What we defended in the war, we lost in peace!

By: Muamer Bandić for NAP

The peace we eagerly awaited during the war has never been harder than today. This cold peace is characterized by continuous political crises, usually provoked by followers of the ideologies that started the war by undermining state institutions and dividing society, and Belgrade's and Zagreb's political influence has never been more present and clear than from the signing of the Dayton Agreement to this day.

British historian Marko Attila Hoare, speaking about the current situation in Ukraine and Western pressure for Ukraine to accept some of Moscow's demands in exchange for peace, says it would be better for Ukraine to accept the Korean or Cypriot variant of a frozen conflict than the Dayton variant of peace because it is “better to be free in part of your country than a slave in the whole country”.

And no one has described these 30 years of failed and futile policy of appeasement and surrender of state institutions, which we defended, to the ideologies that destroyed it and which govern it today, better than in one sentence.
That this is the case in the executive and legislative institutions, no reasonable person disputes anymore, as it is more than obvious at every step, political move, and with every crisis that is intentionally provoked to shift the boundaries of dirty ideological penetration, and the narrative of the destroyers has become an integral part of our daily lives, i.e., legitimate, normal, and acceptable.

However, the real and long-term damage to our society lies in the judicial institutions, prosecutor's offices, and courts, where, against all common sense and at all costs, history is being revised, similar to the processes in Serbia where courts rehabilitated Chetnik commanders and the Chetnik movement, turning collaborators of the fascist occupier and criminals into freedom fighters through court decisions.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the process is slightly different. Here, Chetniks and their ideology do not need to be rehabilitated because they are already in institutions. Their narrative is an integral part of political and public life, they are socially accepted in half of the country, where they even have their associations for “promoting culture”.

Here, the judicial system serves to equate the “warring parties,” to relativize the crimes of those who committed them systematically, intentionally, and en masse, while exaggerating crimes that happened sporadically, affectively, and individually, thereby intentionally revising the narrative and culture of remembrance of the previous war and ultimately concluding that “we were all the same in that unfortunate civil war.”

In doing so, the fact that the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (MUP RBiH) were the only legal military and armed formations in the territory of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose legal successor is the current state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is completely ignored. And today, the judiciary of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is most concerned with the wartime activities of the people who defended and protected this country. The most recent example is the open harassment and process against the heroes of the defense of Goražde and Eastern Bosnia. It is difficult to find a more prominent wartime commander of the ARBiH or MUP RBiH who has not undergone the ordeal of proving their innocence because they defended their country and its constitutional and legal order.

Sefer Halilović and Naser Orić proved their innocence before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), but even that was not enough, so Naser Orić, the hero of the defense of Srebrenica, was again prosecuted by the “domestic” judiciary.

General Atif Dudaković, a brilliant military commander whom any state and nation would celebrate because it is no small feat to achieve such a victory from complete encirclement, with limited resources and fighting against three enemies, was harassed and persecuted by the state for which he fought and which he gallantly defended. Likewise, the commander of the special unit of the MUP RBiH, Dragan Vikić, a celebrated and sung hero of the defense of Sarajevo. This list is endless because it is truly difficult to find a commander against whom the Chetniks did not put a target on and whose wartime path they did not try to tarnish.

Rest assured that today, if Enver Šehović, Safet Zajko, and Fadil Đozo, or any of our wartime heroes, were alive, they would undergo the same media harassment, public slander, and rigged trials, while convicted war criminals from the Joint Criminal Enterprise (JCE) and perpetrators of genocide live freely in their reserve homelands – Croatia and Serbia. Some are even prominent public figures, which is not surprising, as it is quite clear what they fought for and under whose control they did what they did.

Today in Bosnia and Herzegovina, all those prominent individuals who defended the state, its constitutional and legal order, and basic human and civilizational rights, such as the right to life, from 1992 to 1995 are systematically prosecuted. These people did not order or organize mass expulsions and killings, destruction of sacral objects or mass rapes, nor the creation of primary, secondary, and even tertiary mass graves. We in Bosnia and Herzegovina have easily forgotten what we fought for, against whom we fought, and what kind of fight it was. We have turned our backs on our heroes and abandoned the values for which we fought, and this is already backfiring on us because today the followers of the JCE and genocidal policies are playing with us like small children, taking away through the compromised judicial system the last thing we have left, our honor and dignity.

Politically, we are already a broken and irrelevant factor, preoccupied with personal struggles for the seats of cowardly and alienated quasi-leaders without any integrity, who only have a say at the local policy levels, where they have again shown themselves to be weak and disorganized, as they essentially are.

And for the legal and social damage that Milorad Dodik inflicted on the judicial institutions in BiH through his lackey Milan Tegletija, who for years appointed personnel in courts and prosecutor's offices, the bills are yet to be paid. We already know what those bills will be from the experience of those who had the courage, honor, and integrity to defend their people and their homeland when times were toughest.

In life, it is easiest to be a coward, spineless, and tuck your tail when you need to stand up and fight. Today, one fights for the state and the people through every law, every decision, every paragraph, and every article. Whoever is not aware of this and is not ready for it has already lost the war, which is systematically waged through every intentionally provoked crisis from Belgrade and Zagreb against our state and our people. And every concession and cooperativeness in this process has cost us dearly and only moved us further away from Europe, the normal world, and ourselves. Adapting to fascism is not wisdom, nor politics, but the worst possible loss, the loss of one's own integrity.