What have you, as a party, done, I'll use your own words, to reduce the invoice of evil in this city?
I believe that we have succeeded to bring back to the people at least a small bit of trust in reason, that we have, at least by a little, removed everpresent fear.
Fear of what?
Fear of repressive methods which the local regime has used and is still using against the people. Actually, I should say against its own people, since after the completed ethnic cleansing, we are here ethnically homogeneous. An entity, as that is called these days.
How much influence does your party have? Are we talking about mostly local influence?
It is a paradox, but our influence is much stronger abroad, within international institutions and bodies, then here. The local media are inaccessible for us, the communications are extremely difficult and we simply are not able to conduct a wide reaching political campaign. Our policy boiled down to moral appeals: it is well known that on several occasions we demanded that Karadzic and Krajisnik be replaced; actually the emphasis was on Krajisnik because we think that he bears more responsibility.
I would say that Karadzic was more like a Minister of Foreign Affairs, at least until the decisions of the International Tribunal in the Hague, while here Krajisnik was firmly in control. He has been in control since the beginning of the war. He is the president of the Parliament, he controls the media, economy, police. He should be indicted for war crimes. He has done the most against the interests of his own people.
What is Koljevic's position in the trio Karadzic-Krajisnik-Koljevic? Is it true that his power base is here in Banja Luka?
I wish to respond as a private person, and then as a politician. As a human being I believe that none of the top officials, Krajisnik, Karadzic, Koljevic, Plavsic etc., has any moral rights to lead this people and that time has come for them to face us and explain how they pushed us into this tragedy. As a politician I accept speculations that one of them, at least at first, should stay because of continuity, easier transfer of authority. I agree that Koljevic could take that role, although even he is responsible for everything that has befallen this people.
What do you mean by that: "everything that has befallen this people"?
War, death, wounded youth, ethnic cleansing, family tragedies. Our families have been destroyed, marital beds divided. We have returned, based on the ideology of blood and soil, myths, on totally irrational bases, to the long gone past. This leadership managed to place the whole people in a retrograde time-machine.
How did they do it?
Through perfidious use of irrational motives; this is a well tested way to influence masses. People were convinced that World War II hadn't finished and that this generation was predestined to conclude the last war, still fighting against the Ustashe and Balije. The church took part in this, bones were carried around and blessed, the past was mythicized. The basis was in the absolute authority of the nation and national power. The nation was raised above everything else and our human living reduced to our ethnicity, which is only one of human characteristics.
It hasn't been formally defined so far.
But, what does it mean to you?
It should be a part of Bosnia-Hercegovina. I would prefer if it became a region within the state. The idea that the national question is automatically solved once a nation obtains its own state is one of the greatest illusions of the nationalists. On the contrary, we in Banja Luka cannot survive unless we open up towards Croatia, towards the sea, towards our geographical hinterland. If we remain the way we are now, within a statelet, we will irrevocably die off. The Vrbas valley has more value to us than some Pale.
If you were to go to Pale tomorrow and meet Karadzic, what would you say to him?
Nothing. One can not talk to a man like him. He needs a psychiatrist, not a philosopher.
Do you expect changes after the forthcoming elections?
I will reply by telling a story. Before the 1990 elections, the Communists had a pre-election meeting; the leader of the party was supposed to address voters. Before the start of the meeting, Nijaz Durakovic, then the leader of the Communists, had to go to the bathroom. An SDS [Serb Democratic Party, ruling party in Republic Srpska] member, then still an SDS agent in the Communist league, locked him in the bathroom, and went out in front of the voters and explained that "comrade Durakovic is drunk and the meeting is adjourned." That is our democracy. Mafia in power will do everything it can in order to stay in power; I don't have any reasons to believe that anything will change in the future.
Where do we go from here? Some believe that Bosnia has to go through another war catharsis in order to find itself?
We have reached the bottom. I realized that, please excuse my example, when I was a soldier on the Vlasic mountain. The terrain there is so hard that there is no vehicle that can get to the top. Vlasic command had a horse which carried food to the soldiers up the mountain. One morning I saw the horse at the edge of an abyss. For two hours he stood at the edge and stared in front of himself. It looked as he were thinking. Then he jumped. He didn't slip, didn't fall. He jumped, committed suicide. What can be said about us, then? I don't believe in another war; none of us has strength for that. We are all dead tired.
One lives with a feeling that everything, all suffering, destruction was unnecessary. Banja Luka has been destroyed as a city. Before the war, the Serbs were just over one half of the population in Banja Luka, the rest were Croats and Muslims. Today, a half of the prewar urban Serb population remains and I don't even want to talk about the number and the destiny of the Croats and Muslims. Only a fourth of the prewar urbanized population remains. This war has brought at first physical and then spiritual isolation. Ethnic cleansing destroyed the basis of the common living, destroyed the treasure of coexistence and interconnectedness which had been cultivated for centuries.
Departure of citizens and the arrival of refugees resulted in the domination of the rural factor, dissolution of the middle class and its values; everything one refers to as urban spirit. One of the crazed nationalists suggested that the name of Banja Luka be changed to Serb Palanka [provincial town], not realizing how appropriate he was in his primitive cynicism. Today the city economy operates on 8-10% of its prewar level. Salaries are DM 20 to 30, and even that mostly in coupons. We have public kitchens, but don't regularly have heating, electricity and water. Before the war we had 17 mosques, today there is none. They were destroyed and the idiots still don't understand that it is not enough to build new minarets to bring back the richness of common living.
If you had an opportunity to talk to one of your exiled and displaced friends, what would you say to them?
That my life has been amputated with their departure. That I will greet them as friends and that I beg them for one more sacrifice: to return to the city which in the foreseeable future cannot provide living worthy of a human being.