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 […]

When we talk about Kosovo’s tragic past, this narrative often ends with NATO’s air strike campaign, the intervention which we see as the end of the period of violence in Kosovo. On the 23rd anniversary of the 78-day-long NATO air raid, we remember the short history of the fall of Yugoslavia and the position of Kosovo as its socialist autonomous […]

The national day of guilt was marked on 26 February 2022, the thirtieth anniversary since the start of the secret state project of depriving non-Slovenian citizens of their civil rights and expelling them from Slovenia. After WWII the Germans began raising awareness about guilt and taking responsibility ten years or so later, until it became collectively accepted some fifteen to […]

Destroyed buildings, terrified persons trying to reach the border with the neighbouring country or are trying to find alternatives to meet their basic living needs in their city under the siege – it sounds like a description of the four-year state of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, this is currently happening in Ukraine, a country that has been fighting […]

More than two decades after the Kosovo conflict, the Serbian-Albanian and Kosovar-Serbian relations are still portrayed by sinister metaphors like “Europe’s apartheid”, a “system of ethnic segregation”, a “frozen conflict” or “endless tariff war”. Regardless of certain improvements in the domains of bilateral relations, the protection of minority rights, and the political and proactive social participation of minorities at the […]

Photo: Personal archive Kosovo’s declaration of independence could have meant the beginning of a different relationship of Serbia regarding human rights violations in the near future. It could have been a beginning of the implementation of a new type of politics which would show a clear denunciation of war crimes as well as those who committed, organized and ordered them. […]