Children, Power, and Hypocrisy: Sarajevo’s Pilgrimage to Washington
A wave of public outrage swept through Sarajevo following the two-day “Fostering the Future Together Global Coalition Summit,” held on March 24–25, 2026 and organized by Melania Trump. The event, staged first at the State Department and then at the White House, was presented – with no shortage of solemn rhetoric – as the inaugural gathering of an international coalition dedicated to nothing less than the future of our children, focusing on education, technology, and “online safety.” Bosnia and Herzegovina was among 45 invited countries. At the summit, Mirela Bećirović — the wife of Denis Bećirović, the chairman of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Presidency — delivered remarks on the role of artificial intelligence in education and the “digital transformation” of schooling.
But the visit did not end there. While Mirela Bećirović took part in the summit, the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political delegation — in the context of a deeply divided society, effectively representing only Bosniak political interests — pursued a parallel agenda in Washington. Denis Bećirović and Foreign Minister Elmedin Konaković attended the Congressional Passover Seder on Capitol Hill, an event centered on the promotion of the Sarajevo Haggadah, where they spoke of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a space of religious and cultural diversity. The visit amounted, in essence, to political courting of both the United States and Israel, at a time when Milorad Dodik, the de facto political leader of Bosnian Serbs, has also been cultivating ties in Washington, holding meetings with figures close to the Trump administration while presenting himself as a defender of Orthodox Christians in Bosnia and Herzegovina against what he describes as “radical Sarajevo Muslims.” In both cases, the pattern is the same: a display of subservience before an imperial center of power, accompanied by the spending of millions on lobbying firms to discredit domestic rivals and secure scraps of support for entrenched, comprador elites.
Yet when all of this filtered back into the domestic media space, the bulk of Sarajevo’s public anger focused almost exclusively on a single figure — Mirela Bećirović. As if the entire delegation had not participated in the same Washington choreography; as if each of them, on their respective stages, had not performed the same script of compliance, loyalty, and diplomatic self-congratulation.
However repugnant it may be to take part in a conference on children’s rights under the auspices of actors widely accused of grave abuses against children — from the shadow of Epstein’s scandals to the devastation of Gaza — it is entirely misplaced, not to say cowardly, to direct public anger at Mirela Bećirović. She is merely a prop in a much larger production. It is regrettable when any human being is reduced to a prop, but there is little time here for sentimentality.
Because, if we are to be serious for a moment — insofar as reality allows it — Sarajevo’s political affinity for Zionism, despite the routine “Free Palestine” rhetoric, is not a recent improvisation but a long-standing pattern. It stretches back to the era of Alija Izetbegović and his well-known association with Bernard-Henri Lévy — one of the most prominent pro-Israel lobbyists in the world alongside Jeffrey Epstein — a man who, among other things, authored a theatrical work about Izetbegović, staged in Sarajevo with Bakir Izetbegović — ever careful not to offend anyone — seated in the front row. A cultural exchange of the highest order: some write plays, others perform statehood.
To complete the picture, Lévy today speaks without hesitation of “just wars,” a category into which he places, among other things, Donald Trump’s confrontation with Iran. His stance on Gaza follows a similar logic.
After all, this is hardly the first time that this particular brand of “justice” has been exported alongside bombs and moral lectures. Not a single Sarajevo politician, from 1992 to the present, has found it problematic to act as a loyal auxiliary to U.S. foreign policy logistics. Especially prominent have been those who convinced their own people that America, out of sheer love of justice, would one day deliver a fully functional “civic Bosnia and Herzegovina” as a ready-made product — complete with instructions for use and a warranty.
The Serbian historian Milorad Ekmečić is widely dismissed in Sarajevo — often reflexively — yet his remark that the United States and the EU have effectively reserved for Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) a “Central Bosnian reservation,” while everything else would remain in the realm of empty promises, sounds today less like provocation and more like an uncomfortably precise summary of reality. Those who most eagerly made their pilgrimages to Washington have long known as much; but votes are more easily won on the promise of a “civilized world” that will, any day now, fix a “dysfunctional state with three presidents.”
So, if you have ever wondered who, in the post-socialist Serbian political space across Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro, stood behind the open rehabilitation of Draža Mihailović and the more discreet rehabilitation of other nazi collaborators such as Milan Nedić — you need wonder no longer. It is precisely those committed to a colonial mode of thinking, one that justifies every outrage with the language of “necessity,” “responsibility,” and “stability.” In other words, the same international bureaucratic class that exported this model from a subordinated and managed Serbia across the entire region, where the figure of the quisling — recast, in Nedić’s case, as a kind of “Serbian mother” — has quietly become not only a template for dealing with one’s own collaborators, but a broader framework of political reasoning.
Today, every minor figure in a tailored suit aspires to play that same “maternal” role.
Most damning of all, at least in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is that the principal exponents of this philosophy of servitude are not to be found on the system’s more exotic fringes — among the biological or ideological heirs of former Nazi collaborators – but among the former pioneers and rising Party hopefuls of the Tito era: Milorad Dodik and Zlatko Lagumdžija – The Bosnia and Herzegovina Ambassador to the United Nations and also a participant in the current Washington events (both former leaders of social-democratic parties that emerged from the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina), along with the entire army of their functionaries and loyal cadres. These are people who once declaimed oaths to brotherhood, unity, and anti-colonialism, and who now recite with perfect discipline the catechism of submission and accommodation – pardon, patriotism and responsibility.
In the end, however grotesque it may be to sit through a conference where Sara Netanyahu speaks about how beautifully she has raised her sons, the problem cannot be reduced to the expression on a single face across the room.
As one Sarajevo activist put it:
“While I was watching the smile on Mirela Bećirović’s face after Sara Netanyahu’s speech, I was reminded of the man from Gaza carrying the remains of his children in two plastic bags.”
It is a powerful, visceral image – and an understandable reaction. But it is also, ultimately, misdirected.
Because the truth is far less comforting: this is not about one woman, however emblematic she may appear of a broader moral obscenity. It is about the entire system that produces such scenes, normalizes them, stages them, and invites others to participate in them as if they were routine diplomatic engagements. A system in which suffering is abstracted, power is aestheticized, and political loyalty is rewarded with proximity to the very structures that generate the outrage in the first place.
Focusing outrage on an individual – turning her into a symbol of everything that is wrong – risks obscuring the far more unsettling reality: that she is not the exception, but the function. Not the cause, but the consequence.
And until that distinction is made, the performance will go on – with new faces, the same script, and the same applause.
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