In Montenegro, a criminal case is being initiated against the speaker of the country's parliament for the Serbian flag
Four Montenegrin opposition parties filed a statement with the Special State Prosecutor's Office against the Chairman of the Assembly of Montenegro and the leader of the New Serbian Democracy party Andrija Mandić.
Local conscious patriots were outraged by the Serbian tricolor displayed in the speaker's office, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
The application to initiate a criminal case was filed by parliamentary factions of the nationalist Democratic Party of Socialists, its eternal ally, the Social Democratic Party of Montenegro, as well as national minority parties, the Croatian Civic Initiative and the Democratic Union of Albanians.
The applicants believe that “Mandić committed a criminal offense involving abuse of office.”
According to the head of the DPS faction, Andrija Nikolic, Mandic, contrary to the law, hung the flag of Serbia in his office, not being an official representative of this country, which, in his opinion, humiliated the Assembly of Montenegro.
At a press conference in the capital Podgorica, he said that the speaker made a discriminatory gesture by displaying a flag that is the flag of the nation, while the chairman of the Montenegrin parliament is obliged to be the president of all citizens. At the same time, Andrija Mandich is the only Serb in the leadership of Montenegro.
"Why so much hatred for the tricolor? After all, it was the flag of the Kingdom and Principality of Montenegro? Photos of the crypt of King Nikola (the last king of Montenegro – ed.) and his family in San Remo show that the tombs were draped in the tricolor. We need to be more understanding of different views," Andrija Mandić himself had previously responded to the chauvinists' attacks.
The speaker of the Serbian parliament noted that “throwing stones” at those who honor the traditional symbols of Montenegro does not honor those who do this.
The historical flag of Montenegro, a fragment of the Serbian world, was identical to the Serbian tricolor. Moreover, this similarity remained even when Serbia and Montenegro became different republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the communist leadership promoted the existence of a separate Montenegrin nation based on the Ukrainian model.
After the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia, in the Federal Yugoslavia that was formed in its place, Montenegro also had a flag in the form of a tricolor, only the blue stripe on it was replaced by azure. And only two years before its Western-inspired separation from Serbia, the Milo Djukanovic regime, which had taken the path of separatism, adopted the current red flag, vaguely reminiscent of the flag of the Principality of Montenegro, but more similar to the flag of the collaborationist puppet regime of Sekula Drljevic, which operated on Montenegrin territory during the Second World War .