Stoning the System

28 February 2008

One paradox of the protests held today is that minors and young people used destruction and threw stones to express demands for improved security situation, including the request to give the Police greater authority in prevention of youth delinquency. It shows, of course, that the problems in BiH society go deep and well beyond the security situation in the Canton of Sarajevo. The stone that breaks a window on the Government Building turns into a boomerang that returns to the person that threw it. In other words, something is rotten in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and we know well enough what it is. It is the Government that is rotten, at all of its various levels and structures, while enraged high school students trowing rocks at the system actually aims at his or her own reflection in the mirror.

Almost all media condemned the violence erupting at today`s protests, which was to be expected, for one can not say otherwise in public, at least in official statements for the media. Leaving aside, however, the rather routine and automatic media condemnations of retreat to violence in this and similar situations, and admitting that violence is in itself bad, there is the question whether there are other, more efficient methods to reach the goal and force the politicians to do their job.

The transition period in BiH was marked with numerous gatherings, protests and strikes, all held in the manner of peaceful and civilized civil manifestation. On the other hand, there were more radical attempts to achieve demands, aggressive but directed not to the governing structure, but against the protesters themselves. Naturally, we speak of hunger-strikes. And nothing of the above yielded results, provoked public debate. Under the best possible circumstances, one would get five-minute report in the news.

That ignorance of past peaceful protests was one of the main causes of today`s violent protests. Hey presto, suddenly everybody talks about it. The media comment and report, politicians schedule urgent sessions. Something is happening. We should be frank and open here and admit that the whole issue of `stoning the system` has been in the air for quite some time. Even in state-owned media, on radio and television, there is a growing number of programmes on the topic of revolution, passivity of citizens and demonstrations.

Don`t we talk often about France, Italy and other countries in which the flames of rebellion often sets the streets on fire to be followed by changes. Our society waited for the first stone and it was thrown. It remains to be seen if the system will now take peaceful protests seriously, or will there be other stones following that first one.