Le Monde: Mural dedicated to war criminal set Belgrade street ablaze

Painted on a private apartment building, the mural represents a former general currently in the Netherlands after being sentenced to life imprisonment. The mural salutes him: "General, thank your mother for giving birth to you."
The mural appeared in July, a few weeks after The Hague tribunal convicted Mladic of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and shocked everyone in this "fancy" part of Serbia's capital. Similar murals glorifying Mladic are numerous in Serbia and among Bosnian Serbs. At the request of the municipal authorities, the tenants of the building wanted to remove it, but no company dared to do so.

Despite that, several peace activists are still gathering on the spot, with a former MP, Aida Corovic, among them, Le Monde says.

Her "arrest" in front of the camera, as Corovic says, "by parapolice officers", provoked a stormy reaction from the civil sector in Serbia.

On Saturday, hundreds of people took to the streets to protest, but a police cordon again prevented them from approaching the mural.

"The police are officially in charge of preventing conflicts with the extreme right and the hooligans who guard the mural," Marko Milosavljevic, an activist said.

A week ago, the activists painted the mural, but the 'defenders' clean mural after each "attack." Protected by a special varnish, the mural is extremely difficult to remove.

These people seem to have come directly from the intertwined milieu of soccer, underground and nationalism, connected with the very scrum of the state apparatus in Serbia.

The paper recalled that President Aleksandar Vucic justified the large number of police officers sent to protect the activists with the words "not to say that they allowed them to be beaten".

Le Monde added that "the head of state, who was dictator Slobodan Milosevic's information minister, did not publicly glorify Mladic, but criticised all those who criticised him for failing to take action, saying 'they have no other job in life than to hate Serbs' and stressed that cleaning up the mural was under the jurisdiction of the communal police.

"Since he came to power in 2021, there have been more and more such murals because he is forcing a nationalist program," Corovic said.

In the meantime, the battle over the mural in honour of Mladic resonates throughout Serbia. It allowed the opposition to launch its campaign ahead of the elections announced for April 2022. Still, it happened at a particularly sensitive time for the Balkans in connection with the wars that erupted in the region between 1991 and 2001, Le Monde said.