Another year passes: politically perhaps the worst since the war. Getting closer to the bottom, Bosnia and Herzegovina is living its darkest times. Almost everywhere in Europe, negativist, right-wing forces have won, whose ‘philosophy’ is based on the threat coming from the ‘others’. It’s a slimy, and a pretentious game, which, in fact, keeps people in fear of not being able to see the real problems. During this time the new feudal lords become rich. And then they unite, always according to the ‘logic’ that the two stronger go to crush the weaker. It seems to be deep in human nature. And in that combinatorics, Bosnia and Herzegovina has very little chance of survival.
The Brussels administration provides, indeed, a wide range of possibilities for decision makers to hide their true face for a long time. There are almost more legal elements of obstruction than in the former Yugoslavia, and it seems that the only thing that keeps this pretentious community together is a common cash register. That, for now, will not fail. Everything else seems to be in question. And that atmosphere, to some extent, is reminiscent of 1991. Year zero of entropy.
Which produced an epoch lasting three decades.
The reality is not on our side
Because, in essence, it no longer matters who is lying when they say that the Commissioner for Enlargement, Oliver Varhely, ‘opposed Milorad Dodik’, when he revealed his plans to him. The information that ‘leaked’, regarding the fact that Dodik coordinated the session of the assembly with the Commissioner for Enlargement, can be presented in various ways, but it is clear that Rubik’s cube of stabilization and joining Bosnia and Herzegovina is held by Orban’s direct subordinates. To believe that Varhely is pro-Bosnian is much like believing that the JNA and Serb paramilitaries will not attack Sarajevo in 1992. Which, let’s recall, was thought by three quarters of people I had the opportunity to hang out with.
And maybe that naivety is what keeps us from evil? Like in fairy tales. Because the reality is really not on our side. She never was, you will say, and for the most part, you will be right. Recall, after the October elections, it took the government 14 months to establish. The dysfunction was felt in all foundations: of the fourteen magical priorities set by the EU for gaining candidate status, BiH has not fulfilled any of them. So no more fourth from the bottom, as before the war, but at the bottom. Wherever we turned, we had something to see: a race across the border to Serbia for vaccinations, donations from various countries, the inability to issue a covid passport for travel. Lethargy ‘decorated’ with lies is the basic ‘capacity’ of this time.
And then it no longer matters whether people, and even entire nations, hate each other.
It is important that they maintain power by creating conflict with each other. In that story, Oliver Varhely is no guarantor of a solution, but a naturally accrued member of a legalized criminal organization. Dodik and Orban do not visit each other because of common preferences, but because Milorad stays free, after everything he has done. And it all comes at a price. In that sense, the independence of the Republika Srpska is no longer such a spectacular or unattainable goal. If they have already allowed them to call themselves that and do all this, why not allow them independence? Gray apparatchiks like Varhely will not stand in the way of the formal division of the country.
Because it is essentially divided and one escapes from it.
And the next war would destroy it permanently.
Her environment is nothing: I personally think, and that is how their relationship began, that Vučić does not have great inclinations towards Dodik. Both of them think that ‘one’ is enough for everyone – and Dodik is, of course, the other in that story. Maybe that’s why they are drawing on the walls in Banja Luka – not Vučić’s – but murals of the obscure Minister of Defense Aleksandar Vulin. Croatian President Zoran Milanović has followed Orban, and that is probably the worst move he has made in his entire career. Or, perhaps, he still had to, because he joined the Russian financial lobby even earlier.
Which, in fact, aided by China, does all this in Bosnia, going against the grain towards the West.
And it won’t stop this year or next. This will last as long as the European Union protects the principle that you can act anti-civilizational if you are ‘inside’ the wire. If not–then nothing. That hypocrisy, and that paradox–that’s Varhely.
And that is the European Union for us today.
Ultimate political reach
Because, let us remember again, the NATO intervention during the last war, in 1995, did not come after the four-year massacre of Sarajevo, nor after the genocide in Srebrenica, but when members of the Republika Srpska Army played a little and arrested soldiers from the French battalion with NATO forces.
They were slapped a little, mistreated a little, and then tied to electric poles. It was this that triggered the international action. The breakpoint.
Before the war it was known as–‘the point’.
So, if something is supposed to happen in 2022, then we should wish all the actors in this gloomy story a little maliciously that their pawns ‘play’ a little. And they play a ‘point’.
And to finally show that tying people to a tree is, in fact, their ultimate (political) reach.
Until then, we all stay bound. The ropes woven for us by our politicians, tightened by European Commissioner Varhely.
Happy New Year 2022.
Is there any hope that we will finally cut the rope in it?
