By Ilija Buncuk
THE EXTREME right is in retreat
in Serbia
today. They have not managed to launch any serious actions for years and they’ve
split into a number of rival groups, which significantly weakens their
strength.
First of all there was a split
in Blood & Honour Serbia/Combat 18 – the Serbian section of the neo-Nazi
movement that was founded by Ian Stuart Donaldson and proud of its loyalty to
the Combat 18 neo-Nazi terror group that takes its name from the first and
eighth letter of the alphabet, AH – Adolf Hitler,
Blood & Honour (B & H) emerged from the
neo-nazi movement and the white power skinhead music scene in 1987. Ian Stuart
Donaldson, the lead vocalist in the neo-Nazi Skrewdriver band, was one of its
prominent leaders. But a few years after his death in 1993 B & H split into
rival factions following arguments over direction and control of the profits.
This division
was mirrored in Serbia
too. Some disaffected members left the original organisation to establish Blood
& Honour Serbia/Unity – the Unity fraction that is opposed to the Combat
18.
On the Serbian section of the neo-Nazi Stormfront
website the verbal duel between the supporters of two camps over who is the “phoney”
and who is the “real” B&H went on for months. The newly established the
Blood & Honour/Unity has also a new Jurišnik
[Stormtrooper] faction. They had their own website, but it went down some time
ago for unknown reasons.
Meanwhile
Blood & Honour/Combat 18 no longer call themselves the National Alignment (Nacionalni stroj) on their posters and
stickers, following the court-ordered banning of its political branch. They now
call themselves the National Revolutionaries – Blood & Honour or Combat 18.
The split has
seriously weakened Blood & Honour/Combat 18 but there are other reasons for
its decline. Attempts to hold public gatherings in the past few years have
failed because they were prevented by the actions of the anti-fascists. There
have no neo-Nazi attacks on punk concerts in Belgrade
since 2003 and in past few years they have not even organised their secret
“White Power” concerts.
This is a
partly because they are constantly under police surveillance. Their last “white
power” concert, held near the city of Niš,
was interrupted by the police. These
days Blood & Honour Serbia/Combat 18 actions have come down to the
producing Nazi and racist periodicals and cartoons, sticking labels and posters
on walls, secret visits to the cultural monuments of “national significance”
and taking part in national socialist forums on the Internet.
On the other
hand, Goran Davidović, who served a prison sentence for organising an attack on
an anti-fascist platform in Novi Sad,
has closed his New Serbian Programme (NSP) movement after a faction-fight within
it.
The NSP internet forum NSP has been taken down
and it is still unknown whether there were technical problems or whether
Davidovic closed it for some other reason.
All organisations
of the extreme right in Serbia
face stiff competition from Serbian Action (Srpska
Akcija), which has only a few members but is very active. They attracted
the attention of the public in August when they put a litter bag over the
statue of national heroes in Nis –
anti-fascist fighters in the Second World War.
They published footage of that action on their
website. Only a few newspapers reported the action and there was no response
from the authorities or civil non-government organisations. One of the few
public condemnations of the event came from the Young Communist League of
Yugoslavia (SKOJ).
Serbian Action was established by several
former members of the reactionary Obraz movement. They had been supporters of
Obraz leader Nebojsa Krstic who died in a car accident in 2001. But they walked
out in protest at the "lack of clear ideological guidelines" of the new
leadership under its current president Mladen Obradovic, to form their own
organisation.
Like Obraz,
Serbian Action is inspired by the actions of the pre-war clerical-fascist
Yugoslav National Movement Zbor. It classifies itself as within the “Third
Positionist” movement and alongside Charles Maurras and his Action Française,
it considers itself as the successor of the ideological tradition of Codreanu's
Romanian "Iron Guard".
Leading Serbian Action activists present their
movement on some extreme right Internet forums as "orthodox-nationalistic"
. The Internet blog "Srpski Poredak" (Serbian Order), which is edited
by the supporters of the ideology of Adolf Hitler, who also define themselves
as "orthodox national-socialists", is close to Serbian Action.
