Who Slandered Bosnia and Herzegovina

When workers from former Yugoslavia went to Western Europe for temporary work in the seventies, their relatives would see them off, bidding farewell with tears. Who remembers Meho Puzić's hit song "My Brother Abroad"? The sounds of that song blared from Munich, Paris, all the way to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nostalgia was the most frequent and strongest emotion of the Bosnian people. The SR Germany alone accepted half a million workers from former Yugoslavia at that time. People went to work in Sweden, France, Switzerland.

The record-holders of capitalism regularly returned to their homeland for holidays in ostentatious cars. Two members of my family toiled in France and Germany. Both responded to calls from Western Europe through the Employment Bureau. When they left, we saw them off in silence. The one from France didn't contact us for five full years, so we thought we would never see him again, but he suddenly returned.   

In November 1991, just before the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina began, I ended up in the famous Traiskirchen, the largest refugee center in Austria. The "iron curtain" towards Eastern European countries still formally existed. I listened as one of the refugees recounted the tragedy of two Romanian young men. In Timișoara, near the Hungarian border, they hid in a gasoline tanker truck heading for Austria. After about ten hours, the driver crossed the Austrian border and heard banging. He called the police and opened the tanker. One of the passengers had already died from hypothermia, and the other was barely showing signs of life. Although Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime had been overthrown, people lived in desperate poverty and sought a better life.

I returned from the Austrian refugee center on the eve of New Year 1992. Columns of people were heading towards Europe, while I was returning to Bosnia and Herzegovina quite alone. A few months later, more than seven hundred thousand Bosniaks were expelled from their homes and ended up mostly in Europe, America, and some in Australia. Many found their way, but they also return and maintain ties with their country. Those who are fleeing today are in vain saying they will not return.  

Due to recent wars, the Balkans have become a slandered place in world public opinion. The West has created an expression to describe the life in Balkan countries: deception, fighting with illicit means, political assassinations, bribery, a passion for enrichment, crawling towards those above, and rudeness towards those below.       

Even today, people are fleeing the small states of former Yugoslavia. They flee because the leaders of the Western Balkan states still rule by instilling fear. They rule because they are the most primitive among all primitives. Where deception is constant, where bribery is taken for granted, and rudeness towards subordinates is common.  

Unfortunately, where our people go, it is worse than ever. Our youth are fleeing from the inflammatory speeches of domestic politicians, and in European countries, they are met with inflammatory speeches and threatening messages that they are not welcome. European politicians win elections with these threatening messages against refugees. Those fleeing the Balkans are entering a burgeoning European Balkanization.

Our youth in Europe do the dirtiest municipal jobs, change diapers in nursing homes, and are the worst paid for the worst jobs. These days, I learned that a doctor from my family got a job and went to that dream Europe. Her destination was the Alps; a beautiful little village of about ten houses appeared. She is a shuttle doctor, serving a sparsely populated area of about ten mountain villages. And on her first night in the promised Europe, after the light and bustle of noisy Sarajevo, came silence and deep loneliness. Then, while visiting the villages, she met an agricultural engineer who is a shepherd in those areas and is trying to bring his family over, but he is increasingly in doubt about returning.    

The constant talk about departures only intensifies people's desire to leave. It's as if some ugly force is generating hopelessness and offering people only escape as a way out. As far as possible from their homeland, even into the remote European wilderness. It all seems like an ugly performance of a malicious strategy.

The best example is the constant advertisement on social networks, as a message to Balkan men that they can go to Iceland and that a monetary reward awaits them if they marry, supposedly, numerous lonely Icelandic women. The advertisement is embellished with two blonde, smiling, and well-groomed Viking beauties. Our emigrants responded and explained that the advertisement is false: "If you intend to be married to an Icelandic woman, you must be prepared to cook lunch every day, wash and iron clothes, while your wife enjoys absolute freedom. And all her needs have priority over your male needs." This is just one of the constant warnings and explanations from our people in Iceland. But the advertisement is still persistently running, and someone is paying a lot for it. One can guess why. And miserable is he whom politics can drive away from his homeland.