And yet, the radicalization of both Balliet and Tarrant, as well as Anders Behring Breivik almost a decade earlier, originated in radical right internet circles, via mems and humorous songs shared on 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, and similar platforms, where Mladić and Karadžić serve as “prominent role models” in the fight against Muslims and refugees – and by extension against any non-white, non-Christian group.
Even when stretching the ideology of the extreme right, terrorist attacks have little in common with systematic crimes and mass murder committed by an army in war. On 26 August, a process started in Magdeburg against Stephan Balliet, who attacked the synagogue in Halle in October 2019, killing two passers-by.Īt a first glance, nothing but a coincidental time of trial proceedings connects the crimes committed in the war in Bosnia with terrorist attacks in New Zealand or in Halle. On 24 August 2020, a sentencing hearing began of Brenton Tarrant, the man who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019. In 2016, Radovan Karadžić, Bosnian Serbs’ political leader, was given a life sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity. Crimes against Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were committed during the Bosnian War (1992–1995), under Mladić’s military command. On 25 August 2020, a two-day hearing began for Ratko Mladić’s appeal against conviction of genocide and crimes against humanity issued three years earlier. This text sheds some light on usages of Serbian military in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars as a symbol of struggle against Muslims in the Great Replacement theory of the radical right on the internet. And yet, there is a connection between their narratives, one developed in radical right internet platforms (like imageboard 4chan), via online manifestos and memes, about which we are only beginning to learn. Legal proceedings against radical right terrorism taking place in Halle (Germany), and Christchurch (New Zealand), in August 2020 might seem quite disconnected from the final sessions in the trial of Ratko Mladić in front of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), 25 years after the end of the Bosnian War.
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