The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
Starting Over in Bosnia
Sarajevo | 19 October 2009 | By Nidzara Ahmetasevic
Nidzara Ahmetasevic
I am impatient to see that day and hear the introduction by the Prosecution – but I also constantly ask myself how will it influence my life, past, present and future, and my country? Will it bring us back a little bit of what we lost? Will the country be a better place to live in?
Karadzic was indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity committed from 1992 to 1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the Research and Documentation Centre, an NGO from Sarajevo, around 100,000 people died in the war in total. People were tortured in concentration camps, women brutally raped, and more than 2 million forced to leave their homes in a search for safety. That is our past.
It is scary to look back at that past, although we have to in order to be able to face a future that is no less alarming.
Bosnia today is a semi-protectorate. The international community effectively governs the country. They still have the power to change laws, impose decisions, remove politicians and pretend that they will lead us to the EU. What they have done in the past, according to many international academics, was preside over failure after failure. I will not even go into that. It is also scary.
What people from the country itself have done is even less successful.
Bosnia has to face the past, learn from history, and punish those responsible for all these evils. The same has to be done on the part of the international community. They were always too late, both in the war and after, with no clear vision or strategy.
Nevertheless, WE have to look ahead of us and see where are we and where do we want to go. I don’t want to live in a semi-protectorate, like most people in the country. It is not very popular to say this loud, but I believe the international community is over and done with in Bosnia. There is nothing left for them to fix, or spoil, after such a long time.
The politicians leading the country are obviously not capable of doing much. What was their biggest achievement lately? Some of them want us to think they achieved a lot now that Bosnia, together with five other countries, has been elected to temporary membership of UN Security Council. Hardly any international media pay any attention to it.
The domestic politicians are pretending it is something they achieved, forgetting to mention that the decision was in fact made with or without them, and with the intention, as the British ambassador to the UN said, to give Bosnia “the experience of being on the council” in order to help the country “strengthen its national government systems to enable it to take decisions on international issues”.
The civil sector in the country is weak, or is not loud enough. They have tried a couple of times to call people onto the streets to protest, with no clear idea or strategy. It is absurd that the football fan club known as “Horde zla” (Hordes of evil) were better organised in calling people out to protest after one fan died in a riot than any NGO has been.
So what now? I hope and pray that somebody will be brave enough to look the future in the face. I hope and pray that more than one person will do that. If that means a revolution, fine, though if it means political evolution, that’s even better. But we have to build a country and a future for ourselves. No international official can know what is good for me.
We have to leave Karadzic to the judges, the international law system, and then put him in our books as a parable about a type of evil that must never return. Now it is time for a new Bosnia, and we have to invent it, whatever it takes. We must get rid of the entire old burden on our shoulders and start, if needed, from the very beginning.
2009-10-19 18:36:32