yugoslavias implosion

ent on destroying Serbian sacred and holy institutions and monuments.
Let God help his faithful army by providing it with the courage
to prevail over a hostile people.” 515
The reaction to the documentary compelled Serbian authorities
to make an admission of guilt, though they denied any ties between
the state of Serbia and the Scorpio unit. Finally, the Serbian elite
realized that at least some war crimes could not be denied. The elite’s
main concern was how to avoid the implication that the state of Serbia
was involved in those crimes—that the crimes were committed in
the pursuit of its goal of the liberation and unification of Serbs into
one state.
The Scorpio case illustrates how the Serbian elite doctors the
memory of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serbs officially
asserted that “crimes were committed by all warring factions and
sides in the civil war” and “it is a well-known fact that civil wars
were always impassioned in a pathological way, for hatreds at close
quarters are horrible.” 516 The Srebrenica massacre was attributed to
“independent” criminals who were arrested and put on trial after the
screening of the video. The Serbs’ attempts to morph the Srebrenica
genocide into an ordinary war crime were enhanced by the erection
of a monument to the Serbian victims in Bratunac, close to Srebrenica,
on July 13, 2005, the day after the anniversary of the Srebrenica
massacre. 517
In 2005, on the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre,
Belgrade’s largest-circulation newspaper ran a special supplement
listing the names of all Serbs who allegedly had perished during the
Bosnian war. The front page of the supplement declared: “They were
515 Danas, “Priest Gavrilo does not repent for blessing the Scorpio unit,” June 9, 2005 .
516 Danko Popović, writer, Ogledalo, right-wing magazine
published in Belgrade, November 14, 2007 .
517 At the 1993 Christian Orthodox Christmas, the Serb village of Kravice, near
Bratunac, was attacked by the Bosnian army in retaliation for the killing of 70
Muslim civilians . The toll was 35 villagers killed (of whom 11 were civilians) and 36
wounded . (Data from the Sarajevo-based Research Documentary Center .)
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