ANĐELKOVIĆ: CHANCE FOR UNIFICATION OF SERBS MISSED DUE TO YUGOSLAV ILLUSIONS

BELGRADE, NOVEMBER 10 /SRNA/ - Historian Dragomir Anđelković stated that World War I was a grand Serbian victory, in which the Serbs squandered a huge opportunity to resolve the "Serb question" by uniting the majority of Serbian lands into a single state.

"We missed that opportunity because of the Yugoslav illusions of our elites. No matter how much some great powers insisted on the creation of Yugoslavia, Serbia, as the victor, could have imposed a solution to the Serb question within the framework of a united Serbian state," Anđelković told SRNA on the occasion of the Armistice Day of World War I. He pointed out that the "so-called South Slavic brothers" repaid the Serb people with mass pogroms and the criminal operation of the Croatian Army and Police, Operation Storm, in August 1995. "We even have recent examples where an exhibition dedicated to Serbian heroines of World War I is being blocked in Croatia, because Serbophobia is so strong that even things unrelated to current Serb-Croat relations are being prevented," Anđelković said. According to him, it is clear that "both Croats and Islamized Serbs, who call themselves Bosniaks," identified themselves with the enemies of the Serbs during World War I. Anđelković notes that even the very name of the holiday implies that, from the Western perspective, the defeated and the victors are being equated. "In the Second World War, we have Victory Day, while in the First World War there is Armistice Day, as if the defeated and the victors are being equated, as if it doesn't matter who was on which side," Anđelković pointed out. He added that it is clear the Serbs and Russians won the First World War, but that this does not fit into the geopolitical picture of Western centers of power. Armistice Day of the First World War has been observed as a national holiday in Serbia since 2012, in commemoration of November 11, 1918, when the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Germany, thus bringing an end to the First World War. At least ten million soldiers perished during the First World War, and an equal number of people died from disease and famine. Proportionally, Serbia suffered the greatest losses, losing 26 percent of its population, including 400,000 soldiers and 640,000 civilians.