During one of the monstrous forms of Serb aggression on BiH between 1992 and 1995, I was working day and night translating “The Thousand and One Nights”, which is the first translation of that literary work from the Arabic language to the languages of the people of the former Yugoslavia.
That translation of one of the monumental works of the world literature was literally being made not far from the pyre that the Serb armada made of the City Hall, at the time the National Library, where over two million of books and documents were turned into dust. In the preface to “The Thousand and One Nights”, I wrote that I was watching from Bistrik, the place where I lived back then and worked on that translation, the huge tongues of fire destroying everything in the City Hall and I cried, really, as a child.
The City Hall was destroyed then, and these days it was also humiliated in an unimaginable way, together with everything that it stands for and symbolizes. Therefore, now is not the time for tears, but for the inexpressible bitterness caused by the fact that precisely the Evil which burned the City Hall down, together with all the value and all the symbolic, is acceded utterly self-humiliatingly, masochistically, condescendingly almost to self-perversity.
The plaque on the reconstructed City Hall, precisely the plaque which only calls for remembering, is covered so that the Serbian President Nikolić would not be offended, and that is precisely the Nikolić who was one of the protagonists of all forms of Serb aggression on BiH, including this culturocide and the burning of libraries. So that “Mr.” Nikolić would not be offended! This act has trampled the principles of humanity, culture, love for librarianship, antifascism, the suffering of the victims – everything was pushed aside and covered, aware, politically, in the spirit of leadership – so that this creator of Evil in BiH would not be hurt, the one who belongs to the forces which burned the City Hall in the first place and who visits is with a diabolical triumph and success because, everything is fine with Nikolić: he has the reason to be very satisfied because he is consistent – since the beginning of aggression on BiH until this mindless servility for his visit. The paradox is complete because the plaque on the City Hall was covered, no more and no less, with the STATE FLAG. How monstrous that symbolic and the message is! Mental illness and utter political perversion. Shame.
(Remember how recently the Mothers of Srebrenica, with the same self-humiliating servility, pinned the White Flower of Srebrenica on the Šešelj’s war ideologists who not long before did everything he could to thwart precisely the resolution on the genocide in Srebrenica before the Security Council?)
Why some people, especially politicians, think they have the right to humiliate us all until we feel self-loathing? And not only politicians. We have reasons to feel devastated, again and even more severely defeated and humiliated. The humiliation is still harder to take than the defeat itself. Why are they doing this to us, so soullessly and immaturely?
Don’t they understand, don’t they know where the difference is, where the limit is between the need for co-existence and the protection of elemental dignity?
Today, when they cover the plaque on the City Hall with the STATE FLAG, i feel worse than when I watched it burn, because the latter was violence against us, and the former is the violence against ourselves.
What is even worse – it seems like we are already getting used to it.
Written by academician Esad Duraković (vijesti.ba)
(Source: nap.ba/photo: vijesti.ba)
