INTERVIEW Vuk Drašković: I am a Serb, but in the defense of Montenegro I am a Montenegrin

In his autobiographical book "The Scars of Life" (Laguna publishing house), a well-known Serbian writer and politician Vuk Draskovic summarizes many and varied events from childhood, student days, journalism, and especially from the time of involvement in politics from the nineties to today. In this book, the author talks in an almost confessional tone about what and with whom he worked and how he worked, but also about his flaws and mistakes.

Given that many events are forgotten, some faster and some slower, which is a natural psychophysiological process, by writing the truth about real events, without the presence of fiction, with this book Vuk Drašković opposes precisely forgetting. Perhaps it should also be said: if Serbian literature had not received the book "Scars of Life" it would have been a great sin and a moral crime against the Serbian people, because that people deserves to know the truth about its recent past in which it suffered and how it suffered.

In the book "Scars of Life", with references to literary creativity, you mostly talk about yourself, your life, your work in journalism, but mostly about your involvement in politics. What motivated you to make this book so autobiographical?

In an autobiography Scars of life, of my life, I also wrote about others, but mostly about myself, which was both logical and inevitable. Especially since, both as a writer and as a political leader, I was a barrel man. Adored and hated, and always a target of Evil, which killed those closest to me in the family and in the party I led. Scars of life are an autobiographical novel. It is the most difficult literary genre, because the author has no right to imagination, to fiction. Everything is true, a terrible truth, which to those who do not remember the nineties of the last century, seems like a fantasy.

As if by some curse, many people today, whether consciously or unconsciously, often neglect or even forget the truth. While writing this book, did you keep in mind that you are actually fighting against oblivion?

With this book, I am fighting, probably in vain, against the lobotomy that has been systematically carried out over the Serbian people, under the direction of the KGB, under the direction of the Udba, which is a branch of that Stalinist nemani, for more than two decades, and most frantically today while we are being submerged by the tsunami of putinophilia... The Serbian crimes committed in the nineties are a fabrication of the anti-Serbian West, the Serbs were only victims, NATO bombed Serbia without any pretext or reason, with the sole aim of seizing Kosovo from Serbia and giving the country to Albanian terrorists, but the UN Security Council Resolution 1244 guaranteed Serbia's sovereignty over Kosovo. , which is guarded by Russia, Serbian mother and protector...

This is how the vast majority of the lobotomized people in Serbia and the Republika Srpska think today, and many are demented in Montenegro as well.

In "The Scars of Life" you also mention Ivan Stambolic, an important Yugoslav, and especially, Serbian politician and say: "We two deserve a curse because he launched Milošević and I launched Šešelj". Can you clarify this thought for us?

Ivan Stambolic as the president of Serbia, decisively lobbied that Slobodan Milosevic took power over the Union of Communists of Serbia. He naively believed that Milosevic was "a man of compromise and European reforms". He quickly and bitterly repented, but too late. His "pullen" was already an untouchable rider of the apocalypse. During the killing of Yugoslavia, Stambolić often, after his walks in Košutnjak, stopped by my place, and I used to go to his place. He said that all parties of the democratic opposition should go to the elections separately, that everyone should take their own, and that in the presidential elections we have more candidates in the first round, that as many Milosevicians as possible fall away from him, and that in the second, decisive round, we all stand behind the best placed .

He intended to run for office as well, in the hope that many socialists would support him. His life's goal was to free Serbia from Milosevic's deadly grip... That's why he was killed, on Milosevic's order. And no one, like me, in the mid-eighties, publicly advocated that Vojislav Seselj, "a free-thinking opponent of Dahi in Bosnia and Herzegovina", released from Zenica prison. And no one, like me, when he got his freedom and Belgrade, helped him in everything. For almost three years, I was also his driver, and I also baptized his son. That "free-thinker" will become the main megaphone, the main propagandist of the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of Greater Serbia up to Karlobag, Karlovac, Ogulin and Virovitica. He will become the ayatollah of hatred and national blindness and madness.

Have you ever done something in your literary, and especially political, work that you are ashamed of today?

There is nothing in my literature or in my political activity that I should be ashamed of. On the contrary. I am just questioning myself, and painfully, whether, leading the uprising in Serbia for ten years against the thug regime, I could have done more, although I know that, due to the betrayal of my allies in the opposition, it was impossible.

In this book, you also talk about various state tortures, sometimes very aggressive ones. You say that some of the perpetrators of those long-ago tortures held power in their hands for a long time later. Can you clarify that for us?

Not that they held power for a long time after Milosevic's electoral collapse and after his death, but they still hold power today. People convicted in The Hague for war crimes, declared heroes, do not leave the TV screen, educating the youth of Serbia. It's horrible to listen to, watch, and read. Never in history has anyone, like them, caused such defeats and shame to Serbia and the entire Serbian people. And the proud, they brag.

In the 2007 elections, SPO, whose list was led by you, did not pass the census, even though you were the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia at that time. Is it because of your "anti-Serbian" and "anti-patriotic" attitudes that some media qualified your work?

Udba did everything, and is still doing it today, to make SPO disappear and to silence my voice. I am the greatest enemy of Udba's order, therefore a national traitor... In 2007, I would have skipped ten electoral censuses if I had conducted Serbia's foreign policy as my namesake and successor will conduct it. Vuk Jeremic.

You buy a pig, turn it on a spit, in Times Square in New York, gather journalists and cameramen from Serbia, and shout: "For us Serbs, Kosovo is the air we breathe, it is our Jerusalem, our Great Forge and Yorktown, our Alamo and Gettysburg , our Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima, all in one..."

Can you tell us why you were in the government of Slobodan Milosevic during the NATO bombing?

I naively believed that, for the sake of my reputation in the West, by sacrificing my opposition image and accepting the post of head of diplomacy in Milosevic's government, I would Momir Bulatović, to help Serbia avoid NATO bombs and to save Kosovo... And I managed to get both offered to us in Rambouillet: Kosovo remaining within the borders of Serbia (with an end to the terror against the Albanians) and the peaceful and temporary entry of NATO troops into the province, to disarm the KLA and various robber and robber gangs, both Serbian and Albanian. Milosevic rejected the agreement, he rejected peace. He chose war and death for strategic reasons. He wanted Serbia to lose Kosovo and for Udba's propaganda to blame NATO and the West for that loss, ignite anti-Western passions in Serbia and encourage the country and people to turn towards Russia. Milosevic really won. He achieved everything he wanted.

You used to have pamphlets about "anti-Serbian Yugoslavia". Later you tore those same pamphlets. That's why some politicians called you a traitor. How do you interpret these political turbulences?

At the end of the eighties, I was in the club of the supreme Serbian nationalist elite. Academicians, writers, bishops, journalists, actors... sat for the new emperor Dušan and Karađorđe, and his name was Slobodan Milošević. Those pamphlets of mine are from that period. I was extremely valued, respected and praised by that elite as long as I, together with them, was grooming a horse for the leader of Great Serbia. And I was rejected and despised the moment I understood where it was all going and called, publicly, for the horseman of the apocalypse to fall. That's when I founded the Serbian Restoration Movement, attacked Evil, and Evil attacked me.

You were also called "balija" for leading a column of Belgraders who rebelled against the siege and shelling of Sarajevo. How do you view those events today?

I proudly remember Belgrade's black flora after the martyrdom of Sarajevo under Serb shells. In almost four years of siege, more shells were dropped on Sarajevo than the Russians dropped on Berlin in 1945. About eleven thousand civilians were killed, among them about 1.500 children... Because, recently, in a TV interview, I talked about that crime over Sarajevo, the Pale Municipal Assembly voted that I persona non grata. I am also proud of that.

You were once declared the "Ustasha leader". Why?

I was declared the "Ustasha leader" for advocating for the acceptance of Plan Z-4 for the Serbian Krajina, according to which the Serbs there practically got their own state within the borders of the state of Croatia. Seselj also published a book with that title.

What can you tell us about the interstate relations between Serbia and Montenegro today? What is the root cause of the tensions that are becoming more apparent every day?

Relations are strained, sometimes to the point of breaking. The highway of blame for such a state of affairs leads to Moscow and the headquarters of the KGB. When the referendum on the restoration of the state independence of Montenegro was prepared, the strongest support for the achievement of that goal was in Putinova Russia. At that time, Serbia appeared to the KGB strategists as an unreliable Trojan horse. There was a lot of noise in Belgrade about "Euro-Atlantic integration", about membership in the NATO alliance and the European Union. Especially I, as the head of diplomacy, insisted on that. In the Kremlin, they gave up on Serbia and turned to Montenegro. They believed that, after gaining state independence, Milo Djukanovic to renew the age-old Russophilia in their country, that the Russian war fleet will sail into Boka... The KGB realized late that it had missed.

Independent Montenegro turned to the West, to its membership in the NATO alliance and the EU, and suspicious and wavering Serbia, unexpectedly, renounced the NATO alliance and began to condition the path to the EU by denying the independence of Kosovo. The trade in Belgrade and Cetinje also caused the trade in the Kremlin. Accepted into Russia's arms, Serbia became a strategic ally in revenge against the KGB "treacherous" government in Montenegro.

Without the knowledge and help of the Prime Minister of Serbia, and with all the help of its Udba, a coup was prepared in Montenegro, the murder of Đukanović and the bringing to power of the leaders of the Serbian parties, who publicly said that Vladimir Putin is the president of the Serbs in Montenegro. The coup failed, but not the KGB offensive. The Serbian Church was chosen as the main ally. There were more Serbian priests in Montenegro than Montenegrin soldiers and cannons.

The "Serbian world" project was launched in Belgrade, as a replica of Putin's "Russian world", which, again, is a replica Hitler's of the "Germanic world"... And, here, Serbia and Montenegro are in relations that are not historical, allied. I went on for a long time, and my views on the causes of this state of affairs are well known. I am a Serb, but in the defense of Montenegro, I am a Montenegrin!

After the publication of your books "Knife" and "Prayer", your name was perceived in these areas as the name of a real Serb from Herzegovina, who finally dared to tell the long-hidden truth. How do you see it from today's perspective?

I shy away from the term "real Serb". I grew up in Herzegovina, in the years of "brotherhood and unity", when there was only a whisper about the Ustasha pits, about the genocide of the Serbs. In novels Knife i Prayer I spoke about crime and criminals. I have been branded by the "real Serbs" as monsters, butchers, Chetniks, freaks, those "real Serbs" who, soon after, will commit Srebrenica, massacre Vukovar and Sarajevo, throw Albanian children and their mothers into rivers and lakes across Serbia , killed in Kosovo... I also talked about those atrocities in the novels Memoirs of Jesus i Who killed Katarina.