The day courage, bravery, and solidarity won!

By: Muamer Bandić, member of the Presidency of the Party for BiH and MP in the KS Assembly

With gratitude to the martyrs of Velešići - Haris Farić, Ermin Imamović, and Nedžad Pindžo, who gave their lives on June 8, 1992. And with eternal gratitude to the fallen fighters and martyrs of Sarajevo and BiH!

What is a stećak? The embodiment of the Bosnian highlander! What is a Bosnian doing on a stećak? Standing upright! Head held high, hand raised! But nowhere, nowhere, never, has anyone found a stećak on which a Bosnian is kneeling and praying. On which he is depicted as a captive” – Miroslav Krleža

On this day in 1992, members of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in battles on Mount Žuč, liberated the peak Orlić and the wider area towards Volujak and Krstac, as well as the settlements of Smiljevići and Zabrđe, thereby permanently thwarting the aggressor's intention to cut off Sarajevo's defense lines and divide the city into two parts.

The Battle of Žuč was one of the key battles for the defense of Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most of us who witnessed that time probably never even heard of these hills until those days, nor did we know where they were located. On June 8, 1992, on Žuč, gazis from my neighborhood, Haris, Ermin, and Nedžad, fell, and in those days, in an attempt to unblock the city, nearly 200 of our brave and fearless fellow citizens laid down their lives defending their families, their city, and their only homeland, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

One of them was the top athlete, Olympian, and member of the special unit of the Republican Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vinko Šamarlić, who was killed on Hrasno Brdo on June 8, 1992. Mount Žuč became a key point of defense for the city and a symbol of resistance against the aggressor. In that area, we lost many great figures, organizers of resistance, and true leaders like Safet Isović, Safet Zajka, Enver Šehović, and many others until the end of the war.

In those days, we were not defended by the international community, foreign embassies, various resolutions, or promises from foreign statesmen, but by our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters, our friends from the neighborhood, often beardless boys in sneakers and jeans with improvised weapons, but armed with courage, bravery, solidarity, unity, and fearlessness to defend their city and their country.

Armed with an iron will to say NO to the evil that befell us! And in that year of 1992, when the JNA, then estimated as the fourth military power in Europe, transformed into a Chetnik army while we had nothing, we could have remained silent to all insults, endured all humiliations, engaged in compromise and dialogue, and handed over all state institutions and the country to the aggressors, but we did not! At that time, we had a vision for the future and a clear political goal: the liberation of our country, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Most importantly, we had the will and courage to fight for the achievement of these goals! Today, 32 years later, we must confront ourselves and realize that as a people and as a society, we are confused and disoriented. That we lack a clear vision for the future and that we lack clear political goals for which we will fight with the same fervor with which the bravest sons and daughters of our homeland fought on the lines around Sarajevo. First and foremost, we must be aware that it is not a political goal who gets which ministry or who will be a minister. It is not worth wasting time on such matters, because such political concepts have no long-term future. Likewise, nations whose politics revolve solely around such issues have no future, i.e., they are doomed to disappear.

We live in a city that endured and heroically withstood a brutal, barbaric siege in which people were indiscriminately killed and expelled, infrastructure was destroyed, culture was destroyed, all with the aim of biologically destroying the political nation of this country and the very idea of Bosnian statehood. We live in a city where last year, in the middle of the city, under the guise of a trivial cultural event, a film glorifying the heroism of the ideological founders of the same Chetniks who tried to destroy and burn this city to the ground was shamelessly promoted! We live in a society where today war criminals, and followers of ideas and movements condemned by the international court in The Hague, receive more media and public attention than the heroes who defended this city and this country.

It is devastating that today we do not value these people and do not value the ideas for which they fought. It is even more devastating that through the political actions of the so-called pro-Bosnian parties, we have renounced most of the ideas and goals defined in the Platform for the Work of the Presidency of the RBiH under wartime conditions. Under the guise of dialogue and compromise, we indulge the followers of aggressor ideologies, handing over key institutions of the system to them, i.e., we are gifting them the state for which we were dying until yesterday. As if we have forgotten that the political goals of the aggressor, especially the division of our country, have not changed at all with the Washington or Dayton Agreements.

Political followers of these ideologies do not even hide it today. Moreover, they proudly speak about it publicly and undermine all legal and civilizational values. We must be aware that with the Dayton Agreement, the war only entered its second political phase, in which the same struggle for the preservation of the Bosnian political entity and statehood is conducted through the institutions of the system and through legal solutions. And for this phase, we need the same bravery and courage as in 1992.

And we need the knowledge, expertise, professionalism, and incorruptibility of those people who speak in our name and in the name of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the institutions. Dialogue and compromise are in any case better options than warfare, but to achieve them, we as a political nation must have clear red lines that must not be crossed, as well as clear visions and political goals that we collectively strive to achieve. I believe we all have a vision of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the European Union and NATO. But we must ask ourselves what kind of country it will be in which Bosniaks, or any other nation, will be politically disenfranchised and irrelevant, as is the case today, after the brutal unconstitutional act of the OHR and the annulment of the electoral will of a nation? What kind of country will it be in which some people do not have basic political rights, like our fellow citizens Jews, Roma, or Others? What kind of country will it be in which party-controlled police interrogate you if you say Azra Zornić is my hero or when, as never before in the history of our modern parliamentary democracy, the police detain and interrogate journalists who dare to write about the corrupt affairs of the current authorities?

As things stand today and what kind of "partners" Dodik's and Čović's Bosniak "ikebanas" choose, we will become part of BRICS, as Dodik announces, sooner than part of the EU or NATO. And for example, Azra Zornić is not a terrorist, war criminal, or some religious radical, but a brave woman who fights for the basic political rights of all citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina and international conventions on human and political rights, which are an integral part of Annex I of the BiH Constitution. In the same way, when you hand over institutions to the enemies of the state, party police accuse and arrest our generals and prominent commanders, even in cases where they have already been prosecuted and acquitted by the Hague Tribunal. The point here is not to prove guilt to someone, but to bring us all to the same level. And especially to bring to the same level the ideas for which we fought and for which we still fight today. Only in cases where this is achieved does the state begin to treat equally those who fought for it and those who fought against it.

We live today in such a society when it is almost shameful to say that our fighters, i.e., the people to whom we owe our lives, fought for their country and their people, even though that fight was honorable and primarily defensive. And the best proof that it was honorable is the fact that the only military formation from the former SFRY that participated in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Victory Day over Fascism on May 9, 1995, in Paris was the Army of RBiH.

There was no place for aggressors and criminals there!

The citizens of Sarajevo are today subjected to dirty political propaganda which devalues and undermines almost everything related to the fight against aggression, and anyone who was a prominent organizer of resistance is slandered, while empty political slogans about the necessity of dialogue and compromise with followers of aggressive and fascist ideologies on Bosnia and Herzegovina's European path are put forward. It must be clearly stated that the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the only legal military formation on the soil of Bosnia and Herzegovina and as such protected the constitutional and legal order, and inherited multicultural European and civilizational values. Nor should we lie and deny that members of the ARBiH did not commit war crimes. But it must be clearly stated that these crimes were not systematic and organized but sporadic, and that the state of RBiH prosecuted most of these crimes and dealt with the criminals within its ranks. If that were not the case, the flag with lilies would not have proudly flown on May 9, 1995, in Paris. This is the true political legacy of all of us who feel and experience Bosnia and Herzegovina as our only homeland.

These are our political roots, which we must preserve with historical memory, and these are the values we must integrate into the institutions of the system and into the generations to come. This is the only guarantee not only of mere survival but also of the prosperity of our people in these areas and the stability of our state.

I will remind you of the words of the late President Izetbegović, spoken on Mount Žuč on June 8, 1996: “Even today, many rightly ask how we will deal with the threatening number of legal and political traps being woven against a unified Bosnia. The answer is the same as four years ago: we will be stronger and we will win if we are better than our opponents, if, along with military strength, which we must have, we are simultaneously the bearers of proven human values, and against monolithic thinking, barbarism, exclusivity, and violence of all kinds. And vice versa: we will lose this battle if we apply the logic: whatever they do to us, we will do to them. Then we lose our moral and political advantage, and their numerical and material superiority remains on the scene. We must not make that mistake.”

All of us should live and work so that we never fall into this trap and become the same or equal to the enemies of this state, because we never were. Only then will we be, not like beggars begging the world for favors, but as a developed, free society and as people with integrity, ready for both the European Union and NATO.