Vojislav Seselj: Nationalist Whose Dream Didn’t Come True

Sarajevo-born Vojislav Seselj – who was a vociferous Communist until he embraced a nationalist ‘Greater Serbia’ ideology and went to war – faces judgment in The Hague this week for alleged crimes against humanity.

At the beginning of the 1980s, none of Vojislav Seselj’s acquaintances would have guessed that the nationalist fanatic who dreamed of creating a ‘Greater Serbia’ would end up in the dock at an international war crimes tribunal.

On April 11, the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague is due to hand down its second-instance verdict in the trial of the Serbian Radical Party leader.

He was initially acquitted in March 2016 of three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of the violation of the laws and customs of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia in the 1990s.

Vojo the giraffe

The road that took Seselj to political notoriety in wartime and ultimately to the Hague courtroom began in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, where he was born in 1954.

Studying law at university, ‘Vojo’, as he was known, was an excellent student, and ten became one of the youngest teaching assistants at the Faculty of Political Sciences of Sarajevo University. He also made a strong impression on his fellow students.

“He always walked somewhat excitedly, with large steps, like he was measuring up the faculty building. He looked very aggressive in everything he did,” recalled Boro Kontic, Seselj’s former university classmate.

Seselj started his political career at the age of 17 when he became a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Back then, his ideology was purely Communist in orientation. As well as being in the League of Communists, he was also very active in the students’ association.

“Even back then, he obviously had – and later events would illustrate this – some self-projected attributes of a leader or messiah, be they justified or not. He had an authoritarian attitude, he was vociferous and wanted to dominate and be listened to,” said professor Zdravko Grebo, who worked at the Law Faculty when Seselj was studying there.

“Thanks to his exceptional height and the too-short trousers he often wore, because of his long legs I guess, they called him ‘Vojo the giraffe’. He somehow dominated from up there, marching through the faculty building, so he got that nickname,” Grebo added.

Seselj had already showed a tendency to act the leader back in high school, when he was president of the pupils’ association, an A-grade student and the youngest League of Communists member in the school.

He was not prone to joking or everyday conversation. Vlastimir Mijovic, a veteran journalist and editor of Osobodjenje newspaper who was at college with Seselj, described him as “a narrow-minded orthodox Commie”.

“He was very intelligent, albeit not smart,” said Mijovic. “Seselj was stubborn and one-sided to the core, as if he was programmed… A fanatic from head to toe.”

After running into problems with the Communist Party when he accused a politically well-connected fellow student of plagiarism, Seselj started to move towards Serbian nationalist ideas.

In 1984, he was convicted of making nationalist statements and served two years in prison before moving to Belgrade, where he began integrating himself into Serbian nationalist circles which were against the Yugoslav communist regime.

He started to gravitate towards the ideas of the Chetniks, the World War II monarchist movement whose leader Draza Mihajlovic was executed by the Communists. Chetnik groups were banned under Communist rule because of their WWII-era collaboration with Nazi Germany, but in 1990, as the one-party system disintegrated, Seselj founded his own Serbian Chetnik Movement.

This led to his second prison term in 1990, when he was convicted of trying to damage the House of Flowers, where longtime Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito is buried.

Undaunted, he dubbed himself a Chetnik ‘duke’, and while in prison, stood as a presidential candidate in the first multi-party elections in the former Yugoslavia.

Although he only won around 90,000 votes, it catapulted him into a prominent position on the Serbian political scene. He founded a new far-right group, the Serbian Radical Party, in 1991, and the same year became an MP in Serbia’s National Assembly.

Vojo goes to war

After Yugoslavia began to fall apart, Seselj formed a voluntary paramilitary unit, nicknamed the ‘Seseljevci’ (‘Seselj’s Men’), which participated in the conflicts on the Serbian side alongside other military groups.

During the wars, he became well-known for his extreme rhetoric, which he used to mobilise Serbs across the region.

He publicly advocated creating individual mono-ethnic areas through ethnic cleansing. In that period, he also fashioned the idea of a ‘Greater Serbia’. According to Seselj, the idea was based on the principle that “where there are Serbian graves, there should be Serbian land”.

Seselj’s Greater Serbia included all of present-day Serbia and Kosovo, plus Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro, as well as most of Croatia.

During a visit in 1991 to the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar, which was under siege by Belgrade’s forces, he announced to his fighters and to the media that “no Ustasa” would be allowed to leave the town alive.

His attempts to expel non-Serbs weren’t confined to Croatia; in a speech in the town of Apatin in Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina in 1992, he said that all remaining Croats should also be expelled from Serbia.

“We will not kill anyone, we will just put them in buses and drive them to the Croatian border,” he said.

The nature of his ‘Seseljevci’ unitremains disputed, as Seselj claims he got support – training, arms and money – from the Serbian state, while Slobodan Milosevic and his associates, both in the army and in the state apparatus, denied having had any connection with the paramilitaries’ actions.

In January 2003, the Hague Tribunal filed an indictment, accusing Seselj of the deportation of tens of thousands of non-Serbs and murder of at least 905 Bosniaks and Croats.

He went to The Hague voluntarily a month later and pleaded not guilty, but before he gave himself up, he made a defiant speech insisting that he would clear his name: “With their stupid charges against me, they have come up against the greatest living Serb legal mind. I shall blast them to pieces,” he insisted.

Vojo in The Hague

The trial began in November 2007 following a series of delays, including a hunger strike by Seselj in protest having a defence lawyer imposed by the court. He refused legal help from the UN-backed tribunal and mocked the offer of a court-appointed lawyer.

“You falsely present this man with a bird’s nest on top of his head as my defence lawyer. He will never be my defence lawyer. You brought actors here to act as my defence lawyers, but they will never be my defence lawyers. They are your spies,” he told the court.

While held in the UN Detention Unit in The Hague, Seselj published a number of books, including one entitled ‘The Roman Catholic Criminal Project of the Artificial Croatian Nation’.

He claimed that the tribunal was the product of a conspiracy – saying at first that the Pope and the Vatican were involved, then blaming Germany and, on occasions, arguing that Britain and the United States were behind it.

He called his trial “a legal scandal without precedent in recent legal history”, noting that neither Hitler nor Stalin were judged in such a way.

Continuing his mocking of the court, he called for the longest possible sentence for his nationalist ideology. “I wish for a death sentence. It would be an ideal end to my political and legal career,” he said.

When asked by the judges to stand up during his trial, Seselj responded: “Stand up for you? You’re not normal. You are the scum of the earth. How can I stand up for you? I am a Chetnik duke.” He also declared on another occasion that he was proud of his “nationalist ideology”.

While in The Hague, he was also tried three times for contempt of court, mostly because of statements that insulted or made fun of the Tribunal. He was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison for this.

Aid all the controversy however, his trial managed to show that his ‘Seseljevci’ unit, alongside other Serbian forces, occupied numerous towns and villages all across eastern Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, killing, robbing and torturing non-Serb civilians.

Seselj’s story then took yet another turn in 2014, when due to his poor health, the Tribunal decided to release him temporarily to have cancer treatment in Serbia.

But instead of going calmly, he noisily returned to political life in Belgrade, got re-elected as a Serbian MP, and declared that he would never return to The Hague voluntarily. He also kept on mocking the UN court, claiming to have slept through the prosecution’s appeal against his war crimes acquittal.

These days, his media appearances still attract attention – such as when he held a rally in support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, or when he posed as a Hague Tribunal judge on a Serbian reality TV show – but his political star has faded.

In 1992, his Radical Party occupied 101 out of 250 seats in the Serbian parliament. Now there are 22 Radical Party MPs in the legislature, although they are still promoting Seselj’s dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’, the ideology that fuelled the wars and took their leader to The Hague.

Some of Seselj’s allies from the 1990s have done a little better for themselves, however – former Radical Party official Aleksandar Vucic is now the president of Serbia. If Seselj is convicted on April 11, Vucic might be in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether to send his old boss back to The Hague to serve his sentence.