While the Serbian president repeats the narrative of collective innocence, final verdicts of international courts detail in detail the burning of Croatian homes, persecution, and killings of non-Serbs with the aim of creating a Greater Serbia.
On August 6, 2026, Aleksandar Vučić stated from his renovated family home in Čipuljići: "We did not touch the houses of our neighbors, neither Croats nor Muslims... The Croats did. We did not touch anyone's house, we did not burn anyone's house." This statement is not merely a personal testimony but an attempt to derive from an individual fate a general verdict about the collective innocence of Serbian politics and the collective guilt of Croats.
The problem with this claim is not a lack of empathy for a family tragedy-every crime against civilians and property deserves condemnation-but that it brutally ignores thousands of destroyed Croatian homes and the final verdicts of international courts that testify to a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals has finally established that Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović, high-ranking officials of the State Security of Serbia, participated in a joint criminal enterprise. The intent was to forcibly and permanently remove the non-Serb population, especially Croats and Bosniaks, from those areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina that were to belong to a Serbian state. During the realization of this intent, expulsions, killings, deportations, and forced relocations occurred.
This is not a Croatian interpretation but a judicially established fact. Milan Babić admitted to participating in an operation aimed at the permanent removal of Croats and other non-Serbs from approximately one-third of Croatian territory. His verdict mentions the deportation of thousands of people and the deliberate destruction of houses, public and private property, churches, and cultural monuments in places such as Saborsko, Škabrnja, Nadin, Baćin, and Hrvatska Dubica.
In the verdict against Stanišić and Simatović, it was established that Serbian forces, including members of the JNA, the police of the so-called SAO Krajina, and the Territorial Defense, carried out attacks on Croatian villages starting with the attack on Kijevo in August 1991. The court confirmed without any doubt killings, beatings, looting, the demolition of Catholic churches, and the burning of houses, which was almost entirely directed at non-Serb civilians to force them to leave.
Milan Martić received a final verdict for persecution, killings, torture, deportations, attacks on civilians, and ruthless destruction of civilian areas. The court concluded that the creation of a unified Serbian territory was carried out through systematic attacks, violence, and the forced removal of Croats and other non-Serbs from occupied parts of Croatia.
Vučić's method is not new. First, one's own people are presented only as victims, and then Serbian political, military, and intelligence structures are completely excluded from the causes of the war. In the end, one gets a picture in which the attack is not mentioned, the annexation of territory is erased, expelled Croats are not mentioned, and the Croatian operation to liberate its own territory is marked as the beginning of history.
Of course, crimes committed against Serbian civilians during and after Operation Storm must not be ignored. The International Court of Justice concluded that there were cases of killings and serious physical or psychological injuries to individual Serbs, but it rejected Serbia's accusation that Operation Storm was genocide. Individual crimes should be investigated and punished, but they cannot change the nature of the war nor turn the occupier into a liberator.
Meanwhile, on the domestic scene, on August 6, 2026, Marko Ljubić posted a text on Facebook challenging the phrase "Greater Serbian aggression," calling it "an epochal deception of the Croatian people." He specifically addressed the formulation "Greater Serbian aggression of Slobodan Milošević" used by Andrej Plenković, suggesting that much can be hidden under these phrases, especially since they have become part of official state policy.
The specific details and arguments of Ljubić's post are not fully available, but the very fact that on the anniversary of Operation Storm a debate about the definition of aggression is opened, while Vučić denies even the most basic facts about the burning of houses, points to a persistent struggle over the historical narrative.
There is no collective guilt of the Serbian people, but there are verdicts, mass graves, burned villages, and people who never returned to their homes. Vučić has the right to speak about the suffering of his family, but he does not have the right to derive from it the collective innocence of Serbian politics and the collective guilt of Croats. Because the difficulty is not only that in front of one renovated house, thousands of destroyed Croatian homes are ignored-the difficulty is that in front of that house, an attempt is again made to destroy the truth about the attack on Croatia.
