Revision of Lost Lives: A Civilisational Issue and a Natural Attempt to Reach the Truth

The question of the proposal for revision of the judgment before the International Court of Justice is a legal matter. A civilisational issue. A natural attempt to reach the truth about what happened here from '92 to '95.

It is also necessary that Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats finally know what their children fought and died for. For what kind of great-state nails? Those in the coffin oak-beech? It is impossible, after two and a half decades, to deny the genocide in Srebrenica and expect the other side to remain silent about such brutalities. Justice cannot be mocked.

To seek a rewriting of the truth. To revise history. And to block the attempt to revise the judgment on that history. One cannot remain silent about crimes in one's own public sphere. And at the same time deny the verdicts of international justice.

You cannot speak about judicial injustice towards convicted criminals, without uttering a single word about the content and circumstances of that crime. The entire military and political leadership of Serbia and Republika Srpska has been convicted at the Tribunal in The Hague, yet the public in Serbia still speaks of threatened Serbdom and international courts turned against Serbia. Never, on any occasion, have the media in Serbia published details about the camps, rapes, mass crimes and genocide committed across Bosnia and Herzegovina by Milošević's regime and the Yugoslav Army.

Serbia's entire relationship to the crime has been reduced to criticism of the Tribunal's verdicts and those circus performances of Vojislav Šešelj, which filled the programming of Serbian television after midnight. And Serbian war-themed films, about the horrors in Bosnia, resembled that Šešelj Hague circus. It turned out that in terrible mass liquidations and unheard-of suffering, one must always set aside a bit of cynicism, some comic note.

Which should one day turn into jokes about killing Mujo and Suljo. „Knife, wire, Srebrenica“ is a slogan we have heard and seen countless times at sports events in Serbia and RS. Those were cold confessions and cynical mockery of their own crime. And never was the most ordinary human repentance heard for crimes against humanity and genocide. There is no expression of conscience.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian Serbs merely follow what is offered to them as an exit and solution in Belgrade. The corpses are still neatly arranged in family closets. All these years we have watched the washing of hands from crime and the showering from the mud of the nineties. Serbia, with Milošević in the nineties, stepped into the Middle Ages, and in the 21st century returned to the nineties.

That is why all those who were on the side of evil in the nineties are today celebrated as heroes and simply come to power. Twenty-five years later, nothing has changed.

There is nothing except twenty-five years of denying the crime. So persistently and brutally, as if it never happened. As if there are no victims, whose 32,000 were extracted only from secret graves. Secondary and tertiary. One must tell the souls of the parents and relatives of that fallen youth that they died in vain for a Greater Serbia. The authorities in RS and Serbia will never officially say why the war was fought and why people died. The people must be kept in the belief that some national goals were achieved. They will not say that they died in vain and that they killed for nothing.

Written by: Sead Omeragić