Now both of these movements need to prove that they can lead their people better than the previous regime or the backlash will be enormous.
Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power. Joining EuroZone only makes sense iff EU becomes a federation.
do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?
I think you don't know what is oppression then.
(not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)
There are certainly different levels of oppression and autocracy.
Here it was designed and made to look like a democracy, but it really required a 70% turnout and 50%+ of people voting against the ruling party for them to accept defeat, especially as there are still large vote thefts going on (to the order of 5-10% of the entire voting population). Basically, anything less than 50% would have put the country in turmoil and violence — again.
As a tidbit, we've got 6.4M registered voters (18+) in a country of 6.5M people. There are a few explanations about how that works, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
> especially as there are still large vote thefts going on
Funny, because if you even suggest there *might* be cheating in US elections, especially with the farce that is mail-in voting and groups actively fighting to NOT check IDs, people get really upset.
The reason people get frustrated with the things you brought up are because they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and ignores actually impactful voter fraud. It's like complaining about a paper cut while getting mauled by a tiger.
Anything that an individual person does with a ballot is mostly not impactful Barring a handful of generally-not-important local elections, an individual casting one or two or three ballots (or filling out someone else's ballot on their behalf) doesn't actually move the needle.
What does move the needle, are mass voter role purges dome based on demographic. These are done by the government, generally by the party in power in a given location in a bid to stay in power despite their unpopularity.
As a bonus point, when citizens get the voter registration invalidated without being told, then when they go to vote they generate a statistic that gets parroted by internet sycophants talking about evidence that voter fraud is rampant!
That's the excuse often given. If only it were so!
If your voter role purge is >90% living citizens whose only "violation" is living in a zip code unlikely to vote for the party in power, then that's disenfranchisement.
Including a token dead person on your voter roll purge, does not make it a purge of dead people.
We have extremely low voter turnout overall and a truly negligible amount of provable election fraud, even after years of investigations from an administration that has a vested interest in proving the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Why should we enact more barriers to voting to solve a problem that doesn't even exist?
If you investigate these things you'll find only 50 people in all of California illegally registered to vote. Just like checking fares on the the train and posting cops on the hov. When trump investigated he found an extremely negligible amount of fraud.
> Checking ID on election day is more likely to enable election fraud than prevent voter fraud
This could be in the top 3 most hilarious cope I've ever read.
Last time I voted, my "verification" consisted of someone glancing up from a newspaper to look at my signature for 0.25 sec and going "yeah looks good". That's it. No ID, no nothing, all I gave them was a name.
When the ID check to buy a pack of smokes at Safeway is way more stringent than voting, the system is fucked.
It takes more KYC to open a goddamn GMail account.
If only there was any evidence at all. Trump could only find 50 people incorrectly registered to vote in all of California. They still check your registration at the polls too.
There is tons of evidence! When Texas does its biannual purge of voter registrations from blue zip codes, all the people who silently had their right to vote revoked generate statistics when they try to cast a ballot.
Kinda like how you can point to an essentially arbitrarily large quantity of illegal immigrants if you first manufacture them by revoking their ability to be here legally, without informing them.
> do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?
Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.
Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.
Definitely. As someone who's been living in Serbia for quite some time, I'd say Vučić's regime has been relatively mild. I haven't personally heard of people being jailed, killed, or even forced out of the country for political reasons. Turkey is much more repressive, while Russia, Belarus, and North Korea are in a completely different league.
What is the point of this "no true Scotsman" comment, exactly? To defend Vucic? Or to say that what the people managed to do wasn't very hard because they managed to do it?
Ronald Reagan in 1987, while speaking to the Bicentennial of the Constitution Essay Competition winners, discussed reading the constitutions of other nations like the Soviet Union and noting their stated guarantees of freedom, emphasizing that the true difference lies in the concept of "We the People".
I always took this as warning that "We the People", can also be the cause of why those freedoms are taken. Cue the US electing convicted rapists and Brazil almost electing an US agent...
Bad take. These kind of hybrid regimes or "electoral autocracies" are kind of the flavor du jour of modern attempts towards authoritarian governments. You take control democratically, and then build a system where you control as much of the apparatus of democracy as possible: you change rules or laws to ensure opposition parties cannot gain an advantage in elections; you take control of or ally with the owners of media institutions to push your agenda; you concentrate powers under offices that are easy to control, such as an executive or judicial body. When these regimes topple, as with Orban earlier this year and Vucic now, it is because the autocrats overestimated their control. Orban didn't think it was possible for the usually fractious opposition to get the votes to defeat him, but Magyar managed it. Pressure from outside helps, too; when Orban took power, he did so as a center-right figure aligned with the largest political block in the EU (and got support from many of his counterparts, especially Merkel). By the time he lost power, much of Europe had distanced itself from Hungary and that pressure was being felt internally.
I think the important takeaway here is not that "a lack of violence means that there wasn't real oppression," but rather that modern autocrats are trying to execute a playbook whereby they retain the appearance of democracy to legitimize their rule as a mandate from the people while stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible. Indeed, trying to violently retain power kind of defeats the purpose of the charade; by relinquishing control, the autocrats can treat defeat as a temporary setback, not a permanent loss. Expect this playbook to evolve as more hybrid regimes fall out of favor.
This is extremely good news. I know quite a few people in Serbia and elsewhere of Serbian extraction and this is going to make them so happy. Hungary showed the way, though in Serbia they were fighting at least as hard.
No. English is my 2nd language, and even though I started really early and spent plenty of time in English speaking countries I still suffer from the curse of limited idiom. Feel free to correct me at any time. I think in this case it was in part because the people that I know that live here were refugees from the war (kids at the time).
It is glorious. Moscow backed Vučić and lost anyway, due to their combined track record.
Who will they blame it on this time? Maybe those of us in previously forced "Eastern Bloc" countries can now be allowed to have agency, to leave Moscow's influence if we choose to?
This is the problem for Moscow, now what they have openly asked Washington for help. The entire Moscow imperialist mirage is collapsing. There is no one else to blame now. In fact, forget Moscow, it's not a factor. It's just that none of us can deal with pure corruption and still run a great economy. For one thing, that's why so many super smart Russians escape their own country/low-trust environment.
I have hope that at some point Russia too will begin to understand that the days of empire are behind us and that it is better to create than destroy. Trump is an asshole, no mistake there, but he has done us collectively a huge favor: it's very clear that America is for sale and that we should no longer let the good parts from the past cloud our vision in the present.
I wonder how 'MAGA' would behave if I took them on a walk through the allied cemeteries in France, Belgium or the Netherlands. If they would understand that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought precisely against the same mentality that they have brought back into play.
Those cemeteries look so immaculate they could have been laid yesterday. There is huge respect for the United States, Canada and the countries of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and to some extent even for Russia to have put a stop to the Nazi's. But that does not give a country the right to go and misbehave on the world stage to the degree that the United States has done in recent memory.
What I do not know: how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment, maybe this will come to light at some point in the future and if and when it does I suspect that a reconnection between the USA and its - former? - allies may be closer than we think. But it will first take a lot of introspection for that to happen.
But if you look at the path of Hungary, now maybe Serbia, and hopefully the USA skips all of this quickly... it's just that low-trust, aka corruption, is bad for business.
On this website, I read the most succinct comment I have ever seen on the Internet:
> Trust is efficient.
Eventually, low-trust fails. It feels like we have all be getting dragged into a low-trust environment lately. But, as long as the high-trust option seems possible, we will progress towards it and efficiency, right?
Meanwhile, in Bulgaria there was the presidential election that no one cared about so the turnout is in the %20 and the pro-Russian candidate severely underperformed. It was expected to be %47 vs %30, ended up being in the %30 for both the pro-Russian and the pro-western candidates.
Also the stronghold of Erdogan is crumbling with the collapse of $20B ponzi scheme where all the winners happen to be from Erdogan’s inner circle.
It’s overall a feeling of earth moving in Europe again.
Le Pen is more or less dead politically. The RN is currently twisting itself into knots because they want to use the anti-government protests but are still supposed to be about law and order.
Wait, is that true? I try to ignore the prediction markets as they appear to be very well funded efforts at the tail wagging the dog, but can you provide the links to the biggest positions on this?
These folks aren't "the right", they're people dishing out lazy answers to challening problems. They are, like Donald Trump, unserious and will undertake a state level smash and grab as soon as they're put into power, at levels previously unknown in the EU (like DJT here).
Lots of Europeans are turning "right" because they want easy answers to challenging problems, same as here in the US. For example, appeasing Russia is way easier than accepting that you need to fight Russia. Russia is at your doorstep, rabid, and ready to eat you up. And the European "right" wants to buy its gas. Hot diggity dog. That's scary.
I mean those are extremists, not just right wing. I think if we had left wing extremists winning elections all over Europe there would be the same type of reactions.
Look this is just a start, but it is great that dissatisfaction that is expressed throughout the Europe, can be expressed in such constructive and clear way in Serbia.
Great win for democracy. Now the students will
have to show that they can do better than Vucic.
This won't be too hard, but there is an economic
recession in the whole Euro-zone right now.
Overcoming that is a challenge for many countries
right now.
>but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone
Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.
And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.
It is not really a party — it's a nomination list by the protest-organising students — and the people really voted against the ruling party.
The idea is for this to enable true democracy to re-appear, and then actual parties would battle it out in the next elections.
I'd say the risk to political stability in Serbia remains, but just like in any functioning democracy, what matters is that there is regular change and politicians understand that they are soon to be replaced (this avoids the levels of corruption that is multiples of base government project costs and actually cost lives).
I hope that everyone reads your comment. This is how far-gone it was in Serbia, and now there is hope of recovery. This is not some USA left/right party discourse, this is recovery from pure corruption. This is what happened in Hungary, where after years of "far-right"[0] control, a center-right party took over with just the promise of competency and far less foreign influence, and everyone cheered.
[0] What ever the hell that means these days, pure kleptocracy that sells xenophobia but is funded by Russia and China?
The replacement party isn't any better though. It will not change anything in Serbia. Just like Hungary which might look like it's changed , but it's not. The political layer isn't remotely controlling those countries. Powerful institutions are. And they are not chosen.
I'm Hungarian and there have been countless positive changes in only half a year. The people in charge are also way more competent than the last lot who all got promoted based on loyalty.
* Billions in EU funds restored
* State funded propaganda shut down
* Tax cuts for low earners
* European prosecutor's office joined and anti corruption agency established with real power, crooks already going to jail
The same is true of the US, up to a point. Should the democrats win in the midterms, they’re largely defined by being not their opponents. They’re still corporatist and unwilling to take meaningful stands or make significant changes.
> I don't chitchat with defenders of same so I won't respond further.
And that's exactly why there's a thought bubble here. Also the first thing cult leaders tell you to stop doing.
The strategy is call them a Nazi enough and then wait for them to do something that looks like a Nazi salute. I mean it worked really well, to be fair. But of course it had to throw out all of the context that would suggest Elon is not, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer.
Also, I don't need an analyst to tell me how to use my brain.
My pocket theory is that tech advanced so much that more people reverted to the natural state of magical thinking. Yandex bots living in small electronic boxes = evil spirits living in old tree trunks or ugly rocks. Both can lead honest people astray and do sinful things
He already invited the Israeli bots onto Twitter and they're everywhere. This is also why they removed the ability to see who likes a post. All propaganda approved by Musk handlers is highly inflated. Also why blue checks are the only tweets you see for like the first 100 replies to everything.
Why on earth would I be a Qatar sponsored bot??? I'm an anti-Zionist in the US tech industry. That's hardly a fringe position at this point, but it's still enough to get you blacklisted by genocidal venture capitalists if you use your real name.
That’s safe and non critical position to take, but that’s my opinion. I might be wrong, but the more I discuss this theme the more pro-Israel I become. And now you prove that you might be actually bot as you don’t even use real name to stand your position. And if you are not the bot don’t you think taking Israel related VC funding would be immoral from your position? That should be your priority to be blacklisted if that’s the case, otherwise you support what Israel is doing indirectly.
There are many political factions in Serbia. Some (mainly older people) still harbor negative feelings towards EU and NATO countries for bombing them in 1999 and recognizing Kosovo as an independent state. So an alliance with Russia seems like a better option to them even though it's an economic dead end.
Wrong war(s), Serbia (proper) suffered zero damage during those wars. The only time Serbia (proper) suffered any real damage was ~4 years later, in 1999, in response to attacking Kosovo.
Ah yes, how could I forget about all the ethnic cleansing that happened in Serbia during the 90s. You (Serbia) were literally unharmed until 1999. Not even like a a single grenade that flew past the border into Serbia, or like a small scale terrorist attack.
Serbs in other countries were fighting their own separatist wars. You (Serbia) didn't do any of that fighting. You dealt with sanctions, hyperinflation and a refugee crisis, which sure wasn't easy, but you saw no death, you experienced no grief, the village you grew up in wasn't burned to the ground, the city you live in wasn't under siege.
The only time you (Serbia) experienced anything war-like was in 1999, and even that was like a two months long air campaign with no boots on the ground.
It still blows my mind that people on here delude themselves with thinking a pro-conservative piece would ever hit the main page for any meaningful period of time. Not that I care, I'm neither conservative nor do I come into HN thinking it's not heavily tainted one way. But how someone arrives at the opposite result still baffles me.
I looked into Vučić's past and came across a phenomenon known as 'war tourism,' specifically the alleged 'Sarajevo Safari.' Supposedly, foreigners—mostly from Italy—paid large sums of money to travel to Sarajevo and shoot at civilians and children with sniper rifles. What evidence is there that he was involved, aside from that one video where it looks like he’s carrying a camera tripod rather than a sniper rifle
1. Were there snipers targeting civilians from the top of the hill south of Sarajevo? Undeniable, that was never debatable.
2. Was he present at that hill around the time snipers were shooting at civilians? Yes, he never denied being present there and that's where that one grainy video originates.
3. Were there rich foreigners on that hill doing "war tourism" or were all of the civilians shot by Serb forces exclusively? Up for debate, enough evidence to start some investigations, highly unlikely that those investigations will be able to say anything conclusive over 3 decades after.
4. Did he play any role in making those deals with rich foreigners? No evidence of that that's more concrete than putting him at the right place at roughly the right time.
So, him saying that he heard any sort of foreign language around him would be the evidence of #3, but him legitimately not witnessing any such thing (and everyone believing him) wouldn't really be the evidence of the contrary, as #3 could've happened before or (more likely) after his time on that hill.
Interesting times.
Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power. Joining EuroZone only makes sense iff EU becomes a federation.
I think you don't know what is oppression then.
(not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)
Here it was designed and made to look like a democracy, but it really required a 70% turnout and 50%+ of people voting against the ruling party for them to accept defeat, especially as there are still large vote thefts going on (to the order of 5-10% of the entire voting population). Basically, anything less than 50% would have put the country in turmoil and violence — again.
As a tidbit, we've got 6.4M registered voters (18+) in a country of 6.5M people. There are a few explanations about how that works, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Funny, because if you even suggest there *might* be cheating in US elections, especially with the farce that is mail-in voting and groups actively fighting to NOT check IDs, people get really upset.
Anything that an individual person does with a ballot is mostly not impactful Barring a handful of generally-not-important local elections, an individual casting one or two or three ballots (or filling out someone else's ballot on their behalf) doesn't actually move the needle.
What does move the needle, are mass voter role purges dome based on demographic. These are done by the government, generally by the party in power in a given location in a bid to stay in power despite their unpopularity.
As a bonus point, when citizens get the voter registration invalidated without being told, then when they go to vote they generate a statistic that gets parroted by internet sycophants talking about evidence that voter fraud is rampant!
Like dead people? We wouldn't want to disenfranchise them.
If your voter role purge is >90% living citizens whose only "violation" is living in a zip code unlikely to vote for the party in power, then that's disenfranchisement.
Including a token dead person on your voter roll purge, does not make it a purge of dead people.
Why should we enact more barriers to voting to solve a problem that doesn't even exist?
Delusion.
One cannot assert something doesn't exist on the basis that it's never verified.
It's like saying there's no fare-evaders on the train if you never check tickets.
No one cheats in the diamond lane either, because they're never pulled over and ticketed.
Checking ID on election day is more likely to enable election fraud than prevent voter fraud.
This could be in the top 3 most hilarious cope I've ever read.
Last time I voted, my "verification" consisted of someone glancing up from a newspaper to look at my signature for 0.25 sec and going "yeah looks good". That's it. No ID, no nothing, all I gave them was a name.
When the ID check to buy a pack of smokes at Safeway is way more stringent than voting, the system is fucked.
It takes more KYC to open a goddamn GMail account.
Kinda like how you can point to an essentially arbitrarily large quantity of illegal immigrants if you first manufacture them by revoking their ability to be here legally, without informing them.
It's not hacking, it's just surprise maintenance of someone else's computer.
It's not fraud, it's just maintenance of someone else's money into my bank account.
Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.
Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.
But you are, though.
Also, some (not me), have survived regimes like Tito, Assad or Saddam, they definitely would have different perspective on word oppression.
(A thing to get us on the same ground, lets call him extremely corrupt, very few will dispute that)
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
I always took this as warning that "We the People", can also be the cause of why those freedoms are taken. Cue the US electing convicted rapists and Brazil almost electing an US agent...
You could replace the constitution of North Korea with that of the United States without a single thing changing in practice.
I think the important takeaway here is not that "a lack of violence means that there wasn't real oppression," but rather that modern autocrats are trying to execute a playbook whereby they retain the appearance of democracy to legitimize their rule as a mandate from the people while stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible. Indeed, trying to violently retain power kind of defeats the purpose of the charade; by relinquishing control, the autocrats can treat defeat as a temporary setback, not a permanent loss. Expect this playbook to evolve as more hybrid regimes fall out of favor.
Who will they blame it on this time? Maybe those of us in previously forced "Eastern Bloc" countries can now be allowed to have agency, to leave Moscow's influence if we choose to?
This is the problem for Moscow, now what they have openly asked Washington for help. The entire Moscow imperialist mirage is collapsing. There is no one else to blame now. In fact, forget Moscow, it's not a factor. It's just that none of us can deal with pure corruption and still run a great economy. For one thing, that's why so many super smart Russians escape their own country/low-trust environment.
I wonder how 'MAGA' would behave if I took them on a walk through the allied cemeteries in France, Belgium or the Netherlands. If they would understand that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought precisely against the same mentality that they have brought back into play.
Those cemeteries look so immaculate they could have been laid yesterday. There is huge respect for the United States, Canada and the countries of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and to some extent even for Russia to have put a stop to the Nazi's. But that does not give a country the right to go and misbehave on the world stage to the degree that the United States has done in recent memory.
What I do not know: how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment, maybe this will come to light at some point in the future and if and when it does I suspect that a reconnection between the USA and its - former? - allies may be closer than we think. But it will first take a lot of introspection for that to happen.
On this website, I read the most succinct comment I have ever seen on the Internet:
> Trust is efficient.
Eventually, low-trust fails. It feels like we have all be getting dragged into a low-trust environment lately. But, as long as the high-trust option seems possible, we will progress towards it and efficiency, right?
Also the stronghold of Erdogan is crumbling with the collapse of $20B ponzi scheme where all the winners happen to be from Erdogan’s inner circle.
It’s overall a feeling of earth moving in Europe again.
Lots of Europeans are turning "right" because they want easy answers to challenging problems, same as here in the US. For example, appeasing Russia is way easier than accepting that you need to fight Russia. Russia is at your doorstep, rabid, and ready to eat you up. And the European "right" wants to buy its gas. Hot diggity dog. That's scary.
Look this is just a start, but it is great that dissatisfaction that is expressed throughout the Europe, can be expressed in such constructive and clear way in Serbia.
This won't be too hard, but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone right now. Overcoming that is a challenge for many countries right now.
Most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans see decent economic growth currently.
Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.
And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.
The idea is for this to enable true democracy to re-appear, and then actual parties would battle it out in the next elections.
I'd say the risk to political stability in Serbia remains, but just like in any functioning democracy, what matters is that there is regular change and politicians understand that they are soon to be replaced (this avoids the levels of corruption that is multiples of base government project costs and actually cost lives).
[0] What ever the hell that means these days, pure kleptocracy that sells xenophobia but is funded by Russia and China?
Edit: Hopefully this ages poorly. It's a tight race
https://www.reuters.com/live/brazil-election-live-lula-bolso...
* Billions in EU funds restored
* State funded propaganda shut down
* Tax cuts for low earners
* European prosecutor's office joined and anti corruption agency established with real power, crooks already going to jail
* Forint 363 to the euro compared to 400 in 2023
* Homophobic law repealed
* Term limit introduced for MPs and PMs
* Rail overhaul plan
* No more kowtowing to Russia
(2) The most important thing is that power was handed over peacefully. New guy, new team, new ideas and approaches.
I don't chitchat with defenders of same so I won't respond further.
And that's exactly why there's a thought bubble here. Also the first thing cult leaders tell you to stop doing.
The strategy is call them a Nazi enough and then wait for them to do something that looks like a Nazi salute. I mean it worked really well, to be fair. But of course it had to throw out all of the context that would suggest Elon is not, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer.
Also, I don't need an analyst to tell me how to use my brain.
FWIW some of the most crazy, hyperbolic stuff comes from the oldest accounts. Maybe they've gone senile.
Hopefully, wounds are healing, and more productive friends can be found.
Serbs in other countries were fighting their own separatist wars. You (Serbia) didn't do any of that fighting. You dealt with sanctions, hyperinflation and a refugee crisis, which sure wasn't easy, but you saw no death, you experienced no grief, the village you grew up in wasn't burned to the ground, the city you live in wasn't under siege.
The only time you (Serbia) experienced anything war-like was in 1999, and even that was like a two months long air campaign with no boots on the ground.
Disrupting the incumbent authoritarian while surviving LRAD attacks is pretty darn bad ass, and teaches lessons to us all.
On the incumbent side, even when you seem to have all control on your side, you can go too far in your corruption(civility/product/whatever) and lose.
___
meta: I don't think the parent should have been just downvoted. Otherwise, genuine discussion is crushed. I updooted your question.
OMG. Peak hackernews comment.
I looked into Vučić's past and came across a phenomenon known as 'war tourism,' specifically the alleged 'Sarajevo Safari.' Supposedly, foreigners—mostly from Italy—paid large sums of money to travel to Sarajevo and shoot at civilians and children with sniper rifles. What evidence is there that he was involved, aside from that one video where it looks like he’s carrying a camera tripod rather than a sniper rifle
1. Were there snipers targeting civilians from the top of the hill south of Sarajevo? Undeniable, that was never debatable.
2. Was he present at that hill around the time snipers were shooting at civilians? Yes, he never denied being present there and that's where that one grainy video originates.
3. Were there rich foreigners on that hill doing "war tourism" or were all of the civilians shot by Serb forces exclusively? Up for debate, enough evidence to start some investigations, highly unlikely that those investigations will be able to say anything conclusive over 3 decades after.
4. Did he play any role in making those deals with rich foreigners? No evidence of that that's more concrete than putting him at the right place at roughly the right time.
So, him saying that he heard any sort of foreign language around him would be the evidence of #3, but him legitimately not witnessing any such thing (and everyone believing him) wouldn't really be the evidence of the contrary, as #3 could've happened before or (more likely) after his time on that hill.