Questions of the legitimacy of an independent state have become particularly topical today in light of the debate over the status of Kosovo. These discussions are still needlessly being politicized and carry over into Bosnia and Herzegovina, with attempts to “internationalize” the problem of Kosovo, particularly as a means of exerting pressure on the international community from Belgrade and Banja […]
We are perfect. We do not make mistakes. We comprehend. We are the best. We are going to win. We will show them all. We can. We will. And we have bribed help at our disposal, too. We dream. We see. We accomplish. We win. And then you inhale for the first time in your new life. The perfect children. […]
The question regarding the responsibilities for the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina brings to attention the responsibilities of the international community. It requires focusing on those members of the international community who had the greatest impact on the course of events in ex-Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in terms of creating the conditions for the beginning of the war, supporting […]
Journalist and historian William Miller (1864-1945) was educated at Rugby and Oxford, after which he devoted himself to the study of Turkish and Balkan society and politics. His book Travels and Politics in the Near East (1898) was, as he points out in the “Preface,” “the result of four visits to the Balkan Peninsula in the years 1894, 1896, 1897, […]
O, Arabic writing, you are full of curved Sabers and crescent moons. There are no more dragons in the Ropušnica Cavern But the treasure is also gone upon which they once lay Through here, who knows when, The conquerors rode their horses, And even now, we still sneeze from the dust That their hooves Disturbed. And where has it gone […]
It is a stillness and solitude from which perhaps God begins Green and blue they are like polar ice The stillness and solitude one can find only in a soul that, Having just torn itself from its flesh and, delivered from the world’s Evil, is looking upon the earthly globe from above With the eyes of an eagle. It is […]
Asja P, the girl with a dog: sometimes I meet her walking her beautifully trained Irish setter. Her father was a philosopher, a well-known university professor, so I suppose he named his only daughter after Asja Lacis, who used to be the director of the theater in Riga. It was passionate love for Asja Lacis that made the Jewish mystic […]
A nighttime panorama of Sarajevo caught by the light of shellfire, gunpowder flashbulbs, by the dance of silhouettes in which only the persistence of vision can make out the former shapes (calling up flickering skyline lights, orange neon canyons, evening crescendos of headlights tracing their fluorescent snakes on a time exposure). But only this possible postcard can literally catch the […]
We’ve changed? Hardly, not significantly. The world has changed. I’ve stayed the same: I live in constant change and I know all about you, all that can be known, all but your address, the city you live in, your children, the language you fill out forms in, where you go in the morning and who you come back to in […]
It rained all night and the first snow showed up in the morning. But the café is cozy. You can sip hot coffee and look out the window at the street. The whiteness emphasizes shapes, movements, the day’s subtle mechanics. Here on the terrace, last summer there was a huge video screen. Now it’s just an empty steel square. Quite […]