Two years have passed since the mass murders in Elementary School "Vladislav Ribnikar" i Duboni i Mali Orašje, six months from falling canopy. No one accepted responsibility, and the regime's actions were reduced to defending their own seats.
"In each of these cases, we are only in the next day - May 4 and 5 and November 2 are still ongoing. Political elites, as well as social elites that are primarily connected to the government, refused to seriously deal with these issues, as if they were isolated incidents. We knew that there was a high degree of irresponsibility, but now it has shown its unfathomable proportions," he says. Veran Matić in an interview for "Vreme", which is on newsstands from Thursday, May 8.
A country without a family help desk
The state did not do much to help the families of the victims and the wounded, and Matić says that there was no point that would help the families, whether it was about economic problems, health, psychological...
"I remember that at one point, when we realized that the victims of Dubona and Mali Orašje were completely neglected, Saša (Mirković) and I decided to go there, on our own, and I called the prime minister's office to ask about the families' phones, and they told me 'we don't have it.' happy, to find the strength to move forward through joint mourning. That is what happened, which was a very poignant, cathartic moment," says Matić.
Until then, he was not aware of, as he says, what kind of hell it was, and how much help these people needed.
"But in general, that is the picture of the attitude towards the victims here, towards the victims of the wars of the 1990s, veterans... Injustice is built into the system, and towards the most vulnerable. It is the same now - the mother of the person killed in the fall of the canopy had to leave the country a few days ago", says Matić.
Facing the past and the roots of violence
If we do not come to a serious confrontation with the past, with a strong program of creating a non-violent society, the changes will have a short duration, says Matić.
Speaking about the rootedness of violence, Matić says that the system established by Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s laid such strong foundations that they still rule today.
"Those foundations are connected to the power centers, which are again connected to the secret services. We have a number of paramilitary formations, which were formed by the DB during the wars, and it is terrifying what was done already in the first year of the war in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The perpetrators of those crimes are celebrated here as heroes, although some of them have served their sentences, and the perception of the political elites is that those sentences were unjust," Matić told "Vreme".
As he adds, without understanding the evil that has been committed in our immediate history in the last three, four decades, repaying the victims would be partial and hypocritical.
"It's too late for what happened six months ago, everything is compensation now," says Matić in an interview for "Vreme", which is on newsstands from Thursday, May 8.
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