The Communist Party tasked a partisan and philosophy professor, Mira Kesić, with the duty of gathering children, war orphans, and establishing orphanages where they would be accommodated.   At the end of World War II, on the territory of the County People’s Committee Banja Luka, which included the County of Banja Luka, Bosanska Gradiška, Bosanska Dubica, Kotor Varoš, Bosanski Novi, […]

Photo: Dejan Radić An Albanian woman from Belgrade, a Serbian man from Bor, a Serbian couple from Gračanica, a town near Priština, are sitting together in Durrës. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s neither a joke nor a beginning – we are somewhere halfway to reconciliation, but we are not really moving from that point. The […]

It is difficult to assess how many young women from Bosnia and Herzegovina are completing their doctoral studies at the most prestigious universities around the world, successfully defending their doctoral theses or doing post-doctoral studies, thereby specialising in a series of specific scientific fields, thanks to which their work will have a much more comprehensive meaning than mere meeting of […]

Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. ID of a displaced person. Personal identification number of the displaced person: 10367012889. Last name and name: Kanlić Edo. That is me. Given the fact that we live in peace, it seems inappropriate and too mild to call persons that were expelled from their homes ‘displaced persons’. A document found recently places me in this […]

Most of us who have lived far away from this small town know about Višegrad thanks to Ivo Andrić. I knew about it also because my close relative, from Sarajevo, got a job at a high school there after University. She grew up about twenty meters from the Eternal flame and I remember that she reluctantly left for Andrić’s town, […]

They did not touch the frame, nor break the glass. They only took his picture. Even the poster of his face, set opposite the picture, was not touched. The frame is still in its place, and so is the glass, untouched. It is as if the picture disappeared into thin air. For how long has it been gone? How could […]

Photo: Edi Matić It has been three decades since the Bosnian Serb authorities sent a call to the citizens of Serbian nationality via Radio Prijedor to join “their army and their police in the hunt for extremists”. The second part of that message was even more sinister: “The other citizens, of Muslim and Croatian nationality, must put white flags on […]

The war in Ukraine has been going on for more than a month. I was listening to one of the TV programmes that continuously report on the events and I just heard that more than 3 million people fled the country. They aired an interview with two young men who are below 20 and who said that their fathers stayed […]

Author: Edvin Kanka Ćudić When it comes to the fame and prosperity of Brčko, we always think of Brčko the way it was at the beginning of 2000. Those that visited the Bosnian Posavina region in that period could see a city in which persons lived better and more comfortably as compared to the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A […]

Those of us that do not remember socialism or the war itself, obtained information about that period verbally, just as in case of an epic narrative that is transferred by the elderly based on their memories, which, at the same time, constituted a romanticised past. A characteristic that marked the childhood of my generation is heavy political language (entities, cantons, […]

Depending on who you ask, two decades ago there was either a war for freedom or a conflict between a state and a guerrilla group in Kosovo. This is how two different ethnic communities: the Albanians and the Serbs begin to talk about their bloody past. Over the years, both sides have tried to develop a more neutral language when […]

Thirty years have passed… Never has the past hit the present head-on like this year. For the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, we came to Sarajevo, us, some fifty foreign journalists and photographers who had shared with the Sarajevan’s those dark hours of the history of Bosnia and eye witnessed the return of […]