Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 15 October 1991, and the designation of Serb political representatives together with those who supported them as a terrorist structure – created a situation in which Serbs effectively became citizens outside the law. As a consequence, in the Muslim-controlled part of Sarajevo alone, more than 211 places of detention, prisons and camps for citizens of Serb nationality who remained in that part of the city have so far been documented on the basis of victims’ testimonies (https://incomfis-sarajevo.org/mapping/).
Thousands upon thousands of those unfortunate people endured unimaginable torture, humiliation, rape and murder in these places of horror and terror. The mass system of destruction under the direct control of the pan-Islamist structures of the SDA and their military wing, the so-called Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was never the subject of prosecution by the ad hoc Tribunal in The Hague. We remember!
We also remember that the First Corps of the so-called Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Muslim-controlled part of Sarajevo numbered between 50,000 and 80,000 personnel, while the Sarajevo–Romanija Corps of the Army of Republic of Srpska had between 12,000 and 16,000, with the 2nd and 3rd Corps of the SDA’s military wing operating against it on other axes as well. Yet, as in the cases of Hamas, Hezbollah, the 28th Division of the so-called Army of the Republic of BiH in the central Drina region, and the armed formations in Goražde and Bihać, their military presence was concealed behind the civilian population, including through the presentation of military casualties as civilian victims.
We likewise remember that, as early as June 1992, Republic of Srpska handed Sarajevo International Airport – which cut across territory controlled by the First Corps of the SDA’s military wing – over to the United Nations. During the tragic and bloody civil war, at least 160,677 tonnes of humanitarian cargo were delivered through that airport under United Nations control. Of this, at least 144,827 tonnes consisted of food. At least 20 per cent of this humanitarian aid ended up supplying the First Corps of the so-called Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while an incomparably smaller percentage went to the Serb population. Between 1992 and 1995, the Muslim-controlled part of divided Sarajevo was visited by numerous high-level international delegations, all of which arrived through Sarajevo Airport. They included 11 heads of state, eight prime ministers, 31 ministers, 29 ambassadors and 11 senior United Nations representatives, including the UN Secretary-General.
We remember that hundreds of these international diplomats, humanitarian workers and journalists failed to see tens of thousands of soldiers belonging to the SDA’s military wing in the divided, Muslim-controlled part of Sarajevo, or the hundreds of prisons and camps holding Serbs. They saw only the Sarajevo–Romanija Corps of the Army of the Republic of Srpska, which held in blockade an enemy army five times larger than itself, and presented this as the terrorisation of Muslim civilians by the Serb army and its leadership – civilians whom the SDA and the so-called Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina themselves kept confined within the part of Sarajevo under their control. Today, not even ten per cent of the pre-war Serb population remains in the Muslim-controlled part of Sarajevo. Yet those Serbs are today called “aggressors and fascists,” while their political and military leadership are branded “butchers, monsters, war criminals and genocidaires.”
We are aware of the legal fact that judgments of the ad hoc Tribunal in The Hague exist – a tribunal which, through its judgments, in a certain sense denies the Genocide against the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, to say nothing of the other facts. At the same time, we do not deny crimes committed by individuals on the Serb side, including crimes against members of the active and reserve forces of the 28th Division of the so-called Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We insist, however, on our right to name things in accordance with our own experience and scientifically established facts. We remember that only in totalitarian societies do court judgments write history, and that anything which cannot be subjected to scholarly and professional investigation is generally propaganda rather than historical truth.
Our historical experience and scientifically established facts show that pan-Islamist, ultra-leftist and ultra-liberal ideologies display similarities in their patterns of seizing power and destroying democratic pluralism. Among other things, this manifests itself in the following pattern: the movement possesses a higher truth; its avant-garde alone interprets that truth; opposition to the avant-garde becomes opposition to God or to progress; the opponent of that avant-garde is stripped of moral legitimacy while repression and terror are portrayed as the defence of the community and of a future just pan-Islamist or ultra-leftist order.
It is therefore hardly surprising that pan-Islamist and ultra-leftist ideologies and structures have maintained a partnership spanning decades. Those of us who remember Tito and Yasser Arafat may perhaps better understand why and how, even today, what some call Tito’s ideological heirs and pan-Islamist structures cooperate so effectively in the capital of the deceased Yugoslavia.
What is interesting, however, is that there appears to be no place in this partnership for members of the traditional Muslim community. Traditional Muslims experienced this themselves, including the followers of Fikret Abdić in the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia, who rejected the pan-Islamism of the SDA and Alija Izetbegović. In 1993, the Islamic Community of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina issued a fatwa declaring them unbelievers and prohibiting Islamic funeral rites for them because, as the fatwa stated, by fighting the SDA’s military wing – that is, the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – they were fighting against Islam. That fatwa, revoked only in 2013, remains a grave warning and message to all Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region who may wish to identify as Serbs, Montenegrins or Macedonians rather than Bosniaks.
We remember that the funeral of Rasim Delić, a general of the SDA’s military wing who had been convicted for crimes committed against Christian Serbs by the mujahideen under his command, was conducted with the highest state honours. In April 2010, a commemoration was held at the Armed Forces Hall of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where final respects were paid and a book of condolences was opened. Delić was buried at the central military/martyrs’ cemetery at Kovači alongside Alija Izetbegović and Mušan Topalović Caco, and was given the highest military honours. The funeral prayer was led by Reis Mustafa Cerić. Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina at that time, Haris Silajdžić, also attended. Since then, anniversaries of Delić’s death have regularly been commemorated at a high level of state representation.
We remember that there was never any reaction from the OSCE, the European Union or the Council of Europe!
We remember that all of this was acceptable to certain media outlets in Serbia, which however, immediately launched a systematic campaign to criminalise Mr Darko Mladić, the son of General Ratko Mladić. The reason is perfectly obvious. Foreign interests sense that, after all, we were not defeated but – strange as it may seem – were victorious.
What was it that so disturbed those who believe that Serbs must either have their national sense remoulded or dissapear?
The first was a meta-historical scene: in the early morning, before the Church of St. Luke, and in the presence of tens of thousands of Serbs, General Mladić musters before Miloš his soldiers and warriors – the towering heroes with whom he saved the Serb people from another genocide and from the creation of an Islamist state.
The second, no less moving but equally magnificent, scene was Mr Darko Mladić’s address to his father and commander during the burial itself.
The third scene was the Serb people – a grateful witness to the extraordinary achievement of the Army of Republic of Srpska under General Mladić in preserving Republic of Srpska, founded before the war under almost impossible conditions – who witnessed and affirmed what son had said to his father and commander.
From the perspective of combined foreign interests, it is difficult to silence the Serb heroes who stood assembled before the Church of St. Luke and throughout Republic of Srpska and Serb lands. It is therefore easier – and fundamentally more important – to criminalise and dehumanise Darko Mladić as a man who dared to remember, to name, and to state publicly what actually happened to us, and who restored to his father the human face that had been taken from him for years. Since the enemies cannot allow anyone to see reality differently from the imposed image and interpretation, it follows that Darko Mladić and his family become a serious threat to their plans and objectives.
As always, the safest and most effective method is to use the media to turn him into a criminal and thereby desecrate everything he represents. Not even five days had passed since the funeral before a torrent of malice against him and his family began pouring out of ultra-leftist circles. Pan-Islamist structures greeted it with malicious satisfaction and turned it into yet another witch hunt.
One of the principal methods used by these structures is to deprive both the individual, Republic of Srpska and the Serb people, as a whole, of their economic foundations for survival.
I have personally known Darko Mladić for more than fifteen years, and we are close enough for me to know at least something of the hardship, injustice and persecution that he and his family have endured, including within Serbia itself. I therefore have no doubt that they will survive this as well.
But this is not only about Darko Mladić and his family.
This is about the Serbs and our freedom to remember and to call things by their proper names; to preserve, at least in part, our personal and national honour by standing up and defending not only Darko Mladić, but also the freedom of our children – their freedom to be allowed and able to name things for what they are and – and freedom for us to pursue national policies on that basis.
I know personally how carefully Darko Mladić has conducted himself throughout all these years and decades so as to never, in any way, tarnish the reputation of his family, Republic of Srpska or its army. On the contrary, wherever possible, he has sought to contribute to the common good. I also know that I am but one among many witnesses to these facts.
Many among our people believe that this is an exceptionally important opportunity to preserve the dignity manifested before the Church of Saint Luke and during Darko Mladić’s address at the funeral, and to safeguard it as one of the most sacred facts in the journey of our people through history.
Remember! Those who fail to name their own truth are condemned to live within a foreign and hostile interpretation of historical and political reality.
Freedom in history is not a gift.
It is the result of personal and national endeavour and responsibility.
The freedom of a people derives from its ability to name what happened to it, to preserve institutionally the memory of what it endured, and to translate that memory into national policies.
Source: CDPIRS
