August the 6th, 2026 – Serbian historian Milan St. Protić has openly stated that Croatians have a reason to celebrate Operation Storm (Oluja), and that “they got what historically belongs to them” in a recent interview for N1 Serbia.
Index reports that the historian assessed that there’s no way out of the state the entire region has been in since the 1990s without confronting one’s own responsibility. According to him, in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina the same rhetoric is still used, and all sides avoid responsibility while waiting for the other to first admit their own crimes. Protić notes that Operation Storm is rightly celebrated on the Croatian side and mourned on the Serbian side, and that this pattern has been repeating for decades now, and will likely continue to do so.
“Honestly, yes, the Croatians absolutely have something to celebrate. They got the result they wanted and which, historically speaking, belongs to them. Dirty things happened on both sides – that’s just what war is. There are no clean wars or ones like we watch in partisan films. Wars are horrendous, inhuman and no one can come out of them with clean hands and a totally clear conscience,” Protić said, recalling that the insane policies of Slobodan Milošević ended catastrophically for the Serbs themselves as well.
“And now the Serbs are marking the anniversary of Operation Storm, whether that be in Belgrade or in Mrkonjić Grad, it’s all being done with false pathos and crocodile tears. That emotion is, of course, fake. They don’t care about the people who suffered. If they’d cared, they would have pursued a different policy at the time or opposed it entirely. Today’s authorities in Serbia are the direct successors of those back then; they like to justify and support everything Milošević did, so it’s clear what this is really all about,” he stated.
the price of war
Protić posed the question of who “sold the Serbs in Croatia down the river” after first stirring them up, arming them and inciting them. Asked about the 200,000 people who were left with nothing and about the fact that the case still has no legal epilogue after three decades, he replied with a counter-question: which war ends in court?
“The winner has always imposed their own legal solution. War is settled on the battlefield, not in court. You lost there, and in the meantime you also sinned. The fact that others also sinned is on their conscience and their issue to deal with. The issues of the other side cannot be a justification for the things we committed,” he emphasised.
serbia’s need to finally look in the mirror
The prominent Serbian historian believes that in Serbia, people lack examination of their own actions.
“We’ve never had the courage, wisdom or will to realistically and soberly examine the responsibility, the policy and the consequences of the 1990s. We haven’t admitted to ourselves how disastrous that policy was, and we still feel its consequences of it all today,” he said, adding that this discussion must be opened if there is a desire to move forward into the future.
“If we want to step out of this swamp, then we’ll actually have to do it. We should have done it a long time ago, but we didn’t, I’d say out of weakness, despair and a sense of defeat. Of course, people will play that card. Such a wounded people as we became then is easy to manipulate,” he said. That manipulation, he added, continues. “When the Serbs beat their chests and swear that Kosovo will ‘forever’ be Serbian, deep down they know the truth. When they forge Serbian history, whether to deny Serbdom or to glorify it, they do it exclusively in their own interests,” Protić noted.
the end of yugoslavia and the birth of mature nation states
“It was clear that the Yugoslav peoples no longer wanted to live together. No one can force anyone to stay where they do not want to be. Why did our former brothers want to leave Yugoslavia? That is a question both for them and for historians. The moment someone decided to prevent that by war, the gates of hell opened,” Protić described. According to him, the solution could have been a peaceful and friendly separation. For the situation to be resolved, he believes, every nation must examine itself rather than constantly looking at what the other side did wrong.
“One must not live in the conviction that everything done in our name was ‘right’ and ‘clean’, while everything foreign was ‘dirty’ and ‘evil’. That is proof that none of these nations has matured and that they still feed on that kind of infantilism which often brings unimaginable horrors,” he said. He observed that the same rhetoric and refusal to look at the other side is used in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, only with different signs.
“I try my best to simply avoid talking about others; someone of their own should tell them that. That’s why I appeal that Serbs take a long, hard look in the mirror. A person, and a nation, confronts their own responsibility independently of the other. That confrontation is not mutually conditioned. Whenever it is conditioned, both on their side and on ours, it is actually just an excuse to avoid responsibility,” he said.
belgrade was the one to sell its own people down the river
Protić also stated that the expelled people from Knin served the Belgrade authorities only for political score-settling and that there was no real desire to help them. “Belgrade rejected everything that could have led to a compromise – both Rašković’s attempt with Boljkovac, and the Z4 Plan, and the opinion of the Badinter Commission. In the end they left those people high and dry, unprotected, to suffer such a miserable fate,” he said. He noted that even after 30 years there is money for EXPO, Belgrade Waterfront and various investments, but none for the refugees. He also recalled that everything possible was done to conceal their arrival in Serbia. “How can one justify that in such a large Republic of Serbian Krajina the Croatian army swept everything away in four days?” he asked.
even the “mourning” is disrespectful in serbia
Regarding the commemorations for Operation Storm in Mrkonjić Grad, Protić wondered about the appropriateness of such events.
“Is that how one mourns for any sort of victims? Heavy drinking before and after? Is that how it’s done? Or do you raise a monument to those who did unfortunately suffer, hold a memorial service and go home to grieve? What kind of paganism is this? Do Serbs do it this way?” he asked, before assessing that it is all simply abuse and that absolutely nothing of it is remotely sincere.
“They really don’t care about those who suffered. They don’t care how many young men died under their command in Republika Srpska… They don’t give a damn about those unfortunate refugees from Croatia, except for those who sided with them in order to achieve some ridiculous interests in Serbia,” he said.
