UNITED NATIONS — At
the conclusion of the Serbian song “March on the Drina” at a concert this week
in the United Nations General Assembly,
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
and other senior officials rose in a standing ovation — apparently not
realizing that it is associated with massacres carried out in the 1990s against
civilians who were under the protection of United Nations peacekeepers.
After various Bosnian survivor organizations protested the playing of
the song and Mr. Ban’s reaction, the United Nations apologized on Thursday.
“We sincerely regret that people were offended by this song,” the
agency’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, told reporters. “March on the Drina” was
performed as a concert encore by the Serbian choir Viva Vox and had not been
listed in the official program, he said.
The song was written to honor Serbian soldiers killed in an infamous
battle in World War I. But in the 1990s, during the civil war that erupted
through much of the former Yugoslavia, it became a kind of unofficial anthem
among Serbian forces that carried out numerous massacres of civilians in Bosnia
and elsewhere. Perhaps the most notorious was in 1995 in Srebrenica, where as
many as 8,000 men and boys were slaughtered while ostensibly under the
protection of United Nations peacekeepers. The Drina is Bosnia’s main river,
and the lyrics include references to fighting: “Near cold water/Blood was
flowing/Blood was streaming: By the Drina was freedom!”
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"Written around a century ago, March on the Drina is a song that takes a central place in our memory of defending our freedom from aggressors in the First World War, during which Serbia lost a third of its male population in the many battles fought on the side of the Allies," the statement adds.
"We are very proud of that, and we wanted to share this song with the world, with a clearly stated accompanying message of reconciliation for present and future generations," Vuk Jeremić's office said.
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