Between two tours of Serbian villages in Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić decided to walk around Serbian villages and municipalities in Republic of Srpska. He used the slow summer days filled with emotion to mark the action “Storm” to once again visit his ancestral home in western Bosnia and to send messages from there to the Serbian people who were not rejoicing in those days, on the contrary.
Since ten years ago he established August 5 as the Day of Remembrance for the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia in 1995, Vučić uses every beginning of August to silence the Croats and his "rival" at the head of the Government of the Republic of Croatia Andrej Plenković. The reason is simple: if Croats will march in Knin, we will mourn ours from Rača to Mrkonjić town via Donja Gradina. An event that is, according to all rules of international law, a war crime - the expulsion of 200 thousand Serbs from Croatia in 1995 - Croatia celebrates as its Victory Day, and Serbia, in cooperation with Republika Srpska, as a Day of Remembrance for the victims of that crime, but also of the crime committed in the Second World War in the area of the Jasenovac concentration camp.
Vučić made a special effort to that date reinforces, boldly, that every year the guard is made into something that should aim for two things: uniting over the graves of fallen compatriots in order to, I guess, come out of it even more decisively with the aim of strengthening the ties of all Serbs in the region in all possible ways. And indeed, if we look at the reactions from Croatia "on that occasion", they did not dwell too much on the establishment of that date as something that would have special significance for Serbs, on the contrary. They routinely celebrate in Knin, there is a state celebration that always turns into the promotion of Ustasia among certain groups, especially groups of fans who have not even felt the war.
SAVIOR OF THE PEOPLE
This year, in the days when Bosnia was focused on Sarejevo because Dino Merlin was performing there, after an 11-year hiatus, Vučić decided to take a short walk around the part of Bosnia that he judged to be the most suffering and to commemorate the Day of Remembrance of the "Storm" victims in Mrkonjić City. While most of the citizens and the media were focused on Sarajevo because it is not often that a performer fills the Koševo stadium three days in a row (it was estimated that more than 120 thousand tickets were sold), Vučić walked with Milorad Dodik around the province and did what he was doing: he tried to show "ordinary people" that he is also an ordinary man who likes to visit his grandfather's house in Čipuljići near Bugojno, to host his neighbors, to visit cemeteries and monasteries, to talk with Bishop Sergi, one of his greatest admirers, and, finally, to once again play double political dog with Milorad Dodik, who is preparing to formally return to power after the general elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina this coming October.
In the hellish almost 40 degrees, the two of them found time for food and drink and song, and for a tear if necessary, because, in the end, they gathered to pay their respects to the victimized Serbs and to report once again Urbi et orbi that "there will be no new Storm". Vučić and his promo team had hours and hours of material on which he "walks through the people", talks to the people, offers solutions to the people's problems, and then, along the way, sends a message to the Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins who particularly hurt him by sending an envoy to the Croatian celebration of "The Storm". Then that material, which the people in Serbia could see in a live broadcast, is routinely cut and shared on Instagram and Tiktok for those in the diaspora, presumably even younger, so that some category is not accidentally skipped in the campaign.
PETTING A CAT AND OTHERS "SPONTANEITY"
That method still, obviously, "works" because we see that people appear here and there, sometimes it's staged, sometimes it's genuine, who throw themselves at him, who thank him, who bring children to have Vučić pat them on the head and ask: "And what's your name, Master?". Those who closely follow Vučićeva neverending campaign, this time they also noticed a strange video with a cat on the stairs of the renovated grandfather's house in Čipuljići - I guess it's from the series "I love animals, I'm a normal person", although he looked awkward in that "spontaneous" petting with a cat that was getting away. It was a message for the domestic audience, and for the "foreigners" it was about the topic that we will never forget the crimes, that we will always and everywhere remind them of them and that no one will ever stop him from saying so.
To this should be added a strong emotional part with the eyes of a victimized boy, whom he mentioned several times together with his mother, probably wanting to emphasize the monstrosity of the crimes committed against the Serbs. "We are the most suffering people" is the message that Vučić sent to everyone, and I guess it should serve to bring us together in misery, to amnesty us from all other things because, for God's sake, it's good that someone stayed, it's good that someone overtook, it's good that there is someone who "carries a Serbian name and surname" as marketing experts have come up with saying in the last few years.
ANGER AT MONTENEGRINS
There is no information on how many people from Serbia and the Republika Srpska went to Dino Merlin's concerts, but it is possible to imagine that there were more than at the "Alexander Vučić Days" in the Republika Srpska, considering everything seen and shown. Milorad Dodik, as already assessed in the comments and analyses, strengthened his position, behaved as if the entity was his own, kicked the official president of the entity Siniša Karan in the side and I guess got ready to formally sit in one of the armchairs in Banja Luka after the general elections in October.
Vučić did not miss the opportunity to deal specifically with Montenegro, which in incidental "interviews" Pink i To the informer, which is on the big stage in the evening of Memorial Day. Podgorica's decision to send its emissary to the Croatian celebration annoyed Vučić so much that he also attacked the Montenegrin Metropolitanate because, it turns out, they all conspired to remove Đukanović "under the Serbian tricolor", and now they have betrayed that tricolor "by flattering the Croats".
Vučić knows that Podgorica did it for pragmatic reasons - tomorrow it will also need the support of Croatia to enter the EU, but we would not be concerned with that, and all under the banner of defending the Serbs because Vučić, as the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia says, is the president of all Serbs, so according to that logic one wonders which Serbs - and a third of them are in Montenegro - can support the celebration of "Storm" together with the Croats. All this together looks and sounds banal, simple-minded, but it is the continuity of the nationalist policy that Vučić has advocated since the moment he appeared in Serbian politics more than thirty years ago. According to what they "reply" to him from the region, it seems that everyone is aware of this, that everyone understands that the character is bluffing and that everything he says, he only says to keep his voters constantly ready, under tension, because he has nothing else to offer them to mobilize them. That's why politics is a fight, that's why campaigning is a battle, that's why elections are a war that must be won, otherwise there is no survival.
A FAMILY FOR DRUNKING AND FIGHTING
Now it is almost impossible to imagine that Vučić could visit Podgorica, Zagreb or Sarajevo while he is still in power - this is how the trenches have been laid, which, for the sake of truth, the "other side" is also happy about, because it is easy to motivate one's own with the story that there is a madman in power in Serbia who wants new wars and threatens new conflicts. When Pristina and the half-lord Aljbin Kurti are added to these capitals, it seems that in the region we again have a group that resembles the composition of the Presidency of the SFRY at the end of the nineties, which instead of preserving peace led to war and the bloody disintegration of the joint state. When that small group gets together, as recently in Tivat, they look like a team that can have a good time together, and then, when the cameras are turned on, pour disturbing messages and messages explaining that we can't go on like this because everyone threatens everyone.
In reality, Croatia is in the EU, Montenegro will be in the EU, and Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina remain trapped in the ravines and ravines of bad, ineffective policies that only favor the development of crime and corruption and produce mass emigration of the population. Both Vučić and Dodik know that where they were walking now, in the territories that the Serbs defended and for which they died from 1992-1995, there are fewer inhabitants than when the war ended, and therefore fewer prospects. These two "Serbian leaders" seem not to have learned the messages of the past, at least when it comes to politics: Serbia did not progress when the Bosnian Serbs looked to Belgrade, as Vučić says, but when Serbia was the Piedmont of the entire Balkans, so everyone wanted to be with it.
Even today, people from the region look at Serbia, but not with joy and not with the desire to "come to Belgrade" - on the contrary, the aggressive nationalist rhetoric of Vučić and his Government in the last fourteen years have returned us to the relations we had in the nineties - aggressors, thugs, usurpers, and official Belgrade seems to be only following one of the rules written in Machiavelli's To the ruler: "Better to be ruled by fear than to be loved."
Well, until the new elections and who survives them.
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