Andrija Mandić is really not to be trusted. Even when he tries to present himself as a man and not as a chauvinist. He went to visit perhaps the most impressive memorial center in the world, Israel's Yad Vashem, but then it turned out that he chose the wrong date. Which confirmed that it is easier to make a chauvinist out of a man than the other way around. Namely, on February 27, Andrija Mandić was supposed to be in Montenegro, not in Israel. In Štrpci, not in Yad Vashem. It was expected from the leader of a party that holds traditional values, and important historical dates are then part of that, to know in half the day and half the night why February 27 is one of the saddest days in Montenegrin history. Equally in Serbian history. When one must be at home in order to appropriately mark that terrible day when 19 branded by name and surname were pulled from the Bar - Belgrade train and taken to their deaths.
Just as the entire civilized world also marks January 27th - the International Day of Remembrance for all Holocaust victims, in whose memory Yad Vashem was built. The United Nations symbolically chose January 27th because it is associated with the liberation of the infamous Auschwitz.
Jozef Mengele was a doctor by profession. As was Radovan Karadžić. His profession helped him design the most infamous of all Nazi death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Karadžić was left with Srebrenica, a much smaller number of victims, a different form of liquidation, which does not change the essence. Both execution sites have entered history textbooks and international court rulings under the definition of genocide. Mengele was nicknamed the “Angel of Death” precisely because of the monstrosity of the concentration camps. This “professional” parallel, but also the similarity in crime, has led Western media to describe Karadžić as the “Balkan Mengele” and Mladić as a “butcher”. Their state child, Republika Srpska, is being defended by Mandić and Knežević these days.
If Andrija Mandić, before going to Tel Aviv and visiting Yad Vashem, had shown a change in his behavior, if he had found the strength to speak honestly about the character and deeds of Karadžić and Mladić, and if he had somehow managed to get the name of the crime - the genocide in Srebrenica - over his lips, then we would have experienced his words from Israel as an expression of profound change, as philanthropy, and not as cynicism. Because it turns out - how can someone whose supporters still chant "Knife, wire, Srebrenica", or whose delegation includes a person from MK (not Milan Knežević) who sings "The Turks are lying, the bulls are crying", be perceived seriously and credibly when he complains at Yad Vashem ""for the innocent victims who were deprived of their right to life", just because there are "the ideology of evil deemed undesirable"...
And what about those from the Štrpci station?! Whom Mandić has forgotten this year, for the 32nd time in a row. Even though there were not a million of them, but 19, a crime is a crime. Mandić himself knows that. But he knows even better that going to Štrpci, or signing a memorial book that does not exist, or giving a speech on that occasion in Pobrežje, next to a memorial to the victims of a crime that few of the Mandićs even know about, or want to know about, if he were to do any of that, Mandić would have to give up his voters, and thus his party, or his power and privileges. Because in that statement on the occasion of February 27th, he would have to distance himself from his political fathers, Milo, Momir and Pavle, who kept quiet about the crime, he would have to mention the political brothers Karadžić and Mladić, who inspired and organized the crime, in a negative context somewhere, and finally, he should also list the nameless murderers, the convicted ones, led by a certain Lukić, who are recognized as perpetrators of the crime. Torn between remaining a politician, founded on traditional values, of which, as we see, Štrpci and Srebrenica, and Vukovar and Dubrovnik, and Sarajevo and Priština are part, and the challenge to rise like Willy Brandt in Warsaw to philanthropy and chivalry and renounce crime and criminals, Mandić naturally chose the former. Because it is both closer and easier for him.
And I would leave that to him as a right to his personal choice if, on the very day of the crime in Štrpci, as an introduction to the Srebrenica genocide, he had not appeared at Yad Vashem and left a note there about the "sinister ideology of evil" that pushed all those "deemed undesirable" "into hell on earth". Thinking of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Jasenovac, and arrogantly skipping Omarska, Trnovo, Prijedor, Manjača, Potočari...
Andrija Mandić is far from Tomo Buzov. Now that's a man. He asked Karadžić's blackshirts why they stopped the train on February 27, 1993 in Štrpci, then why they were taking out certain "undesirable" passengers, so that, when everything was in vain, he managed to hide a seventeen-year-old Bosniak boy on the train by going to the shooting range instead. Retired JNA officer Tomo Buzov obviously knew what the speaker of the Montenegrin parliament and visitor to Yad Vashem will never understand - that every crime is the same, that there are no large or small genocides, especially not just theirs, that among the crimes and criminals there are ours, and that every crime is a heinous act of humanity.
The story thus boils down to politics and politicking. Mandić and his Belgrade guru Vučić see Netanyahu as a brother. In terms of corruption and autocracy. For the same reasons, Đukanović also hugged him. And then a convenient opportunity arises to manipulate the victims of the most terrible crimes, so the suffering of Jews and Serbs in World War II is constantly being dragged out over the lips or on paper, while, on the other hand, the victims of crimes committed by “our people” are ignored, and thus humiliated. Who were also “branded as undesirable by an evil ideology” and pushed “into hell on earth”. I am thinking of the Bosniaks from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Or the Palestinians from Gaza.
If it's from Mandić, it's a lot. Or, we know about Jadac, Vojvodo. Everyone, or almost everyone, except BS and Ibrahimović. They're waiting for Spajić to explain to them.
Bonus video:
