By Senadin Lavić. We live in a post-genocidal society, divided into ethnic-religious ghetto by means of war. In such broken society are continually inserted seductive and controversial concepts that serve the goals that are not realized by means of war. The terms such as federalism, unitarism and separatism come mainly as political games of political life actors in our country, but regarding the separatism of the entities RS, the Greater Serbian policy is absolutely focused on this goal. The shaping of political reality and the main ideas in it is a work of the ideology – par excellence, which then means that these terms are mostly ideologically determined and conceived in the minds of their constructors. We should remember that M. Kasapović (Zagreb) in 2005 imposed and installed the term of consociation as territorial separation of the people in Bosnia and as the only possible model for the organization of the political system in Bosnia, followed by an orchestrated story of federalization and electoral units. The vague concept about the “impossible state” by N. Kecmanović (Banjaluka) is added to this in 2007 and till today, these two, assembled Serbian-Croatian projects of the dissolution of Bosnia stifled us and taken to a blind track of history. Kasapović has already come to Cyprisation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. These two names, Kasapović and Kecmanović, are witnesses to the great moral problem that has dampened our present social reality! We did not forget that on the ground of Bosnia, “pure ethnic territories” were created. On the objection that separatism must be halted, separatist forces respond that separatism is a reaction to unitarism and the non-recognition of entity “RS” or the necessity of federalization because of the vulnerability of Croats by Bosniaks. Thus, the syntagm of “unitarist politics” is a good excuse to continue the policy of division, ghettoization, hatred, great Serbian policy and similar enterprises. The Dayton political system with imposed Constitution in Anex IV has brought peace to Bosnia, but, it should be emphasized, left the hope of anti-Bosnian forces to continue what they did not end in the war. This was immediately understood by the Greater Serbian policy and the entity RS was called the “Serbian state”, “war booty” or “the rest of the remnants of the Serbian ethnic territory” west of the Drina River. The name of the entity itself allows this in perspective! Many people are already “trained” to speak “Serbian entity” regardless of the fact that it was made by genocide against Bosniaks. Unitarianism is falsely identified with majorization in the explanations of separatist policies that, in fact, do not want the state of Bosnia or want only the formally present state institutions that are subordinate to the entity. The unitary system of government means that there is a state power that is accomplished throughout the territory of the state. Relating to this idea, Bosnia is a highly decentralized state divided into entities and cantons, which considerably slows down its functioning. The key matter is that separatism and federalism as parts of the political ideology of anti-Bosnianism do not want strong state of Bosnia. In such divided state, there we cannot talk about unitarism. The expansionist nationalism of Serbs and Croats sees its goal in the assimilation of the Bosnian territory, then the “territorial authority” of ethnics means suppressing everything different from our “territory” and disregarding that in “our territory “state power or some national (state) institution has any influence. From here to dissolution, it is just a step. This is the way that tribal games go to the extreme. Serbian and Croatian national projects are seeking a “Bosniak policy” that would agree to implementation of Bosnian state’s dissolution in this way and end with its political and historical existence.

A brave Bosnian policy should offer the concept of regionalization of the state area and constantly insist on it regardless of all Serbian-Croatian agreements against Bosnia. Bosnia has five historical regions that derive their meaningful existence from medieval times and that should not be ridden of the mind. In addition, the Bosnian ethatist political philosophy must be reaffirmed, therefore, a new development of awareness of the importance of the state. By this, it should be ended the Bosniak jeremiad in the last twenty years and defeated the anti-politics. The ideologized vocabulary of anti-Bosnian politics We must not agree to accept the ideologized vocabulary of anti-Bosnian politics at all. Unfortunately, we still do not have a sufficiently strong Bosnian policy that could deal with numerous subversives, simulacrums, deceptions and abuses of the system institutions, and we are all troubled by the failure of the rule of law. Parts of the law apply only to powerless or politically unbounded. It seems that the system of law in this country is the main source of corruption and manipulation of citizens, such a monstrous system that we have not even imagined. Organized groups have appropriated “right” of rights institutions and it appears as “party” and “ethnic” property, plus family clans, and the state is catastrophically damaged and turned into a “super-market” for robbery. The law system is subordinate to political groups that implement their constructions of social life. Weak state institutions open the space to all degenerative phenomena that undermine political stability. The state is vulnerable, institutionally deprived and does not breathe full of lungs. It would be good if the unitary system of government worked and organized the political life in the state through the devolution. It would be much more order, responsibility and better life. There would be no anarchy, hunting in the fog, ethnophulism in the education system, anachronistic ideologies, mythical consciousness, Chetniks and Ustasha, denying of genocide, denying the right to Bosnian language for children in schools … In post genocidal society, a strong and responsible state is needed in order to overcome war trauma and reached legal satisfaction. What we have now is a knock-together form of war achievements and fulfilled wishes of the Milosević’s regime. The bureaucrats from the so-called International community We should not be naive and believe to bureaucrats from the so-called International community, to people like for example, B. B. Ghali, J. Akashi, J. Mayor, M. Lajčak or C. Bildt and many others, known and unknown. They consider Bosnia as a regular working task and they did not carry out anything to improve life in Bosnia. Let remember José Cutilliero, Lord Carrington, David Owen, Philippe Morillon and dozens of others who have done everything to carry out an anti-Bosnian idea in Bosnia and led us to the madness of the division of the country towards the ethnic-religious lines of war conquest. They were “just mediators” – that sounds innocently. They came here as maharaja with their colonial narrations. Today’s generations must not forget these people and must save a real memory about them. It is important, for example, to leave a recorded memory of F. Mitterrand and similar figures of modern cynicism that convinced us that we could walk across the city under the siege of Serbian howitzers and snipers beside the burnt City Hall or Markale. They turned our disaster into a “humanitarian issue” and shamefully closed their eyes against the genocide against Bosniaks all over the Bosnia. In addition, Bosnia is settled at the heart of the former South Slavic area and it is “ideal” as a focal point in which Western, European, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, civilized mediators “experts” can be involved for the division of territories leaving the peoples in conflicts. When “bureaucrats” stop working this in the Balkans, it is absolutely certain that peace will be here – to avoid saying eternal peace, because we have never started wars. Let’s look back to the 20th century – everything was transparent. Egoistic bureaucrats do not need civil Bosnia or peace among South Slavic “tribes”, because what would they do then and how they deal with their problems. European bureaucrats have been watching aggression on Bosnia for four years and wrote letters to Milošević. They did not provide protection and defence of an independent state with the UN forces. In today’s constellation, they worry about the Bosnian and South Slavic “primitives” who do not know what “civil society” is and play the role of a civilizing factor. The political matrix of ethnic-religious representation of people It would be worth to express a sceptical attitude towards the “civil political option” syntagm, because it does not have clear semantic structure, as well as a “nationalist policy”. Until we begin to name precisely the phenomena around us, we will not know what is happening to us! Since the 1990s in Bosnia the political matrix of ethnic-religious representation of people has been imposed, so that they have not appeared as individuals, citizens, free citizens, but only and exclusively as members of the team/collective, Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Others. In that wretched matrix, people of Bosnia are not autonomous and free individuals. They have to think as the “team/collective says” or the priest on behalf of the team/collective (tribe, people, nation, religion) and in such way their individuality is reduced of them, and then they are only “cannon flesh” of some great “Načertanija” (1844) and pathological conditions of hegemonic politics. Such a collectivist spirit is controlled by religious institutions and ruling political oligarchs. Here, the religion is the basis of the nation – and it tells us where we are! It is an illusion to present the policy throughout the conceptual pair of “nationalist” and “civil” politics when we know that this is only the seductive surface of ​​the project of tribal division of the people of the South Slavic area and the imposition of a matrix to Bosnia that opposes against its historical political philosophy. Our heroic peoples, who have neglected their production of knowledge and general culture, managed by people with suspicious projects, they will be slaves and serfs in the upcoming establishment of the world order as a system of hegemony of several powers. The pair of terms “civil” and “nationalist” does not correspond to the essential meaning of the historical process in which we are overtaken by a sub-national political culture, a feudalized landscape in which neither citizens nor nationalists “can” appear. We have not yet learned to participate freely in a democratic culture as citizens with their opinions and interests. We still need tribal chiefs and priests who do not know anything about the Bosnian political future! We need to ask questions that help us to focus primarily. For example, first of all – how did it happen that we are the only ones in today’s Europe who has a “tribal political system” or a “state of tribes”, such a constitutional arrangement imposed by Annex IV? Who set us this up as the Constitution of the State? Why all European diplomats are silent on this issue and say that we should “agree” when they, as the International Community, have fulfilled the wishes of the aggressors and nationalist forces in the Balkans and against Bosnia? This cynical European bureaucracy, above all, regardless of European ideals, is a self-sufficient, static and enlarging political group that accumulates great power in its hands. It pretends as awkward in front of the Balkan fascists, the Nazis, the fundamentalists, because such characters serve it as an example of the “primitive Balkans” and “wild Slavic tribes” who are slaughtered each other without mercy. This colonial background and the orientalistic image about us disable a realistic approach to solving problems in this area. There are also quite low and hypocritical moves of Croatian “European” policy that plays its petty-bourgeois super-ordination to this area and shows itself to others as an “heir of European values” while supporting the Hague convicts with Tompson’s songs and ideology. This Croatian unilateralism has led to the incomparable exodus of Bosnian Croats from their homeland – Bosnia and has torn them away from their Bosnian state. The second guidance that helps us to orient ourselves is focused on understanding the distinction between national and ethnic, civil and ethnicity. First of all, it should be reminded that in the area of South East Europe, where the South Slavic nations were located, the state structure of these nations failed because they were mostly obsessed with their own mythical, religious and ethnic constructions or fabrications that served them to represent themselves as a nation superior to others. In Bosnia, this has been happening during the whole 20th century in big noises of the Serbian and Croatian national determinations. Thus, the national question was shaped at a very primitive level as a question of creating an ethnic-religious state from which all who are not “ours” by religion and nationality will be excluded. This incompetence for the difference led the national question under the control of religious institutions of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. In one-track politics, the nuances of the fascist-shape relation to the different are noticed, as R. Konstantinović wrote about it, so knowledgeable and anticipatory, as well as Miodrag Popović. So, it could be said that the South Slavic peoples, as well as the peoples of Bosnia, have not yet developed and tested a political culture that surpasses the “tribal image of the world” and prefers free man as the greatest value of the social life of people. We need to teach people that nationally are not a tribal, ethnic, folk, regional or ethnic-religious definition of a person, but it is meant that a free citizen belongs to a state-nation that assures him all human rights as to its citizen. Nationality is thus a civil definition, a legal-political concept of people’s life who does not exclude their cultural perceptions of themselves. So, it is time to learn to distinguish the political-legal level of human life in the community from the cultural-historical dimension through which a certain national identity is recognized as specific among others. The Bosnian Serbs were captured in the mythologist of the 19th century about the “great Serbian state” in which all Serbs will live and – only Serbs. In front of them there is a great historical task to overcome their own misconceptions, self-denial and historical blind alley. A similar process of liberation from the “Ottoman image of the world” has already begun by the Bosniaks and they are carrying it out. In the end, it should be emphasized that in our country the civil has not yet matured in citizenship awareness, but it entails historicist narratives of Tito-statehood, fraternity and unity, communism and a one-party world, the monolithic Left, existence without identity, misunderstanding of anti-Fascism, bipolar diversity of the world, unable to anticipate the new Bosnian idea of ​​life, and so on. In fact, the civil has never come to life in this region as a political culture of respecting a man, an individual, a free citizen of the Bosnian nation. We still do not know what it means to be a citizen, free and conscious again in our own Bosnianhood? We have not considered this in the past thirty years under the siege of collective metaphysics of ethnic-religious groups. In today’s monstrous political systems, this seems to be utopian, unreal and unachievable before the dictatorship of party oligarchies, leaders and their assistants. In that danger is growing the rescue-thing – Heidegger would remind to Hoelderlin. ——— About the author: Senadin Lavić is a professor at the Department of the Sociology of Political Sciences Faculty Sarajevo, at University of Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prolific author of numerous books and seminal works, prof. Lavić is the Chairman of the Bosnian Cultural Union ‘Preporod’. ——- Photography courtesy of Senadin Lavić.

By Barend ter Haar. Are the Netherlands more powerful than Italy or Spain? Yes, according to 2017 ISA Country Power Rankings published by ISA (International Strategic Analysis), an international research and consulting firm headquartered in Luxembourg . ISA bases its ranking on an analysis of seven different categories of power: economy, demography, military, environmental and natural resources, politics, culture and technology. It is interesting to compare this list with the best countries/power rankings published by U.S. News & World Report . That list is based on only five factors: leadership, economic influence, political influence, strong international alliances and strong military alliances. The lists are remarkably different. The United Arab Emirates, for example, are number 10 on the US News list but do not appear on the ISA list, and Canada, Australia and India are 3, 5 and 6 on the ISA list but only 12, 16 and 17 on the list of US News. Sweden does not figure on the ISA list, but in 2016 it easily won a non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council for two years, while Italy and the Netherlands had to do with one year each. Does this mean that Sweden is more powerful than Italy and the Netherlands? In the US News list Sweden is placed just behind Italy, but in front of the Netherlands and Spain. How seriously should we take these rankings? Not too seriously, if only because they are not always built on thorough knowledge of the countries. US News states, for example, that the “Kingdom of the Netherlands emerged in 1815 after years of Spanish and later French occupation”, ignoring that it was preceded by the Dutch Republic, an independent and relatively powerful state from 1648 to 1795. But on the other hand: perceived power is also a form of power and the rankings provide interesting food for thought. What is it that makes a country powerful? Why is Switzerland, with little more than eight million inhabitants (i.e. half of that of the Netherlands), so high on both lists? How does the power to destroy, e. g. the number of nuclear weapons of a country, relate to the power to get things done? If you are interested in the power to get things done, than it is interesting to look at the ability of a country to obtain visa-free travelling for its citizens. According to the Global Passport Power Rank 2017 , the winners are Germany and Singapore. Their inhabitants can visit 158 countries without a visa. They are closely followed by Sweden and South Korea, with 157 visa-free countries. (By the way: none of these four countries has nuclear weapons.) 2017 ISA Country Power Rankings: 1. USA 2. China 3. Canada 4. Russia 5. Australia 6. India 7. Japan 8. Germany 9. UK 10. France 11. Brazil 12. South Korea 13. Saudi Arabia 14. Netherlands 15. Spain 16. Italy 17. Mexico 18. Switzerland 19. Poland 20. Indonesia 21. Israel 22. Turkey 23. Argentina 2017 Power Rankings according to U.S. News 1. United States of America 2. Russia 3. China 4. United Kingdom 5. Germany 6. France 7. Japan 8. Israel 9. Saudi Arabia 10. United Arab Emirates 11. South Korea 12. Canada 13. Turkey 14. Iran 15. Switzerland 16. India 17. Australia 18. Italy 19. Sweden 20. Pakistan 21. Netherlands 22. Spain 23. Qatar

By Corneliu Pivariu. Things look like that after president Donald Trump’s participation to the “Three Seas Initiative” – Warsaw, G20 Hamburg Summit and France’s National Day – 14th of July in Paris. Yet we must underline that the period of the Cold War when the two superpowers were deciding most of the global geopolitic developments is over and so is the short period after the fall of the Iron Curtain when the USA was prevailing. Currently, we are in a period of a much more complexity then those we just mentioned, whereby each important geopolitical player seeks to position itself as well as it can from the perspective of the emergence of a new architecture of world power, although until that time it is very likely we will witness the intensification of rivalries among the main competitors globally, an unwanted accentuation of the negative consequences of some still unsolved global problems, without totally excluding the possibility of the occurence of a new and ample world conflict until a new setting of the world order is in place. It is under these circumstances that we witnessed president Donald Trump’s participation on 6th of July in Warsaw at the “Three Seas Initiative” (a re-adaptation of the Polish project launched between the two World Wars – Intermarium, a plan drawn up by the Polish Josef Pilsudski, yet a never implemented idea) which is currently grouping 12 countries: Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. The White House noticed the potential of this initiative especially under the prevailing circumstances in the European Union and the Russian Federation’s expansionism and president Trump’s participation increased its value and importance. In his speech delivered on that occasion, the American president emphasized especially the interest and the possibility of developing the energy markets of this area through the USA’s export (the first delivery of US LNG to Poland was made in June 2017), commissioning a LNG terminal on the Croatian Island of Krk, as well as other gas and oil pipelines projects in the area. The president Trump underlined that: “The United States will never use energy in order to coerce our nations and will not permit to others to do so”. (A more than transparent reference to Moscow’s use of what some call the energy weapon, something the Kremlin permanently denied). “The USA strongly support the establishment of the Three Seas Commercial Forum” president Trump added and stressed the importance of the economic component of the initiative that will secure finally prosperity sovereignity, security and freedom for the countries joining the initiative as well as a positive influence for the whole of Europe. The next Three Seas Summit will take place, upon Romania’s president proposal and offer, in Bucharest in 2018 (the preceding one took place in Dubrovnik, Croatia on 25th of August, 2016). G20 Hamburg Summit was followed very attentively mainly due to the fact that it brought about the first direct meeting between the presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. We notice here an open letter addressed to the two leaders by four important personalities (Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger – Chairman of Munchen Security Conference, the former British Secretary of Defense, Des Browne, the former Russian minister of Foreign Affairs, Igor Ivanov, and the former American Senator Sam Nunn), whereby they suggested four fundamental steps for “improving the security situation for all the peoples living in the Euro-Atlantic region”. In brief, the suggestions were: declaring that a nuclear war cannot have any winner and therefore it should not be waged; setting up a new crises management group NATO- Russia; cooperation in order that ISIS (Daesh) and other terrorist groups be prevented from acquiring nuclear and radiological materials through a joint initiative to prevent the terrorism with WMD happen; reaching informal understandings at least concerning the cyber threats linked to interfering the strategic nuclear warning, command and control systems. These are, indeed more than maximal requests for a first Trump-Putin meeting as it has been seen and as we present in Points of view (page 16). It is likely that it has been wanted that the open letter be an emphasis of fundamental threats to the society undergoing globalisation is confronted with. Nevertheless, we notice quite different attitudes (as seen in media broadcasts) of Vladimir Putin towards Donald Trump, as compared to the former first meeting with Barack Obama. These are not only the results of the experience gained and, most probably, we will have much to add after the following bilaterals White House-the Kremlin. G20 Hamburg Summit was essentialy a reunion that represented a dispute between multilateralism and multipolarity. Multilateralism was certainly adopted by Germany with the help of many European nations that consider that the legitimity of G20 is given by the contribution to achieving of a durable development, to a socio-economic progress, to protecting the environment and climate. In America’s vision, G20 has, during Donald Trump’s mandate, the meaning of an instrument for reaching its national interests (America first). At the same time, China, that has its own agenda, seeks to gain advantages from the current state of the relations between Europe and the USA. Germany understands China’s game and the fact that during the summit a basic agreement was reached concerning the commercial exchanges between the EU and Japan, which can be considered a good point in the evolution of the relationship with China, yet without impressing the USA that is obviously aware of China’s obsession concerning the relations between Washington and Tokyo. There are other important players that should not be ignored: Turkey, a country ready to reintroduce the death penalty and to suspend negotiations of acceeding to the EU or to obtain S-400 systems from Russia; North Korea’s nuclear program (to which it was not to give up as Russia served a refusal reason by annexing Ukraine’s Crimea at a time when Ukraine was covered by international guarantees concerning its territorial integrity in order to give up its nuclear arsenal). G20 represents a great playing ground for power and gaining an as favourable as possible position globally. Probably one of the most certain and palpable future results of G20 is the agenda of next summits: Argentine in 2018, Japan in 2019 and Saudi Arabia in 2020. After the disappointment caused to France by the rejection, in Hamburg, of the Paris Agreement concerning climate changes (about which he promised to think over), president Trump was the first American one who, after 1989, participated at France’s national celebration of July 14th, upon his counterpart’s invitation, Emmanuel Macron. Washington is thus trying to bring closer the only EU’s member which is also a member to the UN’s Security Council and a nuclear power too, (having Brexit in mind) and seeking, at the same time, to weaken the French-German relationship. If, according to a French official who kept his annonimity, there is a consensus between the USA and France that fighting terrorism “is the No.1 priority”, adding that “the continuation of the USA’s effort of fighting terrorism, especially in the Middle East, has a capital importance for us… We must be sure that fighting Daesh (IS) continues… everybody understands that this struggle will continue for another generation”. Under president Donald Trump, the USA becomes a force trying to move more decisively the developments on the international arena. If the domestic opposition lets him, it is probably that the American president can do more towards the evolution of a less dangerous and better world. ——– About the author: Corneliu Pivariu, former first deputy for military intelligence (two stars general) in the Romanian MoD, retired 2003. Member of IISS – London, alumni of Harvard – Kennedy School Executive Education and others international organizations. Founder of INGEPO Consulting, and bimonthly Bulletin, Geostrategic Pulse”. Main areas of expertise – geopolitics, intelligence and security.

On the occasion of the 50th commemoration anniversary of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” publication, a masterpiece that led Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) to the pinnacle of his carrier with the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Embassy of Colombia to the Kingdom of the Netherlands together with the Cervantes Institute organized on 18 May 2017 a dialogue about this novel and its author, as well as the opening of the photographic exhibition “García Márquez Portraits” in Utrecht. The event started with a welcoming speech by the Cervantes Institute Director, Isabel Lorda Vidal, followed by a literary intervention by the Ambassador of Colombia to the Netherlands, H.E. Juan José Quintana. A fragment of “Gabo: The Magic of Reality” documentary directed by the British Justin Webster was displayed, in which García Márquez, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and other personalities narrate their stories around “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.   During the dialogue about the 50 years publication of this masterpiece, Colombian writer Dasso Saldívar and one of the most outstanding biographers of García Márquez participated as well as Mariolein Sabarte, literary translator since 1969 and who has spread great authors of the Spanish and Latin American literature in Dutch language; Maarten Steenmeijer also participated as moderator, he is a literary critic and Professor of modern Spanish and Latin American literature at Radboud University in Nijmegen. The “García Márquez Portraits” exhibition opened during the reception hosted by the Embassy. While tasting typical Colombian snacks, the public had the chance to visit the nine portraits captured by Colombian photographer Nereo López (1920-2015) and currently in custody of the Colombian National Library. In this exhibition, “Gabo” can be discovered from his everyday life in his office to his spontaneity during the Nobel Prize for Literature ceremony in Stockholm. This cultural event aroused great interest and the auditorium was widely attended by completing its maximum capacity. Among the guests, Ambassadors, members of the diplomatic corps of The Hague, representatives of international organizations and personalities from the Dutch society were present.

The Power of Culture, The Verve of Spirit

By Mara Lemanis. Culture is the crucible that forges our visceral identity. When the UK ratified The Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Properties last year, it confirmed the importance of sustaining the legacy, the identity of all cultures, especially at a time of armed conflict. Without this protection the patrimony of indigenous groups in many countries could witness the kind of disintegration that has taken place among native Indian populations all across America. The relegation of Indian tribes to reservations ordered by the U.S. government in the late 19^th century led to erosion of what was essential to their livelihood and way of life, resulting in crushing poverty among the native population. They were deprived of their shelters—the circles and hoops that served as spiritual power, artifacts they had created in trust as records of their civilization were withdrawn—their lives forced into square-shaped chambers. Such privations ushered in high crime rates among the Indian peoples along with increases in suicide, alcoholism, gang assaults, and sexual abuse. In the aftermath of government seizure, the remains of Indian lands bear a striking resemblance to third-world countries. In biographer John W. Neihardt’s classic narrative, Black Elk Speaks, the visionary shaman (wičháša wakȟáŋ) Black Elk movingly recounts the history of the Oglala Sioux tribe as the U.S. Government increasingly annexed native Indian territory. Black Elk, describes the wrenching waste after the government conquest: “I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…the nations hoops is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.” Black Elk’s ethnographic memoir, refutes the official version of American history widespread at the time of Neihardt’s 1932 publication, which valorized western expansion and esteemed the profit-making motive as the ideal of “manifest destiny.” The year 2016 marked the first time the destruction of cultural heritage was dealt with as a war crime. The International Criminal Court in The Hague tried and sentenced the Islamic militant, Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi to nine years in prison for the cultural destruction of the historic city of Timbuktu, Mali, a Unesco World Heritage site. Renowned through the 15^th and 16^th centuries as the “City of 333 Saints”, Timbuktu was a prominent center of Islamic learning that included libraries with manuscripts on mathematics and astronomy. As a head of the Ansar Eddine, a movement linked to al-Queda, al-Mahdi directed Islamist fighters to use pickaxes and chisels in razing a mosque and sacred mausoleums along with many shrines and tombs of Sufi saints, and commanded the burning of approximately 4,000 ancient manuscripts. Since the demolition of the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, multiple artworks, museums, libraries, and places of worship have been ravaged in the Middle East and Africa. More recently the ICC has been asked to investigate the razing of the ancient site of Palmyra in Syria. Apart from the importance of preserving a people’s heritage–its artifacts, scripts, tombs, monuments—is the existential gravity that embeds the identity of each individual within its culture. It is the embodiment of a personal sense of being. When cultural symbols are debased or pillaged, a people’s sense of unity and kinship are degraded. When that devastation accelerates, it also deepens, breaking down each individual’s sense of self. Even when an individual considers him/her self to be a citizen of the world beyond any particular region or nation, a steep sense of loss invades the psyche. This often can feel like an amputation, a blow that severs the spirit, because one’s personal bond with one’s past has been ransacked. Stolen. A sense of personal degradation sets in. A vital part of one becomes extinguished. When the hallmarks of our culture are destroyed, our memory will yet retain an image of their substance, but like the image we sustain of a beloved person who has died, whose fleshly presence has departed from our midst, we sharply mourn the loss. And when we strive to kindle in the minds of our children the form, shape, and beauty of those artifacts symbolic of the culture that once linked us, encircling and protecting our endowment like a giant womb, we flounder, scanning photographs of what was lost, attempting digital replicas too inadequate to restore the original work. In vain we strive to shore some fragments against our ruins. We are then like people who survived a tsunami, left beached among the shreds of disembodied shapes. We draw in the sand, constructing pictures for our children, for ourselves, before the surf again rises and washes out our flimsy effigies. Beyond one’s own particular life span and the thoughts of what one leaves one’s children, what kind of legacy we offer to posterity, our thoughts speed outward—like particles birthed in a Hadron Collider–to dimensions distant from one’s daily life. Regardless of religion, we live with intimations of unseen things–intimations of a continuity that ascends beyond our finite life to inklings of eternity. Inklings of what may lie beyond the material world, unfolding in continuous consciousness, can be likened to the sense of an implicate order, not readily seen by the naked or the clinical eye, but that one grasps as immanent. But here is the paradox about this implicate order: though it can generate strong imaginings about the infinite, about our spiritual nature, it relies on the material legacy of manuscripts, books, tombs, sculptures, monuments as berths in which to incubate our spirit. Organizations like Unesco and the International Committee of the Blue Shield are forces, working to protect cultural landmarks and aid in their reconstruction. Both the ICC and The Hague Convention are striving to spare us from the kind of wasteland T. S. Eliot describes, as the narrator laments, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” They are determined to keep a peoples’ habitat from turning into a reservation. Because materials of historical legacy are invariably necessary to mark the communal spirit from where we have come, where now we are, and to limn the connotations pointing to horizons where we yet will be.     Never Seen There lies past sorrow a great sigh of beauty, of distant gods, majestic countries one has never been or seen, but guards the marrow where the mind lies chaste, preserves unending kingdoms of the dream, where neither time, nor love, nor duty pay ransom to the hangman’s scheme. Mara Lemanis.   About the author: Mara Lemanis has worked as an archivist for Historical Preservation. She and the state archaeologist conducted research at numerous Sioux Nation sites in South Dakota, in the course of which she visited a Lakota Sweat Lodge and took part in the communal spirit of the purification ceremony. She was privileged to study the Oglala Sioux sites at Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee. She has been a teacher and scholar of literature and film at Stanford and Yale; her essays have been selected for 20th CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM and are included in undergraduate student textbooks in the U.S. Recently she has worked with the IRC to assist refugees in Oakland, California. Her father, Osvalds J. Lemanis, was an internationally renowned Latvian choreographer (The Royal Order of Vasa-Gustav V).          

On the picture, Scott Martin. By Scott Martin and Wayne Jordash. On 17 July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with a total of 298 people on board from 17 countries when it was shot down over eastern Ukraine, crashing at a site in the Donetsk oblast, killing everyone onboard. This tragedy, well-known to the diplomatic community and people around the world, exacerbated an already tense diplomatic tete-a-tete between the Russian Federation and the Western world, with the West contending that separatists illegally conspired with Russia to occupy Ukraine through reliance on its logistical support and moral encouragement. Predictably, instead of acknowledging its role in the MH17 tragedy, the Russian government continued its systematic denials concerning its culpability for the violent takeover of Ukraine, including its involvement in shooting down the civilian airplane. On 4 July 2017, the international community moved one step closer to ascertaining the truth, as Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders announced that those criminally responsible for the attack would be prosecuted in Dutch courts. While it is a critically important step in holding to account those responsible for this tragedy, the trial process promises to be controversial and complex.

  Firstly, it is likely that Dutch judges will be facing empty courtrooms and instead trying suspected perpetrators in absentia, as implicated separatists are unlikely to surrender and Russia is not likely to facilitate the extradition of anyone to stand trial. Secondly, access to the crime scene in eastern Ukraine will be difficult to negotiate. Not only would this significantly complicate an appropriate examination of the scene, it would obstruct access to eyewitnesses who were proximate to the crime when it occurred. These challenges will push the East and West further down the road of confrontation, compounding an already difficult situation. Indeed, in just the past year, concerns have been raised by Western Governments concerning the Russian Government’s alleged meddling in U.S. elections, the alleged killing of political adversaries of the Russian leadership on British sovereign territory, the killing of political adversaries of Russia leadership in Russia itself, and the occupation of Ukraine. In recent years, Russia has also announced its decision to withdraw from the nuclear security pact with the United States, that it is withdrawing its signature from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and that it can overrule judgements against it at the European Court of Human Rights. Regrettably, Russia is not alone in its pivot away from a rules-based international system. Withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, threats from a collection of African countries to withdraw from the International Criminal Court and the inability of the World Trade Organization to conclude the Doha round of negotiations all endanger what is necessary for international security and economic stability. Failing to promote a solid, predictable international legal foundation brings about economic hardships, international instability and, at times, armed conflict. The Netherlands, home to The Hague (known as the “international city of peace and justice”) and known for its long tradition of even-handed justice, is duty-bound to pursue those individually criminally responsible for the shooting down of MH17. The investigation and subsequent prosecutions must continue in an objective, neutral manner. Other states should fulfil their international obligations to cooperate with this enquiry and provide access to alleged perpetrators and evidence that may prove useful in the trials. It remains to be seen whether Russia will ultimately accept the arrest warrants likely to be issued by the Dutch courts and facilitate the extradition process. Regardless, negotiations must take place and an agreement must be sought to remedy the events of such a tragic day. Justice for the victims of these events, as well as the international legal order, demand it. The world needs to hit the ‘reset’ button, turn its back on “might makes right” politics and geopolitics as usual. The diplomatic community has laboured for centuries to promote the opposite – their collective efforts to bring order, justice, and fairness to the international legal system should not be have been done in vain. A system that makes the world safer, more predictable, just, and in protection of the human rights of all people must be returned to, lest the world fall prey to the same predilection of our forbearers where domestic political demands from powerful countries win the day and dictate international events. The MH17 investigation provides Russia and the West a unique confidence-building opportunity, giving it the chance to promote the sustainability of a system many have worked very hard for and provides a solid foundation for the East and West to build upon. ———- About the authors: Scott Martin and Wayne Jordash, are  managing partners of Global Rights Compliance, a Hague-based company that advises governments (including the Government of Ukraine) on matters relating to international humanitarian law and international human rights law.  ——- Photography by Arthur Koppejan.