Rijeka citizens, protect us from Pavelić!!!

By: Adisa Busuladžić

If there were any justice, I wouldn't be making this plea so publicly, but rather writing to the new Bosnian-Herzegovinian consul in Rijeka and complaining to him that a citizen of Rijeka, a Croatian national and a journalist by profession, persistently, arrogantly, racistly, supremacistically, orientalistically, like some colonial governor, is telling people from Sarajevo on a portal from Bosnia and Herzegovina that they should protect some mathematics professor from the University of Sarajevo who has been publicly calling them fascists, Islamists, and a unitarist mob for years (the latter, only when the said professor is in a good mood!).

And why should people from Sarajevo protect a sick man from his psychotic outbursts of rage and public threats, when there are competent judicial, police, and health institutions for that?

We all know that inciting national, racial, and religious hatred is a criminal offense in this country, and also in Croatia (one hopes!). And we all know that an accusation of Islamism in today's world means not just a mere label, but a threat to the safety of citizens. By persistently spreading the narrative of Islamism, a call for foreign military intervention is made, only to determine, after half a million or a whole million civilians are killed (it makes no difference to those who intervene in its name how many!), that the accusation was a shameless, brazen lie aimed at the complete devastation of a country.

And people from Sarajevo should endure all of this and calmly wait for it to happen as a self-fulfilling prophecy of a shepherd from the Bosnian mountains who was educated at the University of Sarajevo and still teaches mathematics there. Because the shepherd, mathematician, and university professor said we are fascists and Islamists. It's not a joke! He should be taken seriously, and he should be allowed to babble his schizoid constructions on a news portal without an editorial office and address that he has conjured up for himself.

And people from Sarajevo should now protect him from those people from Sarajevo who openly say that this man is dangerously rambling and threatening their safety!? Protect him from what Exactly. Net???

People from Sarajevo, whom regional supremacists stereotypically see as an eternal object of mockery and a symbol of mercy, should always turn a blind eye to a pathological hater, because "what's the big deal?!?

You people from Sarajevo have all seen and experienced this before with a psychiatrist and poet who also descended from the mountains to Sarajevo and became a doctor of psychiatry at the University of Sarajevo. Then, he first passionately hated Sarajevo and its people in his poetry ("let's go down to the cities to beat the scoundrels" - a famous verse by the poet Radovan Karadžić). A Sarajevo publishing house surely printed his poetry collection in the name of freedom of speech.

I clearly remember when this same psychiatrist, shortly after publishing his poetry book, founded the Party of Ecologists with its headquarters in Sarajevo (before the internet, haters of Sarajevo founded parties instead of portals!). And then he was appointed President of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), and he began to constantly and publicly accuse the people of Sarajevo of 'Islamism', 'Islamic fundamentalism', and 'creating an Islamic state within the green transversal', whatever that means.

Shortly after, he held the people of Sarajevo at gunpoint with his Chetniks. In reality, not in poetry! He held them surrounded by artillery, which he personally commanded for 1425 days, trying to kill me and all others he considered scoundrels. He killed eleven and a half thousand people from Sarajevo. Fortunately, he missed me. But the kleptofascists financed by Pavelić's homeland, Croatia, who operated in my hometown of Mostar, expelled over a hundred family members from their homes, and killed several of them on their doorsteps.

What I actually want to say is this: the people of Sarajevo and other citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina to whom one could once address some kind of enlightened appeals in the name of the so-called Mission Civilisatrice or Civilizing Mission (for those who only speak English) have, as Emir Suljagić acutely observed, mostly disappeared into mass graves.

What has survived are those of us who, scattered around the world as war refugees, have gained a lot of knowledge in the last 30-odd years that allows us to easily recognize hate speech, racist, and chauvinistic rhetoric, no matter how many honeyed disguises someone tries to wrap them in. We have academic titles from many world-renowned universities, we have worked and still work in much more demanding and important jobs in government institutions of much more powerful countries than Croatia.

For all these reasons, I ask you, dear citizens of Rijeka, to protect the current people of Sarajevo and all other citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina from your journalists. We also know that Croatia is an undemocratic society where the ruling narrative has been dictated by kleptofascists within the HDZ for over 30 years. Allow your fellow citizens-journalists to freely criticize such a society, instead of scribbling on Bosnian-Herzegovinian portals accusing us of something that exists only in their provincial, stereotype-ridden heads.

If they continue like this, you know yourselves - just as we know very well - what such idle writing can eventually turn into. Please, dear citizens of Rijeka, protect us from Pavelić!