On one occasion, at two in the afternoon, Ante Tomić sent me a message. He has this habit of sending people his final thoughts by cell phone in the dead of day, after lunch.
"The impression is the strongest," Ante writes to me. "No one has ever escaped an impression."
And really, there is nothing more terrible in our languages than impression, some people in Serbia also call it impression. It's a fucked up impression. Whomever he brought into his steel embrace, it was as if a giant python had caught him: for hours then he desperately tried to break away, the unfortunate man's bones crunched as he thrashed about, flailing his arms in an oppressive grip, but all in vain. The unfortunate cannot escape the impression. Of course he can't. No one ever did.
Until now, it has not been heard, in the entire history of our literacy, it has not been recorded that someone escaped the impression.
The pattern is always the same. An impression or an impression arises where it is least expected, in a seemingly innocent experience of some phenomenon: the strengthening of that experience and the growth of the impression is called "acquisition". The impression is then slowly acquired and acquired, until the victim finally and imperceptibly acquires it. By the time he gets the impression, it's already too late: no matter how strong he resists, no matter how much he pulls away, the victim cannot escape the impression.
In fact, the more he is robbed, the stronger the impression.
In the last couple of weeks, several brutal attacks of impressions and impressions have been recorded. After, for example, President Husein Kavazović failed to get rid of the impression that the President of the Republic of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, with her statement about ten thousand ISIL beheadings in Bosnia, was deliberately hindering the European integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in an interview with Jutarnji List, she said in a panicked voice that "she cannot steal the impression that the Republic of Croatia is under orchestrated attacks by those in BiH who simply do not want to achieve entry into the EU and NATO". Then the president of the SDA, Bakir Izetbegović, at the forum on the European perspective of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, testified with a trembling voice that "one cannot escape the impression that the ultimate intention of those statements is actually to poison the European public with a false idea of Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially its citizens of the Islamic faith, as the alleged security threat to Europe.”
These impressions and impressions are the most dangerous of all: impressions of orchestrated attacks and impressions of white world conspiracies. They have no natural enemies and reproduce the fastest, so scientists assume that impressions of conspiracies in the nineties, after they multiplied in Serbia, migrated to BiH and Croatia in search of food and new habitats.
How do they attack? Here is a wonderful example from Bihać: these days - on the occasion of the arrest of five members of the military police of the 502nd brigade of the Fifth Corps of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, headed by Hamdija Abdić Tigra, for the long-ago and never-solved murder of HVO general Vlado Šantić - the Bihać branch of the SDA sent out a dramatic appeal that "Colonel Abdić is a proven patriot, the legendary army commander of the celebrated 502nd Knight's Brigade, in the last local elections with the will and support of the citizens, he was elected to the City Council of Bihać from the SDA list", and that "I cannot escape the impression that his arrest is close connected with the recent judgments of the international court in The Hague".
What does the arrest of the "legendary commander of the Tiger" have to do with the "recent judgments of the international court in The Hague", that is, the judgments of Ratko Mladić and the Herzegovinian Six? Maybe none to you, but that's because you haven't gotten that impression. They did in Bihać, and now it's over: no one there can escape that impression.
Of course, they tried everything they could. To begin with, the five military policemen of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina were neither arrested by order of the Hague Prosecutor's Office, nor arrested by SIPA or Interpol, nor tried by the International Court of War Crimes, but by the order of the most ordinary cantonal prosecutor's office, the most ordinary federal police administration brought them before the most ordinary cantonal court. That is why, finally, after less than twenty-four hours, the Cantonal Court in Bihać, having casually chatted with Colonel Tigra and the gang, let the accused go free to defend themselves: namely, because of the murder of General Šantić, they were not accused of a war crime, but of murder from Article 36, paragraph 2, point 1 of the Criminal Code, usually domestic murder in the courtyard, so to speak, of the avlijaner among the murders.
The devil, as you see, is an impression. Vlado Šantić, for example, was a soldier, even an officer, in fact a general, in his general's uniform that day he was with another general, General of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina Atif Dudaković, from where five military policemen of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, so not ordinary but military, took him to the command Military police, so not ordinary but military, where they killed him with four bullets from military weapons because of his cooperation with the autonomists of Fikret Abdić and the Army of Republika Srpska. And all this on March 9, 1995, in the middle of the war in BiH, in the Bihac pocket, in the middle of the most complicated battlefield of the complicated Bosnian war.
I don't know about you, but viewed from this far - from a distance of twenty-two years - when, in the middle of a general war of everyone against everyone, five soldiers of one army in a military facility liquidate the general of another army, because of cooperation with the third and fourth, I somehow don't I can steal the impression that it was caused by a war crime. It was unheard of that soldiers would abduct and kill a general of another army in the middle of a bloody war, and that the investigation would be led by a local police inspector. If you ask me, that war crime would have been even more warlike if General Šantić had been liquidated by the attack of a squadron of bombers and the dropping of a nuclear bomb on his house.
But that's just my impression. In the Cantonal Prosecutor's Office of the Una-Sana Canton, for example, they could not escape the impression that it was an ordinary murder. They see it every day in Bosnia, a group of soldiers gets out of control - it's not an impression of control, there is no one who didn't get out of control - so they break into some kind of meeting of army generals, they kidnap one of them, cut him up, dismember him and put him in a tin barrel, then set the barrel on fire with gasoline and with thinner, fill it with cement and lime, and bury it in a landfill. When the inspectors in Bihać receive such a case, they just hold their heads: "Not again!" If only it were a little different this time, if it wasn't a general, if it wasn't the military police and if it wasn't a war, but if, I'm speaking from memory, it was a knife to the rib in a bar fight, so that one day they too would accuse someone of a war crime.
And yet, even though it's an ordinary murder, even though Colonel Tigar was interrogated and after coffee he was released home, still in the Bihac SDA "I can't escape the impression that his arrest is closely connected with the recent verdicts of the international court in The Hague". When, for example, the same cantonal police arrested the same young man the other day for the same criminal act, that is ordinary murder, who killed his own father with a knife in the Ribić neighborhood of Bihać, it was not heard in Bihać that "his arrest was closely connected with judgments of the international court in The Hague". Even the indictment against Hamdija Abdić Tigre, due to an ordinary, slightly more temperamental quarrel with the HVO general, would never have been so "closely connected" with the verdicts on Mladić and Prlić's criminal association, if such an impression had not been made after Tigre's arrest in the SDA in Bihać. Terrified members of the Town Board, all twenty of them - witnesses say - put up heroic resistance, but it was in vain. None could escape the impression.
Of course not. No one ever did. Until now, it has not been heard, in the whole history it has not been recorded that someone escaped the impression.
(oslobodjene.ba)
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