City on the Edge of the Galaxy

At the opening of the Queer Sarajevo Festival, Sarajevo got slapped so hard that I think my ears still buzz. On the other hand, we have stopped counting the slaps long time ago and we have lost our capacity for memory and sense of propriety.

We thought it would never come to Sarajevo. We thought we were special. We survived the siege, defended ourselves from aggression, laughed at the names of towns and foresting companies in the other entity. We laughed when we saw the flags and listened to worn out and once malicious slogans. We ridiculed the radicals, boasted our multiculturalism and thought that the end of siege meant the end of all evil and one form of fascism.

Should we look, so to say, objectively, unemotionally and from a distance, it is obvious that what we never thought will come has arrived to Sarajevo. Xenophobia sneaked inside the city, hatred of everyone and everything different arrived. We now have violence as a form of communication, we have everything that we and our fathers fought on the first line of defence of Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

At the QSF opening, the phenomena listed above manifested as a physical attack on the members of the Q population, although, frankly, it was journalists and citizens of Sarajevo that got the worse, together with one foreign guest and one policeman. It all happened in front of the diplomatic corps and foreign guests, so international media carried the story accompanied with video footage. It could have been me, it could have been you. It was my friends and people I know that got beat up and I wasn`t there. I didn`t stand by the people who stood in the way of something that we should not be proud of, which doesn`t have a nice name and doesn`t recall nice feelings.

Some may say I overreact and there is no need for alarm. But, if so many years after the aggression they don`t see that all that goes on around us is a consequence of the division of the country along national lines, or sick ideas and wrong policies, I can`t help their perception problem.

I think that after the attack on the citizens at the Festival opening night, the first line of defence of the universal civilized values and normalcy in this city and the state has moved really close to all those who try to think with their own heads. The line has been drawn in Sarajevo and every other city and town in BiH, for everyone who refuses to fit within the framework of behaviour norms set by the fake defenders of national interests in the country. They will be the first to get a beating wherever they live. We seem to fail to realize the situation that we live in, stunned by the siege, aggression and everything that happened to us in the not so distant past.

If there are still people who are so mislead to believe that the failure to remove cantonal and city officials is not related with prime minister Brankovic`s ...it was in accordance with the law..., Milorad Dodik`s roads and Government Building; and all of the above with the division of Stolac and the attacks on he returnees, they are gravely mistaken. All of that, and million other things more, have everything to do with the attack on the citizens that got beat up. Two schools under one roof are related to the goods in the stock reserves with expired shelf life, with the oil refinery, the roaming charged by three mobile phone operators, weekend houses, forged university diplomas and corrupt prosecution authorities... We are being transformed into a small backwards country, a city at the edge of the galaxy, getting poorer and more ignorant daily. We live our fake lives and console ourselves and we lie to each other, often simultaneously.

How could we agree to all of this? Citizens of Sarajevo, and allegedly Mostar and Banja Luka before them, agreed to religious education being introduced in kindergartens, then we send our kids to two schools under three roofs, students agreed to pay for their exams and provide sexual services to professors... Workers agreed not to be paid and go on hunger strikes. We get occupied with glass covered monolithic buildings and sell the future of our children, all in the name of the nation. And then, we get confounded by the consequences that appear in the shape of beatings given to our fellow citizens by certain elements that have different names in Sarajevo, Trebinje, Mostar and Čapljina, but all have almost identical arguments and slightly different slogans. They do it to keep their alleged patrons in power and keep us hostages to their mislead policies. When will it stop?

How can we fight the thing that we turn into? What are the aims of the rulers of this country and their banner-holders? Don`t we understand that our future, our children`s future is under threat? The question is how to fight the uniformity imposed on us? Or, is that what we want to tell ourselves and our children?

If that is the case, I just feel sorry for all those young men and innocent civilians killed for something else, for universal civilized values and human rights, against division of any kind. They fought for everything we are not. They stood for good and against the evil that we seem to have accepted without much fight. I don`t know how it happened but the hints are all around us. We just moved to the side, pulling back until our space was totally restricted. We avoided some cities, regions, places, events. We now talk rarely to unknown people without a very good reason. Then our friends left and we ourselves have started weighing whether to stay or leave, unsafe in the streets of our own city. All the while, they try to convince us that everything is OK, we just need the highway and it will be hanky-dory forever.

So, we need to fight or hit the road. Those who live will tell the story. We need a deep cut and quickly. Or we could continue doing nothing and just blabber about the consequences!