From 2013 to today, almost 400.000 people have left Bosnia and Herzegovina. A large number of those who leave do not report emigration. Therefore, it is possible that this number is much higher. Mostly the young and educated leave. During 2019, out of the total number of those who went through BiH. limit, slightly more than 28 percent are those aged 15 to 29. No one in Bosnia and Herzegovina is commenting on this exodus anymore, it is not a political issue. It is clear from the polls that in addition to economic reasons, there are also political ones.
Nationalism is a key problem, and the Dayton Agreement, which established peace, promotes exactly those ethno-national values as something that is dominant, and that constantly returns BiH to a state that reminds us of being back in the 1990s. In these 25 years of peace, further divisions were intensified that strengthened radical nationalism, whereby opposition to such a paradigm of government is most often characterized as national treason. Dodik demonstrated this style the other day by calling for "Serbian unity" on the occasion of the decision of the high representative of Inzko, who passed a law prohibiting the denial of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The law will punish those who publicly approve, deny, grossly downplay or try to justify the crime of genocide, crime against humanity or war crime. The Serbian member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina used this Law, which is a civilizing and not a political issue, to rally the position and opposition in the RS, announcing that "if necessary, he will repeat 100 times that there was no genocide in Srebrenica". The unbridled continuity of Serbian nationalism caught Dodik's eye, so that, with minor corrections in relation to the convicted war criminal Karadzic, he continued it, full of himself and his own historically crazy role that he had prescribed for himself. And while he stifled his political alternative in the RS for the umpteenth time because he lined them up like little children at the same table for the defense of "Serbia", at the same time he showed his barbaric face in front of the decent and civilized world for the umpteenth time. Dodik has been playing war for years, threatening secession, denying the institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, spitefully insulting everyone around him. Now he is introducing a new right-wing spin on "freedom of speech" that gives the right not to see genocide as a life-, civilization- and human-disputable act, but is orchestrated and recognized as an indisputable historical self-understanding; something completely normal, determined by Balkan relations, a kind of inertial constant of military practice, for which no human and civilizational person should feel even morally responsible.
The announced boycott of BiH state institutions by political officials from the RS removed the main topic from the agenda - the Electoral Law, which is the biggest reason for the uproar about the alleged discrimination of Croats, thereby exerting pressure to agree to the constitutional and legal changes guaranteed to the HDZ the next 20 years of unquestionability, both in the election of a member of the Presidency and in the structuring of the House of Peoples at the federal and state level, with which they will be able to keep the entire country in a position of total blackmail. Without a package that gives absolute control at both entity and state level, HDZ, like its comrades from SNSD, threatens to block, but elections. It is clear that such an election law does not protect the national interests of the Croats, but the interest groups of the HDZ in robbing the state and society. Political, and especially the so-called national parties in these areas are also the biggest employers, through which they ensure their electoral base.
The SDA has been a long-term partner in such politics, it has become part of its identity - compromised and corrupt members of this party have covered the entire country by capillary action. The shaken credibility of the party is ignored by its president, Bakir Izetbegović, who is aware that capillary corruption from the position of porter to positions at the highest judicial and political instances is the way in which this party and others similar to it have been functioning for a long time. SDA, like HDZ, has acquired the monopoly of representing the vital national interests of a constituent nation, which coincides with the possession of all vital economic, political and cultural levers in the area under its/ethnic control. Of course, any public hostility of SNSD and HDZ is used on the surface, through designed and fabricated affairs about the existence and vital threat of the people.
According to the recipe that always works in the media and public discourse, they all together maintain the necessary level of popular mobilization, while in depth they free up space for internal redistribution of all resources that must be placed under party/ethnic control. That profile of Izetbegović's political activity, which is not far from Čović's, fits into the concept of semi-autocratic regimes.
Towards the end of September, in an article for Der Tagesspiegel, journalist Helmut Schuman asked his compatriots and readers: "Is it still our country?". A few days earlier on the street in Berlin some thug intercepted him and asked if he was "that leftist pig" and hit him. A familiar feeling of almost every independent and honorable journalist, researcher, columnist who has been exposing political and financial affairs for years, but all in vain. Not a single big political head answered. If there is no rule of law, if there is no work, hope and optimism, all that remains is to pack your bags and leave. It is clear to everyone that the soul of a country is irrevocably changed when it renounces its own citizens.
In recent years, I have seen off a lot of decent and good citizens, and I am convinced of one thing: with each departure of a citizen, the past and future of an individual disappears as a narrative of life from that country, leaving an even larger territory that mafias and scum can occupy until it becomes completely their country. They didn't have a long way to go to reach that goal.
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