yugoslavias implosion

300
ChApter 4
Serbia is the only country in the region to renounce its anti-fascist
past, having adopted a policy since 2000 of marginalizing the role
played by the Communist partisans in World War II while declaring
the Chetniks to have been a right-wing anti-fascist movement.
This new nationalistic drive is accompanied by an energetic propaganda
campaign in the media and in the field of publishing. Serbian
nationalists are increasingly turning for ideological inspiration to
such twentieth-century champions of conservative thought as Nikolaj
Velimirović, Justin Popović, Dimitrije Ljotić, and Milan Nedić,
who was prime minister of a Nazi-backed collaborationist regime
in Serbia in World War II. The spc plays a singularly important role
as authoritative promoter of such values. The synthesis of Orthodox
clericalism and an “organic” concept of society that was the distinguishing
mark of Dimitrije Ljotić and his 1930s’ movement Zbor, has
been revived by many political parties, especially Koštunica’s.
The systematic refusal to discuss Serbian accountability for the
war and war crimes encourages the continual glorification of Hague
Tribunal indictees as national heroes. Educational authorities are
partly to blame for this trend: Serbian textbooks treat war crimes
as natural and ordinary. Political parties with indictees nominally
heading their election lists score heavily at the polls. Serbia’s intellectuals
have condemned the West’s demands on Serbia, especially
to cooperate with the Hague Tribunal, as a “specific kind of colonization”;
508 they have argued that the West is enforcing a “colonial
democracy,” 509 an artificial social system that “is not a result of the
country’s natural evolution” or “its internal conditions and laws.”
The thesis that “Europe put Yugoslavia together and is now taking it
apart” 510 is being disseminated to obscure Serbia’s responsibility for
its own destruction.
508 Ogledalo, 2 Ferbruary 2005
509 Ibid .
510 Dobrica Ćosić, Večernje novosti, 25 November 2008