What are your values the Quint?

Author: Darko Šuković

For at least half a decade, the Western Balkans, and Montenegro in particular, has been the graveyard of Western principles and values. Just for a nuance, it would be an exaggeration to say that the crime was committed according to the biblical pattern - (switch to plural) "I created you, I will kill you". 

But for the complicit role - the creators of the concept of a multicultural society and a democratic state that protects the individual and collective rights of citizens - in killing the very same values that they promote in this region - there is no need to open an investigation. Obvious things no need to prove. Unfortunately, Montenegro is a corpus delicti.

Russia and Serbia in 2016, then Serbia and Russia in 2020, spat on the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. As well as on the principle of respect for the sovereignty of other countries. All that - in the face of the UN, USA, EU and other guardians of the values on which the world (should) rely on. The very same values for which, they claim, went to wars. Faced with all of it here, they just brush their faces and continue to silently observe how one country, with the chronic diseases of mega -chauvinism and micro-imperialism, tramples its only neighbour from which it is bigger enough, so that it can, temporarily, conquer.

(Montenegro learned in a cruel way the wrongness of its demographic policy in the previous centuries. The struggle for freedom went to the mill of mortality by law of nature, and the recipe for birth-rate on a stone bathed in blood had not yet been invented. It turned out that patiently waiting for the right to vote and the principle of one man -one voice, was a wise historical choice. Good marketing can really make the past famous. Or so absurd that a certain Vasilije Čarapić “gets the right” to evict the monument to the great duke Mirko Petrović Njegoš. The specific case, however, is an example of the destruction of the Montenegrin code of ethics, the absolute cancellation of the idea of self-awareness and self-respect. And it followed, after, only a few days earlier, MP Milan Knežević set the final limit in that discipline - or at least we hoped.)

But let's return to the burial of the Western civilization agenda in the hilly Balkans. OSCE Ambassador  Dominique Waag refused to receive the CHO delegation! You do not expect a person in that position to refuse a conversation about human rights even when you know that she is French, or even when you know that the ambassador of that country until recently was Christian Thimonier (who is now as far as we hear, on a position of inks in some, for a career diplomat, bureaucratic dungeon in the south of France) - and, above all, not even when you know that, apart from President Shirak at the time of the NATO military intervention in 1999, France used every opportunity, and there were plenty of them throughout history, to do harm to Montenegro. You don't expect it, because Dominique Waag is the OSCE ambassador in Podgorica, not France.

In fact, you don't expect it , if, even after half a decade, you listen to what they say, and you don't watch what they (don't) do regarding the violations of basic human rights and the aforementioned Ambassador Waag, and her colleagues from the so-called embassies of the Quinta.  How, cynically insulting our intelligence, they keep silent or even brazenly encourage the mocking of processes that smell dangerously of political revanchism, as a step forward in the rule of law! Since when are surveillance and endless detentions - "results in the fight against crime and corruption"? Aren't those supposed to be the final verdicts - by the book of democratic rule of law?

We had the opportunity to learn about the double standards during the referendum, when a rule was "offered" (read - imposed) for a fair solution, according to which a vote for independence was worth 10% less than a vote against. However, we don't have to go back that far away for evidence that Western standards do not apply to Montenegrins. The Law on Freedom of Religion was welcomed in the West as "a threat to the rights of Christians in Montenegro". That interpretation was accepted in the USA and the EU partly because of the conviction of the then authorities in Podgorica, that no normal person could believe in such stupidity.

That the explanation is not (only) in the ignorance of "our Western friends", but (also) in the treatment of Montenegro (and the Western Balkans) as an area for which Western principles and values do not apply, we realized after the annulment of the key norms of the Law on Freedom of Religion and the signing Fundamental contract. To the fact that Orthodox believers who have a Montenegrin national identity were left without the possibility to fulfill their spiritual needs; to the fact that the religious rights of tens of thousands of citizens were violated; to the fact that puppets of Belgrade gave the complete Orthodox sacred heritage of Montenegro to the Church of Serbia and practically falsified the DNA of Montenegrin historical identity - "our western friends" did not lift a small finger! They didn't even say a word! Nor because of the violation of the rights of that part of Montenegrin society that is honestly pro-Western oriented. Nor because of the obligation to defend the principles of which their mouths are full as well as the brochures they print in Brussels.

Listing here all the examples of the burying of Western values in the black Montenegrin land, such as the frequent meetings of the European ambassador Oana Cristina Popa with the champion of the illegal usurpation of office, Boris Raonić, or the American award for Vladimir Novović, who is increasingly indefensible due to accusations that he is under political influence, would lead to a multi-volume edition of the Collected Misdeeds of the EU and US in Montenegro.

However, all that, can be replaced by one questioning sentence - What do you, our former Western friends, at all believe in?