Sandulović attacks Paunović: You will not escape responsibility for your statements

Serbian politician Nikola Sandulović reacted sharply to a statement by Serbian Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government Snežana Paunović. She had said that, if she had been in Slobodan Milošević’s position, she would have carried out ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1998.

In his public response, Sandulović accused Paunović of representing a Nazi ideology. According to him, following strong public reactions and widespread international criticism, the minister is trying to soften her words by describing them as an “unfortunate expression.”

He stated that her views reflect, in his opinion, the profile of Serbia’s nationalist elite of the 1990s, which he held responsible for crimes against civilians, population expulsions and the concealment of victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo.

Sandulović said that changing the wording from “ethnic cleansing” to the “deportation” of Kosovo Albanians does not alter the substance of the idea expressed by Paunović, as he believes it is the same logic.

Full response:

When a person with a Nazi ideology faces widespread international condemnation, opposition from the healthy and intellectual part of Serbian society, and realizes that neither Ivica Dačić nor Aleksandar Vučić can protect her from criminal proceedings and responsibility for what she has said, then her cowardly face begins to emerge. She tries to justify herself by claiming that it was all merely an “unfortunate expression.”

This, in my view, is the true image of the hegemonic, nationalist and criminal elite of the 1990s. At the time, it killed innocent civilians and children, expelled people and secretly buried victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. When it was later confronted with the just and justified force of the United States, NATO, the international community and the Hague Tribunal, it began to cry and portray itself as an innocent victim.

She is now trying to repackage the plan for the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo, presenting her Nazi ideology as a plan to deport Albanians to their “mother state.”

Let someone explain to this illiterate nationalist, who falsely presents herself as displaced from Kosovo, even if it is a half-educated person from the criminal den of the Radicals, the SPS and the SNS, that no one was able, nor had the right, to expel Kosovo’s Albanian citizens to an invisible and non-existent “mother state.” Their motherland, where they were born and had lived for centuries, was precisely Yugoslavia. And it was from that country that Snežana Paunović intended to forcibly remove them, that is, ethnically relocate them by trucks and trains from their homeland, as the Nazis did.

Instead of removing her from office and immediately launching proper and expedited criminal proceedings against her, the current government in Serbia is once again giving her media space to demonstrate the ignorance, lack of culture and Nazi ideology that she continues to display without remorse and without a sincere apology.