On this day, exactly 35 years ago, Saško Geškovski was killed - a 19-year-old JNA soldier from Kavadarci, standing guard outside the Military Command in Split. A masked attacker fired four bullets. Saško fell as the first victim of the Yugoslav war, and on that day something began that the Balkans would carry for decades.

He was still a child. Born in 1971, he had entered the army in October 1990 - the „Dračevac" barracks in Split. In September 1991 he was due to finish his service and go home. He never made it.

More than 20,000 people came to his funeral in Kavadarci. Citizens also took to the streets in mass protests. Macedonia never took part in the war that subsequently blew apart the entire Yugoslav space - but Macedonia paid the first price.

Today in Kavadarci, delegations, veterans' organisations, local authorities and members of the army laid flowers. There's a fountain in his honour. There's a roundabout with his name. There's a grave the town has never forgotten.

But the question that gets asked at every anniversary, and never gets an answer: who was that masked attacker? After 35 years, there is no convicted person anywhere for Saško's death. The case sleeps in some Split archive. Neither Croatia nor Macedonia has shown any particular interest in resolving it.

That is the price of „archived history" - when a victim becomes a number in a statistic, not a name with an answer. Saško isn't a symbol of Yugoslavia's collapse only because he died first. He's a symbol of how our institutions deal with their dead - with flowers once a year, and forgetting 364 days.

Thirty-five years is a long time. But for those who lost someone, those years may have lasted only a single day.