Kemal Kurspahic of the Sarajevo weekly 'Svijet' looks at the editorial policy of some of the mainstream Sarajevo papers, like 'Ljiljan', and what kind of politics they are advocating. Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdzic hurried to United States to agitate at a number of universities against the division of Bosnia. His visit had a much more modest media echo and effect then his numerous previous visits to the US. This is mainly due to the fact that the prime minister chose a wrong address to defend the integrity of Bosnian state.
The US does not want to reward Greater Serbian and Greater Croatian aspirations towards Bosnia. Silajdzic - as well as anybody who cares about the future of the integral Bosnian state - instead of dissipating energy on the polemics with pensioned American dividers of Bosnia, could do much more if he would direct this energy towards much more realistic enemies of the Bosnian statehood in the top of the ruling Bosnian elite.
While Siljadjic was rejecting Kissingers ideas, the proponents of the ethnic division of Bosnia have been receiving best arguments exactly from Sarajevo, from the SDA party central office, in the form of the harangue lead by Ljiljan editor Dzemaludin Latic against journalists Gojko Beric and Marko Vesovic. Some of the leading Greater Serbian propagandists in the US, who are consistently playing that broken record concerning Serb right to self - determination and unacceptance of the three Bosnian nations to keep on living together, now wave with Dzemaludin Latic and Ljiljan in their discussions on the divisions in Bosnia in Washington.
They say - you see, the Bosniaks do not want to live with others, the division of Bosnia is a reality. Opening up the harangue on mixed marriages and proclaiming the children born in those marriages, in the good tradition of clean race theories, disoriented; jamming the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina into politics by including three army generals in the main board of the party - and cleansing it of the non - Bosniak command staff; allowing terror against the members of the religious institutions and Serbian and Croat minority on the territories with Bosniak majority; and, lastly, opening a harangue against the proven defenders of history, culture and tradition of tolerance in multi ethnic Bosnia, such as Beric and Vesovic are, the Bosniak extreme Islamists have caused irreparable damage to the idea of integral Bosnia.
Numerous friends of Bosnia in the world have come at least puzzled after this last campaign by Latic: if in todays Sarajevo somebody like Gojko Beric is considered a problem even after in the New Years commentary for 1992 he wrote that it was the year of Serb fascism and if somebody like Marko Vesovic is persecuted as a Serb curse even though he is well known as a fighter against SDS terror in Sarajevo, what kind of message is this to all other non-Bosniaks, and what kind of hope is then left for safeguarding Bosnian integrity ?
What is even more sad is the UNPROFOR style reaction of the Bosniak intellectual and political elite to this offensive of anti- Bosnian Bosniaks. Both, the statement of the Bosnian Writers Society about neutrality in the conflict between the sides in conflict and statements of the Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic about how he is sad when Bosnians quarrel arrogantly refuse to see that there is no question about polemics here between two poets; one of them is a member of the central committee of the ruling political party and it has no right to stay silent and indifferent towards manifestations of bullying of others. Unless it itself is not deep into the business of dividing Bosnia.
Source: Sarajevo weekly 'Svijet', January 18, 1998