Contextual Reflections: Fact Finding

Fact Finding
Throughout the history we have all been witnesses of people, particularly those in power, “trading” with facts from violent pasts. Not very much away from the truth on this matter there is a novel, Dead Souls, written by the great Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, caricaturizing the “trade” with dead souls. It is more than evident the problem of figures in Kosovo related to establishing of a factual truth about the consequences, crimes and human rights violations, those horrible facts about our past. They are still, as in all other cases around the world, the arsenal, the documents in the briefcases of people in power, and the trade itself for more political power. It suits no one else but these several folds briefcase-people, the confusion, the prolongation and the dragging to a never ending completion of the factual history of our most precious losses.

Knowing the facts, the numbers, the names and the wholeness of losses as a result of war is nothing but establishing a truth that can not be adjusted to the personal interests of “traders” with dead souls. Establishing the total factual picture of the war is committing ourselves to the truth, and finding the right place, the one of gratefulness, for people first of all, and other most precious to us, lost, in the machine of war.

Loss, whether a Human Lifjavascript:void(0);e or human dignity, and any other, as a result of war sets us in front of one task only: it being recognized; accepted as a part of the brutal truth about the war; and be given the respect it has committed us with through its sacrifice. And no other way but the truth can set us free from the dept we owe them, perpetrators and victims.

And any loss, whether Human Life or human dignity, and other, as a result of war, by being recognized, accepted and acknowledged serves one purpose only, asks us one thing only: to respect it. And the only way we can respect the loss is to acknowledge the truth about war, the truth about most precious sacrifices and senseless losses, and let the weight of this loss teach us in the future.

B.H.