Every World Cup has a newcomer with some sensational narrative that touches hearts of the sympathizing spectators around the world. The World Cup in Brazil has started and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) qualified for the first time since the country had gained the independence in the early 90s. The soccer federation went through several changes and had shuffled many players who were molded enough to represent our fragile country. While half of us supports the efforts of the soccer team, the other half sometimes silently, at other times vehemently calls for the failure of BiH national team. Overall, we are proud! Finally, we are moving away from our violent recent history into some new era, era of deceit. Overnight, we have become an underdog who went through so much suffering and death in the course of our lives and now we are represented by those players who endured the siege in Sarajevo, or who experienced ethnic cleansing in Banja Luka. Suddenly, we became a symbol of endurance and a success story of the first timers among the traditional stars of football. Croatia is there too, yet it is portrayed as a distant relative of ours who hasn't gone through as much as we have. Perhaps, it is due to recent fascist chants that FIFA proudly condemned and fined during a soccer match in Croatia. For whatever reasons, we are the story of perseverance told through a bloody fairy tail and transformed into an undoubted success.
Yet, all this does not sit quite well with me. The constant mentioning of our redundant history comes as old news or something already left behind a decade ago. I am a product of diaspora with the strong ties to my home country but something smells fishy every time BiH is portrayed through a tale of war. Every time I meet someone and I tell them where I am from, I hear the empathetic statements about the place where I hail from. Sometimes, I feel that people do not see me beyond where I am from and that sucks because I am a person as much as anyone else from anywhere else. I am not defined by the war.
The 90s conflict changed the course of my life but along the way I accumulated the experiences I would have never had a chance to live through if I had stayed behind. I have developed into an individual devoid from my background and although I am sometimes guilty of that melancholic repetition of the days left in the motherland, I am an individual after all and I would like others to see me for me rather than a child of war or some other definition. Sometimes I feel as if Bosnians are proud of all the suffering and negativity the war had brought because without it they would not know who or what to blame for their insufficiencies. If its not the war itself, then history for sure is our biggest enemy. So, we make excuses and patriotically remember the slaughterings and blood spilled on our soil. I am not saying to forget, but the toning down of the significance of the war should occur. We have all lost our homes, family members, countrymen, our childhoods but I refuse to sit around and glorify the war as a defining moment in my life. And those who continuously present themselves as victims of some conflict that occurred almost 20 years ago, I say stand up to it and own up to your own existence. Shit happens all over the world, people die and live in far worse conditions that what we had experienced and they are not even mentioned in the media because they will never make it to the World Cup. They will never have a chance to be depicted as a sob story of our humanity. We finally have to understand that every single individual goes through a war of their own and to them it is the most horrific experience.
Our problem is that we have nothing else to be proud of but the event that left us all fucked up and instead of joining forces and becoming individuals we fall back into the same group mentality where others think for us so we can go on blaming and attacking circumstances in life. I will be rooting for Bosnia in the World CUp with pride and patriotic sentiments but not for the reasons of surviving the war but for better future where culture and diversity will be introduced once again in our backward Balkans. And I hope that all this mushy, hollywood-y approach would disseminate into forgetting once we learn to accept life for what it is stripped of all unnecessary kitsch. The truth is in the essence.
