Parties that won the election in Montenegro defeated “people who committed genocide in Srebrenica,” the leader of the ‘Black on White’ coalition, Dritan Abazovic, told N1 on Wednesday.
His statement came after N1 asked him to comment on recent attacks against the Bosniak minority in Montenegro following the election that saw a coalition of former opposition parties negotiating to form a majority in the parliament after a nearly 30-years-long dominance of President Milo Djukanovic’s Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS).
RELATED NEWS
In the days following the election, Serb nationalists celebrated across Montenegro, including in the town of Pljevlja, where the Bosniak minority was attacked and the seat of the Islamic Community was vandalised.
“Pljevlja will be Srebrenica” was reportedly among the slogans the crowd chanted.
“We have defeated people who committed genocide in Srebrenica,” Abazovic said.
“The fact that you or the public don’t want to accept that is a separate issue,” he said, arguing that those who were political actors during the genocide in the eastern Bosnian town were in power in Montenegro until the recent election.
“Milo Djukanovic was the prime minister at that time and I never heard resignation requests over what was happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he said, adding that he can present transcripts of conversations between Djukanovic and Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb political leader, which prove that Djukanovic discussed ways to “resolve the Serb question within Bosnia and Herzegovina” with the convicted war criminal.
“The fact that you have the perception that the citizens of Montenegro should never get freedom but should be in the service of the mafia, which works perfectly well with the structures in Bosnia and Herzegovina in promoting nationalism as a way to shift the focus away from corruption and the living standards of citizens in Bosnia and Montenegro is something we all have to work on together,” Abazovic said.
He added that he and other representatives of the coalition that won the election went to Pljevlja and strongly condemned the incidents, accusing Montenegrin police of “being connected” to what happened.
“I cannot accept that when the government is changing, 1,000 policemen go to Budva, but in Pljevlja they were not even able to identify someone who writes insulting graffiti, breaks the glass on the door of the Islamic Community, or promotes fear among the citizens,” Abazovic said.
“They are unable to prosecute those people. That is unacceptable to me. If the Montenegrin police continue functioning this way, I will leave the government,” he declared.
Abazovic stressed that “this is a good change” in Montenegro, “because new people can promote new values.”
“This is a message to the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Do you want us to remain a nationalist society forever?” he asked.
“What was done in Pljevlja was not done by Montenegrins, nor Serbs, nor Bosniaks, nor Albanians – but by criminals. Let’s not generalize peoples,” he said.
“We have defeated a giant criminal octopus,” Abazovic said. “Many people are panicking now because of their personal interests. The sons and the daughters of officials who are now afraid of a law on property origin.”
