10. 10. 2016. Sarajevo
October 10, 2016
We, the undersigned,
protest and condemn all pressures and threats towards the management of the international theatre festival MESS and the performance of Oliver Frljić’s play “Naše nasilje i vaše nasilje” (“Our Violence and Your Violence.”) Those pressures and threats are geared against the fundamental freedom of public and artistic expression, which is at the forefront of all other freedoms and rights, and without which any individual human being or the community he or she lives in neither has any dignity, nor sense.
We protest against the already advanced process of creeping clericalization which is more and more aggressively occupying the public space with a conservative arbitrage, willfully deciding on the untouchable subjects which cannot be argued about in the society, and which cannot be the subject of any critical intellectual or artistic scrutiny and inquiry. As a consequence, it promotes the spreading of a culture of rigid conservativism and self-censorship, which destroys critical and especially subversive acts, without which there is no progress of any society at all.
We protest against the local government, which has announced an “investigation” of the management of MESS, while it didn’t even occur to it to examine the work of their own institutions, whose lack of efficiency has led to the fact that even the silliest of threats can be easily imagined as quite possible. That is a mark of authoritarian regimes – regardless of whether they are legitimized via multi-party elections – which persist through spreading fear amongst its citizens. In this situation, it is impossible to rely on the institutions founded by citizens themselves in order to protect their freedom and their safety. If the government at any level is not capable to secure a cultural event and stand decidedly in defense of fundamental human rights and freedoms against the threats of bullies, then we have actually found ourselves in a situation in which citizens have to “investigate” and “analyze” the government itself and the “circus” of a twisted and disappearing democracy.
We encourage all cultural workers to continue in broadening the areas of artistic freedom. With concern, we note that the current management of MESS, through their wavering about the decision to allow the play to be performed, has gambled away – hopefully, not forever – MESS’s image of intransigence and civic courage, revealing a horrifying lack of consistency present in one section of the domestic cultural elite that is happy to point out its courage under the siege of Sarajevo, while it puts its tail between its legs at the first sign of disapproval by the ethnonational and clerical elites. We would like to ask the management of MESS to publicly disclose its role, as well as reveal the entire case in its fullest, while informing the public about the actual pressures and threats they were exposed to, as well as name the culprits.
We express our admiration towards the bravery of a group of citizens, who have literally occupied the National Theatre in their intent to defend their human dignity, and who have taught everyone a lesson in civic courage. This kind of courage is not given awards; rather, it is followed, just like their readiness to fight against regression, nationalist clericalization, as well as capitalist exploitation which it conceals, and which the political and religious elites who have declared war on social freedoms and emancipatory struggles in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region rely on. They have also shown that theatre and culture are a political battlefield that will be decisive for our future, and where there is no place for fear, concessions or compromise.
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