Vučić presents Serbia as a victim at the UN; Mujanović and Serwer challenge his narrative

Following Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he spoke about the NATO bombings and claimed that no Serbian soldier or policeman had ever set foot on another country’s territory, political analyst Jasmin Mujanović and American professor Daniel Serwer have reacted.

Vučić, speaking about NATO’s intervention in 1999, declared through victimization that Serbia had been bombed even though, according to him, Serbian forces had not entered the territory of any other country.

“No Serbian soldier or policeman had set foot on the territory of any other country, yet the decision was made to bomb Serbia,” Vučić stated.

Political analyst Jasmin Mujanović responded to this claim, recalling the wars waged during Slobodan Milošević’s regime in the 1990s.

“By the time Milošević’s forces began their campaign in Kosovo, this was his fourth war in less than nine years. If NATO made a major mistake in 1999, it was only the fact that it did not directly strike Milošević’s regime back in 1991 or 1992,” Mujanović stated.

American professor and Balkan affairs expert Daniel Serwer also reacted to Vučić’s claims.

He rejected the claim of non-involvement of Belgrade’s structures in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, specifically mentioning the former commander of the Army of Republika Srpska, Ratko Mladić.

“This is a serious lie. Mladić himself was on the payroll of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), as were many other officers of the Bosnian Serb Army,” Serwer wrote through his platform “Peacefare”.

Documents and evidence examined in the trials of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have addressed the financial and institutional ties between Belgrade and Serb military structures in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Human Rights Watch, in its analysis of evidence presented in the trial of Slobodan Milošević, has written that the salaries of former JNA officers serving in the Army of Republika Srpska continued to be funded by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Serwer has also previously written about the ties of Belgrade authorities to Mladić, who was later sentenced to life imprisonment by international justice for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

NATO documents from 1999 also present the intervention in Kosovo in a different context than the one Vučić presented at the UN. The Alliance stated at the time that the crisis was a consequence of the policy of repression, violence and ethnic cleansing by the Belgrade regime and demanded the withdrawal from Kosovo of Yugoslav and Serb military, police and paramilitary forces.

Later NATO documentation, referring to OSCE data, says that before the bombing began hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians had been displaced from their homes and that there was evidence of a widespread offensive by Serb forces./Telegrafi.