" The war has made me suspicious of any metaphors (and not only because poets turned into murderers). I put even less faith in metaphors derived from religious mythology: things belonging to “that” world, a world that can only be reached by passing through death, no longer concern the living. Thus, all responsibility for the commission of evil can be abdicated. If you follow through on this metaphor—and that is why it always made me uncomfortable—then you can remove any trace of responsibility from Karadžić’s hellish acts. That is how, to put it mildly, lies emerged victorious—and were measured out in drums of “non-Serbian” blood. Lies were the only political means in which Radovan Karadžić had absolute faith. Since everything he did in the name of racial “cleanliness” created a fact, so to speak—he was creating a reality to fit his lies—all he had left to do was keep repeating the lies until his accumulated acts made his lies seem irrefutable. Maybe that’s why it became so easy for so many of our “neighbors” to put stockings over their heads. The claim most often repeated by Karadžić—that people of different nationalities couldn’t live together in Bosnia—was simply a euphemism for racism. The truth was quite the opposite: peoples of different cultures had lived together for so long in Bosnia, and the ethnic mix was so deep, that any separation could only be accomplished through extreme violence and enormous bloodshed. "
― Semezdin Mehmedinović , Sarajevo Blues