On Aug. 20, 2023, ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson tweeted that he had just met with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. In the accompanying three and a half minute video, Carlson described Vučić as a “smart guy” with an “interesting perspective on what’s happening in Ukraine.” Vučić has engaged in genocidal rhetoric and has a long track record of defending war criminals.
In 1993, Vučić joined the far-right Serbian Radical Party and was elected to Serbia’s National Assembly. Two years later, after the the massacre of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, Vučić vowed that “For every Serb killed, we will kill 100 Muslims.” From 1998 to 2000, Vučić served as Minister of Information in the government of Prime Minister Mirko Marjanović — an ally of Slobodan Milošević.
Vučić also expressed support for “Greater Serbia” — an expanded Serbian state that would include all Serbs who lived in the former Yugoslavia. It was this desire for a “Greater Serbia” that motivated former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević to wage a campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2008 Vučić dismissed the idea of “Greater Serbia” as “not realistic.”
Over the years Vučić has defended a number of accused and convicted war criminals, mainly from the Yugoslav Wars:
- In 2003 Vučić joined a protest against the arrest of Veselin Šljivančanin, a former officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army who was tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for his role in the Vukovar massacre and sentenced to 17 years in prison. After his 2011 release from prison, Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party hosted him at their events. In response to criticism Vučić said, “He is a free man who served his sentence. What would you like to do — arrest him? Kill him?”
- In 2006 Vučić joined a march in Belgrade in support of Vojislav Šešelj, the former deputy prime minister of Serbia and co-founder of the Serbian Radical Party, who was on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Although initially acquitted, an appeals court overturned the verdict and sentenced him to ten years in prison. In response, Šešelj remarked that “I am proud of all my war crimes and crimes against humanity and am ready to repeat them.”
- In 2007 Vučić was part of a crowd of several hundred Radical Party members who held a rally for Ratko Mladić, a former army general who was convicted of genocide and other offenses and sentenced to life in prison. Dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia,” Mladić led both the three-year siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre. At the rally Vučić posted a fake street sign that said “Ratko Mladić Boulevard” on a street named after assassinated Serbian prime minister Zoran Đinđić.
- In 2008 Vučić attended and organized protests against the arrest of Radovan Karadžić. Karadžić, the president of the Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War, was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, which a panel of judges said could not have happened without his support. Vučić told the crowd of demonstrators, “I hope that we will organize large, mass protests and that we will show that we did not kill Serbia.”
- In 2018 Vučić praised former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević during a keynote speech in Kosovo. “Milošević was a great Serbian leader whose intentions were certainly for the best, but our results were very poor,” Vučić said. Milošević was indicted by the ITCY on 66 counts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The trial ended without a verdict when Milošević died of natural causes in 2006.
- In 2023 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over the forced deportation of Ukrainian children during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In response, Vučić said the decision “will have bad political consequences” and “says that there is a great reluctance to talk about peace (and) about truce.”
In his brief video, Carlson said that because “Serbia has the distinction of being one of the countries in the region that’s been bombed by NATO in 1999,” Vučić would have an “interesting perspective on what’s happening in Ukraine” — referring to it as the “NATO war against Russia.” Near the end, Carlson said that Vučić is “smart and aware and has perspective that you don’t get in the United States very often.”
“One of the points he made is that the war in Ukraine — the war against Russia led by NATO — has crushed the European economy,” Carlson told viewers. “The destruction of Nord Stream by the Biden administration either directly or through proxies is killing the German economy.”
In February the Russian government blamed the U.S. for attacks that damaged the Nord Stream pipelines but the perpetrators are currently unknown.
Carlson went on to say that “It’s a little more complicated than Hitler versus Churchill, good versus bad! Democracy! It’s really about a massive shift in power away from the United States and the West to the East. It’s all happening right now. But very few people in our country seem aware of it for some reason.”
Angry White Men 