On 11 July, the Serbian newspaper Politika put the face of the Almighty on its front page. Not the one up in the sky, but President Aleksandar Vučić.
"9 years since the attempted assassination of Vucic", the Serbian media rewrote - verbatim, cynically, vulgarly, but mostly shamelessly.
In 2015, the Belgrade commander went to Potocari and laid a flower at the cemetery memorial for the more than 10,000 slaughtered Bosnian Muslims, shortly before the first stone flew towards his head. Vucic then ran away from the crowd of mourners. His guards protected him with umbrellas from the thrown shoes and clods of earth, dragging him through the woods. Some would pity Vucic if they did not know that in that same forest thousands of boys and men failed to escape genocide. All that remains of them is a memory buried in mass graves.
Today, Srebrenica is empty and lonely. You rarely see people in the crooked streets. You are scorched by the unbearable heat of July days - those when the water is sweetest. Drunk Serbian policemen play cards and throw dice in pubs. Are they drinking away the shame of the past? I don't know.
The scorching sun on the road to Potocari does not foreshadow the view in a few kilometres. On entering the settlement, a mountain opens before your eyes, but not a green and beautiful one. Instead, thousands of white tombstones watch you silently. The smell of death grabs you by the throat, in Potocari you look it straight in the eye. Those who survived are few and hug the graves of their loved ones for hours.
Twenty-nine years ago, the Bosniak people had neither water nor food. If God existed, he abandoned them. They faced a tragic choice - the muzzle of an assault rifle to the forehead or a knife pointed at the throat. Serbian forces, commanded by General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, slaughtered them in a matter of days. The area was declared a "safe zone" by the UN, but only on paper. The Blue Helmets retreated ingloriously, and the warlord vowed, "Allah cannot save you, but Mladic can!"
At the time, Vučić was propaganda minister for Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević. The women of Srebrenica, who lost sons, husbands, fathers and grandfathers, remember Vučić's then bold oath to the parliament in Belgrade: "For every Serb killed, 100 Bosnians will be killed."
On 11 July this year, the remains of 14 newly identified victims were buried. Mladen Grujic, the mayor of Srebrenica, for the 8th consecutive summer, did not wish to pay his respects to the dead and remained behind the desk in his office while the President of Republika Srpska called for the day to pass peacefully and quietly. The same "peace-loving" politician has been pushing for months for a split of the federation and a redrawing of the Balkan borders. For Dodik, the capital of his country is Belgrade and his king is Vucic. True, crooked, southern or northern. Everyone is Serbian wherever the muddy boot of chauvinism steps. Europe remembers but does not say enough about its last display in the 1990s - 100 000 killed and 2 million refugees in Bosnia.
Women's cries have been carried through the thick forest for three decades. Yet they do not teach their children to hate Serbs, but want the next generations to forgive without forgetting. " Serbian mothers deserve to bury their sons too," say the elderly Bosnians. The spirit of humanism has not yet disappeared in Bosnia, but it faces terrible resistance.
This year the UN General Assembly recognised the scale of the crime in Srebrenica. Bulgaria had only one dignified choice and stood by the stance: 'Yes! Genocide was committed 29 years ago."
In the heart of the Old Continent there is no place for a replay of the bloody past. Any hint of a return to the goals of the horrific geopolitical project must be crushed in its roots.
The first stone thrown against Vucic nine years ago was a symbol of truth and memory - the most formidable enemies of 'Greater Serbia'. | BGNES
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Dimitar Ruskov, Head of International News, BGNES News Agency
