on Sunday, SVT showed a documentary about the trial of the bosnian serb general Ratko Mladic.
The international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague sentenced him in december 2017, to life imprisonment for, inter alia, crimes against humanity and genocide. Mladic led the forces that let the grenades rain on the siege of Sarajevo and the July 1995 murdered up to 8,000 bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica.
as the Bosnian hangman, the butcher of Srebrenica. But that Mladic was arrested on a cousin’s farm in Serbia, only in 2011, after 16 years on the run, is an indication of the vitality of the hjälteroll he during the war years was awarded in the Serbian mythology. In the documentary we get to see him dressed in a uniform to help farmers with haymaking. The Lien goes, first on the meadows, then on to the killing fields.
To stow the prisoners in the trucks, run them out to the fields in the forest, execute them and then shovel them down in the mass graves may be criminal and barbaric in the world’s eyes. But his followers worship Ratko Mladic as ”the people’s” savior.
Nationalism takes for granted that people can be ” classified ”like insects”.
from his municipality Kalinovik in the mountains southeast of Sarajevo holding the general’s son, Darko Mladic, in a speech to his father’s glory. It takes place over a bygdefest with the tug-of-war and folk dances. Darko Mladic överbringar greetings from the ”master” and then tells an anecdote about how his father, eight-year-old herded sheep in the mountains. A wolf grabbed one of the lambs, but åttaåringen raised his staff and chased away the beast.
For those who may not understand the point making Darko Mladic the painfully obvious. Many years later came another wolf, and cut ”our freedom” in the leg, “he explains,” but with the ”rod” which they and the bosnian serb army were hunted down also this wolf away and the sheep, that is to say, bosnienserberna, could get their own state, Republika Srpska, where they did not have to have with the muslim goats and cows to make.
if the sheep and the goats and the cows, don’t say Darko Mladic. But it is the spirit. It is one of nationalism’s fundamental beliefs, the belief that ”the people” is threatened by something alien, ”the wolf”, and therefore must be protected by a shepherd who not only keeps the wolf away, but also sort out and drive out the goats that may have crept into the flock.
Or as George Orwell puts it with a different metaphor in the essay ”Notes on nationalism”: Nationalism takes for granted that people can be ” classified ”like insects”.
in the Swedish political debate seems to be irritated over the fact that it is now written and spoken too much about the ”30’s”. You may be surprised that writers who see themselves as conservative, or at least feel some sympathy for conservative values, now please dismiss the historical perspectives as uninteresting and irrelevant.
And it is not true that all who are concerned about the nationalist ängsligheten and the nationalist chauvinismens and the nationalist dumhetens return only see the 30’s again go. We also recall the 1990s; the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the genocide in Rwanda.
r history to repeat itself. But it would be unwise to ignore it. When nationalism has become an increasingly powerful, and increasingly respectable, political force in Europe should remind itself that it can have many faces. One of them belongs to Ratko Mladic, it is the ethnic nationalism fryntligt brutal mördaransikte.
