For BiH, Dodik's policies are less dangerous than those whose scope is 'baby soup kitchens' for returnees

By Ernad Metaj

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Bosniaks will be here for another twenty years and then they won't be. Others will inherit us and I hope they will be happy! This is what Đile says at the end of the documentary film “Ostaj” from Brussels, a man who returned to Srebrenica from wealthy Switzerland. He miraculously survived the genocide. The executioners did not finish the job because he was covered by the bodies of his fellow citizens thrown into a pit.

The film was directed by a French student of editing and scriptwriting in Brussels who, through striking portraits of former refugees who returned to their homeland, realized that they could hardly survive there. They repaired houses, planted flowers, but the author concludes that the past does not return, and there is no future.

The returnees from this film are second-class citizens in their city, in their country. They are excluded from political life, they have difficulty, or no employment, and the future for their descendants is uncertain.

These days, the news that the first public kitchen for babies was opened in Bratunac has caused a media buzz. A humanitarian gesture by the association Obraduj nekoga (Make Someone Happy), which nevertheless does not bring joy regarding the future survival of returnees in Podrinje. The kitchen already has 30 users. From the media, we saw that most of them are returnees. The Serb authorities want to drive them away anyway, which is why the genocide happened, and children growing up without enough food, who don't know they should be surrounded by more teddy bears and other toys, are a disgrace to the political representatives of Bosniaks as well.

The baby kitchen is a reality that reveals the hypocrisy of Bosniak politics, behind whose false patriotism lies a new betrayal of BiH. The ethnic cleansing that began in the war is ending peacefully with the approval of the politics from the Federation of BiH. Returnee families with three or more children should not have reached a situation where their nutrition depends on a public kitchen.

Perhaps someone will now comment that there have always been poor people, which is true, but that should not be an excuse for absolving those responsible, because they offered the surviving victims suffering and uncertainty as their future, because they are sacrificing them again for their political deals. Parents of young children condemned to feed their children in a public kitchen are a defeat for Bosniak politics, but also proof that most of them are not interested in RS any more than the mathematics for winning another mandate from which they live well.

An exponent of such politics is certainly Ramiz Salkić, who has been part of the RS government for over a decade. In his greenhouses, lettuce will soon sprout again, which he proudly showed off on social networks not so long ago. Ramiz is one of the many politicians who saw his own future and the future of his children in the FBiH, while as a politician he convinced people that there is nowhere more beautiful than their own hearth.

During Salkić's rule and the politics he personifies, the number of returnees to RS has halved. It was known that rebuilding a house was not enough to start life anew. Idyllic pictures of a family happy because they have a house, a piece of arable land, and a few head of cattle are still just a romantic fairy tale that today lives only in old western films.

The users of the public kitchen for babies are the best picture of a policy that has spent more than a billion marks on return, which has proven to be sustainable only for the chosen few. The rest are collateral damage of a criminal octopus that lost its face long ago because it washed money through the suffering of returnees, money that could and should have brought life back to burnt-out Bosniak villages. Numerous houses have been renovated, but they stand empty. No one ever planned to return to many of them, some serve as weekend houses, and some real returnees have never even received adequate shelter.

The public kitchen for babies is a testament to this through the confessions of its new users. Three or more children are growing up in facilities that leak, and it is unclear whether hunger or the dampness in which they sleep is worse.
The public kitchen for babies is yet another capitulation of false patriots who have never truly fought for a unified BiH. Their films are different from that of the French author. They hide the truth with their films. In twenty years, there will be no Bosniaks in RS. The old will die, and the generations raised in public kitchens will not want that to be the future of their children. And they shouldn't.

People will manage, and the loser will be the state. The only salvation for a unified BiH is not in policies that will only show muscles to Milorad Dodik. Wars have brought no good to anyone, nor could they destroy an entire nation. The proof of this are the returnees to RS, without whom the story of BiH's integrity becomes illusory. Therefore, the only solution for the salvation of the state is wise and sincere policies that know and want to economically empower people. There has always been more money than wisdom and sincerity.