Regardless of the party in power, Serbia’s strategy for Bosnia-Herzegovina is a constant. Belgrade has not given up its strategic goals in Bosnia-Herzegovina: the safeguard of Republika Srpska as laid down in the Dayton Peace Agreement. Serbia therefore seizes every opportunity to insist on the status quo and invoke the Dayton Agreement as “the only legal and legitimate international act” […]
You have resolved that I shall not be and at all costs You come towards me and in your haste Laughing and weeping You sweep And destroy All before you You have resolved to destroy me at all costs But you cannot find The true path To me Because You know the deepcut and wellworn paths And no other (And […]
Above the roar of a high waterfall a magic town grows, dark and tightly knit, above the water’s blaze; the cascading whiteness widely its freshness throws, the eternal youth of the waters that human eyes amaze. These are the forces of the Earth that endlessly boil. One river magically into the other falls. The black branches frame that white turmoil […]
Andrija Pavlič, for the 800 anniversary of the Franciscan order, which has been alive in Bosnia with the Bosnian Franciscans for over 700 years, composed a mass with the Latin text called Missa Bosniensis. He also wrote a dedication: Dedicated to St. Francis Assisi, to all those unhappy, abandoned, and lost of this world, to the Bosnian Franciscans and to […]
There exists in southeastern Europe a living legacy of the over four-hundred-year-long Ottoman presence–a combined population, excluding European Turkey, of some five or six million Moslem inhabitants. Of these, the second largest component (after Moslem Albanians) is the Serbo-Croatian speaking Moslems of Bosnia-Hercegovina (hereafter referred to as Bosnian Moslems). As of the 1971 census, there are some one and three-quarter […]
The loss of Bosnia that we have experienced and the way in which we have experienced it is such that the country keeps coming back into our thoughts as it once was. We feel an urge to bring it back the way we experienced it and loved it. It is like the love that wishes to remain forever the same […]
National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. – Karl Marx The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilized life as the combination of men in society. Where political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance and nations […]
The agony is like golden dust aswirled, Above me a yellow flower’s aflutter. Never before was there such fragrance In my little room—my great world. My weak hand reached for the yellow flower, Trying to grasp it, so yellow and so sweet, But in vain was my effort, the flower kept fleeing, And fell at last upon my chest and […]
This happened in the sheep world on the Sloping Meadows. Aja, a big ewe with thick fleece and round eyes, gave birth to her first lamb, who looked like all newborns, a fist of damp wool starting to bleat. It was a girl, an orphan, because a few days earlier Aja had lost her husband whom she dearly loved. The […]
In march the soldiers with rifles on their shoulders. out run through brambles the locals with their bundles. Off fly the envoys contemplating new ways of creating symmetry in a future cemetery. Up go the pundits explicating bandits. Clearly outworded, down go the murdered. The expensive warriors, sailing by on carriers flying Old Glory, signal hunky-dory. Far is the neighbor, […]
I didn’t know your name, but you became a part of my soul at the instant of your death. I was sixteen, and the war in Bosnia had just begun. Simply walking on the street became a game of Russian roulette. Each step could be the last. Indeed, death seemed inevitable. Still, we took our chances in daily searches for […]
(a greeting) Twenty years before the first multiparty elections as I watched the sweltering road along the seacoast get rolled up on the wheels like spaghetti next to my father’s sweaty shoulder I was taking lessons in life I wondered why he (for no obvious reason) was honking now and then to the approaching cars and why they honked to […]
They taught us about the climate of Ethiopia, the sheep population of New Zealand. They taught us the area of the USSR and the countries we have borders with. When my next-door neighbor showed up wearing combat boots instead of slippers it occurred to me: the area of the USSR is subject to change as is the number of sheep […]
To Adin While the country I was born in was approaching its forced landing our life and football appetites were soaring high. Deaf and blind to the questions that’d started exploding right in our faces, we contemplated a starry future for ourselves, for posterity, for our national football team. Asked why he kept a player in the center of the […]
Those I know have all grown old, my scattered friends. The snow is getting rusty in Sweden, from the other side of the globe brief electronic messages buzz in: there’s a fire, or else there isn’t. No news is news anymore, they’ve heard it all – my tired friends. Memories are the only news we are still curious about. We […]
The earth has done its work. We wouldn’t have thought it, my brother and I, but a friend said to us “Your father’s gotten slimmer.” “Huh?” “His grave is sinking in!” We went to the gravedigger to order the gravestone. “Don’t worry,” he said, “everything will be just right.” But we wanted a solid gravestone, cost didn’t matter to us. […]
It’s a secret thought, it’s the smallest of worms That slowly nibbles and warms the blood How so? On an eyelash of dreams a little dust At a casual smile moist with fear It banishes all that’s gray and stiff from a head Born of a thought, it lives on hope What’s that? A purple smile in a singing wind […]
Who are we Bosnians of the Muslim faith and what do we want in our homeland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in a region to which we are connected by heritage and historical background, and Europe in which we belong geo-politically and culturally? When the identity of a people is in question as well as those characteristics which define its identity, there […]
As indelible memories go, this basketball moment will be a lot less traumatic than the first one. Elmir Brkanić will be honored on the court tonight, Feburary 13th, 2009, at Wilberforce University’s Gaston Lewis Arena. It’s Senior Night, and the 6-foot-5 forward from Bosnia likely will be playing his final home game for the Bulldogs, who face Pittsburgh’s Point Park […]
Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission, Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition Between two peoples fanatically at odds, With their different diets and incompatible gods. “Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late For mutual reconciliation or rational debate: The only solution now lies in […]