Save the Date
Today is a public holiday in my country, the anniversary of ZAVNOBIH, a WW2 comittee that was the founding body of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its humble beginning was at a small house in the Bosnian city of Mrkonjić Grad where the founding group gathered on November 25, 1943. After the third meeting, it turned into People’s Assembly which had an enthusiastic honorary membership policy. Those were awarded to Roosewelt, Stalin and Churchill simultaneously. A bit like an overambitious Boy Scouts winter camp. Nowadays it’s a bit of a drudge because it’s colliding with Black Friday so the shopping malls are closed and there’s an eerie silence around them where’d you usually expect waiting lines and a frenzy of shopping bags.
It mirrors the one in the Serbian part of the country where it isn’t acknowledged since they refuse to recognize it as something worth celebrating. Because it implies that there’s something historically binding all of us together after all. But it undermines their idea of this country as a political prison that they’re desperate to escape from by any means necessary. Instead, they choose to celebrate the signing of the Dayton Peace Treaty that didn’t achieve anything apart from literally forcing all involved sides to sign a paper ending the conflict and fuck off to deal with the disastrous consequences at home. By now we all know that isn’t really how the story unfolded, because the Serbian entity is basically a semi-independent republic in itself, latching on to the rest as a necessary evil. A bit like what the marriage of Bill Clinton must be like.
The meeting in Dayton painted a grim, but accurate picture of the situation. Three men unwilling and unable to cooperate, self-serving leaders of former colonies that proved that colonies rarely do good on their. Instead, the big kahunas of global politics reduced them to pitiful puppets that had no way out. There are all kinds of responses and reactions to what we’re remembering today. For some, a throwback to a more sensible time that may have had a better foresight of what’s best for everybody. For others, an imposing of political power by the elites. It provided enough ground for the wallowing in almost perverse practice of self-victimisation in the post-Dayton period which lasts to this very day with no end in sight.
A very different time, in the middle of the WW2 rough and tumble, a camraderie of crucial importance that managed to fight off Facists and Nazis. The memory of it is scattered all over this country, even to the point that there’s a public park that was named after the guerilla resistance fighters captured and executed by Italians in my hometown during the conflict. After the historic revisionism did its job however, Partisan forces were promptly labeled as war criminals who had more blood on their hands than the Nazis themselves. Of course it worked so each and every historical narrative unfavourable to nationalist elites was either forced deep into the background or treated as “fake news” that could be disputed or dismissed when needed.
While it seems that the fight for antifacism is lost, there might be different ways to re-appropriate the narrative. One of the reasons it didn’t happen as all-inclusive as it should is the wrong approach to it, that’s very hard to ignore. Primarily because it’s repeating the same mistakes that put such a stain on it: lack of self-criticism and reckoning with its own mistakes and injustices. Instead, young crusaders for the cause turned it into a social media platform that’s more about Instagram reels and shallow Facebook debates that hardly contribute to a serious change at the root of the issue. I belong to the last generation to take part in pre-war rituals and heritage of Antifacism: flower wreaths at the famous WW2 memorial in Mostar and taking the oath of joining their youth movement (like an ideological kindergarden).
I swear, if I see one more selfie of young hipsters at war memorials wrapped in Yugoslavian flags they dug out at a flea market, I’ll smash my fucking phone. It’s literally everywhere: in Kragujevac, there’s even a restaurant called Jugoslavija with waiters dressed up in pioneer uniforms like the one I used to wear. The wet dream of the activist youth that would prefer not to dwelve too much in discussions about WW2 crimes committed by the Antifacists they’re so enthusiastic about. Because there was an ugly side to their story as well, but it wasn’t in the spotlight that it’s in right now. Unsurprisingly, right-wing discourse today is distancing itself from the war atrocities of Nazi satellites, but not too much since that’s the preferred ideology of many of their most loyal supporters, who aren’t that keen to hide the fact in the first place. Politics is about solidifying and maintaining one’s target audience.
This is why power players are so picky about what they choose to celebrate, each vote is too precious to risk changing your course even a bit. Whatever happened at that house in Bosnia in 1943 makes no difference at all if we’re not willing to celebrate its legacy. If you ask me, including Churchill or Roosewelt in a symbolic way into it is like sending someone a “like” request on Facebook nowadays. But I guess in a situation like that you go for whatever you can get. What they got in the end along with the rest of Yugoslavia is the international Non-Aligned Movement established in Belgrade in 1961 with a membership of 120 countries worldwide. It was a sort of a bridge between the two blocs that benefited from its position in numerous ways that now remain a distant memory.
The rejection with which this important anniversary is met is indicative of the effects of 30 years of brainwashing, corruption and brain drain that’s left this country on the brink of losing reason to exist as anything but a giant ATM for aparatchicks that turned into untouchable elites overnight. It’s a subject of so many studies, essays and books so far that I’d hardly anything new to it here but my own personal perspective to it and that’s probably true for all of us. What remains is an idea we used to believe in until it was no longer convenient to do so. And the question if anyone really needs this country the way it is. I’m sure many don’t but there’s not much they can do about it. Either pack up and leave or get sucked up deep into the system in the hope they’ll get their hands on a few loose scraps of cash from the bottom of that giant barrel of corruption.
Whatever those daydreamers in 1943 promised to uphold has been betrayed and ridiculed beyond recognition in the meantime. Fast forward to Dayton in 1995 and a situation where the interrupted war continues to wreck havoc, but without bullets. It gives cultural war a new sense, a literal one. The term might be a modern invention, but it’s been going on here for almost 500 years. It didn’t end because we’re still fighting till the last man standing. Historical grudges have been passed on from one generation to the other to keep constant friction that brought about the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995. For a genocide is a purge of scapegoats. Cleaning downtrodden stables from the stench of manure they’re reduced to. And there’s no real retribution, no release or recovery. In order to do so, we’d need a time machine to reverse everything that happened. But since that’s impossible, the only other plausible option for a change is a revolution but it usually ends up in the opposite of what it was supposed to achieve.
Just like the idea on which the pre-war federation of our countries was based, it’s been pronounced clinically dead by everyone but the consummate activits that still seek to retrieve any ideological residue in the ashes after the whole system was torched and drenched in blood of the 1990s. That’s exactly what November 25 represents. A residue. We can’t allow eloquent demagogues and blatant revisionists to turn our past, present and future into a playground of those that snatched them when we were too scared or too weak to hold on. So why do we still allow them to do it? Because we’re still scared. The ground underneath our feet is still shaking.
The Russian imperial family was slaughtered in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. They expected a safe heaven in England but it wasn’t meant to be. Something similar might be said for the aftermath of November 25 in Bosnia and Herzegovina: it wasn’t meant to be. A political creature that’s denied the only absolution that could possibly silence its woes. A dissolution into three miniature democratorships in the midst of Europe to keep everyone away from each other’s throats. It’s highly unlikely to happen because the price of it is to high to concider in the first place. You might describe them as a dictatorships in velvet gloves, where democracy is a thin veil that barely manages to conceal what goes on beneath. Which is the absence of responsibility, accountability, integrity and sincerity.
But who cares? We’re so used to all of it that even lifting a finger to upset the chaos, to at least try to be the one bug in the system is too tiresome in its painful futility. Our leaders can only assume that title because the only place they will lead us to is to hell. While some of them are paying due respects to the legacy of ZAVNOBiH and others openly shun away from it, you might say that the latter at least don’t pretend it’s not just an another empty gesture. Those people deserved better. If a picture tells a thousand words, the sad state of that house in Mrkonjić Grad says it all. A witness to what started as a promise, now unsettling, derelict and abandoned. Knowing its significance makes it even more uncomfortable to see until you notice a detail next to the door.
On the address plate is a number too ironic to be true. One. The absurd beauty of this country is that in spite of its absurdities something like this makes perfect sense. You know it’s a bleak joke, but you still laugh because it’s true. Maybe that’s where my resistance to this big depressing circus comes from. The monkeys are on the loose and the elephant is in the middle of the room. But just like every other circus it will sooner or later leave the fairground. Maybe the ground will cease to shake. Hopefully we finally had more than we can take.
