In the scope of the ”DARE!” campaign, the EU Police Mission has invited prominent members of the BiH society to reflect on the situation in the country in particular with regards to crime and corruption. 

Their observations are being published through columns in daily and weekly print media. You can read this and all future features by clicking on the link “Columns” within the right-hand side menu of the EUPM website.

Everyone is talking about it recently. What is preventing the success of an average black guy to such extent that everyone is in awe because a half-black guy became the president of the United States? Back in August, I wrote that the younger one will win. Now I won’t.

I am more interested in the parallel between us in the RS and North American black people. Why are there more black people in prisons than in colleges? Arguments such as that they were slaves kidnapped from their own lands and later on have been prevented to practice and preserve their traditions and to be educated – those arguments became boring to us in RS. There’s no need to go through socio-historical analysis. The main cause of the bad position of black people in America and Serbs in Bosnia is organized crime within their groups. Terms like mafia, camorra, jakuza…. sometimes they serve like a fire escape, making us believe there are worse people out there, in other places, but this phrase (organized crime) is not adequate for us. Criminal in everyday life is not clearly distinguished from the rest of society, except when it comes to murders and burglaries. It is more incorporated than organized crime.

Change of the system that led to civil war hasn’t automatically and absolutely changed the moral standards in every single person. Some parents find the abuse of office or reaching out for state’s money a criminal act of the first degree, so they harass their kids to be honest people and good students. Others have used the opportunity and focused on the accumulation of capital. Such an atmosphere in the society makes all of us a criminal of some kind. And instead of hiding this truth like something shameful and disgraceful, we rather make fun of a civil servant who did not take the money for a fictional duty trip, or a privileged kid who said ‘No’ to an undeserved scholarship. That is how this society is being slowly poisoned. Until the day we become totally dysfunctional or until another collapse of the system.

Everything is for sale. Especially convictions, opinions, ideals. For me, this hypocrisy reached its limit when an NGO activist said to me self-righteously: Honesty is an excuse for incompetence. So I did not go to a seminar in Brussels. It keeps coming back to me, as a first line of an anthem of egoistical moral midgets who are driving us towards downfall. Unfortunately, an anthem of those people does not recognize entity, national or race boundaries.

Dark-skinned brothers have tried to fight against their oppressors through something that can be taken as an equivalent for our epical songs sang along the sounds of fiddle – Rap music. Back in the 80s, a band called Public Enemy screamed “Fight the Power”. They were followed by a plethora of artists who wondered why is there a drug dealer, a liquor and a weapon store on every corner of a neighborhood where mostly black people reside; and in neighborhoods of white people those things don’t exist. Followed by reincarnated rhythms of their land of origin, they recited songs that sent the message across to the youth to stay away from alcohol, drugs, thefts, gangs, and killings and criminal in general. That they should respect their black sisters, stop calling them bitches and stop abandoning their newborn children; to be cautious of AIDS, to be good students and to be responsible members of the society. When all this grown to become a movement and reached to the levels of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, those who at first didn’t like it just said “Rap is cool”. So, they found people willing to sing for money, sent them to MTV and created a subculture in which ‘pimp’ is a positive character. By degenerating social rising and glorifying organized crime. It took another twenty years for the appearance of the one from the beginning of the story, the one that has to prove he is real: Barack Obama.

Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. And we already had so many mistakes, the most visible ones made by the cowards in our media. The main collaborator of those who want to destroy one society is always organized crime. They put special effort so you don’t know where the state stops and organized crime begins. That is why, out of millions NGOs, there is none that monitors the elections but all of them are dying to distribute yet another condom to youth. It is not a big problem to arrest all of the dealers and pimps. But if the criminal-friendly environment remains, they will reappear again in a second.

Poor results of the judiciary have exhausted the most honest ones. I hear people saying things like: “Look at him now, and I used to know him when he didn’t have anything decent to wear” “I should have been stealing as well, if I were smart enough”. This is the most dangerous thing. Young people, now without any moral education, stare aimlessly at the kaleidoscope of hollow music spots, becoming a target for drug dealers and human traffickers. This should be addressed by the State, otherwise the State is digging its own grave. To this, many would say that fish stinks from the head. Me? I am just a fisherman.

Danijel Simic