When a war is over - from the juridical point of view, another war is starting: the one with the own past, personal histories. Everything is against the trust, because the experience with the human beings you had during any kind of conflict is a proof that you don't have to trust anybody.
One year after the conclusion of
Dayton Agreement, the Austrian documentary filmmaker
Nikolaus Geyrhalter documented, through
direct interviews with people the conclusion of the four years war. In a bit more than 200 minutes - a bit too long, not always well organized and with lots of longs minutes without too much visual information - you have a various landscape of human testimonies. People who lost their family members, displaced persons (the Internally Displaced Persons wandering from a part to another of the former Yugoslavia, hosted in improper conditions), simple people with lost citizenships.
Through the different experiences and perspectives, you have the same obsessive conclusion: never will be the same. The friendship with the Serbian girls is a matter of past, because the Serbians killed the Bosnians' girl father. People at an age when it is supposed to stay with the nephews are forced to permanently move in empty houses. A couple of times, the inverviewed are asked about love. One of them are warming around a fire in the street. They are poor, without homes, without families. After four years of words, it is a new vocabulary, simplified, cleaned of any descriptions of deep feelings. Not even hate could find a place in this new language. Hate was the overwhelming feeling in the middle of the conflict. Now, after it's over, you try to get accomodating with a new life, and when you are in a hurry, fighting to survive, you cannot enjoy the confort of the nuances.
Nowadays, you don't hear too much about Bosnia. You can see the material traces of the war, as in Croatia or Serbia. And the children who grew up during the conflict are still marked by it. These wounds and memories cannot be repaired or repainted. You live with them, are part of your identity, and are reconsidered in various forms in the present. Maybe they are more immune to nationalist fanatism. During what was once the Yugoslav Federation, the outside image was of a wonderful multiculturalist world, where all the nationalities were living together in a pathetic harmony. It was a fake and the violence of the conflict prooved the contrary. When the myths and the history are invading the daily life, the normal, cold political calculations are becaming a drug, because they are no more cold and no more mathematical-like evaluations of the social perspectives.
The rule of the emotions is destroying the social rules, the political codes. The normal, functional societies are based on reason, measure and evalution. It's one of the main conditions of the progress. Otherwise, let's warm our feeling, go out on the street, kill the others, destroy the sources of revenue, in general, destroy everything. One of the best literary descriptions of the war atmosphere I found in the
War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa. The inter-ethnic wars as those from the former Yugoslavia are not difficult to explain, as the ways in which the atmosphere was set up by the former communist tugs (all the stupid theories of the international complot against Yougoslavia is completely an outrage for the normal intelligence, but not a reason enough to do not still find in far-right publications from the area ), - as Milosevic and his gang with an impressive infractional record - fearful, among others of loosing the influence and the control they used to enjoy since Tito. The outcome of the post-conflict rehabilitation are unknown. Maybe, once in the EU, these countries will bring up the divisive attitude, maybe will help in containing any kind of conflict. From the point of view of the region, all these people need to think in perspective and to hope they would be taught to grow up. And, from time to time, we have to remember they still exist, even they stopped killing each other.
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