The Last Days of December 2000

Best Regards from Sarajevo

AIM Sarajevo, December 25, 2000

No matter who you chose to ask in Sarajevo in the last days of December 2000 where they would be on New Year's eve the answer was most frequently the same: At Home! Even the popular singer Dino Merlin whose song “For Years” sung in a duet with Ivan Banfic was played last year from Mount Triglav (in Slovenia) to Djevdjelija (the Southernmost town in Macedonia), that is on the whole territory of former Yugoslavia, refused every offer to sing on the New Year's eve – and the latest offer was from Montenegrin seaside resort Budva. Although he was offered fantastic 100 thousand German marks for the craziest night in the year, he, too, chose to stay “at home on his couch”. For the sake of comparison, the average salary in the past year, according to just published data in B&H Federation amounts to 426 marks and in Republika Srpska just 270 German marks!

When this, central part of our united B&H homeland is concerned, lack of money is not the only reason why the people will stay at home, especially when the Bosniacs are concerned. In Bosniac homes for a few Decembers in a row the best meals are prepared in the days of the Ramadan in order to make them as pompous as possible. Unlike a few previous years, this year the Bosniacs might even come out of their homes on December 31 because the fast (Ramadan) will not include the craziest night. Bairam is a few days before it, so regardless of the strict Islamic rules, many may have a few drinks.

The “others” will stay at home partly because of the mentioned lack of money, and partly “just like that”. This “just like that” stands for the fact that nowadays they are living in a new environment in which there are no relatives, no old friends, colleagues... What would this New Year's eve be like in which you would sit at a table smiling politely to new acquaintances whom you would even have to embrace at midnight. For comfort you have cards form your old friends and relatives who are in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or Denmark... which still travel for half as long than good wishes from your best man from Belgrade which in the past years, although regularly sent, mostly did not arrive at all.

And the last days of 2000 are passing quite unnoticeable. What reminds of the holidays are only two scantily decorated Christmas trees in the centre of Sarajevo, in front of Imperial cafe which is in Napredak Palace and which the Croat Cultural Society bearing the same name has mostly managed to get back, so that their Economic Bank is in the same building now. An enormous Christmas tree was taken into the St. Joseph Church at Marindvor square (allegedly it was a present of some Muslim who had to cut it because of construction of his house, and he was sorry to just throw it away), but it still is not decorated. In the cold church poorly wired for sound, at an appropriate performance on December 6, St. Nicholas first scolded the children by saying “Look how many of you have come here today, how come you don't come for mass on Sunday?!” In the street still called Tito's, the main one in the city, bookstores offer New Year greeting cards, and in the window of Kompas tourist office there are even humble holiday decorations. When little lamps (for comparison, to decorate the whole city, fewer lamps are used than on a single tree in any Western city) light up, they can almost throw light of the wall across the street and the large graffito written on it: “The Islamic Revolution has begun!” And in the central road in Sarajevo, once Djure Djakovica street and nowadays Alipasa's, not far from American Embassy in the most elite part of the city called Ciglane, there is a graffito which is even more definite: “Islamic Revolution has dawned on us. Why are you still asleep!”

To editorial teams of the media, unlike mostly long forgotten joint holidays, celebrations and festivities of a long time ago, very few greetings are arriving for publication. Perhaps some of the media will earn more than expected from advertising space like in the beginning of 1999 when the then governor of the Sarajevo Canton “paid” whole pages in newspapers in order to thank all those who congratulated him on the nomination by listing all their names. This page, which was not at all cheap appeared in all the dailies by order of the Sarajevo Canton, that is, paid for from the Cantonal budget which is made up of the citizens' money. It turned out, therefore, that Sarajevans (very few of them true ones, so that it would always be more appropriate to say the inhabitants of Sarajevo) paid for the letter of thanks. Those too, who had no intention whatsoever to give their money or anything of the sort. Some independent journalists, and there are less and less of them, interpreted this letter of thanks in the correct manner which the governor did not like at all, of course. Nevertheless, he did the only thing that could save him – they say that the governor withdrew the Cantonal order and paid for the advertisement himself. Nobody checked whether he really did!

There were also some funny things that year, like when at the last annual press conference of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) its president Alija Izetbegovic – who had once when he was also the president of B&H Presidency prohibited Santa Clause – declared that he was in fact a Social Democrat. The next day a letter arrived for him to the headquarters of SDA with contained an application form for membership in the Social Democratic Party. Zlatko Lagumdzija (its president) was somewhere abroad at the time initiating international support “for changes”, while this December he has spent mostly “travelling” from one city cafe to another in order to make an agreement with Haris Silajdzic and Kresimir Zubak on Democratic Alliance for Changes, since they had not received a sufficient number of post-election congratulation notes. They have allegedly talked in a private car even, so nobody could eavesdrop.

Let us go back once more to the year 1999 and its turn into the year

1. Helid Genjac, the current Bosniac member of B&H Presidency and at the time “just” vice-president of SDA, was very angry because of the caricature by Bozo Stefanovic, published on the front page of the New Year's issue of Oslobodjenje. At the caricature the figure 1 (in 1999) which represents the opposition addressed the three nines (one with a fez on its head, the second with the Serb military cap, and the third with a hat, marked with SDA, SDS – Serb Democratic Party and HDZ – Croat Democratic Community, respectively) saying: “Don't you boast, next year you will all be noughts!” Mr. Genjac read it as “putting an equation mark between the SDA and the SDS”, and then a whole tirade followed against Oslobodjenje and then the conclusion that Mr. Genjac could have expected something like that from Bozo, but not from Mehmed (the editor-in-chief at the time).

As concerning the figure one that this year turned into figure two and zeroes with which we have lived in the past twelve months, or the ruling parties and the opposition, any normal calculation can hardly be of any help. The people “choose their own happiness” as OSCE's promotion song was called which was played day and night before the November elections. So Santa Clause may be banished again, and an increasingly lonely generation can do nothing but remember its childhood in apartments shared by a few families after the Second World War, big Christmas trees decorated with oranges, biscuits, few glass balls, nuts dipped in silver dye used for tin stove pipes and sugar-candy wrapped in shiny paper which were not eaten but kept wrapped in cotton wool until next year... Instead of holiday feelings of pleasure and warmth, we shudder because of extremist greetings that are arriving to the addresses of the representatives of the international community in B&H (Wolfgang Petritsch, Robert Barry and Jacques Klein) and majority of the media. A secret group which signs its “greetings” – threatening notes – with Youth's Resistance Movement published an “open protest to all the institutions of the international community in B&H”. Along with fundamental illiteracy, the signatories reveal that they are not at all naive in their threats: ”This is just the first letter of warning, and we shall demonstrate our power. You cannot overthrow us, and we can overthrow you, by force and by all available means. We have learnt to wage war against stronger than us...!”

Bosnia is entering the third millenium with another tie. While its pensioners and the “working class” are struggling to survive, the politicians are concerned only about who will take power. Of all the desired changes for the time being there are only the changes of prices – while, for example, everywhere around Bosnia the prices of fuel are going down, here they have gone up again.

The people in Bosnia and Herzegovina still have not learnt the lesson that the regime is always doing everything for money. The citizens', of course!

Nada SALOM

(AIM, Sarajevo)