The escape from facing the givens and facts of the past, the avoidance of honestly looking into the eyes of what the 20s left us as a collective legacy today, when things in the region, pressured by global trends, are radicalized again, returns to us like a boomerang, which it hits us squarely in the face and prevents us from moving forward in any sense freed from entrenched nationalist narratives. The need to now once again actualize all those burdens we stumble over, from which we have learned nothing, represents our most direct defeat in the face of reality.
One deep captivity in the abyss of ethno-national disputes before which we are unable to find any reasonable solution, but year after year, with ever stronger intensity, we return them to interpretations and fruitless discussions, so that what was committed in the war could once again be used in daily political purposes.
The absence of any kind of open, non-manipulative conversation about the characters and events during our war, which must have been imperative if this country was really thought to exist within the framework of a normal and unencumbered existence, keeps us stuck again and again and drags us to the very bottom. The issue of crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, what we failed to say about them to each other, without reservation, without mimicry and deception, is too heavy a stone around the neck of this country, pressed into non-confrontation, into the revision of the history that holds us hostage.
As soon as there is a deadlock in the political arena, the unwillingness of the government to deal with those real problems, those crucial topics for the survival of this community, those topics that we failed to deal with, no matter how painful and traumatic they may be, return to the scene again and again. What, however, is the most terrible in all of this refers to the years-long avoidance of talking about our heritage as it should be, with the desire to achieve real reconciliation and peace, and not to build new political foundations on the basis of the horrors of the war positions and calculated to achieve the effect of pre-election smoke bombs. In the three decades since the end of the war, the issue of Srebrenica, like all other killing grounds in this country, has never been raised in the way it really should be, with the aim of making a crime of that scale impossible in the future in every sense. To teach future generations on human grounds to what extent, when reason is confused, man can become the most bloodthirsty wolf to man. How would they live normally, without domestic narratives that fuel new crimes and open up opportunities for history to repeat itself again and again, cyclically, in its most heinous sense. Everything that was done here in that past time was primarily related to the re-excavation of painful wounds, without the necessary process of denazification, marking what really are decided facts as humanistically binding ways of looking at what is behind us. Hence, it is possible that convicted war criminals are treated as heroes in this society, and people who want to point out the perniciousness of celebrating crimes committed in our name are targeted as traitors. All this together creates the atmosphere of a sick and sick society, which breathes out under the pressure of refusing to see itself in all that it is, with all the bad and good things. Because no matter how much we run from the past, it will drag behind us like a burden until the point when we see it with wide-open eyes as it really was.
On the other hand, mantras about collective responsibility, about marking whole peoples as criminals, are just one of the confabulating maneuvers of obscuring and preventing life from once finally properly defeating the omnipresent culture of death that has loomed over this community. Denying that individuals took part in the most serious crimes, that there were and still are those who do not want to understand it without reservation, hiding behind the collective, is actually the greatest cowardice, which obscures and prevents any light that might come one day. Therefore, there is no such real life without facing it, without refusing to participate in deceptions and lies for the sake of short-term prosperity of the real gravediggers of the country and the people.
Bonus video:
