Bosnia-Herzegovina
Report #2 – Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina By Peter Lippman
July, 2013
2013 Report index
Report 1: Kosovo, mid-July, 2013 Report 2: Sarajevo, July 2013 Report 3: Sarajevo, continued July 2013 Report 4: Tuzla, July 2013 Report 5: Mostar, July 2013 Report 6: Srebrenica, August 2013 Report 7: Srebrenica, continued, August 2013
Report 8: Prijedor and vicinity, August
2013
Report 9: Prijedor and vicinity,
part two, August
2013
Report 10:
Tomašica,
December 2013
To contact Peter
in response to these reports or any of his articles,
I
went from Kosovo up to Bosnia in mid-July for about three weeks.
It’s not so long since I was there last fall, so some things are the
same, but on the other hand there’s big news, especially in the area
of activism. As usual, there are a lot of details and some of it is
complicated. I’ll start with an overview here, and follow with notes
on my various encounters.
Late last year I participated in the municipal elections as monitor
for the “I will vote for Srebrenica” campaign, and wrote about that.
Soon after that event, the campaign activists, led by Emir Suljagić,
initiated a more wide-ranging campaign, the March 1st
Coalition, which I also wrote about a few times. This campaign aims
to register and encourage voters to participate in the general
elections set to take place in October 2014. The aim is particularly
to target the Republika Srpska, with the hope of capturing a
critical number of seats both in the entity and state-level
parliaments. If there are enough “pro-Bosnia” representatives
elected, that could unblock the way to crucial constitutional
changes.
My report on the Srebrenica elections is
here. For my previous writings about the March 1st
Coalition, see
this and
this. This and other upcoming reports will update that
information.
The March 1st Coalition campaign is an ambitious project,
but it has contributed to the expansion and strengthening of a
grassroots human rights movement in various parts of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. I witnessed this last fall, and now it is even
more the case that activists are in touch with each other, and
collaborating, in many directions – across entity boundaries and
across ethnic lines. A new generation of activists is maturing and
making an impact.
I also wrote extensively last year about increased action in the
movement for memorialization – not a new thing, but an expanding
campaign – and its special manifestations in the Prijedor area. The
campaign for the right to commemoration of the notorious
concentration camps at Omarska and Trnopolje continues. I happened
to be in the Krajina during commemorations this year at these two
camps. There has been some progress as a result of various
organizations’ persistence, in that people are, at least on limited
occasions, allowed to visit the camps and to memorialize their dead
and missing, and remember their traumatic experiences, on location.
But obstruction from Prijedor’s Mayor Pavić continues, and the
placement of memorial monuments continues to be blocked at these
places. Harassment and threats against activists are also ongoing.
I wrote about the White Armband Day that was commemorated in
Prijedor by lone activist Emir Hodžić last year on May 31st.
Well, this year Hodžić was joined by a couple hundred activists from
around the country and beyond, demonstrating in memory of the
wartime edict that Muslims present in Serb nationalist-controlled
Prijedor must wear white armbands. For my writing about activism in
Prijedor, click
here.
The significant increase in solidarity in Prijedor and the
accompaniment during that action by visiting fellow activists was a
reflection of the strengthening of the human rights movement as
mentioned above. Just days after the May 31st action in
Prijedor, activists throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina had the
opportunity to come together around a universal issue that
galvanized much of the population for a month or so.
Stenciled graffiti in Sarajevo, summer 2013, agitating for the
reestablishment of a standardized citizens' identity number.
The issue that sparked the protests was an absurd legislative snafu:
from February through June of this year, there was no mechanism to
register the identities of newborn babies. As a result, some 5,500
infants were lacking citizenship rights because they did not possess
a Standardized Citizens Identification Number (jedinstveni
matični broj građana – JMBG). Lack of a citizen identification
number prevents one from acquiring a passport. By late May, people
around the country were learning, primarily via Facebook, about the
case of the three-month-old baby Belmina Ibrišević. She was in
urgent need of medical care that was not available in Bosnia, but
she had no identification number and thus no passport that would
enable her to leave for hospital care in central Europe.
The legal problem with the identification numbers arose in January
and February, when Bosnia’s Constitutional Court nullified the law
regulating them. The Court made this decision at the same time that
it required that Bosnia-Herzegovina’s two entities—the Republika
Srpska and the Croat- and Muslim-controlled Federation—to
standardize some of the names of towns. The latter issue was related
to the problem of identity numbers because discrepancies in place
names could create confusion in people’s identification documents.
As it happened, parliament at the state level was unable or
unwilling to unblock the registration of newborns. The main
obstruction stemmed from the fact that Serb representatives from the
RS, under the leadership of its separatist President Milorad Dodik,
wished to attach citizen identification numbers to the entities
instead of allowing the universal identification system to continue
to be performed at the state level. However, ordinary Bosnians also
saw that the problem was not only caused by Serb officials, but also
by a long-lasting political standstill in governance on the part of
Croat and Bosniak officials. People considered that a solution was
available to save Belmina and to prevent her plight from being
replicated among potentially thousands of other newborns, and that
all the politicians were collectively responsible for endangering
these most innocent of Bosnian citizens.
The controversy simmered and grew throughout March, April, and May.
Parents protested, saying, “They are making Palestinians out of our
babies.” In addition to the passport problem, parents of babies born
after February 12th were not able to receive tax breaks
that they were entitled to, nor were women able to receive subsidies
owed to them as mothers of newborns. Most critically, hospitals were
technically not able to admit newborns who, legally, did not exist.
For the parents and their sympathizers, it was as if the clunky
state of Bosnia had come to a full standstill.
The entity Parliament of Republika Srpska and the District of Brčko
both instituted identification numbers in their own autonomous
territories, but these were of questionable legality. The
state-level Council of Ministers could not agree, and meanwhile, by
the end of May, the number of “non-babies” approached 5,500. In the
Federation, none were able to register.
On June 5th, some fifty citizens, including parents with
their newborns in carriages, gathered in front of the state
Parliament building to protest with signs that read, “We’re not even
a number to you” and “No numbers for babies, no exit for you” (from
the Parliament building). There was an inscription on one baby
carriage that read, “You’re not leaving until I get my JMBG.” In the
course of the day, the Council of Ministers decreed the
establishment of a temporary identification number, to last six
months. Under the force of this law, Belmina Ibrišević was allowed
to receive her identification number, but the demonstrators were not
satisfied and refused to withdraw what was becoming a blockade of
the Parliament building. They announced that they were going to
remain in front of the building overnight.
This problem was proving to be the last straw for many people. Some
simply wanted a sincere and long-lasting resolution regarding
identity numbers. But others saw the problem as a systemic one
related to all the other problems of life in Bosnia-Herzegovina. One
man, Sanjin Čepalo, interviewed in a local newspaper, said, “I’m
here, first of all, because of the JMBG, because of the children,
but also because of all the other people who have a problem, because
it’s not only the children who are in question…The youth have no
prospects, and this case is just one example of the problems in our
state. Every day we are witness to fascism and nationalism that are
implemented through state institutions, and how can we expect things
to get better, if we don’t make an effort about it?”
Towards the end of the day there were a reported three thousand
protestors, with riot police massing to control the demonstrators.
Mothers pushed their baby carriages in front of the police,
preventing them from pushing back the crowd. Some of the Serb
representatives tried to leave the Parliament building by climbing
through windows, but demonstrators prevented them from doing so,
yelling, “Go back to work!”
Meanwhile, some cab drivers and others used their vehicles to block
traffic in the area.
Tarik Čelik, quoted by a news service, said, “This is not just about
the ID number. It is about their attitude toward us. It is about how
unimportant we are to them as citizens.”
Before the day was out, officials from the Republika Srpska were
already putting their spin on the events. Aleksandra Pandurević,
member of the SDS party (previously headed by indicted war criminal
Radovan Karadžić), stated that the demonstration was a veiled
“nationalist gathering,”
a “lynch” of Serb representatives, and that the Bosniak officials
were involved in it. Other RS politicians called the demonstration
“politicized” and the “start of next year’s election campaign.” RS
President Dodik announced that conditions for work in the Parliament
building “were not safe,” and that this “could be a problem in the
future.” He directed the RS Minister of the Interior to mobilize
special police units for a possible intervention.
The demonstrators delivered a set of demands:
--that the Parliament and Council of Ministers immediately pass a
law on the identification numbers;
--that the Ministry of Civil Affairs form a state fund, financed
from the state budget, for the medical care of seriously ill persons
who cannot receive the necessary treatment within
Bosnia-Herzegovina;
--that the members of the Council of Ministers and both houses of
Parliament donate thirty percent of their monthly payment to this
“solidarity fund” until the end of their mandates;
--that no participants in the ongoing demonstrations be subject to
prosecution for their activities (added later).
The demonstration carried on, with people blowing whistles and
honking their horns. Sarajevo Mayor Ivo Komšić joined the crowd and
criticized obstruction of the law on identity numbers. He said, “I
think that you are right; do not give up. You are not only fighting
for the children, but also for the state of Bosnia.”
It was a complicating factor that besides the state legislators, 250
international bankers who were attending a finance conference were
also blocked in the Parliament building. I read that politicians who
were calling themselves “hostages” avoided contact with the bankers
so that they would not be forced to explain to the bankers why they
were all stuck in the building.
When the police were called to unblock the Parliament, Minister of
the Interior Nermin Pećanac responded, “This is a job for the
politicians, not for the police.”
Aleksandra Pandurević weighed in again via the internet. Responding
to a sign outside that read, “shoulder to shoulder against fascism,”
she posted the message, “That says it all – that these protests are,
first of all, directed against us representatives from the Republika
Srpska.” This comment, naturally, caused widespread amusement. It
also led to the creation of a petition calling on Pandurević to
resign from office, or at least from her position as chair of a
joint parliamentary commission on human rights, children’s rights,
youth, and ethics.
In the course of the night, Bosnian Prime Minister Vjekoslav Bevanda
managed to escape from the Parliament building by climbing through a
window. He ran to a waiting car as bodyguards roughly pushed aside
bystanders, causing injuries that necessitated medical care.
Several hundred protestors continued to surround the Parliament into
the night of June 6th. Finally, High Representative
Valentin Inzko arrived and negotiated with them to unblock the
building, promising that he would exert pressure to have an identity
law passed. The representatives and foreigners trapped in the
Parliament were able to evacuate at 4:00 a.m.
In the aftermath, Dodik called the event the “biggest hostage crisis
that ever took place in the former Yugoslavia.” Serb and Croat
politicians declared that they were going to stay away from Sarajevo
until their security could be guaranteed, as if their own
obstruction of state proceedings was irrelevant to the problem.
Local authorities began delivering infraction notices to some
participants in the demonstrations. But the protests continued.
Solidarity protests took place in Tuzla, Zenica, and Mostar, as well
as in Zagreb, in neighboring Croatia. Protestors continued to focus
on the problem with identity numbers, but often acknowledged that
this issue was but one manifestation of the breakdown of Bosnia’s
state functions. One activist in Mostar said, “There is a saying
that the people deserve the kind of government they elect. But that
is not accurate; no one deserves this government.”
Demonstrations continued throughout the month of June. Politicians
in the RS continued to spin the issue, saying that there had been an
attempted “coup d’état” in Sarajevo. Member of Dodik’s party Dušanka
Majkić blamed the whole event on the March 1st Coalition.
Serb officials boycotted Sarajevo and called for the indictment of
top police officials. In response, Pećanac said, “The citizens have
been hostages for years, for decades. They were only seeking their
rights, and the police secured that gathering. We are neither a
governmental nor a non-governmental organization. We are police who
protect the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
During the ongoing demonstrations supporters joined arrived from
many parts of the country; when supporters arrived from Banja Luka,
capital of the Republika Srpska, they were greeted joyfully by the
demonstrators. Nikola Kunić, an activist from Prijedor, said, “I
don’t know who still believes that these protests are an attack on
the smaller entity [the RS]. Media in the RS, which work completely
on the North Korean model, are promoting that idea. No insult
intended, but whoever thinks that should be hospitalized, because
everyone can see that these are children here.”
People came from Prijedor as well, and from some smaller towns in
the RS. There has been argument about how much ordinary people and
activists in the RS supported the protests, which were mainly based
in the Federation. Simply put, there was some support, and it was
not unanimous. But towards the end of June, a research agency polled
over 500 people in both entities of Bosnia, asking them about their
support for the Baby Revolution. In the Federation, 95% of the
respondents said that they agreed with the protestors. In the
Republika Srpska, support also ran as high as 77%.
A week after the first demonstrations, the largest one took place.
News outlets widely reported a turnout of ten thousand, though other
estimates were as low as five thousand. High Representative Inzko
spoke out in favor of the demonstrators’ right to protest. The
series of protests took on the name “Baby Revolution” (bebolucija).
You can see a photo of one of the demonstrations
here.
Subsequent demonstrations took place across the street from the
Parliament building, with some people holding signs that read,
“Quiet –Parliament is working!” This was in sarcastic response to
the fact that Parliament was not even convening in Sarajevo, due to
the continued boycott by representatives.
In the middle of June Berina Hamidović, not quite three months old,
died in a hospital in Belgrade, Serbia. Berina was born in Sarajevo
with a birth defect that required an operation outside of the
country. She did not have an identity number nor a passport. Her
departure for Serbia was thus delayed, and when paperwork was
cleared for her to be brought to Belgrade, she was delayed again at
the border. There, border police asked her parents, “How do we know
you are not trafficking children?” It was too late to save her when
she arrived at the hospital.
It is not absolutely certain that Berina would have lived in any
case, but her death added to the bitterness that ordinary Bosnians
felt regarding the identity number problem and the carelessness of
their leaders. Berina’s parents participated in subsequent protests
attended by some thousands of demonstrators. Organizers of the
demonstrations publicized a deadline of July 1st for the
creation of an identity number law, saying that on that date, they
would demand the resignation of their representatives if they did
not meet the deadline.
The protests continued with renewed wind in their sails. Activist
Refik Hodžić was quoted as saying, “This is the first time since the
war that we have seen that people, regardless of ethnicity and
however many there are of us, have finally said ‘enough hate’ and
‘enough fear.’ This is all up to us. We can complain, and we can
leave the country, but at least today, we know that we can do
something different. What we do after this is up to us.”
Not long after Berina’s death, protest organizers scheduled a
concert across from Parliament, hosting many of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s
top artists including Frenkie, Dubioza Kolektiv, Letu Štuke, and
Zoster. Leading up to the date, High Representative Inzko commented,
“Their message [to the politicians] is plain and clear: ‘People, do
your work, that is why we elected you, that’s why we pay you, so
it’s high time for results.’ Personally, I am surprised that the
citizens, as dissatisfied as they are with the situation in this
country, have not expressed themselves earlier, because really,
there are so many accumulated problems.”
There was a persistent buildup to the July 1 demonstration,
including a call for people to strike on that day, and not to spend
any money. In the end, the turnout was modest. Participants came
from at least a dozen towns in both entities, but the crowd probably
did not surpass four thousand. There was some blockage of traffic,
but the event remained peaceful.
After this last demonstration, summer happened. People went back to
work, or prepared to go on vacation. No more protests were
scheduled.
There was a variety of comments from activists and politicians alike
around the time of the last demonstration. One sympathetic
politician suggested that a fund for sick babies could be started by
selling off the luxury cars owned by the top politicians. And the
writer and professor Dževad Karahasan said that the obstructionist
Bosnia politicians should be sent to Guantanamo.
***
The rest of this report will share the thoughts of some friends and
activists I spoke with when I arrived in Sarajevo. Conversations
covered all kinds of subjects, as you’ll see. There’s the Bebolucija,
and much more.
In speaking to various activists and observers, I became acquainted
with the inevitable conflicts that arise among organizers and
participants during events such as the Baby Revolution. It's not my
place to take sides nor to discuss these in detail, but there were
important arguments in circulation. In the rest of this report and
in the rest of this series I will be sharing various people's
opinions on the pluses and minuses of the protests, without weighing
in heavily myself on these issues.
One argument was over whether the protests should focus exclusively
on the problem of the identity number. Everyone knew that behind the
massive response to this issue lay deep dissatisfaction with
long-term problems in Bosnian society and in the government that was
supposed to address those problems. But there were people who, for
tactical reasons, argued that the best way to have unity and impact
with the demonstrations was to avoid the introduction of any issues
at all other than the i.d. numbers.
Secondly, there was great resistance among organizers to the
official presence not only of political parties, quite
understandably, but also of non-governmental organizations. People
did not participate as members of NGOs or political parties. There
were people who thought that this restriction was over-stressed. I
heard from some activists that not only were some NGOs
“exploitative” in jumping onto the already-organized demonstration
and presenting themselves as organizers, but there were also those
that had more power than they deserved by virtue of the donors’
funds to which they had access. On the other hand, there are some
sincere grassroots NGOs that could have contributed more to the
demonstrations if organizers had been more open to collaboration
with them.
Night scene in Ploče neighborhood, near Vratnik, Sarajevo
My
story of Sarajevo tends to start and end with Fata, my landlady of
15 years. She’s one of tens of thousands of retirees whose average
pension of 350 KM doesn’t cover their needs for food, heating, and
medicine. She’s also the one who once told me that they should “burn
down the Parliament.”
Now, Fata told me that in the case of the Baby Revolution, getting
ten thousand people out on the street “isn’t enough. There will only
be change if there are massive protests everywhere.”
Before I even I arrived in Sarajevo I contacted Darjan Bilić, a
local activist who was closely involved in the protests. In my
previous talks with him I have felt that we shared
very similar instincts about activism and organizing. Here are some
of his comments about the events.
“The
best thing was that there was no violence. At first, the police were
looking for a conflict. But then, when there was no violence, they
behaved completely correctly. They feared an escalation. But when
Patrick Moon and Nigel Casey came out [US and UK Ambassadors], and
Inzko, and said that the people had the right to demonstrate, things
were calmed down very much.
“And
in Mostar there were four hundred people who demonstrated. That’s
not big, but 400 is better than nothing. And there were people who
participated in Mostar from both sides of the city, from all three
ethnicities. People came there from Ljubuški, too. All of the people
who demonstrated in Prijedor on May 31st were here.”
Q: Do you think that the events represent a new movement?
“When
you consider that the participants in the demonstration represent
only two percent of the population of Sarajevo, it is difficult…We
forbade flags, party representation, etc. People had no party to
identify with, so they only came as individuals.
“It
is a difficult situation, but we have taken a big step. If there
hadn’t been Dosta in the mid-2000s, and the big demonstration in
2008, there wouldn’t have been this. Fear has been reduced, it is an
important thing. And it is good that many young people came, people
who don’t remember the earlier activism.
“It
costs money to organize anything. Here, it was the ordinary people
who collected money for the demonstrations. We raised our own money.
There were times when someone would collect one thousand KM in a
day. And lawyers offered their help to us voluntarily.
“Al
Jazeera followed the events better than the local papers. People
followed Al Jazeera, and that helped us a lot.
“Now the repression is beginning.
People who were in the demonstrations are being served with fines
for infractions, for 100 to 500 KM. That includes the seven car
owners, and some demonstrators who were filmed. This is a tactic of
frightening activists. The RS officials are also preparing to file
criminal charges against the demonstrators.”
Discussing general problems in Bosnia, Darjan noted, “Every
day there is a scandal, and there is never a resolution of those
scandals. There is illegal construction; this is a manifestation of
the neoliberalism that is afflicting Bosnia. But the educated people
have left the country; it's the villagers and farmers who have
remained. They have never heard of neoliberalism. It is easy to
manipulate them. ”
*
My friend Jadranka is the “den-mother” of
CURE, a Sarajevo-based feminist organization of young activists
who have been working creatively to fight patriarchy, to strengthen
the women’s movement and to educate the community about women’s
rights.
Jadranka criticized the Bebolucija for lack of strategy. She said
that the real activists mostly left after midnight on that first
overnight, and people who stayed were drinking and taking drugs. She
was unhappy with activists for criticizing the NGOs and preventing
them from participating.
“There was disorganization in the Baby Revolution and lost
opportunity,” Jadranka said. “There was no coordination of the
actions.” She compared the recent events with the very coordinated
work of Žene u Crnom, the Belgrade-based Women in Black, with whom
Jadranka has much experience. She said, “If there had been 200 real
activists after midnight, the outcome would have been different.
Inzko came out to negotiate with the demonstrators about releasing
some of the people inside the Parliament. But there was no one who
could really represent the demonstrators. It was suggested that the
staff of the building, and the foreigners, be allowed to leave. But
people objected to this.”
On other subjects, we talked about domestic violence. I had read
recently that one of every two women in BiH is subject to domestic
violence. Jadranka said that in the institutional culture of the
police there is a great obstacle to confronting this problem. That
when women go to the police to register a complaint about domestic
violence, the police don’t want to get involved, and say, “That’s
not violence.”
Stenciled graffiti in Sarajevo announcing a July 1 demonstration and
calling for the dismissal of public officials.
I met
with
Elmina Kulašić, a returnee to Bosnia whose family fled Kozarac when
she was quite young and ended up in the United States. Currently she
works in Sarajevo with the Cinema for Peace Foundation, for the
Genocide Film Library.
This project interviews survivors from Srebrenica and preserves
their recollections on film. Elmina tells me that to date, the
Foundation has finished 1107 filmed interviews, and she has worked
on some 300 of them.
The interviews give the survivors the opportunity to talk about
their loved ones who were killed, and to describe them, not just
stating names and ages. People talk about their lives before the
war; what happened during the war; and how they are living now. They
are also given the opportunity to state what they think should be
done to prevent genocide in the future. In this way, the films can
be useful to viewers from other countries around the world.
We also talked about the well-being of the care-givers and activists
who may be in danger of acquiring secondary trauma. Just like
doctors and other people who stare in the face of death, people who
are involved in this kind of work have to know their own boundaries
and take care of themselves.
We discussed the importance of the survivors’ opportunity to relate
their personal memories as part of a healing process. I mentioned a
recent article by the Serbian scholar Sanja Pesek that weighed the
difference between the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia (ICTY) proceedings and a potential truth
commission. The ICTY focuses on the guilt of the war criminals, not
on the experience of the survivors. (See “Making Amends After
Collective Crimes: On Reconciliation” by Sanja Pesek.)
Pesek calls upon the truth commission as an effective way to achieve
what people call “restorative justice” which, as she writes, deals
more with restoring broken relationships and healing than with
punishment. Pesek outlines the advantages and disadvantages of truth
commissions, not proposing them as an alternative to the court
system, but as a supplement that hopes to achieve a different
element of justice from what the court can accomplish. The courts do
not work to chronicle or even acknowledge the suffering of the
victims of war crimes, both of which are necessary components of
justice.
Pesek writes, “Although in Serbia the criminal regime has been
ousted, the criminal ideology has survived.” Some war criminals are
being prosecuted, but on the personal level, there is precious
little work being done institutionally to help both victims and
passive supporters of the crimes to evolve. Pesek asserts that the
establishment of legal accountability in what amounts to a few
symbolic cases is not sufficient. Therefore she advocates the
establishment of a truth commission to engage in fact-finding,
breaking the silence, banishing atrocity denial, and documentation
of the crimes from a grassroots standpoint.
I have heard that in best practice concerning post-trauma recovery,
surivors need to be able to tell their story as soon as possible and
to repeat it as much as necessary. They need people to listen to
them and they need to feel that they are being heard. That is one of
the goals of the film project; another is to make the interviews
available in an archive.
We agreed that the expression “to move on” from the trauma is nearly
equivalent to saying “get over it.” I have developed what I think is
a more appropriate description of the necessary healing: to pull
oneself together to live in a reasonably functional way in order to
survive. People need to understand and accept what happened. This
has nothing to do with forgetting, never mind forgiving. And there
should not be an expectation that the memory of the trauma of the
past will disappear; it is always with the survivor, and he/she has
to learn to live with it and still function.
I mentioned that I have heard from some people that they are
“recovered.” Elmina has heard this as well, and she considers that
when people say this, it usually means that they are just starting
to heal.
I asked Elmina about her opinion of the Bebolucija events. She said
that she approved of the mobilization and that she was present at
the demonstrations. But she felt that there were problems in that
the organizers did not think about the long-term consequences of
their campaign. But Elmina says that the Bebolucija was needed “to
wake us up.” She hopes that it will be ongoing. The i.d. number
problem was a starting point, a wake-up call. “The politicians have
to know that they must do the job for which they were elected. Now
there is a movement, and there needs to be escalation.”
I noted a connection between the activities of May in Prijedor and
the immediately subsequent Bebolucija. Elmina was in Prijedor, and
she says that ninety percent of the people who were there came to
Sarajevo afterwards. People who took part in the first activities
were encouraged to engage in the second.
*
I met with
Democratization Policy Council analyst Kurt Bassuener, whom I’ve
mentioned before (see my writing about them
here).
Kurt compared the Bebolucija with the Occupy movement (now passing
its second anniversary), and he
mentioned various activists who participated in the Bebolucija, who
lined up on two sides of the question of focus in the movement. He
also recalled, “I
was in the Ukraine with the OSCE in 2004, training people. During
the Orange Revolution I witnessed the demonstrations and the
development of a feeling of power among the crowd. People were
looking at each other and saying, 'Are we doing this?...we’re doing
this!' It was like that here during the Bebolucija.”
Another relevant protest that was welling up as we were talking
about these things was the one in Istanbul. In an episode very
reminiscent of the Banja Luka Picin Park protest (see
this), the mayor of Istanbul had decided to allow his
cronies to build a shopping center in Taksim Square, in one of the
few remaining open parks in the city. People protested at length and
were answered with robust police violence.
I asserted that the protests in Turkey, the Occupy movement, the
Bebolucija, Picin Park, and more, were all responses to the
expansion and encroachment of the neoliberal trend. Kurt asked me to
define this. Roughly, I said, neoliberalism is the accellerated
consolidation of wealth in the hands of corporations as facilitated
by political leaders. It is accompanied by austerity measures;
anti-human construction (Picin Park, Gezi Park in Istanbul);
“pre-emptive” wars and militarist answers to all problems;
reinforcement of borders for ordinary people and erasure of them for
corporations; the shrinkage or disappearance of all manifestations
of the welfare state (health care, pensions); and general increase
in racism, sexism, and the assault on the world’s environment…among
other things. This is an off-the-cuff definition, but I think it
addresses what’s happening around the world and what protestors are
responding to.
In Seattle in 1999, in New York in 2011, and in Turkey and Bosnia
this year, people have been responding to these problems.
For a long time I wondered what the hell kind of member of the
European Union Bosnia-Herzegovina was eventually meant to be.
Eventually, looking at the relationship of “transitional”
(post-socialist) countries, the answer became obvious. Bosnia, like
Romania, Bulgaria, and now Croatia, is to be a second-class citizen
of the EU. The question is, as posed by Emrush in my last report,
“What is the alternative?” The alternative is globalization from
below and local/regional control of wealth, but this can only be
organized and achieved as a result of massive grassroots pressure
(cf. Fata’s comment above), and it’s a tall order.
In Bosnia, people have the greatest obstacles because the Dayton
system, with its ethnic key, segregates the ordinary people who have
the most in common so that they can’t organize together. The
Bebolucija was a wake-up call because it helped people to imagine –
at least – that they could overcome that obstacle.
At present, activists in Bosnia are fighting the local arm of
neoliberalism – the Dodiks, Miškovićs, and Radončićs (among many
others) who are happy to take parks and playgrounds and turn them
into shopping centers, and to sell off Bosnia’s socially-created
wealth to foreign companies (from Russia, Austria, Germany, etc) at
profit only to themselves. The encroachment of these regional
neoliberal tentacles foreshadows an accession to the European Union
that might never happen.
Enough about neoliberalism, for now. Kurt and I talked about current
political trends in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in its two entities. In
the main, there is political stagnation. You’ll recall that the SDP
broke up its coalition with the SDA last year and tried to form a
new parliamentary majority with other parties, both at the state and
entity (Federation) level. The SDP collaborated with Dodik’s party,
the SNSD, to remove SDA ministers at the state level, but it has
been thwarted in removing them in the Federation because the
president of the Federation, Živko Budimir, did not comply. So the
SDP and the SNSD arranged to have Budimir arrested this spring for
corruption – always a possibility, since pretty much all the
politicians have skeletons in their closets. Another government
official, from the SDA, was also arrested and spent part of a day in
jail.
I commented on these blatantly political arrests, and ongoing
investigations of the fishy dealings of other uncooperative
politicians, saying that even though those people probably should be
in jail anyway, it’s obvious what is going on. This is not about the
essential personality of the actors, but of their political roles.
They are each behaving according to the political template of the
role in which they find themselves. Kurt replied that “Budimir
was a fascist before fascism was cool. But he is in trouble because
he has been obstructing the SDP’s moves.”
In Sarajevo I saw a statement on someone's t-shirt: “Same shirt,
different day. ”
This ongoing, esoteric struggle that I have been describing is only
interesting on the day-to-day level; in the long run, it's just the
same shirt, summed up by the word “party-ocracy”
(stranokracija in Bosnian). The leaders of the political
parties care less and less about the social effects of their power
struggles, and more and more about their chance to stay in power.
Kurt notes that the common interest between the SDP and the SNSD is
“to insulate themselves from the voters: to fleece the state; to
avoid prosecution; and to preserve their power in their respective
entities.”
One of the effects of the wanton carelessness of the party-ocracy is
the sinking of the economy in ways that exaggerate the world
economic crisis. As a result of this, as reported by the Institute
for Youth Development, “KULT,” more than 150,000 young people have
left the Bosnia since 1995.
General elections will take place in the fall of next year; there’s
talk about the defeat of these parties. Kurt says, “The
SDP is going to get reamed. Their best hope is for a low voter
turnout. Then, their rank and file can have a more weighty vote. The
closed electoral list (a maneuver that the two parties are
concocting) won’t save the SDP. However, if they abolish centralized
vote counting, then it will be easier for them to manipulate the
count at the local level.”
This reminds me of when I asked my friend Emin M. whether he thought
the SDP had a chance next year, and he responded, “Tell me, have you
heard anyone say they like the SDP?”
In other another ongoing political exercise, there are the simmering
negotiations over how to deal with the Sejdić-Finci discussions.
This refers to the 2009 decision by the EU Court of Human Rights at
Strasbourg finding that the Dayton constitution was not in
conformity with EU standards – and was anti-human rights – because
it does not allow a Rom (Sejdić) or a Jew (Finci) or, for that
matter, anyone else but a Croat, Serb, or Bosniak, to be elected to
the three-part state-level presidency.
From 2009 up to today, leaders have been finagling and sparring over
how to conform to the Strasbourg decision, in the face of the threat
from the EU that it will not recognize the 2014 elections if the
problem is not resolved. And it has to be resolved this year, not at
the last minute. RS president Dodik has declared simply that the
member elected from his entity will not be required to be a Serb,
and that anyone can be a candidate. In an entity where at least 80%
of the voters are Serbs, that's an easy solution.
One question is, will the Bosnian authorities even care if the EU
does not recognize their elections?
Croats and Bosniaks in the Federation have tried to come up with
other solutions that will in fact, similarly, guarantee that while
it looks like anyone from the ranks of the “others”
can become president, a Croat and a Bosniak will still be elected.
Some arcane solutions have been proposed by one party or another,
and true to the spirit of party-ocracy, as soon as one party floats
a solution, another shoots it down. (For an illustration of this
ongoing story, see “Bosniaks and Croat Election Reform Plans Criticised, ”
September 19, 2013.)
Kurt says, “The EU is interested in implementation of the
Sejdic-Finci decision, but that process has hit a wall.”
Q: Isn’t the SDA pressing for implementation?
Kurt: “No, nothing will come of that. The RS says that the
Federation can elect a president however they wish, but we will do
it directly. We can remove the ethnic label, thus technically the
post will be open to everyone. The Croats oppose the removal of the
ethnic label. They would like to establish a territorial unit or an
electoral unit based on territory. The Bosniaks could go either way;
they are secure in their numbers. They would be ok with removing the
ethnic label, and they would be ok with the establishment of the
post of a single president.
“The EU made a compromise proposal involving having electoral
(territorial) units where there would be a weighted vote for the
majority ethnicity in that area. The criticism of this is that it
would unfairly skew the vote in favor of that ethnicity. The
international community's approach to Bosnia is infantilizing, as if
the people of Bosnia don’t know what is going on.”
Connected to all this is a project to reform the Federation's
constitution, as politicians and international officials alike are
avoiding the question of reform of the state (Dayton) constitution.
Kurt says, “The US put up the billboards calling for support of the
reform of the Federation constitution. There was a five-member team
of experts who created a proposal two months ago. But it was
underwhelming. It doesn’t resolve things; it’s vague, timid. There
is an over-fetishization of income. Proposed reductions of
politicians’ income wouldn’t resolve things. The US didn’t want to
touch real constitutional reform, but [US Ambassador] Patrick Moon
needed to do something to show that he was still relevant. The
Americans have put all their eggs in that basket, but 'there’s no
there, there.' ”
Continuing on the theme of the international community's
involvement, Kurt says, “Meanwhile, the US policy is not to create
new state institutions. For example, an Agriculture Department is
desperately needed, but the US is bowing to Dodik. And Patrick Moon
says, 'We believe in one state with two vibrant entities.' They are
digging the Dayton trench deeper.”
Kurt has a poor opinion of the High Representative's ability to
promote any change in Bosnia, calling him “an absolute dud.” I ask,
“But isn’t this a reflection of the lack of support from the
international community for robust changes? ” Kurt says, “Yes, but
it’s not only that. Inzko has no support from the Peace
Implementation Commission, but it’s also a temperamental problem. He
is, after all, the HR. He has authority. He can work, he has
leverage... There is no policy, strategy, or forward vision on the
part of the international community.”
I commented, “There is no policy because Bosnia is not that
important to the international community as long as it is not
bleeding and thereby disrupting the EU functions. ”
Kurt: “Yes, Bosnia is not a priority. And, for example, the Germans
don’t want to use financial leverage to pressure Bosnia. As long as
there is social peace, they don’t want to do anything difficult. If
there are no riots and unrest, then there is no problem.”
Kurt further offers, jokingly, that Rudolph Giuliani would be the
ideal High Representative. But I know he likes the idea of an
American High Rep, which would be a first.
