Dragoslav Bokan is the new president of the Board of Directors of the National Theater. This is what the Government of Serbia decided.
It's not fake news, it's the truth - it's written in the "Official Gazette".
The decision is without explanation, but it can be concluded that the Government of Serbia believes that it will be best for the state National Theater if its fate is decided by an aggressive right-wing and criminal personality. Because Bokan is a film director, but among other things he is also the founder and commander of the paramilitary formation "White Eagles".
Bokan is everything that theater is not. And that is why this decision of the Government of Serbia is shameful for the Government of Serbia.
This society knows Dragoslav Bokan from the nineties, when he operated with his paramilitary formation "White Eagles" on the battlefield in Croatia, not in the theater. That's why he directed two gatherings on the occasion of the anniversary of the Storm. After all, he himself says that he is "the proudest in his life" of the period from the war.
Bokan was charged twice: once for having illegal weapons in his apartment, so he was sentenced to six months in prison, and the second time, for organizing and assisting robbery, he was sentenced to one year in prison, which was overturned by the Court of Appeal.
The National Theater does not support crime and will never support it. The National Theater does not promote hatred and war, but art, togetherness, and everything else that is good for people.
The ideal progressive
Did the ministers of Matsuto's government who voted for Bokan know who he was? One hundred percent yes. And yet, they saw nothing, nothing at all objectionable in Bokan's biography. On the contrary. They decided that he was the right man for the National Theatre.
Of course, it is not known what the relevant minister Nikola Selaković thinks about all this, and even less whether he voted for Bokan. But it seems that he did not object, because if he had, it would have been heard. And he would no longer be a minister. Really, how is he going to cooperate with a man who says that in his career he is most proud of his wartime period?
Probably - excellent, because for the current government there is only the present. And theirs. And Bokan is totally ideal there.
When the Serbian Progressive Party took control of Serbia, he quickly rose to the top of the group of SNS propagators and Aleksandar Vučić. Which was returned to him. He became the president of the Institute for National Strategy, whose website says that it deals with the systematic culture of memory and Serbian execution sites and suffering. Two years ago, to the horror of the academic community, he was appointed a member of the Council of the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade.
Now he has become the president of the body that manages the National Theatre, which decides on performances, on the composition of the ensemble, on guests, cooperation with other theaters, on the distribution of the budget - on the life of the National Theatre.
State soldier
Bokan is satisfied with the Government's decision. He would be satisfied if he was elected as an ordinary member, he says, because he is a "soldier of the state".
And the ensemble of the National Theater was astonished. They fear that Bokan will influence the repertoire with his ideological commitment. They experienced it as a punishment. And like a whip. Because they did not obey, because they dared to look the government in the eye and tell it that they want to help the audience to think freely. And that he should not be afraid because of that. Because they were on the side of the students, and because they were on strike against the government.
That is why the government is now sending them someone who will make them think as they are told.
Someone who said that there is "nothing wrong" in the civil war, who claims that the oppositionists are "petty-bourgeois snobs, ultra-urban city faces, sullen rebels without a reason, nihilists and anarchists" and who told the students, those "red-hot kids" before March 15, that "in the hardest possible way, on their own skin, they will understand what a state is."
That is why the Serbian government sees in Bokan the right man for the National Theatre. Who cares about art and culture. The only thing that matters is that the actors and the other lezilebovics get in line. So that they too can feel what the country is like. So that they bow their heads before the one who pays them and that at the end of the show they shout "Aco Serbs" and not "Your hands are bloody".
The setting of Bokan to brighten and darken the National Theater is a warning of what will follow other theaters if they do not obey. Because Aleksandar Vučić announced a long time ago, and several times, that he will show everyone who stands in the way of the "progress of Serbia" what the state is. And the president must be listened to.
