What unites Goran Bregovic with an associate of the Prime Minister of Albania, V. Intzko's decision on genocide and the verdict of J. Stanisic, head of the Serbian Secret Service?

1. A close associate of the Prime Minister of Albania has cooperated with the Serbian Secret Service in Kosovo.

This finding is not part of the usual conspiracies on the "espionage" of this or that person. The current close associate of the Prime Minister of Albania has publicly admitted this at the International Court of Justice for The Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. He admitted that the Serbian Secret Service had asked him to help open a negotiation process with a respected Kosovo Albanian figure in order to avoid negotiations with Dr. Rugova, a leading figure of Kosovo Albanians and at the same time from the position of Dr. Rugova for the independence of the country to be transferred to the position of "Third Republic" within the "FRY". The collaborator fulfilled this request.

This would be discovered, only after the war, by all the rest of us who, in one way or another, had known the collaborator of the Serbian Secret Service. And, this issue would be re-actualized within the state structures of Albania when the person in question would claim the citizenship of Albania. At that time, contrary to legal procedures, information on cooperation with the Serbian Secret Service would be avoided and citizenship would be granted by the  president of the time.

During the past days of this hot summer, three processes will take place, which will serve me to remember the case of the collaborator. The first is the decision of Valentin Intzko, now BiH's former international chief administrator, to declare the denial of genocide in BiH a criminal offense. The second is the announcement of the verdict of Jovica Stanisic, former head of the Serbian Secret Service (who asked for favors from the Collaborator) by which his activity in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is treated as the work of the joint criminal enterprise of his state, Serbia.  And the third is the fuss about the invitation to Goran Bregovic, a leading Yugoslav rock figure of the 1980s and now an international music figure, to take part in the Korca Beer Festival.

2. Valentin Intzko indicated that he had promulgated the law on the denial of genocide at this time for the simple reason that only now has the verdict of Radovan Karadzic- the former leader of the BiH Serbs, who was tried for among others the genocide in Srebrenica- become final. So, although the act of genocide was committed in 1995, only in 2021 it is possible, with the sentence of Karadzic that this criminal offense is sanctioned as such, consequently its denial constitutes another criminal offense, according to the best European tradition built after Nuremberg trials in post-Nazi Germany. This is extremely important for the identity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a state in which the descendants of Radovan Karadzic, rewarded with the Republika Srpska, build their policy on genocide denial. For them, the Srebrenica genocide was part of the war, "where everyone killed everyone else, everyone was responsible, everyone was a victim."

The trial of Jovica Stanisic showed that not everyone was responsible or the victims. He was convicted because, although he was not directly responsible for the killings in BiH, he was responsible for leading a joint criminal enterprise aimed at forcibly evicting Bosnian Muslims from their homes and establishing Serb rule in those  territories. This joint criminal enterprise, according to the verdict, had the full organizational support of the Republic of Serbia.

And Goran Bregovic, a symbol of the music of the former Yugoslavia, invited to the Korça Festival, spurred the next quite intense political and cultural friction in the public discourses of Kosovo and Albania. In Albanian-speak was outlined the confrontation of the argument on the right of Albanians to invite cultural figures who do not pass an imaginary moral test (and such are all) on the attitude towards the war in Kosovo (or if it is diluted, even towards Milosevic, Bosnia , etc.).

3. The three processes have a common denominator, the unfinished wars and the delay to accept this.

The BiH genocide denial law highlighted what should have been the moral pillar of building BiH a quarter of a century ago. So, since 1996 it should have been clear that the moral pillar of building the democratic state of BiH would be that genocide cannot be denied, just as it is not conceivable today for an exemplary European democracy to exist in Germany and not to rely on the moral pillar of the condemnation of genocide. The fact that this is done in 2021 shows that the war in BiH, including genocide, continues in the inversion of Von Clauzewitz- who said that war is the continuation of politics by other means,-becoming the continuation of war by other means.

And this is an important issue for Serbia. J.Stanisic’s court verdict rose a step further what had been done in the International Court of Justice , which on the genocide accusation of BiH decided that Serbia was not responsible for organizing and executing the genocide but was responsible for inaction to prevent it. In this case, Serbia was convicted, through Stanisic, of a joint criminal enterprise in Croatia and BiH, so the state had taken action to help crimes against humanity at various points against Croat Croats and Bosnian Muslims.

Goran Bregovic enters this story as an artist from Sarajevo, who fled to Belgrade during the war and then to European countries. He could, but did not, condemn the massacre of his hometown by Serbian forces. He could not control that his songs would be used for the paramilitary units that would enter Gjakova and from the loudspeakers would mark the dramatic moment of the decision to execute the children, women and men of that city.

4. The debate about Goran Bregovic's participation in the Beer Festival in Korça is not real, it has nothing to do with the truth. Any artist from anywhere will go to a beer festival and that is not an issue at all.

The point is that the wars of the former Yugoslavia are not over. Yes, Slovenia is an independent country and a member of the EU. And yes, Croatia is also an EU member state, but for Serbia it is a country that has purged almost all Serbs from there.

And this is the Serbian policy of almost the past decade and the coming decade. For Serbia, the wars are not over, because Serbia went to war declaring that Serbs anywhere in Yugoslavia cannot be a minority. So they can not be a minority in BiH, Montenegro, Kosovo; consequently, it cannot be said that the war is over until the Serbs are a majority or with the right to be a majority .

For Kosovo, hypersensitive to everything that has to do with the Serbs of Serbia, Bregovic is another argument that Serbia does not understand what Kosovo is still failing to express, that the war for it is not over, that Kosovo is still living in war.

For official Albania, which tries to look at the Balkans from the rationality of a 21st century Europe aspired today by citizens of Paris, Lisbon and Tallinn, Kosovo is that poor village cousin who remembers his ancestry, and thus prevents you from worshiping G. Bregoviiq. and his band, which the inhabitants of Prishtina saw for the first time in 1975, more or less when Todi Lubonja was imprisoned, because in the song festival he had organized on Albanian Radio Television, the songs that were sung were not were of Enver Hoxha's taste.

5. The debate on both sides of the border that divides the majority of Albanians seems temporal to me. Thus, official Albania does not accept that this war is not over and official Kosovo is not managing to explain the opposite, that the war is continuing by other means. Meanwhile, official Albania and Kosovo even legitimized an associate of the Serbian Secret Service: if he is part of the public sphere, why is not possible for Goran Bregovic?

Goran Bregovic, as he likes to call himself, a musician of weddings and deaths, thus becomes a collateral victim, becomes the singer of unfinished wars. The Secret Service collaborator, by contrast, remains an active participant in those wars.

Moreover, this debate is set in a European macro-plan: the EU and the US have been trying since 1999 to convince themselves and others that the wars in the Western Balkans are over, but they are not very successful at it.

The Collaborator and Bregovic are showing that the situation is different.