A Quarter Century of False Prosperity and Our Lethargy: Wake Up, They Are Drawing New Maps with Your Blood!

By: Rasim Belko @rasimbelko

Tomorrow will be 2024, and in a few months, it will be a quarter of a century since the first Stability Pact summit was held in Sarajevo. The Sarajevo Declaration was adopted then.

This event, almost a quarter of a century ago, was supposed to mark the end of a decade of wars and aggressions, the disintegration of Yugoslavia through bloody conflicts marked by Serbian and Croatian hegemonism.

I remember it happening in Zetra, from whose floor numerous flowers exuded a strange hope. The era of Balkanization was supposed to end in those hot days in Sarajevo with the beginning of the era of Europeanization. Bill Clinton, the president of the then leading world power, the USA, arrived in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with 38 other heads of state and numerous representatives of various international organizations.

I remember that the capital of this country was often blocked at that time, but somehow everyone tolerated it, justifying that things would be better and more advanced from the very next morning. And people, politicians, journalists, analysts forgot that a promise is just a fool's delight and that a better future is not brought by Santa Clauses, even if Clinton himself leads them.

Only a few hours remain until the end of 2023, which we spent calculating how accurate the operational and spin data are that say we are closer to war than we dare to imagine. A year passed in which Milorad Dodik developed secessionist paths, Aleksandar Vučić tested the feasibility of terrorist-guerrilla incursions, the spirit of Bulatović was revived in Montenegro, while in Kosovo they fight a little every day until they fight a little more.

Southeastern Europe, as those to the left of Berlin call us, is actually a seismic field where peace means preparations for war, because here the cartographers of evil with devilish faces have not tired of planning wars and dividing territories. Before the Stability Pact, this project was called Greater Serbia, today it is the "Serbian world". And interestingly, instead of Europeanization and NATO-ization, there is a rather strong Serbization and even Croatization of the southeast of the continent.

The only ones Europeanized from that Balkan space of blood are Slovenia, which in reality was never truly Balkan, and Croatia, which Berlin simply absorbed into that European world. However, even such a Croatia did not remain outside the firm Balkan borders.

Thus, Europeanization has become an exclusive illusion with which Bosnians and Herzegovinians are deluded into thinking we are part of them, that they will not let us disappear in blood, that we will be on the threshold of the EU in a few months...
They are lying, just as they lied in 1999.

They are lying because they never wanted us to be part of the European Union, and we became a problem for them after we did not allow Serbia and Croatia to tear our country apart. Because that was the solution the European Union favored then, as it favors it today. Dobrica Ćosić, the father of the Serbian nation, once said that a lie is the greatest Serbian product, and it seems the West is the biggest exporter of that Serbian product.

The amount of lies and deceptions they have offered us from the Stability Pact to today could not be measured even by the largest measuring devices. Therefore, what we need already for tomorrow morning is NATIONAL AWAKENING.

Because, do not lull yourselves into thinking it will get better. New Year's wishes are one thing, but the reality that awaits us is worse than war. And therefore, all of us who love Bosnia and Herzegovina and know that our survival is tied to its destiny must stop thinking that there is a foreigner who will solve our problems.

National awakening means rising above the stagnant ethno-clerical swamp that makes us sick of the everyday life where we watch tycoons and political thugs plunder the future of our children, where politicians sell our destiny for empty promises and good per diems and fees.

Awakening begins in each of us and excludes the question "what are others doing and what have others done". Each of us is a cog that must start the machine of patriotism that will oppose the plans and new forms of aggression that are clearly underway.

A state is not won. And we did not win it, we defended it with blood, and now we must invest additional intellectual or some other form of effort to mobilize the forces of resistance. Because we have seen tanks and executioners, we do not see political aggressors; they are hidden behind illusions. And observe the narrative "the world will not allow it" through the prism of the Stability Pact. Because, a quarter of a century later, we are further from peace and Europeanization than we were in 1999.

We will need luck in the continuation of the path of defense, as well as health and wisdom, and therefore all the best in the New Year 2024.

However, besides that, we will need to define who we are, what we are, what we want to make of Bosnia and Herzegovina and how. When we do that, it will be easier to define strategies for achieving our goals. And then, when we mobilize broader social masses, even the enemies of Bosnia and Herzegovina will no longer have the advantage.

Therefore, when the clock strikes midnight and you make wishes for yourselves and your loved ones, wish to be a link in the chain that pulls towards the right side of history. And that side is called Bosnia and Herzegovina, a united, sovereign, and territorially indivisible European state.

Otherwise, perhaps you will welcome the next year, 2025, as migrants, and most of us have already been migrants once, you know how it is!