In Trebinje, the unconvicted war criminal Slavko Aleksic has died. Yet perhaps the most important question at the moment of the death of an unconvicted war criminal, whom history will place where he belongs, is this: Did he die, or was he killed? Naturally, by a hand from his own ranks. The story is much broader than it appears at first glance.
He began his unconvicted pre-criminal career, as is usually the case, with political engagement, in that context, in the elite Serbian Radical Party in 1990. He became commander of the Novo Sarajevo Chetnik detachment in 1992, from which dates a not at all insignificant detail of the most likely cause of his death. After a year of exceptional devotion to the tenets of the Chetnik movement in Sarajevo’s Grbavica and proving himself through killings, torture, and rape, his ideological teacher Vojislav Seselj proclaimed him a Chetnik voivode on May 13th, 1993, and the internationalization of that act occurred in 1999, when yet another in a series of innocent but surviving visitors to the Bleiburg field, Momcilo Djujic, proclaimed him a voivode as well, from exile.
In those years, he withdrew into his natural habitat around the wilds near Bileca, and only an occasional word about him was heard in public at the beginning of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, when writing began about Bosnian volunteers in that war. And just as a dramatic construction always returns to the beginning, in this case the construction of life’s horror, so, it seems, the life of this unconvicted war criminal also ended.
He died in Trebinje at the moment when the story of the deranged business of that same Chetnik movement, the Sarajevo Safari, was being reactualized.
He died at the moment when the case was revived from the drawers of the Italian judiciary and when the question was once again posed of how, at that very moment and at that very location of the Sarajevo Safari, and precisely with Slavko Aleksic, the president of our neighboring country, Aleksandar Vucic, was present. The answers to those questions went forever with this unconvicted war criminal, and it remains for the Italian judiciary to determine whether, at the Sarajevo Safari, alongside sniper rifles, a TV tripod or, perhaps, an umbrella was also used.
