Summary
Ivica Đikić: Beara
The captain of the battleship Ljubiša Beara was too active, dedicated and criminally creative in the four- or five-day operation to execute Bosniak prisoners from Srebrenica to fit into the mold of a neutral executor of someone else's ideas and orders. He was informed at all times of the ultimate intention with the prisoners, he designed and took decisive steps to translate the deadly idea into reality. He acted out of a belief that it had to be done, not because he was a dehumanized cog in a perfectly tuned machine for the production of death, a dehumanized cog without whose participation everything would end up being the same again anyway. Such a machine simply did not exist in the hands of the Bosnian Serbs, especially not in the last summer of the war, and what produced death in the middle of July 1995 in the area of Srebrenica, Bratunac and Zvornik was an improvised structure of evil that Beara personally constructed, on the fly, to serve his purpose and to show General Mladić and everyone else that he was capable of organizing an execution of almost unimaginable proportions. resistance. He replaced one religion, which was based on proclaimed atheism and Yugoslav supranational identity, with another, which, simply put, was rooted in the myth of the chosenness and historical importance of the Serbian nation that survived thanks to the miraculous powers of Orthodoxy. Josip Broz Tito was replaced by Slobodan Milošević, i.e. Ratko Mladić. But that was only a prerequisite for Colonel Beara to turn into a person who designed and practically managed the mass killing of eight thousand Bosniak prisoners. What specifically motivated him? How did he even understand his role in the mass murder, which he must have known was terrible, if in that four or five-day whirlwind of adrenaline, alcohol, heat, fear and death, he also found a moment for introspection, for self-reflection? Was Colonel Beara ever, and especially in July 1995, even trained to look at himself and his actions from a perspective that would at least strive for objectivity?
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