Greater Serbian Ideology in the Context of European Policy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina
Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada
Published: March 6, 2011
Greater Serbian Ideology in the Context of European Policy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina
Summary
The paper presents the view that barbaric methods and consequences of the use of such methods, must not be accepted as a basis for the future of the new generations in the form of accepted, legalized forms of political life and organization of the State on the local and international level.
In order to protect victims from barbaric crimes and in order to punish crimes and criminals, criminal acts and criminals need to be treated primarily within the domain of Law, i.e. in the domain of judicial truth and judicial method.
The victim must not be cheated by allowing the legal aspect of efforts to address the problem, to be abandoned, sabotaged or watered down in its implementation, by allowing the problem to be redirected, reduced or marginalized to moral lectures, debates and condemnations; religious, academic and journalistic quibbling; delivery of humanitarian assistance to the victim in the form of food, clothing, medicine, etc. – all in the form of a surrogate, i.e. an extremely limited, painfully insufficient exercise of rights provided to the victim under the international legal order.
In this case the victim is a full member of the Organization of the United Nations (OUN), the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (RBH) and its citizens. By strategically redirecting the resolution of its problems - the perpetration of internationally defined and documented crimes against it – from the domain of Law to mere moralizing, public debates, humanitarian campaigns, etc., this victim of aggression, war crimes and genocide had been cynically deceived. All along, unsanctioned by the local (constitutional) and international legal order, processes carrying all the characteristics of aggression and uninterrupted genocide against the citizens of RBH and bringing a OUN member state to final and irreversible destruction, had continued - and are, in fact, still ongoing. Participating in that deception are even those local politicians who allegedly, according to their own words (but not their actions!), represent the victim. All this is slowly taking the shape of success of the Great Serbian barbaric aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not even international factors are exempt from these sins against the victim and the international legal order – primarily the removal and sabotage of the legal method. On the contrary! Therefore the author underlines in this paper the standpoint that legal thought is the initial, basic element of political work, or, in other words, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Law must represent the basis of politics in the resolution of problems. All discussion with criminals should take place within courts, and under no circumstances in “roadside inns”.
Key words: legality, law, crime, genocide, the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, negotiations, Great Serbian ideology/matrix, Great Serbian barbarism, international community.
Introduction
A brief excerpt from one of the ICTY verdicts concerning crimes in Visegrad states:
The Trial Chamber has found that the Pionirska street fire and the Bikavac fire exemplify the worst acts of inhumanity that a person may inflict upon others. In the all too long, sad and wretched history of man’s inhumanity to man, the Pionirska street and Bikavac fires must rank high. At the close of the twentieth century, a century marked by war and bloodshed on a colossal scale, these horrific events stand out for the viciousness of the incendiary attack, for the obvious premeditation and calculation that defined it, for the sheer callousness and brutality of herding, trapping and locking the victims in the two houses, thereby rendering them helpless in the ensuing inferno, and for the degree of pain and suffering inflicted on the victims as they were burnt alive. There is a unique cruelty in expunging all traces of the individual victims which must heighten the gravity ascribed to these crimes.[1]
This is only one of many horrific examples from the creation of the entity of Republika Srpska (RS). There is still hope among the victims that this act of human monstrosity and perversity, this unprecedented crime against the citizens of RBH, will be sanctioned through the institution of international law. It is on this basis that this paper approaches the Bosnian issue as a political-legal issue. Genocide against Bosniaks represents the foundations of the entity RS and this can never and under no circumstances be concealed. We believe that without a drastic violation of international law and the constitutional legal order of RBH it would not be possible to install the entity RS on the territory of a full UN member state. Both domestic and foreign forces were necessary for that criminal enterprise! Without a precise look into the mind of evil, the diluvial atavism and the Greater Serbian ritualistic killing of victims, the structure of the criminal thought, the victim will clearly begin to function according to the wishes of the criminals and will never realize what is happening to it. It is therefore necessary to contemplate evil and its results! The essence of evil in the Balkans rests in the Greater Serbian ideology which has become the inner matrix of the Serb attitude towards others.[2] It is based on this matrix that attempts to form a monoethnic (with an ethnically homogenous substrate) state in a historically multiethnic community are being made – an effort impossible without crimes!
The discourse which has been deliberately installed and encouraged, and which has become the “standard” of political correctness in the post-war society of Bosnia and Herzegovina, consciously avoids important issues concerning crimes, executors, responsibility, rights and trials (judicial truths), and promotes relativization, equal distribution of guilt and absurd compromises. Most ominous of it all is that explanations of the post-war, Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina do not stress as important the fact that a result of planned crimes (entity RS) and a project of Greater Serbian expansionism and terrorism has continued to live within it. It is yet to be seen where the achieved Balkan authoritarianism (candid irresponsibility, mockery of civilization, racism, primitivism and Greater Serbian barbarism) will take us. This Greater Serbian project and its genocidal creation are again heating up the hegemonic demand “all Serbs in one state” to new highs and dangers to political practice. S. P. Ramet rightly notes that “all nationalism, from the beginning to the end, is nothing else but a form of illegitimate politics.”[3] We even need to try, as A. Badiou proposes, to raise the issue of nationalists (Nazis) and barbarians, i.e. to ask ourselves what did the Greater Serbian barbarians think in their atavistic aggressiveness, even though we know what they have done/accomplished.[4] It is therefore important to think Srebrenica and the genocide committed around it. Even more so, we need to think the Greater Serbian barbarism in order to confront it and stop it!
Exposure of the Moralistic-Humanitarian Deceit
As Bosnia was being destroyed by the 1992-1995 Greater Serbian aggression, several countries from the European region, primarily Britain, France and Russia, dedicated special attention to preventing any possibility of a military intervention by the international community against the aggressor forces of the Yugoslav Army and Karadzic’s Chetniks.[5] This made it visible that no one wished to disturb the Greater Serbian regime in Belgrade while it was building Greater Serbia on the ruins of former Yugoslavia. As of May 22 1992 the state Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is an internationally recognized United Nations member (as the 177th UN member state) and based on the UN Charter had the right to be protected or to be allowed to exercise that right in order to oppose the Greater Serbian expansionist rampage. It should be kept in mind that the Greater Serbian conquerors had already in 1992 militarily occupied 70 out of 109 prewar municipalities in RBH. All relevant factors in the international community were aware of this. As if maps dividing the country into ethnic territories had already been drawn at some institute and they now only needed to be preserved!? As if blatant aggression by the Greater Serbian regime needed to be given some other character!?
British diplomacy has since the shameful London Conference (August 26-27, 1992) cunningly transformed the Bosnian legal issue into the Bosnian humanitarian issue, i.e. an issue of opening corridors for delivering humanitarian aid to the victims – so that Bosnians do not die hungry in enclaves into which they had been herded by armed barbarians – with besieged enclaves in East Bosnia suffering the worst fate. B. Simms is entirely correct when he says that the London Conference was a pure scam and an abandonment of the principles of international law.[6] To replace the mediator Carrington,[7] who failed in his role, British Prime Minister John Major appointed a new negotiator, British Foreign Secretary David Owen – in spite of the clear dissatisfaction of other European countries with the fact that “Great Britain has practically monopolized both the work of the peace conference and the selection of the key players.”[8] All along, the Greater Serbian invaders had unreservedly continued their war plans and conquest on the ground in BH, fully aware that they possessed diplomatic cover for their crimes. In the meantime the Bosnian issue is transferred to Geneva. Carole Hodge offered a concise critical assessment of the objectives of the London Conference, which reveal British diplomatic egotism. She says:
(…) The London Conference served to blur the contours of international responsibility in resolving the conflict, at the same time setting the framework for various tensions which were to recur between states, and between and within international institutions throughout the war.[9]
Instead of the international community protecting its member from open and destructive aggression by the Greater Serbian regime, the state of BH is offered negotiations that would be governed by Great Britain and which would then successfully stop US demands for a military intervention.[10] Great Britain profited the most from the London Conference, and Milosevic’s regime was given more maneuvering space. Allegedly, everything was done under the UN umbrella, which meant that no one specific was responsible and that everyone was responsible, while Great Britain played the lead role, which through Bosnia and Herzegovina, through the destruction of one state and its citizens, achieved its main objective – it, namely, “established a new negotiating structure in which it would continue to have a leading role. This would not have been possible had the Bosnian government refused to negotiate.”[11] The state of Bosnia and Herzegovina was deliberately lured into negotiations, instead of demanding that there can be no negotiations in a way that suits the aggressor and that the international right of an attacked UN member state must be respected. The British were able to move the conference to Geneva, and in Belgrade Dobrica Cosic, then president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), applauded the decision to establish a permanent peace conference and “generously” proposed the demilitarization of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This means that he realized that there would be no military intervention by the Western countries and that the Greater Serbian war machine could take all it wished!
According to British Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind the British undertaking, backed by French diplomatic activities,[12] to reduce the Bosnian issue to a humanitarian issue and several moralistic phrases was not so much motivated by concerns either for humanitarian or military needs as it was by objectives of British foreign policy, because the entire idea of providing protective support for humanitarian assistance helped “keep Great Britain in the first ranks of world diplomacy, but also remove increasingly vocal demands for military intervention in the true sense of that word”[13] UNPROFOR was given the task of implementing a humanitarian mission, and the Greater Serbian barbarians had already occupied seventy cities in RBH, killed tens of thousands of citizens and continued to do the same things. Nobody emphasized the right of RBH to defend itself or the commitment of the UN to protect its full member. International cynicism was at an all time high and is linked to the irresponsibility of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its state of shock as a victim. “Great” European philosophers had been wrapping this into historical narratives in their little texts. And all along, RBH, in all its misery, needed the right to defend itself from Greater Serbian aggression.
British diplomat Robert Cooper, in his book The Breaking of Nations, partly touches on and describes the condition from which parts of the international Western alliance acted in Balkans. Naturally, we do not have to agree with those views; however it is essential to read the subsequent versions of power. Cooper says:
Western intervention has been above all in support of the individual – humanitarian intervention began out of good postmodern motives. But it ran into the ambitions of Milosevic’s thoroughly modern nationalistic state. The first major clash, over Bosnia, was eventually handles more or less according to the recipe outlined above for Gulf War I – a mixture of limited force and negotiation – with a certain measure of success.[14]
It needs to be said that Cooper disregards the fact that British diplomacy persistently prevented any military intervention of the Western alliance with NATO forces. Cooper also disregards the fact that RBH had the right to defend itself and that that it was prevented from exercising this right. This helped give the Greater Serbian regime from Belgrade a strategic advantage, which was made possible by diplomatic networks working on preventing any military intervention. During this time the Greater Serbian barbarians were given the maneuvering space to capture as much territory as possible, to expel all other non-Serb ethnic groups which were in most case barehanded, and to then humiliate and blackmail the Bosnian government at the negotiating table. Only through such actions was it possible to create the genocidal entity RS. Perhaps aware of his imprecision concerning the intervention, which came too late for tens of thousands of dead, Cooper says later in his text:
Thus the initial Western response to the situation in the Balkans, in Somalia or Afghanistan was a combination of neglect, half-hearted peace efforts, plus a humanitarian attempt to deal with the symptoms, while steering clear of the (possible infectious) disease.[15]
It is necessary to cite an entirely different views and understanding of narration on events in Bosnia after the 1992 London Conference. Namely, B. Simms holds an entirely opposite view on British policy and actions in BH during the Greater Serbian aggression. Simms says:
In the autumn of 1992 it was clear both that a negotiated solution was not imminent that the war would not end with an early Serb victory. This forced the British government to rethink its original strategy. Whereas ground troops had initially been firmly ruled out, the growing humanitarian crisis now led to the dispatch of substantial British forces to Bosnia as part of the UN Protection Force (UNPRO – FOR) tasked with the delivery and protection of international humanitarian aid. The political purpose of the deployment was not stated, but quite transparent: to head off demands for a politico-military commitment to the Bosnian government by the pre-emptive dispatch of ground forces for purely humanitarian purposes…
All this was a part of a strategy to relativize and depoliticize the conflict and turn it into a purely humanitarian problem. Instead of ethnic cleansing and aggression, the watchwords of British statesmen were ‘ethnic strife’ and ‘humanitarian relief’. According to this reading Bosnia became no more than an inconveniently conspicuous but essentially routine civil war and humanitarian crisis…[16]
Simms fully understands the logic of British political and diplomatic activities concerning BH. Therefore, when dealing with a humanitarian problem, military intervention is not necessary, it is not necessary to stop the Greater Serbian project on the territory of BH, it is not necessary to provide support and respect the right of the Bosnian government to defend itself as a UN member state. This was the shape of the strategic involvement of British politics in the Bosnian tragedy, which replaced international law and the right to self-defense with humanitarian convoys for refugees in the enclaves. “Humanitarization” of BH turned out to be a strategy of “depoliticizing” BH, reducing a UN member state to a “flash-point” – loss of political personality, and its citizens were reduced from political subjects with rights and liberties to a biological mass which should only be fed as if fish in a fish farm.
The idea for creating safe areas for Bosniaks (safe areas for Muslim population in Bosnia[17]) was presented in the winter of 1992 by Cornelio Sommaruga, then President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva. The creation of such “protected zones” (safe areas, safe havens, secure zones) across Bosnia and Herzegovina speaks volumes about the intention of certain circles from the international community to prevent any valid defense of the state of BH, and to turn it into a total humanitarian issue, i.e. a catastrophe and tragedy.[18] This masks the responsibility of individuals and governments, representatives of the UN and representatives of the great powers, many figures from the international community, who had the commitment to respect the right of the state of BH to be defended and to allow it to exercise that right. Then the Bosnian government was drawn into that cycle and a negotiating process ensued in which the genocidal creation was imposed. It has been long since the citizens of one state and institutions of the international community were scammed in such a way as was done with the Dayton obliteration of BH. The responsibility is immense and it directly undermines the international legal system and order, not only the Constitution of the Republic of BH, but also the UN Charter and the UN Convention on Genocide. When UN Secretary General Kofi Annan presented the report on genocide in Srebrenica in November 1999 he acknowledged the responsibility of the UN, but he then again played false by narrating about the objectives of the Greater Serbian aggression against BH and the failure to act on protecting BH, instead of punishing the Greater Serbian enterprise through the UN. He says, four years after the destruction of Srebrenica, that a “military-political solution” should have been undertaken and RBH saved from aggression. However, Annan’s report was partially sincere – he acknowledged the responsibility of the UN for failing to fulfill its obligations towards a member state. This sincerity exposes many and shows, for example, how the Foreign Office and the British government prevented efforts to help Bosnia and Herzegovina militarily and tried to force the BH government to an unjust peace. At the end of his mandate as Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd ordered the development of an internal report on the management of the Bosnian case in the form of a strictly classified document in order to prevent their dirty involvement in the destruction of BH and the wicked prevention of military assistance to a UN member state under attack from seeing the light of day.[19] This served the purpose of preparing the ground for forcing the Bosnian government into accepting an unjust peace and accepting an illegal genocidal creation on the territory of the state of BH. Simms reminds of a statement made by one of the commentators that the word Bosnia would be engraved into Hurd’s headstone! This is the source of most of the problems BH is facing decades after the Dayton twilight of international law.
Dayton stopped the RBH Army in its liberation advance against the Greater Serbian regime and the genocidal creation on the territory of RBH. The Dayton-Paris Agreement installed the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina into three ethnic territories achieved by aggression.[20] The causes and results of the Greater Serbian barbarianism in BH were of no real interest to anyone.[21] It appears, after all that has happened, that they were taken into account from the start of the wars in the region of former Yugoslavia. In the shadow of the siege of Sarajevo, for example, which served to force the Bosnian government to compromise in accordance with the wishes of the aggressors and the rebels, a horrific genocide was carried out in East Bosnia, an area where Bosniaks were in majority until 1992.[22] This is what betrays the key intentions of rescue-offering thought of many authors today who, when speaking about the Dayton structure of BH, emphasize that it is a divided country, an unstable society, a dysfunctional state without civil participation in the development of the democratic system, an ethnopolis, etc. That it is practically impossible! As though it is necessary to definitely and finally accept this imposed evil and injustice!? They constantly battle ghosts, the consequences, yet the bulk of the Greater Serbian hegemonistic ideology remains untouched, hidden unpunished. At the same time none of the numerous concerned authors mention that a product of crime under the name RS remained on BH territory after the war, that it remained to exist as a result of crime against Bosniaks and Croats – as a testimony of evil of which we need to think about. Many “impartial” commentators and experts see nothing unusual in the genocidal creation! As if it is something completely normal, as if a genocidal creation is a justified and common way of implementing and achieving political ideas. As if legality and responsibility for crimes never existed! As if ethno-nationalistic barbarism were a legitimate policy![23] They don’t even mention what led to the “divided society” (M. Kasapovic) and the “impossible state” (N. Kecmanovic); yet, these supposedly concerned authors pitifully rejoice unaware of their own anti-humanistic misery and continue the discourse of dissolution of the Bosnian substance as a continuation of hegemonic expansionism, which is entirely illegal. None of them stress the position that the existence of the entity RS (as well as of the dysfunctional entity Federation BH) is an expression of an illegally imposed condition on RBH and the cause for the failure of the attempt to install liberal democracy, a single economic space, ethnic-confessional cooperation, and that the Dayton division of the country represents the main obstacle for its development. Everyone knows and sees this today, by they cynically remain silent and call for talks, negotiations, compromises!
After all the misery BH has endured we still see two anti-Bosnian models of interpretation of the Bosnian being at work: according to the first model – Bosnia was dominated by centuries of hatred between peoples; close to this view are those voices resonating the consociational mutilation of history and the denial of certain historical developments, and according to the second model – Bosnia went through a civil war, not an aggression (the Greater Serbian version of the war in BH preserving Serbia from responsibility). The task of both these models is to thoroughly and irreversibly deny the Bosnian distinctiveness (Bosnian paradigm) and relativize crimes carried out by Greater Serbian paramilitary elements in BH. This was accompanied by the policy of powerlessness of the international community, the wicked policy of handing over Bosnia into the hands of the enemy through utter indolence, indifference and coldness towards the suffering of innocent people. The denial of certain historical and legal facts and their recomposition and reinterpretation, without any valid arguments, rejects RBH and denies its history, cultural distinctiveness and status of a full UN member, the status of an international recognized state – it appears as nothing more than an “artificial creation” which was never a state, or, to put it in the harshest possible terms, the Bosnian Kingdom never existed, it never had a special position within the Ottoman Empire, it was never a corpus separatum within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was never a federal unit (republic) within Yugoslavia and the international recognition from 1992 never happened. All these lies and insinuations cannot be accepted.[24]
Lacking a notion of what happened in Bosnia, i.e. without a thought reflecting and showing that it is aware of what kind of scam, fraud and crime is at issue, all moralizing narrations, humanitarian compassionate reflexes, diplomatic games behind the screens of the international community, religious prejudices, serve the purpose of hiding the horror of the destruction of BH. This hiding of the horrific suffering of Bosnia equals destroying it. By reducing BH to a moral, humanitarian and religious issue, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is removed from the domain of international law! It then faces an enormous risk of being abolished by the so-called Dayton process which consists of a gradual – according to the UN Charter and international law a prohibited, illegal, thus outside the field of law – “voluntary”, “consensual” legalization of a creation defined in Annex IV (Constitution) of the Dayton Agreement. This Dayton BH is no more than a temporary, loose union of two “states”, the Republic of Srpska and the Federation BH. To this, the RS is on the path to legalization by virtue of the fact that it is “consensually” (“extrajudicially”) recognized by the representatives of its victim, leaders-negotiators of parties in which citizens loyal to RBH participate. Alongside the stable, unitary and ethnically, religiously, ideologically entirely formatted Greater Serbian RS, we also have an unstable Federation BH consisted of 10 mini states, cantons. Bosnia, therefore, does not need a pat on the back, pity, false compassion, charity or cans – Bosnia demands from civilization that its right as a UN member state be respected.
Barbarism, Negotiations and Deception of Law
The special war against Bosnia and Herzegovina started in the late 1970s within SFRJ when Serbia began to show clear signs that it wishes to eliminate the 1974 Constitution, which prevented it from achieving the hegemonic position within the federal state as if Yugoslavia belonged only to Serbs. Texts published in the NIN magazine during that time are especially conspicuous. The special war against the Republic of BH was waged in 1992 as well. Concerns of BH becoming a “new Vietnam” were deliberately spread. US General Colin Powell, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time, was especially vocal in expressing such fears. The fear of “vietnamization” concealed and deliberately suppressed a simple fact that the Republic of BH as a member of the UN did not need international troops (armies of other countries to defend it), but only the right to defend itself with its own army from the aggressor – it was not given that right by the international community. Great Britain and France supported the arms embargo and rejected a military intervention. Thus, they created damage to the state of BH that can never be compensated. The Bosnian government expected the international community to act and militarily protect its member from apparent aggression; instead it fell into the trap of the London Conference.
The disgraceful spirit of the London Conference was then continued by D. Owen in Geneva where the aggressor and the victim were approached as equal, i.e. given identical legal status, placed on the same plane, on one side an internationally recognized state and a member of the UN and on the other a terrorist-insurgent movement waging war against the state of BH. The project of placing the right of the victim, or the attacked side, onto the same plane with the aggressor, the attacker, and by doing to equate them as equivalent sides in conflict, i.e. “warring parties”, was prepared at the London Conference.
However, it was shortly afterwards in Geneva that such a despicable description of events on the ground was expanded with the addition of one more warring party, the BH Croats, thus “three warring parties” now existed and Owen and Vance would lead BH towards the dangerous domain of negotiations.[25] Through D. Owen’s “peace mediation” in Geneva the concept of “three warring parties” was introduced and the path laid towards ethnic territorialization of the state territory of BH.[26] This meant that the legal Bosnian government which defended against the Greater Serbian aggression was equaled with the aggressors, i.e. it become just “another warring party” in the eyes of the impartial British peace mediators. BH has been in a big and difficult mess ever since. Many believe that the Vance-Owen maps directly inspired crimes committed by HVO against Bosniaks and conflict with the RBH Army. Warren Christopher sent a letter to President Izetbegovic on August 19, 2021 advising him to accept the plan of Milosevic and Tudman on the division of BH. Owen and Stoltenberg also supported this.
The Dayton-Paris agreement did stop the genocide, persecutions and the suffering of the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the further destruction of the state and society, and this was achieved largely thanks to the US and its President William J. Clinton. However, the agreement also stopped the liberation of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Greater Serbian aggressor, allowed the status quo achieved in the war to be maintained, as it failed to lead to justice and allowed the creation of genocide to be installed on the soil of an internationally recognized state. The Dayton-Paris Agreement prevented the full liberation of RBH by the RBH Army and HVO. This is its paradoxical ambiguity which the Greater Serbian propaganda and its political representatives exploit. What is more, it awarded aggressors from Milosevic’s inner circle and thus violated all moral, human and international principles in the recent history of humanity. The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had been “destroyed” and on its foundations a criminal creation “entity RS” has been formed as an act of barbaric killing, destruction and atavistic primitivism. It is from this initial injustice and manipulation that all post-war perversion, immoral, twilight of humanity, international “naivety”, cynicism of Greater Serbian politicians, crime, dehumanization of human relations, ethnic distancing and hatred stem. All this represents an ocean of enormous problems for a fragile democracy, which is in addition burdened by the dysfunctional Dayton organization.
The existence of the mono-ethnic entity RS on the territory of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was recognized under the name Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, a name it should be given back under international law, is a result of a war for territories, a historical-political game of the great powers (Britain and France) and cynicism of international institutions. Under the Dayton-Paris Agreement from 1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina was forcefully and illegally divided into two entities: one consisted of ten cantons which are all but states, something that has totally decentralized that part of the state and rendered it dysfunctional, and the other, smaller part of the state, with one government, president, parliament, unitary-centralistic authorities entirely dominated by Serb politicians, a territory from which hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats had been expelled. With this the use of force and the effects of war on the territory of a UN member state have been “recognized”.[27] It therefore need to be said clearly that the entity RS on the territory of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina emerges as a result of wars waged by an organized Greater Serbian political and military clique led by S. Milosevic and his satellites in Croatia and Bosnia. Serbia created on the soil of Bosnia and Herzegovina the mono-ethnic entity RS and this has still not been sanctioned by the international community, because Bosniaks and Croats are unable to do this by themselves. The name of the entity RS is a clear indication of the expansion of Serbia to the territory of the state of BH, a fact proved by numerous secret and public deals and processes (privatization of the telecom company in Banja Luka by Serbia). Many hardcore nationalists in Belgrade think that the entity RS represents the “Serb spoils of war” from several failed wars of conquest, horrifying not only for other Balkan peoples, but primarily for the Serb people itself.[28] The Dayton-Paris project turns out to be, summa summarum, a Tower of Babel, because it did not sanction the Greater Serbian hegemonic project. However, this was not its intention in the first place! With its built-in flaw of ethno-clerical separation, on which it is based, it has merely opened the dangerous abysses of the existence of the state of BH. Every political option based on the idea of citizenry is ignored within the Dayton framework; it cannot be implemented and is not seen as favorable in the collectivistic approach to political issues.
The entity RS was not created accidentally or ex nihilo, it was created as a result of a military invasion by the Milosevic’s regime against BH. It was carried out by the Yugoslav Army and the Precani Greater Serbian rebels (a terrorist irredentist movement). The entity is a result of genocide against Bosniaks in East Bosnia (from Foca to Bijeljina, and not only in Srebrenica), Krajina (the valley of river Sana, Prijedor and Banja Luka), and the persecution of non-Serbs from the territory conquered by war. Allowing the RS to exist on BH territory would mean to recognize genocide as a legal method of achieving political objectives and monstrous ideologies of the Greater Serbia project. The entity RS represents a horrible “misunderstanding” and disgrace of today’s humanity and its international order. This is why the Bosnian issue is, in fact, a legal issue par excellence! The genocidal creation is a projection of Milosevic’s regime in Serbia and a result of military aggression by that regime (JNA which became a Serb army). According to the 1991 census Bosniaks comprised a majority in East Bosnia until 1992 when they were exterminated, killed and expelled by the Greater Serbian aggressors. Since then cities in the Drina river valley are considered “Serb” and this was exactly the objective of the Greater Serbian war for BH territories. This was the whole purpose of the Greater Serbian barbaric destruction, policy and “wisdom” in the last two centuries (19th and 20th century). To kill the unarmed population of an area, brutally abuse the powerless and then build a “heroic” myth and declare everything “ancient” Serb land. A truly horrific “cultural” matrix in the core of which lies the belief that efforts conducted against the non-Serb population of the Balkans during the 19th and 20th century will finally be successful!
The guardians of the RS warn (develop Platforms, Warnings, Petitions, Conclusions) that an indisputable territory belonging to the entity does exist; however, it functions more as a dangerous undemocratic para-state on the territory of the state of BH. The Dayton-Paris Agreement produced peace without human right, or in other words, it did not end the Greater Serbia project on BH soil. The entity RS is neither a “constituent entity” nor a “permanent category” as guardians of this genocidal creation like to wickedly and imprecisely describe it, instead it is a creation of shameless crime against the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina of Bosniak and Croat ethnic character – this cannot be concealed – and as a result this entity can only be a “permanent genocidal category”[29] The entity RS is indisputable to the same extent as the lives of people in Podrinje, Semberija, Hercegovina, Krajina or Posvaina were indisputable for the “founders” of the genocidal grave who killed them in the most monstrous ways. Present “guardians” of Radovan Karadzic’s (evil)doing are implementing the same policy as the “founder”. Nothing will ever be able to hide its inception in crime – it lacks a moral and historical-cultural basis, legality and justification of its existence. It is a result of human evil! The RS is therefore a burden on the shoulders of the Serb people which constantly presents it to others under the light of crime. The present generation of “guardians” and “preservers” is perhaps unable to see this today, but the bills of history always arrive without exception. It needs to be stressed that the negation of the RS is not a negation of the Serb people; it is a matter of respecting international law. Negation of the entity RS is, in fact, in compliance with the UN Charter, international law, especially the Convention on Genocide and the ICJ verdict from February 26 2007. The Verdict for genocide in Srebrenica clearly stated what the entity RS is – Bosnian politicians need to request international institutions to ensure that the Verdict is respected!
The Dayton Constitution (Annex IV) has in many ways institutionalized injustice and inequality as the supreme law by allowing the name of this criminal creation to remain. It is better to say that this Constitution is a dangerous illegal deception, not a Constitution of an internationally recognized state. It does not show what the form of government in the state of BH is, while one of its entities is a republic?! It also needs to be kept in mind that the Republic of BH and its Constitution were “overthrown” by military force used by the Greater Serbian aggressors. This “overthrow” was then only confirmed by the Dayton-Paris Agreement – an entire group of so-called international mediators had worked on this before Dayton and they made no effort to hide their ethnocentric and imperial-Eurocentric prejudices against Bosniaks and Islam. They are responsible (together with the Bosnian side which accepted negotiations beneath all level) for taking BH out of the framework of international law and into the dangerous field of bargaining, discussions and political gambling with a state. The disrupting mechanism of destabilization and disorder has been installed into the system of the state of BH itself – this, of course, is the genocidal entity created as a result of Greater Serbian barbarism.
It has become clear that the state of BH needs to be transformed into something civilized, human, normal, antifascist and democratic. A metastasis of evil has continued to function on its soil! The entity RS is not a “remnant of a remnant of Serb ethnic territory”, as M. Ekmecic maniacally reiterates, nor is it a “Serb state west of Drina” – it is a place of shame for the Serb people. Bosnia craves for justice and order, in other words law really needs to be upheld in the case of Bosnia – not fairytales of moral, not humanitarian charity and pity, not leaders, not ranting of fanatics, not clerical fundamentalists, not ethnical leaders, not High Representatives as guardians of the Dayton ethno-clerical anti-democracy[30] and similar scams. Bosnia needs strong government institutions and rule of law, levers of power mentioned by Cicero in the ancient days. It is high time to put an end to attempts at dividing Bosnia as an empty country, space territory, or wilderness. The state of BH has become a hostage of the entity RS, which has by persistent obstruction and ethno-nationalistic policy led to a crisis in the functioning of the entire system of authority and hindered all possible progress of the state and its institutions. Citizens have become disenfranchised in the collectivistic system of representation, a herd mechanism without responsibility, a system in which it is possible to commit wrongdoings and escape justice. No one respects the will of the citizens expressed at the Referendum on March 1 1992 when they clearly stated what they want – this is ignored instead of respected. Greater Serbian barbarians rose up in arms against it because they never recognized the fact that BH is a state. Nobody asks the citizens anything anymore – we now have the leaders who, being the know-it-alls they are, make wise decisions “in the name of the people”. Democracy is thus transformed into the self-will of individual leaders, consociative rule by a cartel of elites.
“Settling of the Ground”, Genocide and Hostages of Greater Serbian Barbarism
The backwardness of Greater Serbian exclusiveness, this ill-fated discourse of isolationism in the spirit St. Sava’s legacy, the one R. Konstantinovic speaks about in his book The Philosophy of the Province (Filosofija palanke), has been put as a straightjacket not only on the Serb people in the Balkans, but also on all its closest neighbors, regardless of what the ruling nationalistic Serb establishment may think about that. Therefore, independent of what monstrosities the Greater Serbian discourse is preparing for Bosnia in the future – Bosnia was and will be the paradigm of European pluralism, an anticipation of the community of European peoples who have chosen antifascism, peace and prosperity.[31] The united Europe promotes the historical essence of Bosnianhood, of the Bosnian cultural being, which is historically constructed as pluralistic.
A campaign against Bosniaks started in the 19th century – an epoch of persecution of Bosniaks, and unfortunately culminated with the genocide in Srebrenica. It represents the greatest tragedy of the Bosniak people and the greatest disgrace of the Serb people. Concerning the genocide in Srebrenica Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both try to offer, first, a detailed interpretation of the “battle” for Srebrenica between July 6 and 11 1995, then of the ensuing deportation and mass killings following the fall of the city into the hands of Mladic’s murderers; second, explain why Mladic’s Chetniks attacked the UN safe area Srebrenica and systematically killed so many citizens, and, third, analyze why the international community failed to prevent these acts.[32] In addition to the Greater Serbian barbarians as the main culprits of the genocide in Srebrenica and the betrayal by the international community, which had control over Srebrenica as a “safe area”, the responsibility of the Bosnian side, people who held senior political and military positions in 1995, will also have to be established one day – it cannot be that no one is responsible for the catastrophe of an entire people. At the beginning of the 21st century continuators of the Greater Serbia project are trying to minimize all talk of the Greater Serbia project by trying to present it as no more than fantasy and myth. They are trying to accuse the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy of making up that project. As if the Greater Serbian political ideas in the period between 1989 and 1999 were the ideas of Martians, not of Serb invaders in the region of former Yugoslavia who, under the slogan “all Serbs in one sate”, destroyed, killed and persecuted non-Serbs. This is a phase described by Greater Serbian architects as settling of the ground – a time when the events of war need to be “civilized”, responsibility for war equally distributed, and a return to international relations ensured. The failure of the project of returning displaced people to their prewar homes in part wraps up and completes the aims of the Greater Serbian aggression against the Republic of BH.[33] But not even this is enough to fully implement the project. “Settling of the ground” requires the legalization of what has been achieved by war, crimes and genocide in the name of the Greater Serbian mythomaniacal project at the expense of Bosniaks, Croats and others. And for this to happen it needs to be recognized or signed by the victim!
Serbs have become hostages of Greater Serbian barbarism at the beginning of the 21st century in Europe. This is a result of the Serb mythomaniacal-ideological template from 1790 in Temisvar to 1992 and the aggression against BH. Milorad Ekmecic would probably agree with me on this assessment, and he is a man in comparison to which Milosevic and Karadzic, together with their killers, appear as no more than foolish barbarians. Fortunately, this does not mean that all Serbs are supporters of Greater Serbian expansionism. Serbs are in a difficult position today because they need to free themselves from primitivism and barbaric destruction of everything that is civilized, different, non-Serb, European. There are Serbs who are unable to come to the forefront from the criminals within their ranks. But we need to believe that they will be able to change things one day and show a different face of the Serb people, a people which is not inherently criminal. Zoran Dindic started this process! The Serb people (and his policy) have become hostages of Greater Serbian expansionism, prisoners of provincial hyperbolas which they share with Bosniaks and Croats. They cannot remain in this condition for long![34] However, Greater Serbian expansionism, brutal and vile in its essence, is reflected in the fact that Greater Serbian politicians think that they have reached for themselves and “their people” in BH indisputable “Serb territories” on which only they can live, rule and be free. This entails that the “achievement” of Greater Serbian barbarism is indisputable. The entity RS is therefore a genocidal, monoethnic creation on the soil of the internationally recognized Republic of BH. Namely, Karadzic’s para-state (de facto government) was transformed into a “Dayton entity” in 1995, and the successors of this genocidal creation wish to transform it into a legal “Serb state” today. The only thing they do not know is what the consequences of such an attempt would be!?
Bosniak Agony and the Achieved Creation of Genocide
On the other hand, Bosniaks are being pushed into so-called religious radicalism in order to ensure equal distribution of responsibility and provide justification for the committed crimes. These scams with religious radicals cannot be applied to any people rejecting them and which through history has never shown an affinity towards radical political expressions. The Greater Serbia project counts on fabricated religious fanatics among Bosniaks which it would then use for its own ends. What suits it the most is the reduction of Bosniaks to a “religious group” which has turned its back on the “religion of its forefathers” and should therefore be eradicated. Njegos in his The Mountain Wreath programmatically speaks out about this. Bosniaks have also become prisoners of disorientation and undefined political objectives leading them towards the dangerous field of existence at the beginning of the 21st century. It needs to be stressed that without Bosniak cynicism and the complex of inferiority it would be impossible to install a creation of genocide on the soil of the internationally recognized RBH. Ultimately, politics is a supreme skill and activity – it is not a matter of “defending a group of like-minded people” and honorable religious feelings. Bosniak politics is terribly reduced to a small group of people acutely unfit for the time of post-genocidal existence of the Bosniak people at the beginning of the 21st century. A small group of petty politicians are making decisions concerning the fate of an entire people and state – this is where the real danger lies. These petty politicians lack intellectual and moral qualities necessary for the general interest of the state of BH and meeting the challenges of this complex historical-political period. This poses an absolute threat to Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e. the people and the nation. A policy promoting the idea that one political party should represent one people leads nowhere. This represents true anti-politics, a destruction of the anthropological experience of existence in a state as a common and general good of the people, i.e. its citizens. Skepticism also needs to be expressed towards a common habit that “the leader” can represent an entire people – this can only be the case in an authoritarian nightmare. The freedom of thought cannot be stopped by anything, not even by fabrications, stigmatizations, meaningless qualifications, collective representations, clerical narrations on issues they alone are unable to understand without philosophers, inquisitions, lies, old Greater Serbian tricks (make an accusation and then let them explain themselves), intimidations, etc.
Bosniak politics had been conducted between religion and fatalism in the agony of the last decade of the 20th century. It has continued in a similar vein in the first decade of the 21st century. It has still not reached full responsibility of political activity, because it is unable to free itself of its “quasi political” source. Bosniak politics since 1991, and this needs to be stressed, has been conducted as a symbiotic simulation of political activity on the premises of a religious worldview. Since the staged trial of so-called “Muslim intellectuals” in 1983, Bosniaks were “prepared” to fit a religious image of the world and a take on reality corresponding a feudal time in which the ruler and clergy determine the content of narratives on life. Therefore, an unrealistic and thoroughly apolitical take on life. An abuse of Islam for miserable political aims has also occurred along the way. Those that prosecuted the so-called “Muslim fundamentalists” were able to forge an apolitical infantilism that would in the 1990s appear as a political subject of the “Muslim historical circle” without a clear understanding of the state of BH. The two-sided unpreparedness and inadequacy to meet the challenges of modern political activities has been in effect since then. It is best seen in the replacement of positions – discussion on political issues is dominated by moralizing on the religious view of the world, while religious issues (or issues of the theological and eschatological position of man in entirety) are politicized to the extent of miserable abuse of common sense. This is, and let there be no mistake about it, a common feature of both the Serb and Croat politico-religious abuse of ethnic and religious sentiments. All of them (priests and politicians) were familiar with the narrations about “ethnic territories” and “humane displacement of people” – they are only pretending to be naïve today! Sadly, in 1991, Bosniaks did not have a developed national (state) politics – as if they were not a match for the historic moment.[35] Today, bureaucrats or political representatives at the state institutions who loaf about, that is, who do not and do not know how to do work, represent pinnacle of the Bosniak cynicism. They radiate non-intellectualism and simulate political activities while unconsciously roaming the complex space of the political maze, etc. – their activities are not politically constructive and they are not accountable to anyone. In short, they are a projection of ignorance… That is why the key and overwhelming issue is: In the name of which Bosniaks was the Bosniak policy of the 20th century, especially in the period of the 1990s, created?[36] We should mention at this point that only the Bosniak cynicism is worse than anti-Bosnian cynicism, for it has been equivalent to the international cynicism since the first day of the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina…
Bosniaks have been brought to such a situation because of the irresponsible, passive politics, in which, in the issues concerning the state and its future, they do not have attitudes and positions of their own. Their cynicism is – an enlightened false consciousness – because they, among other, do not let the International Community to be “in charge” of the important postwar affairs which directly determine their fate. Bosniaks constantly exhaust, justify and prove themselves in the issues that are not important (Santa Clause and the like), and do little on the development of consolidation! Serbs are even in a worse situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina – few may raise their voice against “their leaders” and emphasize some other possibilities of living. People are mostly silent and are used to living their difficult lives of the Balkan paupers accustomed to the life in herds. They have started living a fluid life, that is, “an unstable life in the conditions of constant uncertainty”[37]. In fact, that is deconstruction of life and its humane content. All the eschatologies and grand projects have failed in the era of global information capitalism. That is what brought Bosniaks and Serbs, together with Croats, Albanians and Montenegrins, to being probably the most underdeveloped peoples in today’s Europe, although they embellish themselves with the insignia they do not possess in reality. These peoples have not yet elaborated the primary modernization, let alone the reflexive modernization (U. Beck). Those who speak of the reflexive modernization are looked at with surprise! Priests and politicians who perceive their peoples as herds trapped in folds, convincing them that it is the purpose of human existence, are to blame.
All is possible in the confusing, fluid society which is constantly undermined but, paradoxically, also sustained by ethno-clerical hatred and destructive mentality. Thus, people who live and represent the Greater Serbian ideology may represent themselves as humanists, liberal thinkers, democrats, just judges of the civic interests, fair people. Answer to the question of how the RS was formed will shape the future discourse. That means that one civilizational – political, legal and, in part, theological question is: was the RS formed by the immaculate conception or “somehow differently”? Many humanistically-oriented intellectuals in Bosnia and Herzegovina are keen to know whether the Bosniak cynicism is capable of discussing this issue separately from Greater Serbian ideology which tries to characterize it… Again, in more precise words, one of the most challenging issues in the Balkans is: Is it possible for the RS entity to survive as the result of a horrible crime of genocide? Existence of the RS entity shows that not all people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are equal. However, it should be emphasized that Bosniaks have the Verdict for Genocide in Srebrenica, but are not using it at all as means of defense of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The verdict states that the RS army and police committed genocide, which is a completely valid base for Bosniaks to echo their urge for implementation of law before the International Community. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the US Constitution, he had presupposed that “all men are created equal”. All who swear to the American democracy and freedom obviously forgot about that in Dayton! The very territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was occupied by war and the crime of genocide, reminds us that such criminal act of violation of international legal order and such source of immense injustice and of all future disasters in this area of Europe cannot become and has never been the Serb land. Yes, Serbs have lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but together with Bosniaks, Croats, Albanians, Montenegrins, Jews and others. The fact that the Greater Serbian conquerors killed and banished all others and seized half of the country (49%) does not stand as the complete or definite solution. That obviously creates enormous problems in future perspective to the Serb ideologists and politicians. There is no other solution to the crime than justice and law (judiciary truth that is not politically agreeable or negotiable).
Answer to the question of formation of the RS in the territory of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina means a lot more than mere pointing at the RS entity. What is important for our critical discourse is to bear in mind the difference between the Serb people and Greater Serbian expansionist project – the two notions should not be made equal. Within that distinction settled a possibility of opinion, which ensures us the recognition and hope that the Serb people may one day rise above the primitivism to which it was pushed by the religious and political representatives in the last decade of the 20th century. Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina have not yet come to understand, or refuse to understand, that their national issue in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is – absolutely of Bosnia and Herzegovina! The state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a national frame of the Bosnian Serbs. That is why one day they, as citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, will need to build, develop and respect their country – Bosnia and Herzegovina. That is the base for a normal existence, for only then it will become clear to them that by accepting their own country (the mother country of Bosnian Serbs is Bosnia and Herzegovina) the Greater Serbian expansionist frenzy will disappear. This is because Bosnia has absolutely never been a part of Serbia.
US Senator Robert Dole recently warned in his article entitled Bosnia and American Exceptionalism, published in the Wall Street Journal (dated October 22 2009) that “Today, Bosnia is again under threat. This time the threat is not from the brutality and immediacy of genocide. Rather, it is a more subtle menace: the prospect of a state weakened to the extent that it dissolves; leaves its people in separatist, monoethnic conclaves; loses all hope for democratic development; and validates ultranationalism. This is happening not on battlefields, but at the negotiating table. It is happening because, rather than strengthening state powers and drawing the recalcitrant Bosnian Serbs back into Bosnia, representatives of European Union member nations led by former Bosnia chief negotiator Carl Bildt are walking back parts of the 1995 Dayton Agreement that had put an end to the three-and-a-half year war that had torn the country apart.“[38] It is obvious that Dole notices that we are moving around in a circle – whether we are or are not aware of that! That circle is highly dangerous for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The growing relativization of the crime and leveling of evil prepares the ground for new irresponsibilities in which monsters may appear. All attempts of relativization of the crime of genocide over Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina are only continuing the horrible genocidal practice. Genocide had been well-prepared and executed without mercy, especially in the UN-protected zone – Srebrenica (in July 1995). About 25 000 people participated in the crime. The mass participation of the Serb people in that crime tells us that it was not a coincidence and that it was not an unorganized criminal enterprise similar to hundreds of those that occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the aggression. That tells us that large parts of a collectivity may be trapped inside a dangerous and endless ideology which will bring about nothing good. Genocidal intention and a criminal plan existed for the aimed extinction of the Bosniak people (orders exist for execution of genocide and formation of concentration camps). The main leader of the project, Slobodan Milosevic, „participated in a joint criminal enterprise, together with the Bosnian Serb leadership, whose aim and intention had been a partial destruction of the Bosnian Muslims as a group“[39].
International Community’s Premeditated Debacle in Bosnia
It is obvious that the International Community does not have a unified narrative on Bosnia today. In 1995, J . Baudrillard ironically noted in The Liberation that the whole problem rests upon “persuading Bosniaks that they are to blame for their own misfortune.” Many who participated in undermining the future of Bosnia are now skillfully concealing their traces. They are writing books and present their impressions and contributions to the democracy, peace and prosperity. In an article[40], Roger Cohen mercilessly ironized David Owen’s morbid statement in his book The Balkan Odyssey (1995). Cohen says: “But after the Serbian concentration camps at Omarska, Trnopolje, Susica and elsewhere, after the execution and ‘disappearance’ of tens of thousands of Bosniaks in the first six months of the Bosnian war, after the relentless bombardment of Sarajevo, after the all-too-predictable denouement on the killing fields of Srebrenica, Owen does feel qualified to venture that Karadzic may have violated the Hippocratic oath.” Cohen warns of David Owen’s indecisiveness and “cynical ignorance” related to the issue of Karadzic’s war crimes: “Owen, who got to know Karadzic and his methods well during thirty-two months as the European Union’s chief mediator in the Balkans, is not prepared to say whether the Bosnian Serb leader is a war criminal.” He also added that “Balkan Odyssey is the chronicle of a lacerating failure - that of its author to settle, or to grasp, the worst war in Europe since Hitler’s war.” Owen has become a symbol of hypocrisy and international debacle in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His book is supposed to conceal that – not by coincidence and not in ignorance. Owen played the role of “bias observer”, for Bosnia and Herzegovina had been drawn into extrajudicial and out-of-court settlement and negotiations (conferences on Bosnia and Herzegovina).
Apart from Owen’s book hoax, there are other examples as well – namely books by Florence Hartmann[41], Carla Del Ponte, who skillfully concealed the evidence on participation of Serbia in aggression against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Brendan Sims, S. Woodward, P.S. Ramet; as well as the collection of texts edited by Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz[42] and Christopher Bennet’s book[43] which, like dozens of others, offers a completely different insight into the dissolution of Yugoslavia and Greater Serbian attempts to form Great Serbia on its basis.
Years after the imposition of illegal, unjust and dysfunctional Dayton-Paris agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ethnoclerical mechanisms disable the country’s progress and are in circulation just as they had been in the early days of Greater Serbian aggression. The attempts of extrajudicial “agreement” on the state property and misuse of the entity voting which has been turned into ethnic[44] are only some of the most prominent examples of such mechanisms. Elimination of the entity voting[45] is a necessity because it is an obstacle for adoption of state laws in Bosnia and Herzegovina – the entity veto places the state into a subordinated position, that is, the state becomes blocked by a region which behaves in a monotheistic fashion, refusing to recognize Bosniaks and Croats and others in the territory which was turned into a special region by crime and was imposed in extrajudicial way to the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Dayton Agreement which was made official under the title The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, planted in the Constitution (Annex IV), in an attempt to regulate the constitutional issue in Bosnia and Herzegovina for which a detailed procedure had already been in existence. Everything that occurs outside that procedure is unconstitutional, illegal and Bosnia and Herzegovina should be, in such cases, protected by the UN and international courts. An unseen “public” aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina is taking place; an attempt to destroy BH has been taking place since 1992 – the Greater Serbian savages are mere executors of that dangerous undertake. Nobody has seriously tried to prevent such continual, public aggression. Most of the war criminals from Bosnia have found refuge in Serbia, where they hide from justice. Milosevic boasted about how they had, for the first time, realized the goal – creation of the “Serb state” west of the Drina River. That should be stopped by all legal (judicial) means of the international law and UN decrees. The radicals trying to destroy the state need to face trial for the crimes they committed. However, their work cannot survive, regardless of all the Greater Serbian frauds, mythologies, lobbying, threats, bribery, conditioning and lies. Those who adhere Karadzic’s RS also adhere all the initial reasons of aggression against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. That is why the International Community needs to help free Bosnia and Herzegovina of all the criminal acts, intentions, content and quasi-state forms.
Negotiations on Bosnia and Herzegovina resulted not in safety and progress of the state; rather, they brought the country in grave danger. Namely, Bosnia has been taken out of the LEGAL framework (starting from the London conference in which “two conflicting sides” participated; through the Geneva conference where “three conflicting sides” appeared; the Dayton meeting of 1995, the Prud meeting, to the Butmir meeting of 2009) and has been pushed into the volunteer world of dangerous, secret NEGOTIATIONS (which Bosnian Government representatives managed rather badly, which initiated the display of cynical mentality which has lasted for almost twenty years and can be seen in the current Bosniak politics). The Bosniak cynical spirit “matches” the ideology of Greater Serbian representatives, but will not admit that. It is an indescribable danger, directly causing damage to the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for it moves the country away from the light of the international legal stage and the UN decrees and drags it to the dark paths outside of civilization; to the “law of the jungle”, to casual hostelries in which political gambling brings many issues at stake. That is a peculiar deceit set for Bosnia and Herzegovina, which the Bosniak politicians still have not recognized or understood. That is why Bosnia and Herzegovina needs to be brought back to the framework of the international LAW and the country’s right to be a UN member should be claimed. For fifteen years already Bosnia and Herzegovina has been outside the legal framework and has been, as such, at the disposal of aggressors and suspicious mediators-negotiators which can be bought at a price. Bosnia is a captive of foreign will.
Legal theory knows of the de facto government. It is a group of people who aspire to governance or a kind of dominance and are not recognized as legal by law and who “rule” in certain part or in entire territory of a country on the basis of military, or some other kind of potential. That happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina, once the insurgents lead by Radovan Karadzic refused to recognize the results of the democratic referendum of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. With the help of Milosevic’s army and foreign paramilitary formations, they had risen against the democratic results and will of the majority of BH citizens. They had started a journey outside the law; they had started a barbaric aggression by the use of force and crime, in an attempt to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina and make it a part of the failed Yugoslavia. The aggressors failed to turn the de facto government into an entity (aimed to become a state) even in Dayton. Of course, all that would have been impossible had there not been for the Bosniak helplessness and support of the Russian, French and British diplomacy. That is how an insurgent, illegal government in the occupied territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina became the RS entity in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. That entity has been understood by Milosevic’s followers and Karadzic’s murderers as a transitional solution until the formation of Greater Serbia.
Law as the Base of Political Activities
The issue of whether the RS, in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a result of the immaculate conception or crimes is not an issue of theology but an issue of law, implementation of which Bosnia and Herzegovina should ask for, because, legally, the RS entity is a result of the crime that was committed and was illegally (by war, genocide, force, terror) imposed in the territory of internationally-recognized Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It has been proven that the entities – Federation of BH and the RS – have taken Bosnia and Herzegovina away from LAW and into the narrations about the AGREEMENT of the “conflicting sides”, where all have been made equal; that is, the aggressor and the victim are brought to the equal (negotiating) position. That is not law – on the contrary. It is cynicism, deceit and danger. That is why the story of the necessity of agreement at all cost is dangerous and has been used by the aggressor to the extent of sadistic perversion. The aggressor wants to negotiate about everything – even about the issue of whether “a man should walk on two feet”. In that sense, Bosnia and Herzegovina should under no conditions give up its RIGHT that concerns the issue of fate of the STATE. That is why CONSTITUTION of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina should not have been annulled in a military base (Dayton), with the “agreement” between the mighty criminal and powerless victim. State of Bosnia and Herzegovina should have been protected by the UN as a valid member, not brought into the hands of suspicious negotiators at the international conferences which dissolved its state substance while the Bosnian Government watched powerless, and while, at the same time, the arms embargo prevented the country’s right to self-defense and merciless genocide unfolded before the eyes of the whole world in the early days of aggression in 1992. Those who were at the highest positions in the UN at the time should be held responsible for participation in Greater Serbian crime committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Boutros B. Ghali and Y. Akashi).
The fact Bosnia and Herzegovina gave up its rights has opened an abyss and danger beyond imagination – all of the country’s issues have been reduced to one – humanitarian issue, the way F. Mitterrand had “foretold” instead of protecting the country, a UN member, in accordance to the UN decrees. Throughout the negotiation processes, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina had been under siege, unseen in the modern history. Dayton brought about the annulment of legitimacy of Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina; the country’s constitution was abolished and negotiations were lead with the aggressor as with the equal party in the negotiating processes (the criminals faced trial after that, but their crimes remained). Politicians (primarily the Bosniak representatives) should also be held responsible, for they had engaged into the double standard politics before the citizens (especially Bosniaks) for whatever reasons (blackmail, threats, deceit), thus enabling the aggressor to become an “equal member”. Once the cynicism of the Bosniak politics is revealed, which also disabled the Bosnian politics, Bosniaks will be able to, together with other citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, create conditions for creation of a LAW-based state, instead of the state based on dangerous and non-transparent “gentlemen agreements” of people who “do not know what they are doing” and who do not match the political moment in the history we are now living. That is why the high representatives and the OHR are here – to protect the The General Framework Agreement for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, not the Republic (STATE) of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a unique, internationally confirmed country. The high representatives keep the Dayton Agreement, not the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina! That is why the OHR is a “beauty parlor” whose role is to convince Frankenstein of being beautiful!
The Dayton Agreement acknowledged the majority of demands posed by the Greater Serbian aggressor and it has been proven in practice that the agreement depends on the will of the negotiators, not on the international legal norms (so Sarajevo was made a part of BH Federation on the basis of Milosevic’s good will). We can partly claim that the Bosniak cynicism, ethnicism, powerlessness and irresponsibility, as well as the cynicism of the International Community and immoral character of secret diplomatic games enabled the dominance of Greater Serbian project in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In other words, the Bosniak cynicism saves through the “agreements” the Greater Serbian project in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Bosniak cynicism is not capable to admit that the Dayton Peace Agreement is neither an expression of law, for that confession would serve to think about bringing the state back to the path of the international law. By that “arrangement” the act of genocide in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina was “acknowledged” and the norm of non-recognition of illegal acts of genocide and aggression was thus abandoned. That is why it should again be emphasized that the LAW precedes any politics, not the other way round. That is when one would see that the very Dayton Agreement has been given up a long time ago and that the Greater Serbian project followers have been laughing at the face of the whole world, while the Greater Serbian ideology solely recognizes the name of the RS entity, which is the result of a military campaign against the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and which is overtly against the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in which it was formed by crime.
One of today’s deceptions of the Greater Serbian ideology and its political matrix is the narrative that the RS entity can, by the “will” of only one people (by a referendum), separate from the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina – that was not done even during the 1992 military aggression. International Community and the local politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina need to go again to the law, and that means that the results of genocide need to be annulled. That is what the local politicians, and with the assistance of the International Community, need to insist upon if they truly are to represent the interests of citizens loyal to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia is today defended by having its future politics based on the law. Speaking from the legal point of view, there is the Verdict for the crime of genocide in Srebrenica on the basis of which the International Community can and should take steps related to the implementation of the law to annul the RS. The Verdict should, however, be respected. Bosnia and Herzegovina is an internationally recognized country, regardless of the Dayton Agreement as the “cumulative result of all the agreements achieved” (D. Owen); that is, Bosnia and Herzegovina was not formed at a military base in Dayton, as an extrajudicial project of the “agreement between the sides in conflict” policy. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a state on the basis of the Dayton Agreement or according to the Dayton Agreement, but in spite of the Dayton Agreement’s extrajudicial, illegal deceit. The Dayton Agreement has already and for a long time been considered an illegal agreement, for it was not aimed to protect the legitimate state (the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina), but to conceal the fact that a territory had been created by war crimes, in which a criminal rebel group gained power. Karadzic has been aware of this and that is why he used to say the whole time that “the entire Serb people is with him”, that he was the first of the Serb sons and all who did not follow were traitors. The High Representative cannot leave Bosnia and Herzegovina and say that the “Dayton Peace Agreement has been brought to the end” – such a statement cannot be true because almost nothing has been implemented from the time of signing of the Agreement. Greater Serbian nationalists immediately breeched the “agreement” because they failed to adjust the entity with the state Constitution. Following that legal logic after the OHR, all that was illegally and by crime seized, captured and occupied from the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina should be returned.
The state of Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot be compared with the failed Yugoslavia, contrary to the frequent practice of Greater Serbian propaganda. The UN admitted the dissolution of Yugoslavia as legal, for the issue was that the republics had already become states (the statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina was confirmed back in 1943). Yugoslavia was formed on November 29 1943, by a volunteer unification into a federation – they did not unify in Serbia (the country’s name was Democratic Federative Yugoslavia, Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, and, from 1963, Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia). On the other hand, the RS entity is not a legally recognized state, that entity does not have a legal continuity; on the contrary, it is the result of a military campaign undertaken by Milosevic’s regime, which created, in the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a “Serb territory” by crimes of genocide and persecution of citizens, which should be made a part of Greater Serbia, which is a realization of the goal – all Serbs in one state.
Nobody in the would, without the consent of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina Assembly and the prescribed legal procedure, could have made amendments to or abandon the Constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and then impose, within the Framework Agreement on Peace, the Constitution of a country against which aggression had been performed (Annex IV). The octroyed constitution is outside the legal constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and that is why the “peace agreement” cannot replace the constitution of the state (the UN Decree, the 1969 Vienna Convention on Constitutional Law). The Dayton Agreement should not have omitted the Constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, placing instead the Annex IV Constitution – that is illegal and it is a par excellence example of an anti-state act. That is how dozens of international legal norms, upon which the international relations rest, were breeched. Bosnia and Herzegovina was set aside the field of law, and that is how the ordeal of the country was relativized. That is why both criminals and aggressors are in position to laugh at the victims because the truth about suffering is not determined legally, but in accordance to the agreements between the “leaders” of the ethnic groups, at a moral and humanitarian level, and through the “commissions for truth” etc., which only further drags the substance of Bosnia and Herzegovina through the mud of human cynicism. And that is the matter of arbitrariness; everything can be agreed there, even if it means going against the interests of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
L. Kolakovski used to say that the 20th century died in the 1992 – 1995 Sarajevo, during the barbaric siege of the city which took place before the eyes of the whole world. “Again”, fifty years after the Warsaw ghetto, a genocide over the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the name of the ethnic, nationalistic and religious goals took place. The hypocrisy destroyed all the great hope of the European continent – that is why the issue of Bosnia in Europe is absolutely a legal issue. The history has terribly repeated with Bosniaks. It appears that Hegel’s thought is true – history teaches us that it has nothing to teach us! People mostly learn nothing from history. They are powerless and are left to fight the evil alone, against the human evil, which comes out of the Greater Serbian expansionist ideology and destruction of the different, and which is a historical root of the continuity of crimes over Bosniaks committed by the Greater Serbian savages. The preserved memory of the barbaric crime; of the unseen savagery of Greater Serbian aggressors, should be the nerve center of future of the younger Bosnian generations, because the Greater Serbian project has not yet been stopped. That is why repeating the phrase “never again” is ridiculous. Never again, except in Bosnia! No sane person will ever accept to be en masse thrown out of his/her own country, from cities and towns of centuries’ old existence, only to later understand that as circumstances of fate!
National politics of Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina is of Bosnia and Herzegovina!!! That will one day probably be understood by people living all the way from Bosanska Raca, through Bosanski Samac, Bosanski Brod, Bosanski Kobas, Bosanska Gradiska, Bosanska Dubica, Bosanska Kostajnica, Bosanski Novi, Bosanski Petrovac and to the hills overlooking Trebinje…
Bibliography:
- Ali, Rabia & Lawrence Lifschutz (ed.), Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War, Pamphleteer’s Press, Stony Creek, Connecticut, 1993.
- Badiou, Alain, Stoljeće, Antibarbarus, Zagreb, 2008.
- Bauman, Zygmut, Fluidni život, Mediteran, Novi Sad, 2009.
- Bennett, Christopher, Yugoslavia’s Bloddy Collaps. Causes, Courses and Consequences, Hurst & Company, London, 1995
- Biserko, Sonja, Bosna i Hercegovina – jezgro velikosrpskog projekta, Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, Beograd, 2006.
- Cooper, Robert, Slom država, Zagreb 2009
- Hartman, Florence, Mir i kazna, Sarajevo
- Hodge, Carole, Velika Britanija i Balkan, Detecta, Zagreb, 2007
- Ramet, Sabrina Petra, Balkanski Babilon. Raspad Jugoslavije od Titove smrti do Miloševićevog pada, Alinea, Zagreb, 2005.
- Sims, Brendan, Najsramniji trenutak. Britanija i uništavanje Bosne, Baybook, Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava Srbije, Sarajevo, Beograd, 2003
[1] This excerpt from the verdict for crimes against Bosniaks in Visegrad has been taken from: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Press Release, “Judgment summary in the case Prosecutor v. Milan and Sredoje Lukic”, 20.07.2009. (http.://www.icty.org/x/cases/milan_lukic_sredoje_lukic/tjug/bsc/090720_sazetak_presude.pdf.)
[2] Because of the existence of the RS the majority of Bosniaks do not wish or are too afraid to return to their pre-war homes because fear is stronger than love for the birthplace. This was perhaps the main objective of installing this product of genocide on a half of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territory, which has been stripped of the attribute republic (a form of government besides monarchy) only for it to be given to an entity created as a result of brutal violations of rights and interstate relations.
[3] Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkanski Babilon. Raspad Jugoslavije od Titove smrti do Miloševićevog pada, Alinea, Zagreb, 2005, p. 440.
[4] Alain Badiou, Stoljeće, Antibarbarus, Zagreb, 2008, p. 9. (The author goes so far as to say that not thinking what the Nazis have thought prevents us from contemplating what they have done, consequently it prevents any realistic policy on preventing the return of such actions which have led to the extermination of European Jews)
[5] Carole Hodge, Velika Britanija i Balkan, Detecta, Zagreb, 2007, p. 96.
[6] Brendan Simms, Najsramniji trenutak. Britanija i uništavanje Bosne, Buybook, Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava Srbije, Sarajevo, Beograd, 2003, p. 17.
[7] In July 1992 Carrington monstrously claimed that peace would not come to Bosnia “until a de facto division takes place”. By doing so this shameless man pressured the Bosnian Government to sell its land for a sterile and uncertain peace, and encourage the aggressor to capture as much as possible to the state territory of RBH.
[8] Carole Hodge, ibid. p. 92.
[9] Carole Hodge, ibid. p. 93
[10] Brendan Simms, ibid. p. 47. [When people working with J. Baker tried to do everything in their power to start an intervention, which would mean starting a bombing campaign of Serb positions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this was opposed by a “very harsh line in the British Embassy, which targeted precisely those people in the State Department who advocated such action”. British diplomats tried to silence them at all cost.]
[11] Carole Hodge, ibid. p. 94
[12] The arrival of French President F. Mitterrand to the besieged Sarajevo in 1992 represents the culmination of dishonor of French policy towards RBH - it was aimed to show that it is possible to live under siege and that a military intervention by the Western military alliance in not necessary.
[13] Carole Hodge, ibid. p. 97.
[14] Robert Cooper, Slom država. Poredak i kaos u 21.stoljeću, Profil, Zageb, 2009, p. 77.
[15] Robert Cooper, ibid, p. 84.
[16] Brendan Simms, ibid. p. 18.
[17] Jan Willem Honig & Norbert Both, Srebrenica. Record of a War Crime, Penguin Books, New York, London, 1996, p. 99.
[18] In this safe zone – a reservation under custody – similar to nature reserves under the custody of different services responsible for providing food, breeding and killing animals, UN forces in BH care for biological units of an ethnic group which represents the most drastic example of reducing BH citizens to a primarily-biological element, i.e. drastic exclusion from the political sphere and relegation to the “animal kingdom” on the other side of good and evil.
[19] Brendan Simms, ibid. p. 1.
[20] Brendan Simms, ibid. viii
[21] The book edited and prepared by Sonja Biserko, Bosnia and Herzegovina – the Source of the Greater Serbia Project (Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, Belgrade, 2006) is certainly a well detailed and valuable one. It provides numerous information on the horrific plan to destroy Bosnia by the Greater Serbia barbarians, accompanied by the cynicism of the international community which from the start of the aggression against BH possessed relevant information indicating genocide against the Bosniaks. Therefore, the military aggression against BH was prepared in advance, and this comes from the domain of thought. Every destruction of cities, bombardment of civilians, killing of women and children, is thought up in advance and implemented on the ground, thus, barbarism and evil are not devoid of logic and human thought.
[22] Sonja Biserko, Razaranje Bosne, in: Bosna i Hercegovina – jezgro velikosrpskog projekta, Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, Beograd, 2006, p. 9.
[23] When the issue of legality in BH is raised, then all its ethno-nationalistic institutions, included the entity RS are brought into question, because they cannot stand the test of legality (starting with the Constitution, Annex IV, and on). This is why the international community is at such pains, because as it avoids to face the questionable and illegal constitutional legal structure of BH problems only multiply, this naturally mostly at the expense of BH citizens who remain hostages of the mad and illegal state structure.
[24] At the time when Bosnia and Herzegovina was being recognized by the EU in April 1992 and by the UN in May 1992 (Serbia was an independent state from 1991) and when it declared its independence, Yugoslavia had already ceased to exist.
[25] Even if the war is “somewhat prolonged” it could be characterized as “civil war” and it would then be possible to speak of “three warring parties” in BH; as a result the roles of Serbia and Croatia will gradually fade away and the ground would be set for a three-way partition of BH.
[26] When the political-legal subjectivity of a state is broken up through “humanitarizuation” to its “subunits” – ethnic groups – a “logical” consequence is to come up with a tripartite structure of the “new state” (from the “three warring parties”), as it is important to preserve its territorial integrity because of the stability of the region. The Dayton BH is therefore a state with territorial integrity, but with practically no subjectivity.
[27] BH citizens have never recognized the results of Greater Serbian aggression against BH, despite the fact that the entity RS had been installed against their will and the Constitution (Annex IV) fraudulently made a part of the peace agreement.
[28] When Belgrade finally abandons the Greater Serbian ideology, new prospects of existence will open up for the peoples in this part of Europe.
[29] The premeditated Platform for the Indisputability and Integrity of the RS (2009) represents a preparatory political game for further negotiations on constitutional changes aimed at concealing the issue of its criminal, genocidal establishment on the territory of BH, i.e. its criminal and anti-state activities. The entire Greater Serbian strategy is based on the position that “everything needs to be negotiated”, which means that “nothing is true until we reach a political agreement”. This is why negotiations on the survival of the state of BH have also started as if it were some remote Serb village and not an internationally recognized state.
[30] The following High Representatives have pleasantly served in Bosnia: Karl Bildt, Karlos Vestendorp, Wolfgang Petrich, Paddy Ashdown, Kristian Schwartz Schilling, Miroslav Lajcak, and, most recently, Valentin Inzko. They are the guardians of the Dayton division of BH, not of its historical multilateral essence. They seem to support the idea of letting the war “cleanse” old, ancient hatreds (the myth of ancient hatred and antagonism of ethnic groups in the Balkans).
[31] We are witnessing a detailed revision of historical processes concerning Chetniks and Partisans. In brief – historical reinterpretations that could represent Chetniks as antifascists, democrats and humanists simply do not exist. It is enough to look at their program documents, directives, letters of ideologists and war reports to realize that they are no more than cutthroats, pagans, murderers, savages. Lacking a brave and humane vision of the future, the Greater Serbian anti-Bosnian Leviathan rehabilitated the Chetnik ideology and tried to present it as an anti-fascist one. However, it needs to be stressed that the Greater Serbian military-political orientation from the XIX century is the source of all problems and miseries among the peoples of former Yugoslavia. In their programmatic-ideological texts others are portrayed as objects against which to vent “Serb anger” because of the centuries-long subservience to the despised conquerors. Bosniaks, Albanians and, to an extent, Croats represent those others.
[32] Honig, Jan Willem & Norbert Both, Srebrenica. Record of a War Crime, Penguin Books, New York, London, 1996.
[33] One of the first persons to return, Muharem Murselovic, said after spending ten years as a returnee in Prijedor: “I was among the first to return to Prijedor, I encouraged these people to return and I therefore feel great responsibility and guilt because none of our expectations have realized. We were perhaps naïve to believe that the same people who threw us out of our homes would allow us to live normally once we had returned, but also to expect more support from the international community and the state institutions in the reintegration process… Bosniaks here are no more than tourists who are welcome as long as they pay utility services and taxes and I wonder how long will it be before they start charging them a sojourn tax. This is a horrible condition.” (Oslobodenje, Sarajevo, June 1 2009, p.5.)
[34] Roughly said, there are three ideologies on the political stage in Serbia today: radical, social-democratic and liberal. The radical option, especially, has an effect on parts of BH in which the entity formed by genocide exists and it serves the purpose of maintaining pressure on Bosnia and the barbaric readiness for new “campaigns”.
[35] Bosniaks could not have had a national or state politics, because immediately after the first multiparty elections they took the ethnic (particular) perspective – they tied their own flag onto the other two particularistic-ethnical flags and only focused on negotiations on the maps for demarkation of the ethnicities in a multicultural state. That shows that Bosniaks failed to develop a national politics in the right moment, for they were only treated like Bosniaks – that is, like an ethnic group, whereas the Bosniak national politics formula can only be in favor of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
[36] The same question can be asked for Serbs and Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina! In the name of which collectivities does one, for example, kill members of other collectivities?
[37] Zygmunt Bauman, Fluidni život, Mediteran, Novi Sad, 2009, p. 10.
[38] Robert Dole, “Bosnia and American Exceptionalism” published in The Wall Street Journal on October 22 2009.
[39] International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Prosecutor’s words in the case against Slobodan Milosevic, in Decision upon the Motion for the Entry of Judgement of Acquittal, the hague, June 16 2004.
[40]This article, entitled “Peace in His Time” was published for the first time on March 11 1996, in The New Republic.
[41] Florence Hartmann, Mir i kazna, Buybook, Sarajevo, 2007.
[42] Rabia Ali & Lawrence Lifschutz (ed.), Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War, Pamphleteer’s Press, Stony Creek, Connecticut, 1993.
[43] Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloddy Collaps. Causes, Courses and Consequences, Hurst & Company, London,1995.
[44] Those defending the state position of Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot give, hand over, present, misappropriate, etc. the state property (property of internationally-recognized state of Bosnia and Herzegovina), to an entity aiming to destroy the country. Giving away the property of Bosnia and Herzegovina means signing its death penalty. Legally, property of Bosnia and Herzegovina has clearly been defined. That issue is not “politically” negotiable. That is the worst form of betrayal. What is a country like without its property? All who advocate that are working on the destruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina and should be held accountable for their acts. This especially concerns the Bosniak politicians who have partaken in frauds and negotiations to the extent that they not “do not know” where they are going and what they have been doing from Dayton to Butmir. An entity is not the form of state governance and as such does not need ownership over property – an entity may merely use the state property, that is, it may be a user of the state property under the conditions prescribed by the state. A state region is always subordinated to the state and cannot bargain with it, contrary to the practice of today’s Greater-Serbian politicians coming from the Dayton entity of the RS.
[45] The European Commission clearly emphasized in its October 14 2009 Progress Report on Bosnia and Herzegovina that the entity voting, which is at the disposal to the RS, is the key obstacle for the development and further European and world integration processes of Bosnia and Herzegovina. High representatives have made no attempts to change that circumstance, while the domestic politicians use it in their exchanges and useless outwitting. Misuse of this model of voting enables obstruction of the legal constitution of the state and cynicism of International community representatives. That even enables the Greater Serbian ambitions to undermine the legal contents of the state.
Professor Senadin Lavić, Ph.D.
Faculty of Political Science
University of Sarajevo
