December 15, 2023
A section of the Serbian public was left feeling disgusted after Olivera Zekić, president of the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media, published a photomontage on her Telegram channel showing her dressed in a Nazi uniform.
She stated that she had done so as “pure provocation”.
The Nazi uniform featured in the photomontage attracted the attention of experts, who determined that the same uniform had been worn by Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi criminal and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust until his 1942 death. One of his nicknames was “God of Death”.
“I did that out of pure provocation,” said Zekić in response to being asked by Radio Free Europe why she posed in a Nazi SS uniform for a personal photo. “I laughed in the face of the mob,” she said in a subsequent statement for daily newspaper Danas.
The Coalition for Media Freedom announced that it was appalled by the disrespectful gesture of the President of the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM), Olivera Zekić, and by the even more disrespectful “explanation” that she had done it “out of pure provocation”.
The Jewish Community of Belgrade announced that Zekić “uses the worst period of human history as material for fun, while at the same time insulting the entire Jewish community in Serbia and the region and downplaying the greatest evils of humanity, which are still remembered by many of our surviving members.”
According to the Bureau for Social Research (BIRODI), with this gesture the REM Council president violated the Code of that council, which is tasked with regulating integrity.
