BIJELJINA – When the western powers “buried” the Socialist Republic of Bosnia & Herzegovina 24 years ago, no one could foresee a possibility /today a reality/ that it will extend to some ten joint institutions in the centre of federal Sarajevo.
After a “bloody Bosnian dance,” destroyed lives, displaced persons and a changed history, those who believed that they are building “a sovereign, single and indivisible” Bosnia & Herzegovina, now can tour it during a morning walk to the local market and say hi to a few neighbours, that is, fellow citizens.
And really, where are “BiH symbols,” where is “the Bosnian public”, where is the “Bosnian people” and where is the spirit of a new state recognised on April 6,1992, on the date when in 1941 the Nazis bombed the first Yugoslavia, where a thousand times greater and more prosperous BiH was conceived than this one which can be examined from a nearby balcony?
The answer is that the “Bosnian identity” lives only in these buildings, now repaired from war damages, where bureaucrats work who are paid by BiH for their work and many are paid for life away from their families.
To put it simply, “the BiH people” is comprised of several thousand civil servants who, by the way, collect the charge for the gas they spend to go to that expensive administrative reserve.
So many sufferings, bombings, so much media propaganda, money spent for international tribunals, so many peace conferences….All this in order to get “a state” which a passer-by can more quickly walk across than he/she can describe it!
Since there is no BiH outside downtown Sarajevo.
There is no BiH in Republika Srpska, except in general vocabulary, there is no BiH in Cantons with Croatian majority, except on the lips of those who for the sake of a job in “the administrative reserve” utter the name of BiH as a general political term.
There is less and less a joint state in a great part of the Bosniak public who first settled accounts with a benign joint heritage such as Santa Clause, and who is now inventing their own language and history.
Could the proponents of the destruction of, as they used to say, “a greater Serbian and Yugoslav creation,” and of the creation of a new state, imagine that instead of Energoinvest, Unioninvest, Famos, Agrokomerc, Sipad and other good socialist companies, which fed several million people, they will count the graves and desperate unemployed people?
Who exchanged a federal unit with a complete economy, without internal borders and national hegemony, for bureaucratic institutions located in buildings built downtown Sarajevo mostly at the time of Austro-Hungary annexation and the first and second Yugoslavia?
In which “state” and in which “society” do those who flushed down the toilet a real multiethnic republic with socially content people and solvent companies only to sell them later for a pittance in order to pay off their ambitions, live now?
Since the departure of the Ottoman Empire from these parts, no more expensive sentence has been uttered than the one uttered by Alija Izetbegovic at the last, really joint, session of Parliament, on the eve of the war: “I will sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia & Herzegovina.”
A comparison of that which was exchanged with that for which it was exchanged will lead future historians and economists, unburdened with today’s politicking, to tear down their diplomas so that they don’t have to explain that which is inexplicable.
Peoples in these parts maybe really produce more history than they are able to handle, but the most successful brand of that which is today called “BiH’ is absurd.
Those who were against exchanging a certain today for an uncertain tomorrow and who asked that a stable federal unit is not exchanged for thousands of topographic and war elevations are now being sent to serve long-term prison sentences by the ICTY.
At the same time, those who, by creating new states in keeping with their ideas, left people both jobless and headless, are now enjoying their pensions with the smell of /war-time/ lilies.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia /ICTY/ can make and interpret history the way it likes, but it will never create a new multiethnic BiH, since it, as such, was destroyed in the name of some “new multiethnicity.”
After all, you cannot condemn those who were against such a BiH and call people who created such a BiH with their policy of independence at any cost to testify of “this crime,” while expecting reconciliation and coexistence.
The Turkish conqueror abolished the continuity of the medieval Bosnia for several centuries, and the modern proponents of a sovereign BiH and the justice of the ICTY destroyed every trace of it, not only the trace but an idea of such a state. (SRNA)