Balkan Youth Deserve the Truth About the Past – Not Denials

But the process of peacebuilding is never a straight line and is often slowed down by chauvinistic and nationalist narratives and actions coming from key politicians, state-controlled media and extremist groups.

Serbia is one of the countries that is a key to solving and addressing problems directly related to war and the past. Problems such as a shrinking civic and public space, media freedom, misuse of democratic procedures, lack of transparency and corruption have all become a part of its everyday life - and these challenges also jeopardize dealing with the past.

The struggle to keep streets free of hateful content

Last year, Youth Initiative for Human Rights YIHR organised a campaign led by the young in Serbia focused on mapping murals, graffities, stencils and other drawings on walls in Belgrade that glorify Ratko Mladic.

Mladić commanded the main staff of the Army of Republika Srpska, the Serb-led entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina during Bosnia's 1992-95 war. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, as one of the leading men responsible for the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, on June 8, 2021.

The fight for streets and walls free from hateful content whose role is to deny crimes such genocide and to celebrate those who have been convicted of genocide and war crimes intensified in 2021, when big mural dedicated to Mladic appeared in the Belgrade's city centre in Njegoseva street.

A worrying fact is that the people engaged in patrolling this mural to prevent others from removing or destroying it were all young. The location of this mural was also registered on Google maps as a historical landmark, alongside a mural of Draza Mihailovic, a war criminal from the World War II worshiped by nationalists in Serbia...