My country will remain what it was, the last backyard of empires, which heals its humiliations with provincial daydreams. In these words, which the American writer Raymond Carver quotes from the poem "Return to Krakow 1880." Polish poet Česlav Miloš contains the essence of the society and country in which we live today. The depth of the provincial abyss in which we are based, decades of crushing and humiliation, but also essential self-humiliation and cancellation, which the citizens of this country brought to themselves through the absence of the desire to be truly involved in the destiny of this country, to deal with the essence of its existence and the meaning of existence in it, in order to improve it, to build it on some sound foundations, led us, at the end of the third decade of our post-Dayton horror, to a wall that does not show that it could be transferred in any way run or crash. Moreover, in the new constellation of global relations, the current domestic political gravediggers of Bosnia and Herzegovina are pressing in with all their might, looking for all the channels and cracks in order to bring this society to the final division and disintegration. Conflicting truths, views, personal interests and a criminal spiral that destroys everything existing in an effort to preserve the stolen levers of social power from citizens, dissolve step by step any possibility of normalization.
Again and again, the scenarios of ethno-national manipulation of fear are repeated, boards and counter-boards are hit, laws with a totalitarian flavor are passed, to which, to make matters more terrible, the citizens of this country, although impoverished and depopulated by the same rulers they now side with again, agree. On the stage today, the games of blood and soil are once again very heated, they are replicated within their own frameworks by the citizens of BiH themselves, thus wholeheartedly contributing to the stifling of every form of togetherness, common vision and model of a new society. First of all, societies that will finally reflect only on themselves, stand in front of that mirror of themselves, wipe off all the soot with which it is covered and admit to themselves that they have been defeated. So that from that defeat, from that burial of a disastrous social monster, which is drowning, a new, more honest and just society would emerge. Until we admit to ourselves that we haven't done anything in the past thirty years to leave at least the foundations for someone after us to live without ethnic friction and threats, we will sink and perish in agony. As long as we agree to the fact that the political elites build their survival, their defense against political decline and responsibility for the committed acts of criminalization of the government, on unearthing the wounds of the nineties, we will not exist.
A few years ago, the public was buzzing about the boy Anta from Mostar who had never crossed the other side of the Neretva in his life. At the time, few asked questions about how responsible we as a community are for our children to live in ethno-corridors with demonized representations of the other. Today, there is also a discussion about two female students who glorified the war criminal Ratko Mladić. And no matter how much the personality should be formed within the framework of academic education, and know what is good or evil, what is war, what is genocide, what is killing another because of his ethnic, religious or any other affiliation, it is necessary to raise again the question of the responsibility of this whole society for those terrible statements. What kind of society is it that generates narratives that war criminals are heroes, that glorifying a war criminal is "we defend our own"?
Let me tell you, this is a society that has not even entered the process of its own denazification. The courts ruled, we mostly pretended to be crazy. For years, three para-truths, three para-societies were created, in no way did we work with young people, in no way did we face the crimes of our fathers, we did not work on empathy and togetherness. On those necessary connecting points of humanity, on which must rest any even remotely normal community that wants to have a future free from the mistakes of the past. Instead of talking, confronting, questioning and extending a hand, we built walls, separated and in the end, as it seems now, cemented a future for ourselves in a youth that, instead of culture and art, life and joy, chooses the war crimes. But that's how it is in a society where the public and cultural scene is instructed and deals with crucial problems, when the clock strikes midnight, just as one of the protagonists of the "Novine" series Dalibor Matanić says: "Paradise wants joy underlined in black." A row of tits, a row of asses, a row of tragedy".
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