Biser: Today's authorities cannot preserve the state we built with pickaxes

The state we built with pickaxes and shovels, today's authorities cannot maintain with the help of millions in IMF loans. That is pitiful. The citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina apparently no longer have patriotism. If they had it like we did, everything would be different, says Šerif Biser, president of the Association of Fighters of the National Liberation Anti-Fascist War Center Sarajevo, for the Bosnian news agency Patria (NAP).

Bosnia and Herzegovina celebrates November 25 as Statehood Day. On this day in 1943, at the first session of ZAVNOBiH in Mrkonjić Grad, the ZAVNOBiH Resolution was adopted, expressing the determination of the peoples of BiH that their country should be a united community ensuring full equality of all peoples in the country, and the equality of the Republic of BiH within the Yugoslav federation, with historical borders dating back to the time of medieval Bosnia.

However, 71 years later, the country is far from what 173 delegates from all parts of BiH agreed upon in Mrkonjić Grad. The country is shaken by national turmoil, economic instability, and corruption has seeped into all pores of society. Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina still feel the consequences of the last bloody conflicts, which two decades ago claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and more than one million people were displaced from their homes.

- Of the state we made 70 years ago, only Bosnia and Herzegovina as a federal unit remains – says Biser for Patria.

- Everything else has been destroyed. In 1943 and the following years, we created a Bosnia and Herzegovina that was tailored to all citizens, we resolved pre-war issues, returned land to peasants and gave factories to workers. None of that exists anymore.

The small Balkan country, which had a resolution on human rights before any European country, has turned into a state where national divisions are great, there is no middle class, and for several years the country has not been fighting for development but for survival.

Biser, who today tries to explain to younger generations how BiH is a country where all its peoples can live, was imprisoned in the Jasenovac camp on November 25, 1943. A year later, he escaped from the camp and joined the partisans. Today, he most regrets that fascism, which his generations had completely suppressed by 1945, has returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Statehood Day of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be marked on Tuesday in the Federation of BiH, while the RS authorities will deny it again this year, writes NAP.