Russian journalist Daria Aslamova, who was arrested the day before yesterday at the border of Kosovo, and was later banned from entering the country for five years, was in these areas before. More precisely, she was in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Sarajevo during the war.
According to her, she wanted to come to Kosovo to write about the relations between Belgrade and Pristina, but she was arrested on suspicion of espionage, for which she was also declared persona non grata. It is interesting that Kosovo is not the first country in which her entry is prohibited for the same or similar reasons.
Daria Aslamova is a 52-year-old from Russia who works as a special correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian daily newspaper and web portal. Namely, this newspaper is known for its pro-Kremlin views.
During her career, she worked as a war journalist in Chechnya, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ossetia, Tajikistan, and Yugoslavia, and she interviewed many famous politicians, including Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Syrian Bashar al-Assad, but also Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Serbs in BiH, and later convicted of war crimes.
Almost 15 years ago, she published an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda where she described her meeting with Karadzic during the war, what she was doing in those days in BiH, and transmitted a part of the previously unpublished interview.
At the beginning of the article, she writes that she got her first dictaphone from Karadzic when she came to Pale to do an interview with him. She described the drama with a borrowed dictaphone, which someone stole from her, and after not finding it for a long time, Karadzic, gave her a new one.
After the interview, she went to Sarajevo in the morning, from where she shared her experience.
”The besieged Sarajevo was mercilessly sunk by the Serbs. They had an extremely favorable position – a city in a valley, surrounded by mountains. Locking the Muslims in a trap, they poured fire on the defenseless city directly from the mountains,” she wrote in July 2008.
Then she singled out several parts of the interview that she had never published before, on the occasion of Karadzic’s departure to prison.
”What mistakes do you think you made as president,” she asked him, among other things, to which he replied: “Big mistake is bad propaganda. The world is against us. Out of pride, out of a desire not to humiliate ourselves with excuses, we allowed the world to see Serbs as the embodiment of evil. It is not fair.”
She also singled out the answer to the question of whether being a psychiatrist helps him in politics and at the end, she gave her conclusion about Radovan Karadzic’s national views.
Judging by what she wrote, it seems that she supported Karadzic’s thinking:
”After 15 years, I am bitterly convinced that what Karadzic feared has come true. Isolation broke the Serbs and pushed them into the irreparable – to surrender their own. When a nation renounces its heroes, it ceases to be a nation and becomes only a nationality. A poor addition to majority. On his personal website, under the name Dr. Dragan Dabic, Karadzic wrote the favorite saying of the Chinese sages: “He who surrenders his own, digs two graves. One for himself,”,” she wrote as the conclusion of the published article, Klix.ba writes.
E.Dz.
