Vučić on Mladić's funeral: "People are tired of being humiliated"; "Only Serbs have been convicted"

“It would be easy for me to make excuses, but I don’t want to do that. It is easy to find a scapegoat and say that there is a culprit responsible at the state level — that it is always Serbia, that it is Vučić — but no one has analyzed the situation more deeply,” he said.

“When war criminal Slobodan Praljak committed suicide in The Hague in 2017, there were expressions of condolence and a minute of silence in the Croatian Parliament,” he added.

“They then adopted a declaration stating that all the verdicts against the six Croatian officials were ‘unacceptable,’ ‘unjust,’ and something else along those lines. And there was no reaction,” he said.

He added that the situation in Serbia was different when Ratko Mladić died and that there had been no glorification.

“People were mostly stunned by the number of people who attended the funeral... No one asked why so many people, such a huge number of people, came to that funeral. I will tell you one of the main reasons: because people have grown tired of being humiliated for the past 35 years,” Vučić said.

He pointed out that Serbs were the only people who did not want to secede from Yugoslavia, yet suddenly became the only ones to blame.

“Everyone else committed crimes against Serbs, and Serbs committed crimes against others. But it has always been the case that only Serbs were not only accused and prosecuted, but that only verdicts were handed down against them, and only Serbs were ultimately sentenced to prison, while others were not,” Vučić said.

He said he himself was surprised by the number of people who attended Mladić’s funeral, but not by the emotions surrounding it.

“We must focus and say very openly and publicly: peace is of the utmost importance to the Serbian people. We must preserve it, we must preserve stability. We must continue working toward our European path. Will there be some setbacks or negative reactions? Most likely there will be. And what else can we do?” Vučić said.

He said he was pleased that security at the funeral had been ensured and that there were no incidents.

“It was very risky, and we handled all of it in a highly professional manner. When it comes to logistics, transportation and security measures, we carried all of that out very professionally and very well,” Vučić said.