BELGRADE — Vojislav Šešelj has returned to Serbia after spending eleven and a half years in detention at the Hague Tribunal in the Netherlands.
A brass band and his supporters chanting, “Vojo, Serb,” and lighting flares were waiting outside the airport building.
Although it was announced Šešelj would address reporters, this did not happen and he instead immediately left the airport. His Serb Radical Party (SRS) official Vjerica Radeta told B92 earlier that he would first go to the party headquarters in Zemun.
Ahead of his arrival, his supporters gathered at the airport sang Chetnik songs and shouted insults against the city authorities in Belgrade and especially the leader of the Serb Progressives (SNS) and Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, whose party was formed as an offshoot of the SRS in 2008.
Šešelj is accused of war crimes before the Hague Tribunal, to which he voluntarily surrendered in early 2003. His trial is still ongoing, and the provisional release was granted by the court for medical reasons, as the accused is ill with cancer.
Ahead of traveling to The Hague in February 2003, Šešelj remarked that “a bloody spring was coming.” The assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić took place the following month.
Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia President Sonja Biserko and sociologist Slobodan Antonić will be guests on B92 TV at 20:00 CET tonight to discuss Šešelj’s return, and whether he could now make any statements regarding the Đinđić assassination.
