September 27, 2018
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Western interference in all things Bosnian is hardly news. Not today, not yesterday, not 26 years ago, when the then-US ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, encouraged Bosnian Muslim fundamentalist leader Alija Izetbegovic to reject a peace plan – accepted, incidentally, by the very same Bosnian Serb leaders soon to be demonized by the unipolar West as “aggressors” on their own land – that had a good chance of preventing the outbreak of a bloody, three-and-a-half-year civil war that produced about 100,000 dead and many more wounded and homeless people in this former federal republic of ex-Yugoslavia.
But it is news when such a charge comes out of the mouth of Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, who, although eager to keep and develop good relations with Russia and China, has over the years remade himself into an essentially pro-Western politician, whose main ambition is to integrate his country and the rest of the Balkans into the EU, torpedoes be damned.
Thus, Vucic’s announcement that, as soon as the October 7 general elections in Bosnia were over, he would present “astonishing evidence of the most brutal interference of certain Western powers in the elections in Republika Srpska” (one of two entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a majority Orthodox Serb population, taking up 49% of the country, the other being the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dominated by Muslims and Catholic Croats), is a fairly reliable sign that the West has truly outdone itself, even by its own standards of “democracy export,” going so far, in Vucic’s words, that certain Western ambassadors were calling opposition candidates and threatening them not to switch allegiances, otherwise they would “answer both for real and imagined crimes.”
