Remorseless Seselj still dreams about Greater Serbia

Vojislav Seselj has no remorse over his role in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Now 63, the ultra-nationalist Serb is again an MP in the parliament in Belgrade and has no regrets.

"We will never give up the idea of a Greater Serbia," he insists.

A close ally of the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Seselj was found not guilty in 2016 of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the 1990s Balkans wars that claimed around 140,000 lives.

The radical Serbian leader had been accused of being behind the murders of scores of Croats, Muslims and other non-Serbs and Seseljs acquittal in 2016 after an eight year trial at the Hague came as a major surprise. Croatias prime minister condemned the verdict as "shameful".

Two years on and UN war crimes judges will rule on Wednesday on an appeal brought by prosecutors.

They allege that Seselj incited hatred through his fiery speeches on nationalism "seeking to unite all Serb territories in a homogeneous state that he called Greater Serbia".

But in an interview with AFP, Seselj - who has always denied the charges - said he will not go to the Hague for the hearing at the former International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), whose function has been taken over by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT).

The political objective of his extreme-right Serbian Radical Party (SRS) remains "to unite within the same state all the territories where Serb people live," he says, adding that Serbs have been divided "due to the will of big powers, Serbia's traditional enemies".

Of course, he admits, Croats and Bosnian Muslims "are currently against" that programme.

"But we should continue convincing them that they are Serbs."
He states that "out of the Serbian nations body new nations have been formed artificially: two-thirds of todays Croats are ancient Serbs of the Catholic faith, Croats today speak Serbian."
And Bosnian Muslims are also of Serb origin, he claims. "They converted to Islam during the occupation of the Ottoman Empire."
"When he returned he was without an army, but the closer he got to Paris, the more his army grew. It is important to have a good general."