Crisis Up Close

By Edin Urjan Kukavica

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The year that has passed differed in almost no way, except by date/number, from any year since 1996... full of brazen and insolent substitutions of theses, complete and (all)encompassing manipulations of everything, anything, and everyone, the most indecent verbal diarrhea, threats, blackmail, "successful" and unsuccessful trials, (every)day mentions of war (both the unfinished Second World War and the stopped last one, as well as announcements/threats of some future, possible or impossible ones, assurances that we should trust them more than our own eyes, wallets, and troubles, convincing us that we save best when we have nothing and that educated, learned, world-renowned experts are actually the worst rabble, thieves, and idlers whose only interest is their own promotion and idleness... in short, the past year – like all previous ones – was marked by demagoguery of the worst and cheapest kind, which no dictator or tyrant worth mentioning in history would be ashamed of, partisanship, lies, fear, and a complete absence of any sense of responsibility.

To give all of the above scientific credibility, none of the claims/references were left without comparative values: the number of verbal diarrheas is comparable to the number of secret public procurements, the amount of alleged inflow increases to funds is comparable to the amounts of collected direct and indirect taxes plus parafiscal levies for which even those who allocate them do not know where they go, the number of allegedly employed is comparable to the number of people removed from the unemployment bureaus plus the number of those who bought one-way tickets to Anywhere-but-Here... On one hand, there are open processes and initiated endeavors, charted paths, and open doors, and on the other, soup kitchens and the migrant crisis, kilometers of unbuilt highways, and a bad road from Sarajevo to Mostar, and even worse to Tuzla...

Is it worth mentioning that 23 years have passed since the war – at least this last and final one, God willing... for comparison, the former, bad, одно-minded Yugoslavia had a nuclear reactor in the 14th year after World War II, i.e., in 1959, and we – advanced, aware, and God-given – are struggling with public city transport and persistently fighting for first place on yet another black list: cities with the dirtiest air!

Bosnia and Herzegovina may indeed be an unsuccessful experiment of the international community, an attempt to find a unique approximate solution for problematic multi-ethnic countries and territories where accumulated personal frustrations and collective dissatisfaction could explode... Perhaps it is also a country of chance and a historical accident and a territory with special needs and a bargaining chip for regional territorial inadequacies and a feast for insatiable neighborly appetites whose mouths only the earth can fill... Since that time, Bosnia and Herzegovina has most often been led by people from the very edge of the definition of humanity, mental premature births, by-products of unsuccessful historical lobotomies with incurable brain tumors that press on completely non-anatomical centers... And it all began the moment when two world-class scoundrels convinced us that Bosnians and Herzegovinians do not live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but rather some constituent peoples and completely unknown people who should share power among themselves and that this is all that needs to be known and be.

In insincere relationships, it is hardest to speak the truth. And the truth is: Bosnia and Herzegovina in the past and previous years has been irrevocably marked as a wound that does not heal by the terrible cases of Memić and Dragičević, but by no means should we forget the two girls killed at a pedestrian crossing in Sarajevo (Selma Agić and Edita Malkoč), which show that all people in Bosnia and Herzegovina suffer from the same or similar problems that have nothing to do with national or any other politics, and that among people and nations – even among Bosniaks and Serbs – in this country there is much more human potential that goes far beyond all superficialities and trivialities, beyond all obscurities of meetings on Jahorina, beyond all illogical, unclear, and inexplicable mega-projects with two or three unprovoked detours up and down, beyond the announcement of prosperity for this or that number of years.