“General Mladić is in my heart”, Knezević’s scandalous statement – he also mentions Adem Jashari

A debate about Serbian songs in Montenegro took a much graver political turn when the pro-Serb MP Milan Knezević placed Adem Jashari and Ratko Mladić in the same discussion – two figures linked to two completely different narratives of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

In the Parliament of Montenegro, Knezević opposed the prosecution’s reaction to a group that had sung a song in Bar dedicated to Serbian general Veljko Radenović. To strengthen his argument against minister Nik Gjeloshaj, he also brought Adem Jashari into the debate, claiming that institutions do not react to songs dedicated to the KLA commander.

But then he went even further.

“General Mladić is in my heart,” Knezević declared, placing the name of the man definitively convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the same discussion as the central figure of the Albanian armed resistance in Kosovo, as Borba reports.

The comparison was not merely a side part of the debate about songs. It served to shift the discussion from the question of whether Montenegrin institutions should investigate the content of songs, to the relativisation of the figures and crimes of the wars of the 1990s.

Knezević presented this as an issue of double standards. But by mentioning Mladić in the same context as Jashari, he also brought into Parliament one of the most discussed figures of the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

Ratko Mladić was definitively convicted by the international judicial mechanism for the former Yugoslavia of genocide in Srebrenica, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Meanwhile Adem Jashari, a KLA commander, was killed in March 1998 in Prekaz, in an operation by Serbian forces. He has become a symbol of the resistance of the Albanians of Kosovo and one of the central figures of the memory of the war in Kosovo, as The GeoPost reports.