Bosnian professor: Footage from nationalist party attended by Vucic revives symbolism of genocide and rape
Express newspaper
25/07/2025 8:15
Renowned professor from Bosnia and Herzegovina, prof. dr. Edina Becreviq, has reacted strongly to the event organized on July 22 in the town of Požega (southwestern Serbia), where a new section of the highway was opened in the presence of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. The event, organized by the pro-government tabloid “Informer”, was accompanied by a nationalist musical repertoire offensive to Muslims and Bosniaks.
The live broadcast of Informer Television featured the song “Oj vojvodo Sindjelicu”, which contains a sensitive and offensive line: The Turkish woman swore in front of the mosque that she had only loved a Serb. This song has been described as part of Serbian nationalist mythology, which was used to justify the genocide and mass rape of Bosnian women during the war in Bosnia (1992–1995).
Becirevic, a security expert and author of the book Genocide on the Drina River, published by Yale University Press, emphasizes that such content testifies to the ideological continuity of violence and ethnic hatred in Serbian political discourse. She emphasizes that such songs are not harmless, but are directly related to the motivation of the systematic rape of Bosniak women during the war, as part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing.
“The reaction of President Vučić, who not only did not condemn this repertoire, but also entertained and rewarded the musicians during the performance of a song glorifying the figure of Draža Mihailović, a convicted war criminal from World War II, is particularly worrying,” the professor states.
She recalls the words of scholar Catherine MacKinnon, who in 1994 described wartime rape as “rape to kill, to destroy a people, to expel, to break the spirit of a community.”
“It is rape to death, as part of a massacre; rape to kill and to make the victim wish they were dead. It is rape as an instrument of forced expulsion, with the aim of forcing victims to leave their homes and never wanting to return. It is rape as a spectacle, to be seen, to be heard. Rape that destroys a community, divides a society, destroys a people. It is genocidal rape.”
“Not only does it echo the fantasies and symbolism that MacKinnon and other authors have written about, but it also recalls the strategies of war that have been documented in both the Hague decisions and the decisions of domestic courts. In the context of genocide and thousands of raped Bosnian women, this song not only sounds disturbing. It testifies to ideological continuity, to the fact that the violent nationalist imagination is not something of the past, but still lives on in the political and cultural practice of the Serbian state. Based on the recording, we see that it undoubtedly lives in the head of the President of Serbia today,” concluded Prof. Becirevic.
According to her, this is why the recording of the Serbian president in a nationalist trance singing seems terrifying.
“In this context, the fact that the president of Serbia publicly celebrates with such songs is not just an incident, but living proof that the ideology of hatred is still alive in Serbian state politics and culture.”
In the end, she concludes: “Such songs, performed by a country’s own political elite, are not simply folkloric nostalgia, but evidence that the dark past has not only not been faced, but is proudly reappearing on the public stage.”