Bosnia After the War Essays

A Warning Against Nationalism
By Ilvana Dugalija & Jasmina Galijasevic
April 2000

Bosnians have known war recently with their own bodies. We wish that the world could be warned by this brutal experience. Many people have offered analyses of the causes. Having witnessed it here ourselves, we believe that nationalism particularly ignited this maelstrom.

"Cherish brotherhood and unity," Marshal Tito repeated constantly when he appeared in public. He was our prime minister and eventually our president, 1945-1980. He must have predicted what would happen if we didn't. Twenty years after his death, multi-cultural Bosnia, at the hart of former Yugoslavia, has become famous for one of the most barbaric wars in history. Unfortunately, his message hadn't penetrated.

Like a kind of virus, chauvinistic ideologies attacked a weakened body. During the '80's, the region had sustained social and political instability. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe coupled with a deep-rooted economic crisis shook the country. This made people insecure and disoriented and receptive to nationalistic propaganda.

Politicians exhorted the population with incendiary slogans. They drew on history and stirred latent animosities, old wounds which 50 years of co-existence seemed to have healed. As a consequence, some people began to believe that the answer to their malaise lay in their ethnic identity.

Surnames became of vital significance. People were separated by them. They were rationale for discrimination and eventually expulsion.

Following the referendum on independence in February 1992, divisions grew deeper. Some Bosnian Croats preferred the leadership of Tudman; some Bosnian Serbs, the leadership of Miloševic. We are convinced that the megalomania of these leaders in those neighboring states who provided modern weapons and strategies plunged us into bloody conflict.

Thousands of vanished, 250,000 dead, millions of refugees, destruction and poverty at their worst have been the result. By failing to prevent fanatics from coming to power, the development of Bosnia has been set back hundreds of years.

Witnessing what Bosnia went through should warn others that putting their trust in nationalists, as history has shown, is a dubious solution for problems. The years-long brawl in the Balkans should have been an instructive lecture on this, but obviously it wasn't. Seeing nationalism arise over and over again in all parts of the world, makes us wonder how often the same lesson has to be taught before humankind finally learns it. World, please heed our alert.