Like many other controversial dates and events that are interpreted and used politically in Montenegro and beyond, the commemoration of the Battle of Mojkovac has also served as a new politicization. Wreaths were laid at the monument to the undisputed heroes of the Battle of Mojkovac by the President of the Parliament of Montenegro and the leader of the New Serbian Democracy (NSD) Andrija Mandić and the formal Prime Minister of Serbia Miloš Vučević, who allegedly came at Mandić's invitation. Prime Minister Spajić did not invite Vučević to Mojkovac, nor did he meet with him while he was in Montenegro.
The Mojkovac Municipality Day was marked, which falls on Christmas Day according to the Julian calendar and coincides with the commemoration of the Battle of Mojkovac (6-7 January 1916) from World War I. At that time, around 6500 poorly armed and equipped soldiers of the Royal Montenegrin Army under Commander General Janko Vukotić stopped the advance of the three times larger Austro-Hungarian army of General Wilhelm von Reiner.
Like many other controversial dates and events that are interpreted and used politically in Montenegro and beyond, this commemoration also served as a new politicization and scoring point. Wreaths were laid at the monument to the undisputed heroes of the Battle of Mojkovac by the President of the Parliament of Montenegro and the leader of the New Serbian Democracy (NSD), Andrija Mandić, and the formal Prime Minister of Serbia, Miloš Vučević, who allegedly came at Mandić's invitation. Also present were the NSD's President of the Municipality of Mojkovac, Vesko Delić, the President of the Municipal Assembly, Marko Janketić, and Marko Kovačević, Mandić's well-known nationalist mayor of Nikšić.
Mandić emphasized that “we want to build the future of Mojkovac, Montenegro and better relations with brotherly Serbia, with whom we have been in the same state for a hundred years.” In those “100 years, we have not had the slightest conflict or misunderstanding,” he stated, without blinking.
He then noted that in our country "more than a third of citizens live who are Serbs, the same people as in Serbia, the majority of citizens speak Serbian and these are important threads that connect us". Then Mandić turned to praise the mayor (who, apart from his party affiliation and the claim that he is a Serb, has no other official biography), saying that Delić "presented important projects and I hope that what we have been talking about will be supported by the Government of the Republic of Serbia".
Delić became better known to our public in early January 2023. At that time, information was released that representatives of six Montenegrin municipalities from the then Democratic Front (DF), including Delić, went to pay homage to the Serbian authorities in Belgrade on December 13, 2022.
DF representatives of local authorities from Nikšić, Mojkovac, Berane, Tivat, Herceg Novi and Danilovgrad reported to the Serbian Parliament's Diaspora Committee on the position of Serbs in Montenegro in their local self-governments. There, they stated that Serbia is their "mother state" and announced that they had returned the tricolor and Cyrillic alphabet to their cabinets. They also presented plans to further strengthen Vučić's version of Serbianness in Montenegro. The then chairwoman of the Diaspora Committee and current Minister of Family Care and Demography, Milica Đurđević Stamenkovski, greeted the supporters from Montenegro with the sentence; "In Serbia, we say - as long as Herceg Novi exists, Serbia has access to the sea."
Before leaving for Belgrade, Delić sent a letter of submission to Aleksandar Vučić in which he “first of all wants” to greet him and thank him “for the selfless support he has been providing to the Serbian people in Montenegro all these years”. This includes “the numerous donations from the Government (of Serbia) for the cultural, identity and historical preservation of the heritage of the Serbian people” and that Vučić’s “care for Serbs living outside the borders of the Republic of Serbia is best reflected in Montenegro”.
The letter ended with a wish for Vučić to come as soon as possible and be “the guest of honor at the ceremonial session of the Mojkovac Municipality Day”. He sent a similar letter to Ana Brnabić, but with less flattery than to the boss in chief. Although the Serbian ruler has announced a visit to Serbs in Montenegro several times, he has now sent his Prime Minister Vučević, whom the Serbian opposition calls “the butler of the Vučić family”.
Vučević has been involved in numerous corruption scandals since the time he was the formal mayor of Novi Sad according to the Budva model of Svetozar Marović, who now enjoys the protection of the First Family of Serbia from going to prison.
Vučević is also a public friend of convicted criminals who work for the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and people in the service of the First Brother, whom leaked Serbian police reports and SKY transcripts describe as drug lords who, among others, do business with the Albanian mafia in Kosovo.
Vučević also used his visit to Mojkovac to promote Serbian historical revisionism and propaganda, saying that if there had been no Battle of Mojkovac, there would have been no Thessaloniki Front or victory in 1918. “We deeply respect the great sacrifice of the brave falcons who protected the retreat of the Serbian army through Montenegro and Albania,” he explained at the wreath-laying ceremony. “That is why the Republic of Serbia, our entire people… deeply respect the great sacrifice, courage, and brotherhood of all heroes,” Vučević concluded on the 109th anniversary of the battle. The story being told by Belgrade and its Montenegrin puppets that the Montenegrin army protected the retreat of the Serbian army through Albania and Montenegro so that the Austrians would not cut off their path to the sea and later Corfu is highly questionable. The official narrative of the Serbian Ministry of Defense (MOD) also says the opposite of Vučević’s speech in Mojkovac.
The Ministry of Defense portal states that “between 15 and 21 December 1915, the main body of the Serbian army gathered in the vicinity of Shkodra. There were around 160 Serbian soldiers there, awaiting further steps by the Allies regarding reorganization in that area or further evacuation”. On 4 January, the last Serbian soldier left Shkodra on his way to Corfu. The battle that took place on 6 and 7 January could not have served as a retreat for the already withdrawn army. In any case, the German command no longer attached importance to the Serbian army in Albania and stopped issuing communiqués from that battlefield.
Montenegrin soldiers were, not for the first time, unnecessarily sacrificed in the backstage games of the Serbian supreme command, which did everything to prevent the Montenegrin army from withdrawing along with their army. Back in 1910, King Nikola, under pressure from Russia, signed an unfavorable military agreement with Serbia.
In the Great War, the Montenegrin army was commanded by the then Serbian Colonel Petar Pešić, who, on the orders of Belgrade, did everything he could to weaken the defense of Lovćen and force the Montenegrins to surrender so that they would not retreat to Albania and later to Corfu. For the successful realization of the “fraternal” sacrifice, Pešić will be rewarded in Serbia with the rank of general, chief of the general staff, minister of the army and royal senator. After the breakthrough of the Thessaloniki Front, the Serbian royal government “brotherly” repaid Montenegro. The Serbian generals themselves write in their reports that they occupied Montenegro, which was destroyed as a state with countless crimes against supposedly fellow people.
To iron out the violation of diplomatic protocol, because he did not come at the invitation of his Montenegrin colleague, Vučević added in the host country that he was ready to meet with Prime Minister Milojko Spajić “whenever and wherever necessary”. He suggested that “it is more natural for us to meet either in Podgorica or Belgrade, rather than in some European metropolis”. Spajić did not invite Vučević to Mojkovac, nor did he meet with him while he was in Montenegro. Vučević’s “visit” was officially kept quiet by the Montenegrin government. In an interview with the prestigious American Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Spajić said that he was a victim of the machinations of Serbian state security in the Do Kwon Affair, which had previously provided shelter to this global cryptocurrency fraudster.
If Andrija Mandić had called Ana Brnabić his colleague from Serbia, the commemoration in Mojkovac would have made more sense. It turns out that the gathering in Mojkovac was a meeting of Vučić's subjects at home and in Montenegro.
In response to a journalist's question, Vučević also said that not much has been done to provide free education in Serbia to students from Montenegro who identify as Serbs.
“It was a mutual initiative of the Union of Montenegrin Students and the Government of Serbia,” he explained, adding that “we are giving privileges in education and studies to citizens who feel like they are part of the Serbian people.” The problem for Vučević is abuse. “It is not nice for someone to declare themselves as Serb when enrolling in a university, and then declare themselves otherwise the next day.”
At the end of October 2023, in anticipation of the population census in Montenegro, Vučević, as Minister of Defense, received alleged representatives of the fictitious Union of Students of Montenegro in Serbia. The “students” proposed to the Minister of Defense that the signatory from the census be used instead of the current legally non-binding statement, as a kind of additional pressure to get as many Montenegrins to declare themselves as Serbs in order to be more certain that they would exercise their rights in Serbia. The delegation included Vuk Orović, a student at the Belgrade Faculty of Law who was arrested as a hooligan during a clash with the police in front of the Serbian Parliament in July 2020. The hooligans then chanted the name of war criminal Ratko Mladić, as well as slogans against Vučić and his friend Milo Đukanović. Orović was ordered to be detained for 30 days but was released after seven days – which can be interpreted as recruitment. In addition to Orović, the “delegation” also included Jelena Dobričanin, the daughter of United Montenegro MP Vladimir Dobričanin, who also belongs to Vučić’s bloc.
The propaganda of the Serbian world and Serbian organized crime continues.
Bonus video:
