Half of the 910 participants in a survey on the attitudes of young people in Serbia about the Yugoslav wars say they know very little about them, and a fifth of them say they don't know anything at all, says the author of the survey, Rodoljub Jovanović, and Voice of America reports.
The largest percentage of respondents, 18,68 percent of them, believe that the biggest crime in the war in the nineties in Yugoslavia was the Croatian action "The Storm", and slightly more than 13 percent think that it is the NATO bombing in 1999.
Less than five percent of them said that it was a crime in Srebrenica, while one percent of the research participants mentioned the war in Kosovo as the most important event.
"Most of the respondents were biased, their most important criterion was the crimes committed against Serbs." Their attitudes are based less on knowledge and more on feelings," said Jovanović, assessing that "political cynicism" is present in that population.
Actors of war crimes from other countries are evaluated most negatively, and as many as 74 percent stated that they had not heard of mass graves in Serbia, he emphasized.
Data that 48 percent of respondents consider murals and graffiti sacred Ratko Mladić should not be crossed, Anja Zloporubović from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights rated it as "worrying".
"The streets are the embodiment of the people. If our walls are decorated with such murals, our aspiration to create a democratic society is not right," said Zloporubović.
And sociology professor Marija Vasić estimated that the breakup of Yugoslavia was not well interpreted in textbooks and that this is one of the reasons why young people know little about those events.
He concludes that "our entire society, including the youth, suffers from the same syndrome - that they have no knowledge, but that they have an opinion. There is no reconciliation without confrontation".
MN/Voice of America
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