A fan at the Serbia-Brazil match on Thursday night at Lusail Stadium was spotted wearing headgear with the symbol of the ultranationalist Serb Chetnik military organization with an infamous history of genocidal acts and war crimes, including the infamous Srebrenica Massacre that took place against Muslims.
The abominable Serb Chetnik group is the perpetrator of massacres and atrocious crimes committed against the Muslim and Croat population during the 1992-95 war wherein they were ethnically cleansed, were killed, imprisoned or driven out, in the ultranationalist group’s pursuit for a Greater Serbia.
The headgear worn by the fan is identical to the ones worn by guerillas who worked for this fascist military group and took part in its barbaric activities.
The Chetniks, a Yugoslav Royalist and Serbian nationalist movement and guerrilla force, committed numerous war crimes during the Second World War, primarily directed against the non-Serb population of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, mainly Muslims and Croats. Most historians have considered Chetnik crimes against Muslims and Croats during this period as constituting genocide.
Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled, after which 700 thousand people sought asylum making it the largest exodus after World War 2. The Bosnian ethnic cleansing saw the “killing of civilians, rape, torture, destruction of civilian, public, and cultural property, looting and pillaging, and the forcible relocation of civilian populations”. The Srebrenica massacre, which was also a part of the ethnic cleansing campaign, and constituted the crime of genocide.
The Srebrenica Massacre
The Srebrenica massacre was the only episode of the Bosnian war to be legally defined as genocide. The Srebrenica killings were the bloody peak of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which took place after the breakup of Yugoslavia’s nationalistic emotions and territorial aspirations that set Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic factions – Croats and Bosniaks. In July 1995, at least 8,000 Bosniak males from Srebrenica stripped away Serb troops from their families, chased through forests around the eastern town and were killed by those forces. They plowed their victims’ dead bodies into shabbily dug mass graves. These were later dug again with bulldozers to scatter the remains to other burial sites to hide any proof of the massacre.
