Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Serbia: Far Right in dissarray


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.