Millions of Serbs like veteran Balkan affairs expert Stevan Gajic were left reeling when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the events of 1995 in Srebrenica. They feel deeply offended by Germany, which co-sponsored the controversial motion, the political analyst told Sputnik.
Memories of atrocities committed by German forces in World War II, and later killings carried out by the Bosnian Muslims are indelibly seared into their memories.
“I can't speak calmly about this resolution,” Stevan Gajic said. He recalled the painful events from the Second World War, saying:
“Multiple members of my family were murdered by German occupiers during World War II. My grandfather was a war prisoner in a German prison camp in Norway. And, I think that millions of Serbs who also have similar family stories are deeply offended by Germany.”
Russia, Serbia, China, Syria, Cuba, and Hungary were among the nations opposed to the resolution. Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia called the resolution “provocative” and a “threat to peace and security.” After the vote, he underscored that Germany "has no moral authority to even mention the term of genocide to describe anything other than their own atrocious crimes."
Serbian officials decried the vote, claiming that the resolution brands Serbs as a “genocidal people” and, as such, imposes collective guilt on them. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic called the resolution “highly politicized,” adding that it would "open Pandora’s Box."
"You are going to face dozens of this type of resolutions on the genocide issue,” Vucic warned.
Germany, Stevan Gajic noted, waged three wars against the Serbs in the 20th century, occupying Serbian lands in WWI and WWII, and “committed genocide both times.”
Furthermore, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and his Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer from Germany's co-governing Green party rallied in support of the NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Gajic recalled. It was the very same Green party that Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock hails from.
German Kosovo Force (KFOR) troops advancing into the country after NATO's bombing and aggression against the Serbs “murdered two Serbian civilians in cold blood while they were in their car," said the research associate at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade.
Gajic’s family also suffered at the hands of the Bosnian Muslim forces from Srebrenica.
“They brutally murdered my uncle, Ljubisa Gajic, on June 27, 1992, at the village where generations of my ancestors with my family name came from, were born and lived... This village, Magdovici, does not exist on the map anymore,” he said.
But besides reopening old wounds, the fallout from the resolution will likely see Europe engulfed in a series of conflicts, “because of such conduct of Western countries, especially the perpetrators of World War II and Germany,” the pundit stressed.
The vote on the Srebrenica resolution at the UN General Assembly “comes as an offense, one that will be remembered,” Stevan Gajic underlined.