MEHMEDOVIĆ ATTEMPTS TO DICTATE TERMS OF GENERAL MLADIĆ'S FUNERAL

ISTOČNO SARAJEVO, SEPTEMBER 3 /SRNA/ – Šemsudin Mehmedović, a member of the House of Representatives of the BiH Parliamentary Assembly, has gone so far as to seek to dictate where General Ratko Mladić may or may not be buried.

In statements to media outlets in the Federation of BiH, Mehmedović is attempting to deny the Serb people the right to decide for themselves how they will regard a man whom they consider a symbol of the military defense of Republika Srpska. Responding to SRNA's request for a statement, Mehmedović declined to speak to the agency, but sent his position via Viber and attempted to draw a moral comparison between General Mladić and war criminal Rasim Delić. However, he "forgot" to mention the key fact that the El Mujahideen detachment operated under Delić's command, and that its members beheaded Serb soldiers. Among their first crimes, in September 1992, Mujahideen fighters carried out a massacre at Crni Vrh, on the Teslić-Tešanj front, killing three Serb soldiers, beheading them and posing for photographs with their heads. The photographs were published around the world. At the time, Mehmedović was head of the police station in Tešanj. According to information published by the Centre for Investigative Reporting, he held that position from 1991 to 1993, when he became head of the Centre for Security Services, a position he held until 1995. In his statements to media outlets in the Federation about what the Serb people may or may not do regarding General Mladić's funeral, Mehmedović is attempting to draw a moral and historical dividing line between the victims of the war in BiH even though history cannot be viewed through one-sided political narratives. The decision on where General Mladić will be buried, he was born in BiH, but was a citizen of Serbia for decades after the war and lived there, belongs to his family, not to an individual who presumes to speak on behalf of an entire people, in this case the Serb people. The Hague Tribunal convicted General Ratko Mladić, as well as many other Serb generals and political leaders, in final judgments. It has long been argued, however, that the tribunal was exclusively political and existed solely to prosecute Serbs with the intention of presenting a different version of events to the world. Relatively few and, in some cases, comparatively short sentences for war crimes were also handed down to others, including General Rasim Delić. No one, including Mehmedović, has a mandate to decide on behalf of the Serbs whom they will mourn, where they will bury their dead or how they will remember the war years. It is problematic that Mehmedović is attempting in the public sphere to create the impression that Serb victims are less worthy or that their suffering cannot form part of legitimate remembrance simply because it does not fit a particular political interpretation of the war. War criminal Rasim Delić was buried in Sarajevo in 2010 with military honors.