The text states that the long-term siege of Sarajevo has been described by the Hague Tribunal as a war crime, while one of the points from which Serbian snipers shot at the city was the Sarajevo Jewish cemetery. According to FAZ, Vučić himself admitted in interviews in the 1990s that he had served as a volunteer in Sarajevo and that he had stayed for a period in the Jewish cemetery.
“The man who, as a young war volunteer, was present at least for a time in the midst of criminal activities in the Sarajevo Jewish cemetery, is today’s president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić. It was not his opponents who discovered this part of his biography. He himself spoke about it several times with pride in interviews in the 1990s,” writes FAZ.
The newspaper cites an interview published in August 1994 in the magazine Duga, where Vučić stated: “When the war broke out in Bosnia, I went to Serbian Sarajevo and registered as a volunteer,” adding that he did this “to defend Serbia.”
In another interview, published in 1997 in the magazine Velika Srbija, the organ of Vojislav Seselj’s Serbian Radical Party, Vučić claimed to have spent about eight months in areas of Bosnia under Serbian control, two months of which were “on the front line.”
“If you think I came out to defend Croats or Muslims – no, and I don’t think I’m ashamed of it,” Vučić said in the interview, while defending Serbian territorial claims to parts of Bosnia and Croatia. However, Martens stresses that there is no evidence that Vučić personally committed war crimes.
“We do not know whether Vučić committed crimes in Sarajevo. Today he denies this and no one should claim the opposite without evidence. But we know for sure that he voluntarily put himself at the service of a deeply criminal policy and publicly supported it,” the journalist writes.
At the end of the article, FAZ notes that today Vučić declares that he respects the Dayton Agreement and the territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but warns that revanchist tones continue to appear in the discourse of the media surrounding him.
Martens concludes by raising the question of whether the wait for the realization of Serbian nationalist aspirations is coming to an end and what Europe will do if this happens, emphasizing that this is an issue that should seriously concern Western policymakers.
