Can anyone stop this madness?

New Zealand's national television broadcast the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, as a sign of remembrance for the Muslims killed in the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, who were killed by Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant, inspired, among others, by the Balkan butcher Radovan Karadžić. 

Five days after the massacre, Tarrant was interrogated in a New Zealand prison, and his idol Karadžić was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Court in The Hague for genocide in Srebrenica and other crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. Thus, both teacher and student have been sent to the dustbin of history.

In which ideological direction should we look for the cause of the evil that befell Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, led by Karadžić, and which a few days ago cost the lives of 50 worshippers in the Al Noor mosque, most of whom certainly probably don't even know where Bosnia and Herzegovina is, just as few in BiH know about Christchurch? It should, of course, be sought in Greater Serbian nationalism, which furiously began to attack neighboring countries at the end of the last century, and which, in its monstrosity, gave rise to many other '-isms', and as former Serbian Minister of Defense Dragan Šutanovac said, 'plunged both its own and other peoples into mourning.' 

What can be said about it today? The only thing more dangerous than one hundred thousand dead and hundreds of thousands displaced from the Balkans in the period behind us is that such an ideology has continuity and has not been extinguished to this day. Karadžić's sentence was welcomed by the whole world, from east to west, while it was rejected by the political leadership of Serbia, as well as the political representatives of Republika Srpska, although the entire former military and political leadership of that entity in BiH has been convicted of genocide and other crimes before the UN court, while some of them have admitted to these crimes themselves, such as Biljana Plavšić. Milorad Dodik also told reporters in Banja Luka, despite all his denial of the verdict, that he would never support a law that would ban the denial of crimes.

The fascist ideology defended by Dodik, Vučić, and Brnabić has been alive in continuity since World War II and Draža Mihajlović, was interrupted during Tito's Yugoslavia, and then re-established and uninterrupted from the mid-1980s with the arrival of Milošević, up to the present day, when Vučić and Dodik ride on nationalism. Therefore, it is not just about sick individuals who, at a certain moment and in a certain space, hate others and the different, but about an aggressive blindness that has been threatening these areas and all the peoples living there for almost four decades.

Academician Esad Duraković, in his article "Religious Violence or Moral Monstrosity" published on Patria, warns that the world has largely entered the phase of religious wars and religious terrorism. This is becoming global. In the Middle East – in the very essence of things, even if it doesn't seem so at first glance – religious wars are being waged, which in some important aspects represent modernized replicas of the Crusades. Terrorism from Nice to New Zealand is extremely religious... Can we say that on a micro level in Bosnia and Herzegovina, from the 1990s to the present day, a war has also been waged against an entire people simply because they are Muslims? 

To better understand this professor's thesis, let's unpack the political messages of the leading Serbian politicians in the region over the last 30 years. First, Karadžić, in a speech to the parliament of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina on October 17, 1991, warned that the Muslim people would disappear. During that speech, Karadžić said: "Don't think that you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina to hell and the Muslim people perhaps to extinction, because the Muslim people cannot defend themselves if there is a war here..." A few years later, the current president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, also from the parliamentary benches, this time from the Parliament of Serbia, threatened that for every Serb killed, he would kill 100 Muslims: "Kill one Serb, we will kill a hundred Muslims, and let's see if the international community or anyone else dares to attack Serbian positions, and whether one can behave like that with the Serbian people." Vučić said this just two weeks after the Srebrenica genocide on July 11, 1995, when the international community threatened to bomb Serbian army positions because of those crimes. The current chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik, continued the same rhetoric. As president of Republika Srpska in 2010, he stated that "Muslim judges cannot judge him."

Does fascist politics, from Karadžić through Vučić and up to today's Dodik, offer any argument for fighting against Bosniaks, other than the fact that they are Muslims? If that is the only reason for inciting one people against another, then Professor Duraković is right when he speaks of religious wars, which are all the more dangerous because "their goal is not only to eliminate the Other, as a member of another religion, but the real, 'exalted' goal is to eliminate him in such a way that his religion – with all its most sensitive particularities – is presented as something that is supposedly worthy of the greatest possible humiliation and trivialization, and on the other hand – that one's own religion is presented in supposed sublimity, in a superiority that, as such, must not tolerate 'otherness'."

But there is still one more problem that needs to be deciphered before we definitively declare the era of religious wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Which religion do Karadžić, Vučić, and Dodik represent? God to whom the Serbian Orthodox Church appeals says – do not kill! The Church opposes abortion, i.e., the killing of an unborn being, so Karadžić and Vučić are even more in trouble when they call for the killing of children who have already been born and raised, or are starting to be raised.

Is it possible, and how, to stop this evil fate? In Bosnia and Herzegovina, this is possible only with the pressure of great powers, just as after World War II the Americans helped reconciliation between Germany and France. These countries are today the personification of mature society in Europe. Germans and French were pulled out of the mire by American help and fear of the Soviets. Processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina are again going in the wrong direction. From an environment in which war criminals are glorified even after international condemnation, only new bloodshed can emerge. In all of this, only the United States of America is again acting concretely, more or less. From the European Union, as in the 1990s, we again see condemnations, expressions of concern, and calls for reconciliation. Nationalists do not heed such messages. They only understand the arguments of force. If allowed, they will produce new conflicts.