One burned flag, one camera and a social network - and there's already a new scandal in the Balkans. According to a video posted on an Instagram profile, a group of young people took down and burned the flag of Republika Srpska mounted on a pole near the inter-entity line in Bosnia and Herzegovina, near Darivo. The clip quickly gathered plenty of reactions - among them shameful comments of support along the lines of "heroes."

The exact moment of the incident remains unknown, as does whether the authorities have been informed and whether there's any investigation at all. In other words - we have a video, we have online rage, but for now we have no institutional response whatsoever. And that's exactly the most dangerous part.

Because videos like these rarely stay isolated. Only two days earlier, at the World Cup, there was a similar provocation in the opposite direction - an alleged attack on a person holding a Serbian flag. One burning pulls another, one provocation demands a comeback, and so the circle spins for decades, fed by those for whom divisions are useful.

The Balkans know these symbols painfully well. A flag isn't just cloth - it's someone's identity, someone's history, someone's pain. But the question rarely asked is - who does this serve? Not the ordinary people on either side, who want to live in peace. But those who build a career on tension out of every burned flag. While the cameras film provocations, the real problems - poverty, emigration, empty institutions - wait quietly off to the side, unrecorded.