Aleksandar Vucic appears to have won a new mandate as Serbian prime minister. The former ultra-nationalist, who two years ago was chased away by a Bosnian crowd from a memorial ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, has always claimed that he is a leopard who really has changed his spots.
During the Serb assault on Bosnia and a few days after the 1995 massacre of 8,000 men and boys, Vucic notoriously told the parliament in Belgrade that if the Bosnians killed one Serb, the Serbs would kill 100 Muslims.
Disgusting threats like this had not been heard since the Nazis warned and then carried out savage reprisals throughout their conquered lands in Europe, including in Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia.
In 2012 as he ran for office, Vucic said that he had changed his views and he was proud of it. This was not the virtuous protestation that some media pundits took it to be. The simple truth was that Vucic did not also appreciate that his opinions in 1995 were bestial in the extreme, did not see that they showed that he was a man without moral compass and that far from rehabilitating him politically, his gross views should have disqualified him from any future role in public life. Would Hitler or any of his fellow mass-murdering leaders who appeared in the dock at Nuremberg ever have been allowed to run for public office if they had escaped the hangman’s noose and later announced that their former abhorrent views were behind them?
Vucic is an ambivalent figure. Serbia still has a hidden state in which former top military officers have links with organized crime that in turn has connections with the Russian mafia. The old Communist nomenklatura never went away but slinked off into the background. Their former Capo, Slobodan Milosevic was brought before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and Radovan Karadzic and his military henchman Ratko Mladic were likewise taken to face justice, but the organization of which these murderers were a part was never dismantled.
Vucic promised when he became premier that he would clamp down on corruption. Investigations started but there have been no significant prosecutions. Serbia’s widespread corruption is one of the major concerns of the EU as it deals with Belgrade’s application for membership, a key part of Vucic’s political platform. Brussels worries that there is a lack of accountability, a weak court system and little transparency.
A cynic might believe that the one creditable policy that Vucic has pursued has been designed solely to curry favor with the Germans and so advance his EU membership ambitions. He has aligned himself with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s humane and generous response to the migrant crisis, promised Serbia will take migrants and said it is not about to build fences to stop the migrant flow.
Given that Hungary, Serbia’s northern neighbor has already built a wall to keep migrants out and for the moment Turkey has stopped the migrant flow into Greece, Serbia needs no fences anyway. Moreover, Serb police have been abusing the migrants that the country does have. In the Bogovada Asylum Center officials were refusing to register migrants who did not pay or grant other “favors” meaning that this winter some were forced to sleep outside in shacks and were not permitted to join other migrants in reasonable shelters.
