BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) – Serbia on Wednesday launched a new national holiday with a display of military power and calls for the union of all ethnic Serbs in the Balkans under a single flag, causing unrest among its neighbors decades after calls similar ones would bring to blood wars of the nineties.
Serbs were told to display thousands of red, blue and white national flags wherever they live in the region or in the world on the occasion of “Day of Unity, Freedom and the National Flag of Serbs.”
Opening all day of celebrations, populist President Aleksandar Vucic inspected the military hardware displayed in a park in Belgrade, praising the army’s willingness to respond to external threats.
He said the army is “five times stronger” than it was just a few years ago and announced new military purchases.
On Wednesday, Vucic spoke at a rally in central Belgrade, where nationalist sentiment flew high, attended by members of the government, Bosnian Serb officials and tens of thousands of his supporters.
Vucic, a former ultranationalist who advocated the expansion of Serbia’s borders at the expense of his neighbors, said the new holidays are not intended to threaten anyone or change established borders in the Balkans.
“The Serbian flag threatens someone and they expect us to apologize?” Vucic asked. “My answer is: Never again. We will proudly carry our flag anywhere in the world. “
Bosnian Serb separatist leader Milorad Dodik also spoke at the rally.
“Our country is not Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is Serbia,” he said amid loud applause from the people.
The muscular inflection of Serbian officials, as well as their calls for the creation of the “Serbian world”, or the political unification of some 1.3 million ethnic Serbs living in Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Croatia with Serbia, have provoked concerns in neighboring countries. .
In the 1990s, Serbian forces with the financial and political support of Belgrade led bloody campaigns in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo with the aim of forming a “Greater Serbia”. The campaign tried unsuccessfully to redraw the internal borders of the former Yugoslavia and create a single Serbian state.
Denis Becirovic, a parliamentarian in the Bosnian parliament, said Vucic was “restoring the Greater Serbia project” by supporting the secessionist policies of Bosnian Serbs.
“Unfortunately, Serbia’s expansionist forces have the potential to re-ignite the entire region,” Becirovic said. “The West must stop the demon of Greater Serbia before it is too late.”
Croatian President Zoran Milanovic said he could not “believe that Serbs have nothing more important or smarter to do” than to create holidays that would violate the internal affairs of neighboring states.
Serbian Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin, the most supportive of the “Serbian world,” responded quickly.
“There is nothing more important than preserving the identity of Serbs,” he said.
The new national holiday coincides with a key victory for Serbia and France in 1918 against the central powers in the theater of operations in the Balkans during the First World War.