You can now visit a sovereign, complete and indivisible BiH in a ten-minute morning walk to the centre of a once-truly multi-ethnic city. For such Guinness record, thousands of people were killed; countless assets, lives and families were destroyed during the war, as well as one prosperous state.
Internationally recognized on April 6, on the day the Nazi bombs were dropped on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, especially Belgrade and Sarajevo, BiH has not yet found its identity, people, territory and its own government for 26 years.
Western powers “buried” the Socialist Republic of BiH within Yugoslavia and recognized a new BiH that spreads over a dozen joint institutions in the centre of federal Sarajevo.
Therefore, the “sovereign, complete and indivisible” BiH can now be visited in a ten-minute morning walk to the centre of a once-truly multi-ethnic city.
For such Guinness record, thousands of people were killed; countless assets, lives and families were destroyed during the war, as well as one prosperous state.
Not only it is not, nor does it seem that it has become a state, but BiH does not have its own society – it has not got its symbols, joint public, people, sphere of interests, counting the politics and education, which could make a kind of tie in a completely alienated territory.
It is a country made by only a few institutions in one part of the city, with officials and bureaucrats working eight hours a day, where the joint symbols – the anthem, the flag and the coat of arms are imposed, and therefore put away as these symbols are always a matter of heart and identity, that do not exist just a few kilometers away from the BiH institutions.
BiH does not exist in Republika Srpska, except in the general vocabulary; it is not in the cantons with a Croat majority. It only exists on the lips of those who utter the name of BiH as a general political term because of the position in the “administrative reservation”.
Large part of the Bosniak public is more engaged in the establishment of “Bosniakcism” trying to “correct” the language they were using for centuries and translate it into a new one, which they have been using for several years.
So “Bosnian identity” hangs only in the buildings in federal Sarajevo where bureaucrats work, who charge their labour services as well as separate life compensations.
To put it simply, when foreign ambassadors speak of the “BiH people”, they can only think of a few thousand government staff under the contract, who, by the way, compensate the fuel they use to come to that expensive administrative reservation.
Who today remembers BH – the federal unit within Yugoslavia, with a circular economy, without internal borders and national homogenization?
BiH, based on the will of those who wanted exclusively their own state and voted in an anti-Yugoslav referendum, was traded for the current bureaucratic institutions located in the buildings in narrow Sarajevo city centre, which were built during the Austro-Hungarian annexation, the first and second Yugoslavia.
Thus, one real multiethnic BiH, with socially satisfied people and financially powerful firms, disappeared in order to give a birth to a new one, which sells its assets for price cut to the bone for the sake of paying off the ambition of sovereignty.
Perhaps it is not popular to say it in diplomatic circles, but it is an indisputable fact that since the departure of the Ottoman Empire from this area, there was no more expensive sentence than the one Alija Izetbegovic said in the last joint assembly in the wake of the war: “I will sacrifice peace for sovereign BiH”.
The most general comparison of what has been changed and what this has been changed for will bring future historians and economists, unburdened with current politicization, in a position to tear their university diplomas up so they do not have to explain unexplainable.
The peoples of this region may indeed produce more history than they can bear, but the most successful brand of what is now titled “BiH” is – absurd.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has created and interpreted history at its own discretion, but it did not create a new multiethnic BiH, as it was destroyed as such in the name of a “new multi-ethnicity”.
Continuity of medieval Bosnia has been abolished for centuries by Turkish conquerors, so modern sovereignists, Hague justice and diplomatic stubbornness of key international factors could obliterate it not only as a functional state, but also as an idea.
That is why April 6 is the day when, instead of the imposed little flags of BiH, the image of Dorian Gray – an ambition that disappears into nothingness – would fit best.
Author: Nenad Tadic
Source: srna