Srđan Šušnica: I feel sorry for the Paris victims, but the tragedy of my Bosniak and Catholic neighbours is closer to me

I feel sorry for the Parisian and French citizens, I am furious at Islamic fundamentalists who take the right to life or death into their own hands, but I also feel sorry for my neighbours and I am furious at Serbian extremists and nationalists who took it upon themselves to exterminate entire villages and towns of my Bosniak and Catholic neighbours.

That tragedy is nevertheless closer to me because it is part of our existence and life here and now, wrote Banja Luka culturologist and researcher Srđan Šušnica, after terrorists in Paris killed nearly 130 people and wounded several hundred, reports the Bosnian news agency Patria (NAP).

In his open letter, which he sent to the editorial office of Patria, Šušnica recalled the Bunarevi pit, near the Manjača camp, into which the bodies of 24 people, citizens of BiH, Bosniaks who were imprisoned and killed because of their name, surname, religion or nationality, were thrown in 1992.

One of the pits into which the bodies of Bosniaks and Croats were thrown during the last conflicts (Photo: Archive)

The Manjača camp, Šušnica recalls, served in the system of concentration-transit camps and places of detention of Prijedor and this part of BiH, through which the wartime elite of Belgrade and the SDS committed genocide in Bosanska Krajina.

- It is a shame that the state of BiH still does not have a list of places and dates of remembrance for the victims of all crimes committed in this war, does not have a prescribed universal state protocol for commemoration, nor does it attempt to mark and protect these places from oblivion and humiliation, whether it is Tomašica, Omarska or Kazani.

Through oblivion and denial, victims are killed and humiliated once again, regardless of whose they are... – warns Šušnica.

He says that the wartime elite of Belgrade and the SDS managed to expel and exterminate large enclaves of the non-Serb population of Prijedor, Sanski Most, Ključ, Kotor Varoš and Banja Luka through a campaign of cascading terror, attacks on villages, individual and group murders in villages and homes, mass deportations, marking, grouping, detention, transferring from one camp to another or transferring part of the camp inmates to execution sites where they were systematically liquidated, claiming that what would eventually happen in Srebrenica actually began in Krajina, the strategically most important region of the Belgrade plan "RAM", which had to be "cleansed" and controlled in order to enable the connection of RSK, Banja Luka, Bijeljina and Belgrade and to continue with the ethno-territorial homogenization of the so-called Serbian lands.

- War crimes committed in the name of the RS were the goal, not the consequences of the war, which is an important difference compared to other crimes committed in the war in BiH – writes Šušnica.

- Crimes of ethnic extermination, expulsion and genocide were not a consequence, but the goal of an aggressive and profiteering war that tore apart and destroyed the fragile and precious social substrate of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its inter-ethnic communities.

The political blackmail of the militarily superior Belgrade elite, which read "if you secede, there will be war", from the beginning had as an alternative military and paramilitary organization, followed by political ethno-national homogenization of BiH citizens who perceived themselves as Serbs or Orthodox Christians.

For such a thing, intensive media indoctrination and victimization were needed, but also criminalization and dehumanization of those "others", one's own neighbours.

For ethno-national homogenization on the claimed "Serbian land" in BiH, it was necessary to demographically exterminate and expel the majority of non-Serbs and establish an ethno-exclusive territorial-political entity called the "Republika Srpska".

First, there was a homogenization of the elite that had already emerged in the first multi-party elections, where the political elite split along national and religious lines, rather than on some rational basis. Then there is the element of a frantic war-mongering and nation-building, i.e., nation-stabilizing media propaganda, mostly from Belgrade, and then the element of victimization, in which Jasenovac and the crimes of Nazis, fascists and collaborators against the Serbian population in World War II were used, especially towards the Serbian population.

After that, the mobilization and arming of the Serbian population begins, ethno-territorialization and military takeover of Bosnian-Herzegovinian municipalities, followed by elitocide against prominent non-Serbs. After that, space was created for unpunished and unstoppable genocide. Demographic genocide and crimes are simultaneously accompanied by the complete erasure, destruction and oblivion of non-Serb and ideologically unsuitable cultural-political identifications and narratives, from street names to religious buildings.

This kind of culturocide, like the consequences of the demographic one, is still felt today on the streets of Banja Luka and other municipalities in the RS. Both at the level of official (selective) remembrance and oblivion policies, and at the level of street communication.

What was foreseen by the Belgrade military-strategic plan RAM, in its organized and mass form, begins with terror against the Catholic and Bosniak population in Bosanska Krajina, Prijedor, Banja Luka, Kotor Varoš and the Sana Valley, and ends with Srebrenica and a renewed campaign of expulsion of the remaining non-Serb population of Bosanska Krajina. The circle closed where it began – writes Šušnica further in his letter.

Šušnica finally claims that in the RS, which was created precisely on the basis of the RAM plan and extermination on ethnic and religious grounds, today a policy of silence, oblivion and denial of the genocide and crimes on which the RS was built prevails.