Zrenjanin Assembly Walkout Over Minute for Mladic

The Zrenjanin City Assembly opened its session today, September 10, with a minute of silence for Ratko Mladic, the former commander of the Army of Republika Srpska. Opposition councilors walked out of the chamber during that minute, explaining their decision in a joint statement issued as soon as they left.

Sources disagree on exactly which councilor groups walked out. N1 and Nova report that councilors from LSV, PSG, ZLF, SRCE and SSP left the chamber, while Razglas News lists six groups: LSV, DS, SSP, PSG, Srbija centar and ZLF. None of the sources specify how many councilors left in total.

The joint statement signed by the councilor groups reads:

We will not accept a civilizational collapse and the abuse of the Zrenjanin City Assembly. We refuse to take part in the shameful radicalization of public space and the imposition of collective guilt on the citizens of Zrenjanin. The city assembly must be a place that celebrates life, tolerance and the development of our city, not an arena for glorifying a politics of crime that has set back the entire region. There is no place for war criminals in Zrenjanin.

Thirty-nine items, first one on ending a mandate

After the minute of silence, councilors moved on to debate 39 items on the agenda. The first was a proposed decision to formally end the mandate of a councilor whose term had already lapsed back in August, after a final court ruling sentencing him to a year in prison was submitted to the assembly. The agenda also included:

• election of a member of the City Council, the assembly’s executive board
• annual work reports from public utility companies
• a decision on naming and renaming city streets
• the disposal of city owned building land
• construction of solar power plants in the Ecka and Muzlja cadastral municipalities
• adoption of Zrenjanin’s transport model and its Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan
• appointment of acting directors at the National Museum, the Contemporary Gallery, and the public utility company “Cistoca i zelenilo” (Cleanliness and Greenery)

The same pattern in Nis, with the session interrupted

The Zrenjanin session was not an isolated case. The Novi Sad City Assembly opened its own session the same way, with a minute of silence at the start, and its opposition walked out as well. Two days earlier, on September 8, the same pattern played out in Nis, but with the opposite outcome: there, it was the ruling majority that left the chamber.

The trigger was a speech by councilor Ivan Jovanovic, from the NSP-DS-PSG group and head of the Nis branch of the Movement of Free Citizens. Addressing the Nis City Assembly, he said:

Ratko Mladic is a war criminal. I want this to be heard and I want this to be known.

Ruling majority councilors took offense and walked out at around 3:05 p.m. The Nis session was left without a quorum as a result and did not resume for more than half an hour, when councilors voted on six of the 32 items on the agenda, including decisions on the General Urban Plan, on Borska Street, and on the site of the old brickyard.

The Nis session also opened with a minute of silence for Mladic. Darko Nikolic, the president of the Nis City Assembly who chaired the session, did not say who had proposed the minute of silence, but defended the decision:

We made the decision to pay tribute with a minute of silence. We consider it a civilizational act, to pay our respects to our general, Ratko Mladic. I would not want to discuss this any further. It does not matter whose proposal the decision was based on, what matters is that we paid tribute to the general in a dignified manner.

The Hague verdict and a funeral in Belgrade

In 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced Mladic to life in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The trial opened on May 16, 2012, presenting evidence took more than four years, and the tribunal sat for 530 days, hearing 592 witnesses and reviewing nearly 10,000 pieces of evidence.

Mladic died on August 27, at the age of 84, in a prison hospital in The Hague, and was buried on Monday in Belgrade. Srpske vesti previously reported on the funeral, which was attended by five ministers, with the funeral service led by Patriarch Porfirije.

In just over a week, three local assemblies produced three different outcomes from the same gesture, a minute of silence for a convicted war criminal: in Novi Sad and Zrenjanin it was the opposition that walked out, in Nis it was the ruling majority. Whether the pattern will repeat at the next sessions of local assemblies across Serbia remains an open question, since neither Zrenjanin nor Nis has yet announced the date of its next meeting.