Iva ANDRIC
249
Kraut and "carpetbagger" who lightly leaves the country he was born
in at the very moment it is beginning a free life, and needs all possible
strength.
Let me get to the point right away. Bosnia is a wonderful country,
fascinating, with nothing ordinary in its nature and its people. And just
as there are mineral riches underneath the earth in Bosnia,
so
undoubt–
edly the Bosnian man hides within himself many moral values rarely
found in his compatriots in other Yugoslav lands. But you see, there is
one thing that people in Bosnia, at least people of your kind, should see
and never lose sight of: Bosnia is a land of hatred and fear. But let's leave
aside the fear, which is only a correlative of this hatred, its natural echo,
and talk about hatred. Yes, about hatred. And you instinctively wince
and protest when you hear this word (I saw it that night at the station),
just as everyone of you resists hearing it, grasping it and understanding
it. But it is precisely what should be seen, established, and analyzed.
And the real harm is in the fact that no one either wants or is capable
of doing it. Because the fatal characteristic of this hatred is in the fact
that the Bosnian man isn't aware of the hatred that lives in him, abhors
analyzing it, and hates anyone who tries to do it. But still, the fact is:
there are more people in Bosnia and Herzegovina willing to kill or be
killed in the fits of this subconscious hatred, because of different causes
and under different pretexts, than in other bigger Slavic or non-Slavic
lands.
I know that hatred, just like anger, has its function in the develop–
ment of society, because hatred provides strength, and anger provokes
action. There are ancient and deeply rooted injustices and abuses that
only floods of hatred and anger can uproot and wash away. And when
these floods subside and disappear, there is room for freedom, for the
creation of a better life. Contemporaries see hatred and anger much bet–
ter, because they suffer from them, but their descendants will only see
the fruits of strength and action. I know this well. But what I've seen in
Bosnia, that was something different. That was hatred, but not limited
just to some such moment in the course of social development and an
inevitable part of a historical process; rather, it was hatred that exhibits
itselfas an independent force, that finds its purpose in itself. Hatred that
sets man against man and then throws them into equal misery and mis–
fortune or drives both adversaries into the grave; hatred that like a can–
cer in an organism consumes and eats away everything around it, only
to perish with it in the end, because such hatred, like a flame, doesn't
have a permanent form nor a life of its own; it is merely a weapon of
