Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

I spent nearly a decade investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia,

and now I head the New York Headquarters Unit of UN´s

Office of Internal Oversight Services.

After I published my book about my work for the Tribunal,

I lectured across Europe and the US.

This lecture was unique

because it took place in the UN General Assembly Hall.

I will start talking about

the investigation of the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

But before I start with that,

it's very important that we understand one thing.

There might be some students from the former Yugoslavia here,

and I'll be using the specific examples.

Please, we shall leave the demons of the war sleeping,

because a lot of bad things happen in the former Yugoslavia

from all sides,

from the Serbs, from the Kurats, Bosniaks and others.

And I'll be using an example of the crimes committed by the Serbs

or non-Serbs in Croatia.

It no means that the others didn't commit crimes.

I just want you to understand before I start my presentation.

I spoke to more than two thousand students from all over the world there,

and as I was leaving, some twenty Serbian students stopped and accused me

of giving a one-sided lecture.

Although none of them had experienced the conflict, they were hostile to me.

I realized then, how painful the trauma still was for the people there.

Vukovar must fall tonight. Then we’ll move on.

In 1992, I was working for Interpol’s national bureau in Prague,

and I had almost no interest in what was happening in Yugoslavia.

Until I found out that UNPROFOR, UN’s armed forces

that operated in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina,

were recruiting civilians.

The year in war changed me.

After seeing snipers literally hunt people and kill children,

I realized I had a moral obligation as a criminal investigator

to get involved with the nascent Tribunal.

I knew that I was part of something groundbreaking:

the search for a new mechanism of international justice.

And at the same time, I was hoping that we could help the nations

of the former Yugoslavia coexist as neighbours again.

The hospital became the target of daily shelling

as well as aerial bombing.

So we decided to move all the departments

to the basement of the hospital.

During the entire aggression, we kept treating all patients.

We treated Croatian defenders as well as enemy soldiers

but especially civilians.

I sent out hundreds of appeals,

urging Zagreb, the International Red Cross, and Geneva

to protect Vukovar and Croatia

from the unprecedented aggression.

Unfortunately, our appeals went unanswered.

Citizens! Croats! People!

We know that you want to surrender

and that it’s your only salvation.

But you must let us know

if we should stop or start killing everyone.

There were still some 350 people in the hospital

who kept providing care to all the injured and sick.

We were once again on our own.

To the very end.

Till the 18th of November,

when an agreement was to be made

on the evacuation of the hospital

under the oversight of observers from the International Red Cross.

But no one came.

We knew from the beginning that the Yugoslav army had prevented

the Red Cross from accessing the hospital.

In the meantime, they brought five buses to the back

and secretly took away some 300 people to an unknown location.

Tell us what the problem is.

He sees soldiers walking on the street and trucks going through.

But he can go through. Why doesn’t he?

- Go there. You could have gone there. - I just opened the bridge to traffic.

But it was closed until now.

There’s war here!

We are trying to ensure your safety and peace, and you’re making trouble.

If you don’t like it, you can go wherever you do like it.

Investigating 300 missing people was a completely new experience.

Moreover, their families believed they were being secretly held in Serbia

and trusted us to bring them home alive.

For the first ever, I saw someone cry during an interrogation.

Even grown men cried every day.

Gradually, we realized what had happened.

The fighting in Vukovar ended on 18 November 1991, and two days later,

when the hospital was to be evacuated,

Serbian media reported that Croats had murdered forty-one Serbian children

on the outskirts of Vukovar.

With emotions running so high, something terrible was bound to happen.

ITV, an independent British TV station,

reported on the massacre of 41 children at the Borovo Naselje elementary school.

The station cited photojournalist Goran Mikić,

who said that Croatian soldiers, while withdrawing from Vukovar,

massacred entire Serbian families in Borovo Naselje.

Goran Mikić is here with us tonight.

You came back from Borovo Naselje last night.

Please, tell us in brief what you saw. The school, the children...

We simply saw body bags filled with small dead bodies.

I managed to get within some 20 meters of them

You could clearly see that they were 5, 6, 7-year-old children,

their heads lying in pools of blood.

It was such a horrible sight that even the soldiers cried.

And...

- at the cost of our lives, we wanted... - How many bodies were there?

They were pulling them out of a cellar

and pairing heads with bodies. It was just terrible.

I believe there were around 40 of them.

- I couldn’t count them... - But you had your camera. -Yes.

- Did you try to take pictures? - I did, I got up,

but bullets were flying everywhere. One of the soldiers cocked his gun

and told me to duck unless I wanted to get shot too.

We couldn’t locate Goran Mikić,

but I managed to contact Italian journalist Milena Gabanelli,

who was also used by the Serbs.

She was brought to Vukovar by Serbian paramilitary unit commander

Željko Ražnatović Arkan.

This is an Italian journalist,

who just couldn’t believe it

until she saw it with her own eyes and filmed it.

Where is international community? Where is Amnesty International?

Where is Vatican? Nobody is here.

What I would like to understand, and I feel guilty for that,

a mass of killed people I saw.

So I can say to God that I saw this.

I cannot say that there were 40 children because I didn't have time to see this.

It was a situation so very dangerous, very confused, it was dark

and people that accompanied me, that threw me out in a tank

told me that there were 40 children.

I interviewed a guy who was among those who were doing the killing

and he said that he heard the news about Korats killing our children,

so they decided to kill those.

It's enough one shot.

It's enough one.

Let's start the game and then people get full completely.

Despite having doubts, Gabanelli decided to report on the child killings,

but before she did, Reuters had spread this fake news around the world

and retracted it a day later.

But the events in Vukovar had already begun unfolding.

Some woman in the hospital

gave me ten or twenty thousand dinars

because we thought we were going to Zagreb.

But we went straight to Ovčara.

There were some two hundred and fifty of us.

We were terribly scared.

Had we known they were going to kills us

we’d have probably tried to escape.

Who would have thought they’d kill five busfuls of people.

Zorić hit me over the head.

Tears start coming down my face.

I’m bleeding here on the head, where he hit me with the stick,

and I still can’t believe this is really happening.

I knew Zorić, and I knew his two sons.

I knew Bulidža. I used to play football with him.

I knew Lunčužanin. I knew Dokmanović.

He scissor-kicked one boy in the face,

and he grabbed Dado Djukić, who was kneeling,

and slammed his head against the concrete floor.

Siniša Glavašević came in after me.

When Dokmanović and his pack saw him

seven of them came at him at once.

We had four main suspects in the Ovčara case.

Three high-ranking officers of the Yugoslav army

and Slavko Dokmanović, a civilian and the mayor of Vukovar.

He too was responsible for what happened at Ovčara.

He even abused the captives himself.

And he was the first one we located.

We managed to convince his wife to give us an interview for the film.

But I didn’t attend it.

It happened at night, and there was no power. Even the witnesses said so.

One couldn’t recognize their own mother in such darkness, let alone him.

He could not have got there.

Even if he wanted to. Even if he knew about it.

When he read about it in the newspaper he was horrified,

and he said: “Someone’s head will roll for this”

He was a decent, honest, and hard-working man.

A respectable, good man.

In the first democratic election in Croatia,

he received by far the most votes and beat all other citizen’s groups.

There were not just Serbs. Vukovar is a multinational city

with Muslim, Croat, Serbian, and Roma citizens.

Since he won the election, he was appointed municipality chairman.

His official title was Chairman of the Municipality of Vukovar.

While preparing for the trial, we came to the conclusion

that we needed a witness from the unit that did the killing at Ovčara.

A witness who was not a mass murderer

otherwise they would not be credible.

Looking back now,

I’m certain that I already knew all the prisoners would be killed,

and I couldn’t do anything about it.

I drove away this professor, his wife, and one boy,

we used to be neighbours in Mitnica.

and several other people I knew from Vukovar,

and then I returned to Ovčara.

I asked if I could take away some more people,

and they told me that I could take ten more.

I took them out, where they got on a trailer.

When they left, my commander came to me

and told me that I was doing a good job.

That they followed me like sheep.

He ordered me to keep separating them into groups. That’s when I realized

that the first group had been killed

and that everyone else would be killed too.

Even though he saved several people at Ovčara and his testimony helped us,

I can’t think highly of him.

He now lives under a secret identity.

He got off really cheap.

But I cannot forget the things he was involved in in Vukovar and at Ovčara.

How hard must it be to accept such people when you live there?

Is it possible at all?

I arrived at Ovčara in August 1996, expecting that the exhumation

would take about three weeks.

But the first layer of soil revealed that there would be hundreds of bodies.

Heads, arms, and legs were protruding from the ground.

It was clear the exhumation would take much longer.

In the end, I spent seven weeks there.

I left reeking of dead bodies.

I managed to wash the stench away,

but you can’t rid yourself of what gets stuck in your head.

At the time the Hague Tribunal was established,

I was the head of the Croatian Commission for Missing Persons.

That’s when I met Vladimír.

It was in our common interest to bring Dokmanović to the Hague.

The Tribunal had existed for four years.

There were judges, prosecutors, investigators, lawyers, analysts,

but no perpetrators.

The former Yugoslav countries did not cooperate in arresting war criminals,

and NATO claimed it had no mandate to get involved.

He was in hiding.

Another country was hiding him although they knew he was a criminal.

He was not from Serbia, he was from Croatia, and he hid in Serbia,

which protected him and sheltered him from justice

instead of bringing him to trial,

as was their obligation to the International Criminal Tribunal.

We got a permission to act on our own and try to lure Dokmanović

to UN-controlled territory where we could arrest him.

He had to cross the Bogojevo Bridge between Serbia and Croatia voluntarily.

Otherwise it would be considered kidnapping and, therefore, inadmissible.

Sometime in February, he got a call to come to Vukovar

to discuss what would await the Serbs once the Croatian government took over.

He asked what would happen with the property Serbs left behind

since our house was there as well.

They promised him safety,

and he took the bait.

We urged him not to go,

but he was the kind of person who always makes good their promise.

“I promised I would go, and I will.”

And so he went.

We were taken from Vukovar to where the arrest was to take place.

We hid in two white containers and then waited for ages.

The heat inside was suffocating, and our anxiety was palpable.

After the escort left for the bridge to wait for Dokmanović to cross over,

the atmosphere grew even tenser.

It was perfectly clear to us that if the arrest failed,

if any of us was injured or even killed,

it would paralyse the Tribunal as such operation would never be approved again.

The Tribunal would fizzle out without any impact and fade into memory.

But then we heard the agreed signal.

Mr. Dokmanović, my name is Vladimír Dzuro.

I work for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The Tribunal has issued an arrest warrant in your name.

You are charged with grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, war crimes,

and crimes against humanity for your role in the abuse and the killings at Ovčara

near Vukovar on 20 November 1991.

Did you understand all I said?

I did, but it’s not true.

I had a sort of premonition.

The news had already started,

but we were sitting on the terrace, and the TV wasn’t on.

Then one of our friends who worked with him called us,

and he said in a trembling voice:

“Danilka, BK just announced that Slavko is in Hague.”

I was to read Dokmanović his rights, and thus become the first investigator

to do so since WW2.

Any mistake could result in the court releasing him due to a procedural error.

I felt it was my duty not to disappoint the families of the Ovčara victims,

who were waiting for someone to finally answer for the crimes.

We never said that Dokmanović was the worst Yugoslav war criminal.

There were far greater monsters, who massacred thousands of people.

But we wanted him arrested, tried, and convicted like all the others

to show that the hand of justice could reach all the perpetrators,

even the political elites.

The prison was empty, and there were no Serbs.

So they would grab anyone just to justify their existence.

Serbia was demonised.

I suppose that was their main goal.

So after they brought him in,

they retroactively added his name to the indictment.

I only met Toma Fila during my questioning about Dokmanović’s alibi.

Before I entered the courtroom, my colleague Clint Williamson told me:

"Whatever happens during the cross-examination, tell the truth.

We can deal with the truth. But if Fila catches you lying, we’re screwed."

Fila welcomed me with a smile and said he had just a few questions,

and in the end, I was cross-examined for three days.

We realized that more than Dokmanović, he was defending the Serbian regime

and President Slobodan Milošević.

We didn’t know how else to explain that he had Dokmanović testify twice,

given his disastrous first testimony

and poor mental state.

14 December 1949

Your Honour, the witness needs not to be instructed.

Not guilty.

Not guilty.

Not guilty.

Not guilty.

That year was like a concentration camp for us.

For us and for him.

It was awful. We would cry every day.

He and we. He on the telephone.

And even when we visited him, we would cry all the time.

Even when we were with him, we didn’t know what to say.

I can’t even describe how we felt.

Awful. Awful.

And on Vidovdan in 1998, at half past one in the morning,

Fila’s people called to tell me they found him dead in his cell.

He imposed a punishment on himself that the Tribunal never would.

We were back at the beginning.

All our effort, two years of work...

and justice was not served.

It had all been for nothing.

I went to Hague five times.

Was it necessary each time? I don’t think so.

Let’s say they needed me there twice.

It was worthwhile to them to repeat it again and again.

So all in all, I can’t really...

I can’t praise them.

They simply made good money.

I think we aroused high expectations.

When the Tribunal was established, it was stressed that it’s goals

were both to convict war criminals and reconcile the ex-Yugoslav nations,

which gave the impression that it would solve all problems.

We hoped that Yugoslavia would go the way of post-war Germany.

But Yugoslavia was not Germany.

The Serbian side was doing everything they could

to justify their aggression against Vukovar and Croatia,

arguing that it was necessary in order to protect Serbs from Croats.

To cover up their own war crimes,

they brought charges against Dr. Njavro and me in Serbia.

They claimed that we had not treated injured Serbs properly

and that our inadequate treatment

resulted in the death of one Yugoslav soldier.

The last time I was to go to Hague to testify,

they called me the day before to tell me

an arrest warrant had been issued in my name.

I told them I wouldn’t go then.

I didn’t want to end up in a Serbian prison again.

Later, whenever I wanted to travel somewhere,

I would first check with the police if there was a warrant in my name.

Many people, including myself, come to the conclusion

that the Tribunal...

would bring the victims no satisfaction.

Neither justice nor the rule of law.

And that was really very disappointing and brought disillusionment

to all of us in Croatia.

Many of the people who actually did the killing never stood trial.

This inevitably causes frustration among those affected by the war.

Justice will never be served in full,

and since the Tribunal has become such a lightning rod for frustration,

it will take people a lot of time to come to terms with the past.

We pray to you, Lord, for all who sacrificed their lives for Vukovar.

For those who laid down their lives for Vukovar,

and especially those gruesomely murdered

and buried in a mass grave at Ovčara.

Justice should have been dispensed in the former Yugoslavia,

in courts in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina,

but that was impossible at the time,

and even now, more than 25 years after the war,

it is still very difficult.

It’s easy to try Croats in Serbia and vice versa,

but it’s very difficult to try Croats in Croatia and Serbs in Serbia

Good afternoon, citizens of Sanski Most,

the city for peace and unity.

We are happy to see that so many of you gathered here

to hear our messages, with which we want to call for peace

and for people to get along again

in Bosnia and Herzegovina and our Yugoslavia.

Love and peace...

Love and peace...

Let’s sing about love,

let us all sing!

Love and peace...

Love and peace...

Let’s sing about love,

let us all sing!

Love and peace...

Love and peace...

Let’s sing about love,

let us all sing!

Peace is behind us, peace is in front of us, and it’s next to us.

And where else should it be?

In Yugoslavia, in our hearts! Do we all agree?

Yes we do!

It seems children come first.

There have been happenings for peace here before,

but never with so many people.

In 1992, when the Bosnian War started,

many people fled from here, especially Bosnians and Croats.

I too was waiting in the line for the papers you needed to leave,

but they suddenly stopped it, and said: “No more departures.”

“These people will stay here.”

They kept us here literally by force

to do the hardest work for them.

We had to cut down trees and repair local roads, for example.

Then they started sending us to the front lines. That was the worst.

Some will praise us, and others will criticise us.

The enemy will definitely criticise us because as you have seen or heard

we don’t treat them with kid gloves.

But our people will praise us.

Especially people of this region, whom we came to help.

To save them from this pure fascism.

Later, our team started investigating the Arkan case.

Željko Ražnatović participated in the war from its very beginning.

He put together his own paramilitary unit called Arkan’s Tigers.

He was already a criminal, and his involvement in the war

was motivated by his own interests.

We first noted his activities in 1991 during the fighting around Vukovar.

Our later investigation focused on the Bosnian town of Sanski Most,

where he had a base in the Sanus Hotel, and where he initiated ethnic cleansing.

Two years later, we stayed there too.

Not because the place was directly connected to the crimes,

but because it was far and wide the only open hotel.

We came here to stop the attack of the Muslims,

and to repel their attack

along the entire front line.

I would like to ask the citizens

not to run away because we definitely won’t run away,

and to remain in their houses until it’s safe out here.

We’ll protect them to the last tiger.

There was a small window above the door to the boiler room.

Tiny, really.

We all had to squeeze inside through that window.

One of us was a bit stocky,

and the poor guy got stuck in the window.

The soldiers beat him from behind until he fell in.

He was half dead.

Arkan’s soldiers tortured us

and forced us to do unspeakable things.

They beat one young man so much

that he shit his pants.

One of the soldiers made him lick his own faeces

until his underwear was clean.

Two men died in the boiler room.

Their bodies laid there with us for several days.

They wouldn’t let us take them out.

When the smell of the bodies spread to the courtyard,

they finally allowed us to carry them out.

Arkan simply

arrested and killed

non-Serbs.

So they grabbed anyone who was not a Serb,

they arrested them and killed them.

When we arrived in Sanski Most

on a truck loaded with ammunition and weapons,

we stopped in front of the Sanus Hotel. Arkan came out

and one by one asked our names.

Then he sent us to one of the corridors

and told us to take a rest because we would have a lot of work.

After a while, this...

smallish guy came in and asked me: “Are you a Turk?”

“If you are a Turk, sit down and cross your legs like Turks do.”

“And get your head to the floor.”

I could never cross my legs before, but I managed to do it then out of fear.

I saw that they were handcuffing us into pairs and loading us into a truck.

They lifted the tarp and said: “Two of you outside.”

Shortly after the first pair stepped out, there were two shots.

And so it went on: “Next! Next!” We went into some garage,

and there I saw the two who went before us dead on the ground.

I suppose I stumbled over one of the bodies there

so the bullet that he probably fired at my heart

hit me a little higher and went through my collar bone.

When I realized I was alive, I pretended to be dead.

Someone in the pile of dead bodies was still gurgling.

One of them said: “Some are still alive. Shoot each one in the head.”

The bullet they shot at me hit me in the chin.

Because Arkan was still alive, the investigators from Hague asked me

if I wanted protection since I decided to testify.

I went there to prove the involvement

of the Serbian army in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Because it was from those soldiers that I experienced...

I basically survived an execution.

And right now, we are where it all happened.

I consider it an act of great courage for a secret Tribunal witness

to connect their face and name with their testimony

Especially in a country, where over 100,000 people were killed

and the conflict is still smouldering.

When Sanski Most was liberated,

I was in Germany.

We watched it on the news.

Reporters kept bringing fresh news.

During one report, I noticed something.

I saw the dead bodies, and I called to my wife:

“That’s our garage! Our house!”

“Oh, come on!” she said.

“It is, look!” I replied. “I can see bodies lying there.”

It was not a house any more but a ruin.

We were the first to return. No one else was staying in Trnova overnight.

He went to bed in the evening, and I was standing by the window.

Terrified, I was waiting if the shelling would start again.

He wasn’t scared at all. He slept like a log.

I just started going to school

when the war broke out

in the former Yugoslavia,

and I have to say that in those years,

I heard nothing about Arkan.

But immediately after the war,

Arkan became very popular in Serbia.

He was then frequently invited to

both political TV programmes and light entertainment shows.

On those shows, he was presented as a strong man,

a successful man and a witty and charismatic person

who fought for Serbian values and protected us during the war.

We knew that he had been the commander of some unit,

but we knew nothing about what exactly he had done

besides that he had protected us.

Until it was made public

that he would be indicted by the Hague Tribunal

and what charges would be brought against him.

Popularity brought Arkan prominence, but the focus of his activities

was economic crime.

Under the guise of defending Serbs, Tigers plundered wherever they went.

He used the money he had made by looting for his political campaign in Serbia.

He even became an MP for some time.

The Serbian nation continues to be divided

into communists and monarchists, Partisans and Chetniks.

All that is history that we don’t need any more.

We need the Serbian nation

to become a single, united nation.

Only then will we all be

the strongest and invincible.

Only then will we all be Serbs and humans.

And that’s the most important thing!

We went after him for two long years.

He could only be arrested legally outside Serbia, under international law.

In September 1998, we received intel that Arkan would go to Madrid

to watch his football team Obilić play.

He had spent an incredible amount of money to get the club

into the European league.

Perhaps Arkan got a tip-off or just gave us the slip,

but we left Madrid empty-handed.

I led a team that worked on locating them.

So we located and arrested them and then sent them to the Hague.

If it weren’t for the Tribunal, no one would have been able to stop

those rolling Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian war machines.

Only the Tribunal and the threat of being arrested

somewhat brought them to their senses. No one else could.

There was no chance that the courts in Serbia would do anything

nor those in Croatia and Bosnia, I think.

For several years, we tried to arrest Arkan all over Europe.

Then, out of the blue, in April 1999,

it was announced that Arkan would cooperate with the tribunal.

At the time, Slobodan Milošević was on trial, and Arkan testifying

would spell a huge problem for him.

Shortly after, Arkan was shot dead by a Serbian police officer in Belgrade.

It’s strange.

The two most important cases I had ever worked on ended this way.

Arkan would never have gone on trial in Serbia

just like many other people who were involved in war crimes.

Had he been tried and convicted by the Hague Tribunal,

I think that it would have been the end

of the Serbian mainstream narrative

that paramilitary units simply form on their own

when four friends get together and decide to go to war,

and it has nothing to do with Serbia.

I was invited to Nuremberg.

We were in courtroom 100.

That’s the courtroom where the leaders of the Third Reich were tried,

and there’s a photograph there, in which you can see the dock.

I saw Göring, and then I noticed Jodl.

And, interestingly, all of them had very concerned looks on their faces.

They were worried about what would happen to them. And I said

that it was a pity that the guys from our country hadn’t seen the photo

and how terrified they looked.

I think that things would have gone differently here.

Our press then confronted me, asking how I dared compare those fascists

with our peacemakers.

They came at me.

I am rather critical

of the Hague Tribunal.

But ask yourselves what would have happened

if it had not been established.

In the next election, we would have likely re-elected

Slobodan Milošević as our president,

Arkan could have become Minister of the Interior or Defence,

and all the people that were charged

with very serious crimes by the Tribunal would have been free,

and after the war, they would have probably kept their positions and power.

We all grew up here in Bosnia.

Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians.

As far as I know, only the Croats,

who had some 50 houses around here, they alone didn’t come back.

All the young people have left for abroad.

That’s how it is.

Of course I would prefer if my children and grandchildren were here.

Who will serve my son dinner when he comes home from work?

I arrested both Karadžić and Mladić

so I wasn’t very popular. Even today, some people say:

“That’s the guy that arrests only Serbs.”

But the neighbourhood I live in is quite classy.

There’s a lot of decent people here, and I get no trouble.

But as soon as I head to the suburbs, they call: “Look, it’s him!”

From the moment the Tribunal was established

I firmly believed that it was an institution

that would help bring to justice

perpetrators of war crimes,

but that it would also help

national courts

to start trying war crimes.

I testified at a national court

in several cases of war crimes perpetrated by Croats.

As a result, I was labelled as someone

who took the enemy’s side.

It’s not pleasant for me nor for my family.

I was targeted by the media at one point, and it went on for a while,

but it made me realize

that it was probably time for me to leave my job.

I don’t want to live in a society where my neighbour

is someone who has killed 200 people in Croatia or Bosnia.

I don’t want my child

to play with such person or even say hello to them.

I don’t want it to be acceptable that they won’t be convicted

because twenty-five years have passed.

In total, the Tribunal prosecuted 161 people and convicted 90 of them.

I can’t say it’s a low number, but it’s not enough for me.

We gradually obtained the names of the actual shooters,

and most were out of our reach. Outside our jurisdiction.

More justice could have been served, had the Yugoslav states

fully cooperated with the tribunal.

We could have solved far more for them.

When you do this job for ten years,

the stress and emotions inevitably get to you.

That’s why I eventually left the tribunal.

I got a job offer from the UN, and I thought to myself

that ten years was enough.

In hindsight, I think I made the wrong decision

and that I should have continued working for the tribunal.

We did a lot of bad shit But there’s a catch

You burned and stole, too We’re a match

Years went by, we only stuck with our brothers

Never grew the balls to talk to the others

That’s why, dear Milan, I’m writing you this letter

We’re not the same Some are worse, some better

They’ll raise their voice But I made my choice

My intention is kind I have a peace of mind

Fuck their rules I’ll never be a hater

Time will tell If I’m a fighter or traitor

We all suffer When will it end

I’ll be the first to reach out my hand

How can you show some love to the others

Kicked by your team Spat on by their brothers

They will use you to fight in their ring

Look at the sky New fires are burning

How can you show some love to the others

Kicked by your team Spat on by their brothers

They will use you to fight in their ring

Look at the sky New fires are burning

I’m afraid even when I’m writing these lines

They’ll say I spat at our granddads’ lost lives

I know you’re waiting for the phone to ring

I know cause I, too, have been waiting

We’re so alike It’s a shame

We come to visit lying about a relative’s name

Feeling like a swine in Teheran

Just like me when I come to Trebinje

How can you show some love to the others

Kicked by your team Spat on by their brothers

They will use you to fight in their ring

Look at the sky New fires are burning

How can you show some love to the others

Kicked by your team Spat on by their brothers

They will use you to fight in their ring

Look at the sky New fires are burning

I won’t be bugging you about Dodik’s lies

the nationalism machine just to make more dough

We’re not brothers Fuck the good old days

Going to each other’s Bayrams and holidays

They sold it all It fell apart

Brothers into rivals overnight

No more counting deaths and corpses

Burned mosques Torn down churches

It’s hard to stand the guilt trip, the tension

when my people call you a genocidal nation

You’re not like that I know it’s bullshit

I want you to know that’s not what I think