While politicians instigated the conflict in Bosnia, people from everyday life committed the atrocities, and this must be taken into account, columnist Zvonimir Nikolic told N1 in an interview on Saturday.

“Politicians are ideologues of everything bad, but those who committed the atrocities were not politicians, they were regular people. We need to begin looking at ourselves: we persistently try to put the blame on politics, but a lot of blame belongs on us,” he said.  

Nikolic said that, “In order to become a villain, you do not need to be educated. All you need is to be a little skewed as a person.”

“Those who were nobodies before the war suddenly became important people. You need no education in order to be a nationalist or villain. We all need to ask ourselves what it is that happened in our heads. I think that ‘small, common people’, as we often call them, share part of the blame. They were those who actually carried out these actions,” Nikolic said.  

“We should change our way of thinking, so we don’t leave something terrible, like only hate, to our children as our heritage. My generation is infected with all off this because we survived the war, but I think that it is being spread to today’s generations,” he said.  

Nikolic said that he thinks the severest corruption in Bosnia currently is in the justice system. As an example, he points to a court case he is personally involved in which he said has lasted 20 years.