Dear Friends,

Here I am forwarding some music that was intended as a message of international friendship.
I hope you can enjoy it.
However, the story has a bitter ending.

As current President of the UN General Assembly, Serbian foreign minister Vuk Jeremic conformed to tradition by hosting a display of his country’s culture at the UN headquarters in New York. He chose to invite the a cappella choir “Viva Vox”, dedicating their concert to peace among nations and hopes for a peaceful world.

I suggest that you skip Ban Ki-Moon’s speech on the YouTube recording and start at around minute 12, to get Jeremic’s introduction, and then listen to the songs. They were international, with a predominance of songs in the English language. Among them, John Lennon’s “Imagine”.

In response to enthusiastic applause, the group sang as an encore a classic composition from the First World War, “the March on the River Drina”, an invigorating tune sung without words. It was composed in 1914 in commemoration of Serbian soldiers’ heroic resistance to the Austro-Hungarian invasion, in which Serbia lost a third of its male population. The spirited march is well-known in the region, and was performed for example at a 1987 New Year’s concert in Vienna conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

Ban Ki-Moon seemed carried away, and the concert ended in a happy mood.
Serbs everywhere thought that at last, they were being welcomed back into the world as a normal people.
But this illusion was soon shattered.

Leaders of the “Congress of North American Bosniaks” (meaning Muslims) and kindred organizations, claiming to represent 350,000 Bosnian (Muslim) Americans, and 50,000 Bosnian (Muslim) Canadians, promptly addressed a protest to the UN Secretary General stigmatizing the concert as “a scandalous insult to the victims of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina because the orchestra played the infamous and offensive Serb nationalist song ‘March on the River Drina’.”

(By the way, there was no orchestra, as the concert was a cappella, using voices as instruments.)

The Bosniak militants, in their status as official victims, claimed that: “The genocide that occurred in Srebrenica and Zepa, and other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was conducted by Serbian aggressors while blasting this song as they raped, murdered, and ethnically cleansed the non-Serb population. This particular fascist song is used to inspire ethnic and nationalist hatred against everything non-Serb and was used as a tool to inspire the murder of thousands of non-Serb civilians at the hand of Serbian nationalists.” 

This was a preposterous falsehood, conjuring an image of the Bosnian civil war as a sort of macabre musical comedy.
It was profoundly dishonest about the song, about the 1992-1995 civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and about the spirit of the UN concert.
And yet, the office of the UN Secretary General humbly issued an apology!
This was a slap in the face of the young Serbian choir members, who from their appearance were mostly small children at the time of the war in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina and the 1999 NATO bombing of their own country.
But the Serbs have had to become used to such treatment.

In the tragic disintegration of Yugoslavia, the United States, for geopolitical reasons, decided to adopt the Muslim side. As a result, nearly some two decades later, the Muslims enjoy the privileged status of “official victims”, and Serbs are stigmatized as the guilty party. All in the name of “multiculturalism”, “human rights” and “our common Western values”.

This scandalously cowardly reaction of the UN Secretary General’s office makes it practically a duty to listen to this concert.

Diana

https://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbian-choir-stars-at-the-un