East Sarajevo coup-demons: Violation of the Constitution is not a provocation – it is a criminal act!

Violating the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a provocation. It is a crime. It is, in fact, a subversion of the constitutional and legal order. And that is what it falls down to. That is what is being answered. By force, of course. Just as Spain responded to the Catalan separatists gathered around Carles Puigdemont.

In East Sarajevo, in a live television broadcast, they violated the decision of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A crime was committed in front of the cameras. It is not a provocation, as the Federal Minister for the Interior, Aljosa Campara, calls it. It is a subversion of the constitutional and legal order of the country.

People are arrested and detained for minor matters, for more innocuous crimes. But these people live in the ‘wrong’ Sarajevo and the ‘wrong’ part of the Federation of BiH.

Disregarding the judgment of the Constitutional Court of BiH is therefore not a provocation. It is a criminal offence. And when you defy the decision of the Constitutional Court by armed force, you are subverting the constitutional order of a sovereign state. And a sovereign state, of course by armed force, must establish control over every inch of its internationally recognised territory.

Did the institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina have control over East Sarajevo, where a crime was committed against that same country in front of all the cameras of that country?

Unfortunately, they didn’t. A hundred metres away from the East Sarajevo sign and the one with the Republika Srpska inscription were armoured vehicles of the Republika Srpska MUP. And this armed force did not come to prevent the crime, but came to support it and to carry it out.

But these are provocations, will say the Federal Minister of the Interior, Aljosa Čampara, who in the previous days persuaded the former fighters of the RBiH Army not to react.

This is roughly on a par with writer Abdullah Sidran’s suggestion that Sarajevo’s taxi drivers should respond to the subversion of the constitutional and legal order – by blowing their horns. Not that war. Already with a horn on their car, letting it be known that someone in the “wrong” Sarajevo disagrees with the collective commission of a crime in East Sarajevo.

Imagine, for example, that last week members of El Mujahideen were parading in the “wrong” Sarajevo. And that they saluted to Denis Bećirović, Bakir Izetbegović, Željko Komšić …

By the end of the same day, at least some of them would be in detention or in Guantanamo.

Imagine, for example, that in the last days of his mandate, Šefik Džaferović posthumously decorated the leader of ISIL, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whose crimes were the most monstrous equivalent to those of Milan Lukić, Darko Mrđa, Goran Jelisić and similar members of the army and MUP of the Republika Srpska who were answering to Ratko Mladić or Radovan Karadžić.

It is, of course, inconceivable.

Try to imagine, for example, that a certain German provincial police force had formed an alliance with neo-Nazis and that they had paraded together through the streets of the city to commemorate Kristallnacht and the beginning of the Holocaust.

And that is unthinkable.

Try to imagine, for example, that the police in Austria organised a parade on 1 September and put the descendants of Adolf Hitler or Hermann Goering in the ceremonial box.

It doesn’t work, does it?

But that is why, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a few kilometres away from the scene of the worst war crimes tried by the UN court, it is quite possible that the son of the war criminal Ratko Mladić is in the VIP box, while members of the Republika Srpska MUP are saluting in front of him, in deliberate defiance of the ruling of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This is not a provocation. This is humiliation. And of the state. And of the victim.

Imagine, for example, if neo-Nazis had placed a torch outside the gates of Auschwitz in honour of Nazi Germany?

Would that be called a provocation, or would the police have summarily arrested the “participants”, as they should have been, and take him away to prison for many years.

In Visegrad, torches were lit on the bridge where five-month-old babies were impaled on bayonets in the name of Republika Srpska. In ‘honour’ and in the name of this same Republika Srpska, in the name of Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, Milan Lukic and other war criminals sentenced to life imprisonment.

You will not be defended by strangers. Especially not those who watched for four years, for example, as houses and children burned in Višegrad. EUFOR will not defend you. No military peacekeeping mission has ever saved victims anywhere. It has always brought them to stronger ones.

Why does the West tolerate Milorad Dodik and his concrete separatist actions? Because they believe that Milorad Dodik is prepared to use armed force to defend himself or to pursue his objectives.

Are the authorities in Sarajevo prepared to do that? No. They are not. They are urging citizens “not to fall for provocations”. And they are invited to blow the trumpet. Just like in the early 1990s, when Bosnians and “reformists” went to peace concerts and most Serbs went on “sudden” holidays to the firing trenches around Sarajevo and other besieged towns./Avdo Avdic for The Geopost/