"Is that Zlatko Dizdarevic?"
"Speaking."
"Kaffir, that staff you barked in Dani, that's too much. Are you aware of that? Has someone already told you so? If no one did, here it is. After this, you're gone. Both you and the one who interviewed you are gone. He has overdone it a long time ago. No more forgiveness. Neither you nor your little bastards will walk on our soil in the future. Nor anyone of those who bark like the two of you. Your seed should be extirpated. You must know that. So that others can see how our cause should be defended from bums and scum like you.
"I see, you are a hero, so you immediately go for children. Why don't you come and see me in person and tell me openly who you are and what you want? You know where we live. Or are you only brave enough to go for kids?"
"We shall show up, of course we shall show up. We have been hiding long enough, but now the time has come. This land will not be the kind of land where we would have to hide. You shall have to hide in burrows from now on. We are coming out."
"Where are you calling from?"
"It does not matter, but if you really want to know, from Zenica. But we are everywhere, in Sarajevo, in Dobrinja, all over Bosnia. Even abroad. Just look around and you will see. Don't you remember? We met recently in Marindvor?"
(I recalled a recent "encounter" at a red traffic light. Four bearded guys with burning eyes. They looked as if they were drugged. They stopped for those fifteen seconds in front of me in some old gray car, opened their windows and shouted: "Kaffir, you won't be around here for much longer, you'll see..." The light changed and they sped off towards the station and drove towards the city. I do not remember telling anyone about this incident.)
"What do you really want?"
"Nothing, we just want you to know that the end is near. The same as with Pecanin, Avdic and those like them."
"It's kind of silly to announce a crime like this, over the phone. It's not done like that, you know."
"You will see how that's done. What you do is a crime, and what we are beginning, that is Jihad..."
Jihad is, of course, something else but what was said was said. He was collected and spoke rather quietly. Before every reply he was quiet for a while. He said a few more unimportant sentences which boil down to the same thing and when I asked him to speak up because I was "recording" our conversation, he laughed cynically and hung up.
Until the bomb under Kopanja's car I did not think about this call too much. I still do not think that those who make phone calls put bombs under cars, nor do I think that a phone call, no matter what kind, should be compared with the drama in Banja Luka which is truly, as someone wrote these days, "a more cruel and miserable showdown than any of those which took place during the war". I do think something else, though. Any appearance of violence is, however, divided into periods of individual motives, threats and executions, and the period when that collective, unidentified "WE" which stands behind that violence is born. This latter is terrorism and three ingredients are needed for it: terrorists, a victim, and a corresponding social and political environment. Now, we have all of that. The assassination attempt on a magnificent man and grand journalist and editor, Zeljko Kopanja, was not carried out by those who make phone calls, nor those who like individual wounded dogs barked at him when he touched them with his articles published recently in his Nezavisne. It is a diversion if someone claims that this attack was an attempt to exact revenge for "damage" inflicted by these articles. The bomb obviously exploded when the concentration of crime, mafia, the lack of the rule of law, and legalized violence around all of us became such that terrorism became simply a logical consequence. At the point where Kopanja's accumulated contribution crossed the line after which he was not aiming for individuals but at the total evil installed in some of power centers. The dissatisfied, cheated, and to the bone hurt soldier, as an individual is not the one who in this country, regardless of what that means, places bombs. That is perhaps a certain paradox. The bomb in Mostar, than the one in Sarajevo, and now this one in Banja Luka, are in a way parts of the same terrorist act. Those who have evolved under the state protection from "I" to "WE" are behind that terrorism.
Thereby, for the first time, my return to the phone call. The man, calmly, collectedly, as if he were not concerned whether someone was listening to him or recording the conversation, spoke and said "WE". As if no one else but those who refer to themselves as "WE" could hear him. That is why he laughed when I told him I was "recording the conversation". As if he knew that that was not true and, even if it were true, it would not matter. Since he is not "HE", he is "THEY".