North Macedonia’s independence should not be commemorated by glorifying war criminals

Filed 1h ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk

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Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Пресс-служба Президента России · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Ratko Mladić, convicted by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo, died August 27 while serving a life sentence. His guilt was affirmed on appeal in 2021; the verdict is not a matter of interpretation.

In North Macedonia, that fact was met by public officials with tributes rather than silence. Minister Ivan Stoilković's party described Mladić as a general who served his people, and Dalibor Kitanović, head of the state agency meant to protect the rights of ethnic communities, posted a since-deleted image placing Mladić among 'generals of the heavenly army.'

North Macedonia's Criminal Code criminalizes public approval or minimization of genocide. Whether these posts meet that legal threshold is for prosecutors to determine, but the political question, whether officials who glorify a genocide convict belong in office, does not require a verdict first.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

You don't get to run an agency for community rights and post tributes to the man convicted of trying to erase one community from the earth. That isn't a lapse in judgment, it's a job description problem. A country doesn't build trust between its neighbors by letting its own officials decide which genocides count.

Source: Read the original at Global Voices → Scored: Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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