interview by Emir IMAMOVIC
ALISPAHIC: The Bosniak identity is endangered from two directions. The first direction is the decades-long effort of Izetbegovic's oligarchy to install among Bosniaks foreign observance of Islam, Shiite, pan-Islamist, are based on Sharia law, even though Bosnian Muslims are Sunnis. That is like the difference between heroin and marijuana. It is not necessary to explain how Izetbegovic and his followers sold Bosniak interests for Arab money and various awards for the strengthening of Islam. The other direction is the effort of the SDP to label Bosniak values as Islamic fundamentalism, which buys favor with the international mentors, as well as Serbs and Croats, who continue to behave as civic Serbs and Croats. Bosniaks form the political alternative are willing to play the role of quislings. I claim that the intent of the international community is to politically and economically suppress Bosniaks and finish the division of BH to two ethno-nationalist parts. They will finish that with the assistance of Bosniaks who will sell the idea of BH for short-lived terms in power, although BH can be called whatever without equal Bosniaks. In order to do that, it is necessary to pacify and exhaust the consciousness and memory of Bosniaks. Izetbegovic and his followers played a perfect first half in the match for Bosniak disappearance.
Your views are additionally interesting because you belong to the intellectual elite of the city that for the last ten years had the reputation of the Bosnian oasis of tolerance. Could it be now said that that tolerance has outlived its usefulness?
No, I do not belong to the elite that commercialized what a group of citizens did during the war defending Tuzla from nationalism. That elite all the time during the war vacillated between religious fascists from the SDA and what was expected of them. They even named two streets in Tuzla after pro-fascist Bosniaks from WWII, Hitler's and Pavelic's officers. This year, after a lot of effort the street named after the commander of Handzar-division was finally renamed, while the other fascist still has his street in antifascist Tuzla. The street named after Ivo Andric was almost renamed, but after my article in Oslobodjenje and consequent ruckus, that stupidity failed. There are too many proofs. They cannot put together in their wartime biography even two public appearances against the Muslim religious fascism, although they obtained both moral and material profit from abroad on the account of that. I was among ordinary mortals who fought for civic Tuzla without any material inspiration. The then Forum of citizens of Tuzla, or Grubic's Tuzla-list [paper], were totally ignored by that elite, because we could have spoiled their harmonious relations with the SDA! When the danger went by, cockroaches came out, those who always show up when everything is over, and turn everything we did out of idealism and love for Bosnia into money. Tolerance in Tuzla is a historical rule because it is not based on commercial interests, but on feelings. However, today the elite that you mention is prepared to trade with limits of tolerance. They have a shallow and wide understanding of economic transition and believe that patriotism, Bosnia, Hercegovina, morality, immorality, and everything can somehow be transformed into money. Alchemists! They never cared about ideas.
Can we be more concrete? Who are those democratic profiteers you are talking about?
All those from the so-called democratic alternative who are today ten to hundred times wealthier then before the war, and who did not say during the war a word against nationalism in the ranks of their own people. All those careerists who sneaked out of mice holes once everything was over and whose biggest enemies are people like Zlatko Dukic, the SDP member who during the war wrote against nationalism and because of that suffered public reprisals by religious fascists from the SDA. Dukic, the former wartime president of the municipal and cantonal SDP, is today not even a candidate of the SDP for any office, although he kept the SDP alive when many shunned the civic option. If the SDA at one point preferred former Communists because of their loyalty, and readiness to with bad conscience serve the new authorities, the SDP today prefers moral worms, at the expense of personalities who even at the bad times were fighters for the social-democratic idea. This digression is not accidental. It explains how commercialization of an idea pushed out and humiliated fighters for that idea, and put the idea in the context of material interests. The SDP social-democracy is not an idea anymore, but a bait for the conquest of power. Once they come to power, then that state will look just like post-war SDP's Tuzla. That will be the rule of nepotism, profiteering clans, politically and morally spineless individuals, united in the conviction that private profit is the essence of social-democracy. The democratic alternative was morally destroyed by international donors who financed pure formalism without any criteria regarding the credibility of those to whom they gave their money. It is questionable whether they are also a part of that. You'd like to hear a concrete example? For example, the citizen Georg Grubic financed 80 issues of Tuzla-paper [Tuzla-list], the paper that in 1993 and 1994 was the only medium opposing nationalism and religious nationalist Zmaj od Bosne. The civic option never saw that man in person or offered him any support. When the foreign donors came, then the civic option sent them to the address of the company owned by beslagic's son in law who during the war never spoke out against religious fascism, he played music. Radio Kameleon is today technically most advanced radio station in BH. Or, during the war, in 1992 Front Slobode was published twice a week, and after many donations it is now published once a month and on less pages then in 1992. The whole content is today written by three journalists. The commercialization of the democratic alternative is caused by superficial approach of the donors who are satisfied with form, which resulted in the creation of a greedy profiteering lobby in the option which is supposed to replace criminals and nationalists.
You are the chief of the Press-Center of the Tuzla Municipality, the institution whose leaders, Selim Beslagic above all, have received numerous awards for the respect of human rights. The mayor and the municipality, however, entered into a big conflict with journalist Vitomir Pavlovic because of his book Pages and Knights. Aren't double standards at play here? On one hand there is alleged support for human rights and on the other there are open attacks on the man who used his freedom of speech, interpreting wartime events in his own way?
Yes, I am professionally proud because of those eight years of work and the results of my propaganda and information work. In Tuzla and BH there were many people who did bigger and more courageous deeds than Selim Beslagic, but he received more international awards for human rights than all Bosniak politicians together. In case of poisonous Pavlovic's book Beslagic reacted like a true Bosnian, Bosniak, resident of Tuzla, and I am sorry if he regretted that. No one denied Pavlovic the right to interpret wartime event in his own way, while there is an attempt to deny the mayor of Tuzla the right to say that that interpretation does not correspond to the truth. There are no double standards there. If Pavlovic's human rights were taken into account, let it be allowed to the residents of Tuzla to defend themselves.
I've been informed that that resistance to slander was organized? Is that true, and why was the municipal press center, rather than some other institution or media, chosen as the place to reply to Pavlovic's accusations?
Beslagic reacted first, then "Preporod", then the Serb Civic Council. The Forum of Citizens, the SDP, the Women's Association and a few other civic subjects that belong to mayor's ideological family failed to react. That is a proof that the response was not organized. The man who tore up the book at the press conference organized by the war veteran organizations did them a bad favor. It turned out that all those who were in the room supported his private act. The municipal press center only distributed Beslagic's statement.
You recently started a debate with journalists of Radio Kameleon because of a visit of a group of residents of Novi Sad to Tuzla and the results of their contacts with the hosts, an offensive article about the Gate and religious customs of Muslims from Tuzla. I would like to know who, in your opinion, should be blamed more, the guests who still need to be explained what happened during the Bosnian war or the hosts who for the sake of peace accepted to go along with the prejudices of their guests?
Radio Kameleon in that debate openly confirmed that it supported the views of the journalist who offended Tuzla, victims of the war, refugees, Islam... I will include this debate with pleasure in the book of my columns, because the views of the "chameleons" in their full morbidity testify about psycho-pathology of this badly understood, commercial democracy. They are prepared for the sake of someone's interests to defend the lie about imam who howls like a dog, about refugees who do not want to return to their homes, about cemetery into which Tuzla was turned after Chetniks "slaughtered" us etc. Not even Radovan Karadzic would know how to produce such perfect fools. Some malicious Serb woman from Novi Sad cannot be blamed for our domestic problem, because it is the matter of her own intellectual and moral hygiene whether she understands the Bosnian war. The guilt is here, in people who are paid not to understand that to spit on Srebrenica is to spit on themselves.
Explaining the Bosniak problem of the loss of identity, you recently wrote about the rebroadcasting of the program of TV Pink by the local TV station FS 3. However, you did not mention Radio Sloboda, whose musical program is almost identical. Did you do that because TV programming is more influential or because the owner of "Sloboda" is a relative of Selim Beslagic?
The rebroadcasting of the program of TV Pink on TV "Front Slobode" is a much more complicated problem than the Serbian program of Radio Sloboda. According to what I know, the criminal business empire of the war criminal Zeljko Raznatovic, supported by Serbian intelligence-propaganda services, is behind TV Pink. It is a media aggression whose goal is to blunt the consciousness of Bosnians about their state affiliation. This aggression is conducted through Serbo-philes in Tuzla and with assistance of sold out or incoherent politicians who call that democracy. Berbic, the owner of Radio Kameleon and Radio Sloboda and the son-in-law of Selim Beslagic, is doing a similar dirty deed of infecting the people with Serbian influences. They are all businessmen.
What is actually the problem there? The editors of the media, who accept to in spite of ethics and aesthetics pander to their audience and its taste, or the audience that does not recognize anything bad in Dragana Mirkovic [folk singer from Serbia]? Would you, if you were in a similar position of an editor, consciously accept the loss of a significant part of your station's audience and stop the turbo-folk infection of the masses?
The audience's taste cannot be a criterion for the editorial policy if the protection of cultural interests is concerned. In France, radio and TV stations are obliged by law to broadcast 70 to 80 percent of program in French. Perhaps the French would prefer if that percentage was smaller, but the state thereby protects its cultural identity, integrity and sovereignty. All cultures survived thanks to self-protection. Find a single democratic state that allows outlaws to pillage its media space. The program "koktel" [cocktail], produced by Zlatan Jovanovic on the Tuzla Canton TV, is an indicative example. This is the most watched program on the TV TK. That confirms that Daragana and Ceca are not the condition for high audience ratings. The two of them are merely the advance party of the Serbian media hegemony. I have nothing against private individual consumption of that crap, but I am decidedly opposed to institutional promotion of Serbian wailing in our media. Editors can do whatever they like in the chaos ruling in the broadcasting policy.
During the aggression, you were the founder and a member of the Civic Forum Tuzla. Today, conditionally speaking, you are in the position of a protector of the Bosniak identity. Have you changed? Have the circumstances changed, and how?
I can only be in the position of the protector of the Bosniak identity to the extent that I am aware that without equal Bosniaks there is no common BH. In December 1992 all Muslim institutions in Tuzla publicly denounced me as "a Chetnik and the enemy of the Muslim nation" because I wrote the article about dismissals of ethnic Serbs from work and wrote that there is no BH without Serbs. Then, in the dead of night, certain individuals shot from machine guns under the window of my family home, while the civic option slept a peaceful and slimy dream of a layabout. I take it for my intellectual obligation to protect and affirm that balance of equality of BH nations. Today Bosniaks are endangered from within and without. I would be happy if the Bosniak equality were today protected by some Serb or Croat author, the way I during the war protected Serb and Croat component of the BH society from the Muslim religious fascism. Why are the Bosniaks endangered? For example because leading Croats from the SDP, the officials in various Croat associations, every morning drink Croat coffee, while Bosniaks from the SDP are persecuting Hasanaginica in Tuzla and everything that smells of Bosniak heritage. There are too many examples.
What a minute. Those Croat representatives during the war were frequently taken as an embodiment of Beslagic's idea of common life. Therefore, was that a conscious projection of a distorted picture? Also, would you justify SDP's persecution of some project, as expensive as Hasanaginica, but unimportant for the Bosniak heritage? Is your sensibility in connection with that project influenced by the fact that one of its creators is your father Nijaz?
These are not the same people. Croats who during the war fought for the idea of common life are today marginalized. They were pushed out by those Croat upstarts who got together with those Bosniaks about whom I've just spoken. Since their goal is power, rather than BH, and since they are favored as quislings by the OSCE and the OHR, they have no obligation to sincerity. Today it is considered normal that the local Croat SDP officials every morning drink ethno-national coffee in Hotel "Bristol", that they are members of all possible Croat associations, and that they expect from Bosniak members sterile loyalty to the Bosnian idea. In Tuzla, not a single Bosniak from the SDP leadership is a member of "Preporod" or any other Bosniak or religious institution. Bosniaks are not allowed to do that, because they would immediately get in trouble. Secondly, I would never support persecution of a cultural project, even if it cost as much as the opera Hasanaginica, because I believe that investment in culture is never too expensive. However, I did not talk about the opera, but about the play staged by the Tuzla Theater. All the way until the premiere it was uncertain whether the play would actually be played to the audience. Some local SDP leaders initiated a huge campaign trying to stop this project as allegedly nationalist. Unprecedented silliness! In that case Fortis, Goethe and Pushkin and many others who admired the most beautiful ballad of the Slavic south were Islamic fundamentalists. And I do not agree with you that Hasanaginica is a part of only "the Bosniak heritage". If that were so, it would not be staged in Zagreb and Belgrade. Hasanaginica as little else testifies about all of us. As far as Nijaz Alispahic is concerned, he was gratified when his play Hasanaginica was included in the Anthology of Bosnian-Hercegovinian Drama, and the editors stated that his is the best of ten versions produced so far. However, he had to pull through all the crap thrown his way, including the offensive congratulations published in your magazine on his 60th birthday. I can be sensitive to that topic, but that does not mean anything in the assessment of what that writer does. And as far as my dad Nijaz is concerned, as a dad... He is great.
You say that you would be happy if some Serb or Croat author defended Bosniak interests the way you defended Serb and Croat interests. Haven't Ivan Lovrenovic and Mile Stojic been doing that in BH for years, as well as Petar Lukovic in Belgrade or Ivancic and Lucic from Feral...?
Unfortunately, I am not aware that anyone of them has spotted the marginalization of the Bosniak axis of the BH society, without which there can be no reaffirmation of desired values. If there is a doubt that the long-term international project is the political and economic destruction of Bosniaks, then that is a danger for BH. There is no possibility that a moral and spiritual giant such as Ivan Lovranovic can prefer today made up Croatian hegemony to his proven patriotism. True, only during the last ten months it has become obvious that the international community has earmarked a ghettoized future for Bosniaks. The activities of the OSCE on the division of BH to electoral units are evidence of that. Such activities can only cement the existing situation. Dodik's unpunished and lauded Nazism in Banja Luka, Janja, Srebrenica, western Mostar, and general tolerance of the eruption of enmity with respect to the Bosniak equality testifies to that. If Serb and Croat authors spoke out about that, that would bear much more weight then if a Bosniak says so. Besides, only they, in that way, could undo the SDA election strategy which is this time based on truthful and objective circumstances.
Can we try in the following way, relatively speaking, to measure national awareness: is a better Bosniak the one who in 1992 voluntarily took up arms and spent four years in the trenches, and today listens to Ceca Velickovic [Arkan's wife and Serbian turbo-folk singer], watches Minimaks' [Serbian entertainer] interviews and laughs to comedies with Bata Zivojinovic [pro-Milosevic movie actor from Serbia, famous in the former Yugoslavia], or the one who was a civilian in the war, and likes Hanka Palum, Nedzad Latic and Emir Hadzihafizbegovic? Of course, I would like to know whether the mentioned criteria can or cannot be used at all?
I know of many individuals who did a lot of good deeds for Bosnia and Bosniaks but did not fit Reis' or Alija's description of a good Bosniak. This is a political, rather than national set of criteria. Neither four years in the trenches, nor Hanka Paldum can be exclusive signs of national awareness and belonging among Bosniaks. An aware Bosniak is today a Bosnian who understands that the SDA and Izetbegovic betrayed Bosniaks and Bosnia, and who understands that Lagumdzija prefers Dodik to Bosniak interests. Such Bosniak at the moment has no political representatives.
One more question: is a better Bosniak the one who respects law and order, while being convinced that a civil war took place in BH, that all are equally to be blamed and that Serbs were tortured in Tuzla in the same way Bosniaks were tortured in Bijeljina, or the one who has a crystal clear understanding of the recent past but, for example, does not pay taxes, is active in organized crime and today has much more money than at the beginning of the aggression?
This taxpayer is not to be blamed that his state is leaking like a sieve and that he can be a legal criminal. One cannot demand from a thief to arrest himself. This former element can think whatever he likes, and as long as his empty head does not endanger the constitutional order, that should not be anyone's concern. Of course, both of them are far from the vision of the ideal Bosnian citizen.
How should, in your opinion, act the ideal citizen of Bosnia-Hercegovina, and do you see someone like that on the Bosnian political, or even media scene?
An ideal citizen is created, fostered and educated. That is done by the state, which via the education system and other means ennobles the society. The peak of the pyramid emanates the energy of moral and humanist virtues and that is conveyed to the wide masses. We had a chance to witness that during Tito's time. Then we lived the ideology of solidarity because the state wanted that. Then, we were prepared to sacrifice our own interests for humane deeds. This state today is lead by moral mischief makers and mafia dons whose interest was to create, as Rusmir Mahmutcehajic says, confusion of moral values in the society in order to rule more easily. Milosevic does the same. It is not surprising that savages rule the streets and they beat up and rob people without fear of being held accountable for their deeds. The ideology of chaos, crime and violence has infected most of young men and women. They do not anymore want to be good citizens, because one cannot live from that. They want to be like their idols who became wealthy through crime. An ideal citizen is not an ideological, but a sociological category. For the SDA, the HDZ, and the SDS, that is one thing and for state interests something else. Thank God that there are ideal citizens both on the political and media scenes. Such individuals could establish the energy of virtue that would disinfect our society. But it is questionable whether the new authorities will need virtues.
Is it more dangerous for Bosniaks that most members of that people do not in any way feel that Cajnice or Sovici near Grude are parts of their homeland, or that early in the morning they are prepared to tear up in front of TV cameras Vitomir Popovic's "anti-Bosnian" book, and in the afternoon listen to the orthodox chetnik Era Ojdanic?
Both dangers are based on deformations implanted in the Bosniak collective consciousness by Izetbegovic's policies. He is the first leader in the world who wanted for his people less than it actually had. People have started getting used to this mini-state as their own yard. Secondly, exactly the SDA made official the religious and national formalism. You could have been before the war Stalin himself, but if you joined the party, you immediately became a Bosniak and a Muslim.
They produced people who in public do one thing and in private another.
Finally, can we preserve the memory of genocide and achieve state and political interests, and avoid the possibility of transforming the memories into ideology?
It is of crucial importance for Bosniaks to depoliticize and institutionalize the memory of genocide. Bosniaks do not have such a possibility today. First, because the SDA views the victims of genocide as their political capital. Supposedly there will be more genocide if Bosniaks are not led by the SDA, which is confusing the cause and consequence, because any Bosniak leadership in place of the SDA, even totally illiterate, would have reduced the consequences of genocide and been more successful in defense. Genocide against Bosniaks was necessary to Izetbegovic and his ilk so that he could convince Bosniaks that the way out was in self-isolation and pan-Islamism. Izetbegovic's award for the promotion of Islam was paid by Bosniak lives! Secondly, that so-called democratic alternative views any mention of genocide against Bosniaks as a danger for the reintegration of the BH society. Serbs could get angry if we mention Srebrenica, Ferhadija, Foca, and if they get angry, our multi-culture fails. I have so far published three monographs about the victims of the war, which all together have about 2000 pages. With that action I saved lives of the victims of the war from Tuzla and Gradacac from oblivion. I worked on the Tuzla books about civilian and military victims for one year each, for free, out of my patriotic and human need. No one thanked me, nor did I expect to be thanked. The only benefit I had was that several times I was publicly insulted in Front Slobode and Radio Kameleon as a necrophiliac, the person who has sexual relations with corpses. There are people who are paid to extirpate the memory of genocide among Bosniaks. They are capable of denouncing the memory of genocide as necrophilia. The pinnacle of Bosnian patriotism today is to recognize the quisling intent to exterminate Bosniaks and divide our homeland in the Serb and Croat parts. The pinnacle of patriotic consciousness is to set up identical critical criteria with respect to the new authorities. People who yearn to rule other people's lives are active in politics, and that in itself is a sickness. The public must accept the role of a neuro-psychiatrist if it does not want to end up in a psychiatric institution.