Never Again 1992

One distant April in 1992, the Sarajevo sky was, I remember well, ominously purple. The Muslim holiday of Kurban Bayram was approaching, and at the moment when the lights on the mosque near our high-rise turned on, the eerie purple sky was slashed by tracer bullets—hundreds of them.

I remember it well; it was a weekend my brother and I usually spent at our grandparents’, Branka and Milivoje, a retired lead singer of the Sarajevo Opera. That Friday, the last day of our pre-war childhood, our teacher, the strict yet soft-hearted man from Romanija, Mlađen Lopatić, divided us, the third-grade students, into groups. Our task was to finish a story from our reader in different ways, though I no longer remember its content. I only remember that we agreed to meet on Monday before classes started to compare our stories. Our stories did indeed continue, but mostly in a way that ensured we never saw each other again.

“What is this, Grandma?” I asked when the bullets tore through the sky.
“It looks like the Serbs and Muslims have decided to kill each other,” she replied in her characteristic way, comforting me with a brief explanation and without showing her own fear.

That “decision” marked the rest of my childhood—and my life. However, for those of us who were born and raised in Bosnia, it did not merely signify a gaping chasm dug between “us” and “them”—it was a decision that quite literally tore apart different parts of our own identities.

Because when people live with one another, or even just next to one another, whether consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly, that “other”—even if despised—becomes a part of our human identity.

The “decision” to “kill each other,” as my late grandmother described it, was not just a decision to take up arms against one another—it was also the disintegration of our very selves, no matter how difficult that is to admit after three and a half years of suffering and proclamations of eternal hatreds and “civilizational differences.”

The war ended nearly thirty years ago, yet not a day has passed without it being discussed—at family gatherings, on religious holidays, in cafés, in the media.

Ruthless politicians and media under their control—even those who presented themselves as progressive and conciliatory—have survived by spreading fear.

Fear that, any day now, war will break out again.

Fear that we must close ranks, remain vigilant—because if we don’t, we will once again be betrayed, slaughtered, left to the devious schemes of our closest neighbor.

It cannot be said that historical facts have not generally worked in their favor, especially since our Bosnian and Herzegovinian wars were mostly wars between neighbors, making it easiest to manipulate transgenerational traumas—to convince people that only our suffering was real, while the suffering of our neighbors was either insignificant or somehow “deserved.”

However, it was always clear that in a country governed from the U.S. Embassy, war-mongering politicians were nothing more than puppets, and that there could be no war deep within the U.S. empire’s hinterland as it pushed toward Russia’s borders—because war simply wasn’t in its interest.

Until now.

It is the spring of 2025, and global relations have shifted in such a way that, amid a flood of often contradictory reports about U.S.-Russian détente, it is still impossible to clearly discern its consequences.

In this context, the decrees of the illegitimate German overseer Christian Schmidt regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state property and the refusal of the National Assembly of the Republic of Srpska (Autonomous Serbian Republic in Bosnia created by the Dayton Peace Agreement) to enforce them are no longer just the daily political circus we’ve grown accustomed to.

The “NGO sector”, funded primarily by American foundations, which had been reduced to an outrageously well-paid, detached clique of elitists lecturing the poor about the virtues of reconciliation and life in the West, has all but vanished overnight.

In line with the “values” of the 1990s war, when preparations were being made behind the trenches for the fire-sale of socially owned property, Serbian so-called sovereignist politics is represented by a figure who does not even hide the fact that he would sell us off to Rio Tinto or some other corporation tomorrow, handing over the land for waste disposal.

Meanwhile, Bosniak “state-building” politics is embodied by figures for whom the “triumph of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s institutions”—or rather, the very existence of those institutions—is dictated by a third-rate German bureaucrat and lithium lobbyist, Christian Schmidt, who suspended the Constitution to amend the national election law in favor of Croatian national interests—a move that had Bosniak politicians wailing for monthsabout the establishment of apartheid.

While Serbian “defiance” is nothing more than just another corporate lithium scheme, the triumph of Bosnian/Bosniak “statehood” and “defiance” has been reduced to the decrees of a foreign overseer—the very antithesis of any form of statehood.

I hold my five-month-old daughter in my arms and look at the sky over Sarajevo.

It is not that ominous blue-purple hue like in the distant spring of 1992, but rather gray and sorrowful.

For the first time, I am truly afraid that we might “kill each other” again—not in the same way or to the same extent as back then, but for the same reasons:

To keep our country in colonial servitude—either for the same colonizer or for someone meant to replace them.

And then I see footage from Novi Pazar (a city in Serbia with a predominantly Muslim population)—Serb and Bosniak students dancing the Užice kolo, waving their national flags, marching together in traditional folk costumes.

Their unity is not imposed by decree.

They don’t need a foreign overseer to dictate solutions through divide-and-rule tactics.

They don’t need so-called NGOs, run by spineless people with outrageously high salaries from foreign funds, to “reconcile” them.

They have understood who the real enemy is.

They are not just no longer divided—they refuse to be divided within themselves.

They know that everything belongs to them and that all they need to do is reach out and take what is theirs.

Back in ’92, I parted ways with my classmates in front of our school—never to see each other again or truly feel as one.

I do not want that fate for my child.

The energy from Novi Pazar can and must spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina—because tomorrow, there will be no more Bosnia, no more Republika Srpska, no more Serbia for us to argue over.

There will be no more Serbs or Bosniaks, no matter where they live, if we do not unite against the real enemy—the one coming to take away the little that remains after our senseless mutual hatreds and slaughter.

Never again 1992.