Thewesternbalkans
Until 11.07.2025, the world will rarely remember Srebrenica, but the UN Resolution adopted on 23.05.2024 declaring July 11 the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica” and condemning denial of the genocide as a historical fact, including those responsible about the genocide in Srebrenica, will continue to dominate the Serbian public. In the rhetoric of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, the resolution will be used to create external enemies from which only he can save Serbia.
The text of the adopted resolution does not mention either Serbs or the Serbian people and emphasizes that criminal responsibility for the commission of genocide is individualized and cannot be attributed to any ethnic, religious or other group or community as a whole and reaffirms the firm commitment to maintaining stability and promoting unity in the diversity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, A. Vučić purposefully focused on the anti-Serb character of a routine international document without binding force and deliberately generalized the attribution of guilt to the Serbs. Idolizing Serbian guilt for the casualties caused by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995 served Vučić both domestically and internationally.
The phrase “genocidal people” is explicitly distributed by Belgrade, and the labeling of the Serbian people as “genocidal” is used to glorify Vučić as the greatest defender of his stigmatized people.
In 2007, the International Court of Justice ruled that Serbia was not responsible for the genocide that Bosnian Serb forces committed in Srebrenica, but that Serbia was responsible for failing to prevent the genocide and convict those accused of committing the genocide.
However, the “genocidal people” narrative, repeated hundreds of times by Serbian leaders over the past two months, aims to create a “new reality” in which individual guilt becomes the collective guilt of all Serbs. This eventually led to the acquittal of those convicted by the Hague Tribunal. A total of 47 people were convicted of genocide and other crimes in Srebrenica in 1995, including five life sentences, three of 35 years and one of 20 years.
Vučić skillfully deployed all the tools of political PR in recent months for his own heroization as the main fighter against the resolution, including with theatrical convulsions during the vote on the resolution in the UN General Assembly hall and a ritual wrapping with the Serbian national flag, typical of the fans during sports competitions. The role taken by Vucic is an element of the formation of a cult around his personality.
The fight against the resolution was a good occasion for Vučić to deploy a wide international activity to polish his image internally as a skilled leader capable of protecting Serbian national interests.
The resolution achieved an effect that was probably not intended by its authors, but was beneficial to Belgrade – deepening the division between the Serbs on the one hand and the rest of the Balkan peoples, on the other hand. Serbs from all Balkan countries have united against attempts to hold them responsible for war crimes in the 1990s.
Defending the Serbian position gave Moscow the opportunity to further strengthen the division in the Balkans and in Europe, and for Belgrade’s new mentor – Beijing, to demonstrate its responsible role in seeking and finding consensus, peace and stability in international relations.
A political crisis is brewing in Montenegro over the official support for the resolution, as the government coalition also includes the Serb-dominated Democratic Front of Andrija Mandić, who was elected Speaker of the Parliament.
Even Croatian state television, which cannot be considered a friend of the Serbs, admitted that the Srebrenica resolution was a “diplomatic victory” for Serbia. In fact, 109 out of a total of 193 UN member countries did not support the resolution.
If the resolution is a victory for the Serbs, will the president of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik carry out his threats to separate the republic from BiH? To find out, we will have to wait until June 26, when the 30-day deadline announced by Dodik for “formulating the agreement on the peaceful separation of BiH” expires.
While the West considers that the division of BiH means the disappearance of RS, and for the Bosniaks it means a new war, independent experts remind that it is practically impossible to divide the borders in BiH. The western part of the RS in case of separation will remain a hard-to-reach enclave, and the RS economically and politically would hardly be able to exist independently without the help of Serbia and Russia. Serbia’s relations with the RS will resemble those between Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, which received half of its budget from Yerevan.
If we return again to the question of why the adoption of this resolution was undertaken just now and why exactly Germany is its main sponsor, the parallel inevitably arises between the guilt attributed to the Germans for the victims in the Second World War, from which they were not allowed to shake off in the post-war decades and the attempt to impute guilt in the Serbs for the victims in the 1990s. Vučić intentionally instrumentalizes this process because a people with a sense of guilt is more easily amenable to consolidation for nationalist purposes by its own elite.
The international community will not allow the RS to leave BiH at this moment, but the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina – Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks – do not need resolutions and facade anniversaries, but the functioning of the rule of law, for which the West can have a significant contribution.
