Report 1:
Why Bosnia; Exodus; protests; Scandal. Report 2:
Impunity, manipulation, activism Report 3:
Aluminij conglomerate; Corruption at Gikil. Report 4:
Political charades; militarization of police.. Report 5:
Pride in Sarajevo Report 6:
Migrants stuck in BiH on the way to Europe
To contact Peter
in response to these reports or any of his articles,
Apropos of Milan Tegeltija and the HJPC (see report #1) corruption
saga, Here's a concrete example of the negligence of the state
prosecution under the direction of Gordana Tadić
in the last couple of years. I should note that "negligence" can
sound accidental, but in many cases the piles of folders pertaining
to war crimes investigations are moldering in the prosecution's
cabinet drawers as a reflection of political leanings, not because
of laziness.
In early 1999, not long after the first expelled Croats returned to
Muslim-dominated Bugojno in central Bosnia, I visited a Croat
returnee family in that city. At the time, the hardline SDA
operative Dževad
Mlaćo was mayor. His tenure was distinguished by ignoring Croat
claims for the return of their property in Bugojno, usurped in
wartime by Muslim squatters and by the city. As Croats tried to
return, they were subject to discrimination when attempting to get
jobs. Mlaćo was implementing the SDA policy of discouraging minority
return wherever Muslims held local power after the war.
And what's worse, it was Mlaćo who conducted a terror campaign
against Croats during the war. It's true that Croats and Muslims
were at war in central Bosnia for more than a year, but it was still
a war crime when Mlaćo instituted a concentration camp to hold local
Croats, and another war crime when he ordered the "liquidation" of
some of them. There are at least nineteen Croats still missing from
that episode.
Mlaćo was eventually removed from his mayoral seat by High
Representative Petritsch in 1999, but he was soon afterward rewarded
for his war crimes and discriminatory practices by the SDA when he
was elected to membership in the state-level House of
Representatives.
Mlaćo's diary, containing instructions to do away with Croat
prisoners, has been in the hands of the state prosecution for more
than a decade. But Gordana Tadić, chief prosecutor and formerly
head of the war crimes department in the state prosecution, has
essentially protected
Mlaćo. Tadić is not Muslim and not a member of the SDA;
rather, she is a Croat from the Tuzla area. So
what kind of deal led to her shielding of Mlaćo is open to
conjecture. But it is still one of many cases where war crimes have
gone unprosecuted.
*
Meanwhile, in Foča,
in eastern Bosnia, the majestic
Aladža mosque, built in 1549 and destroyed in 1992, was ceremonially
re-opened this May. The event was attended by some 5,000 of the
faithful. But that represents some five times the number of Muslims
who ever returned to this lovely, out of the way town on the Drina,
where before the war there were some 15,000 Muslims, or more than
half of Foča's
population. Most of the Muslim return to Foča has comprised older
people who came back to the surrounding villages.
Like Višegrad
and pretty much all the other formerly Muslim-majority towns along
the Drina, Foča became a black hole of Serb extremism and
nationalist expressions. The most recent provocation against
multi-ethnicity, Muslim return, and general decency has been the
creation of a mural on the side of an apartment building in the very
center of town. The mural glorifies World War II Chetnik general and
commander Draža Mihailović, whose troops were responsible for the
rape, murder, and ethnic cleansing of tens and thousands of
non-Serbs during that war. These same crimes were repeated in the
1990s, with even greater damage. The mural has met with protest by
the Association of Foča War Victims but, as of July, no action was
taken.
South of Foča, in the heart of eastern Herzegovina, lies Bileća, a
smaller town where before the war, Muslims constituted some 15% of
the population. During the war they were all expelled, and only a
couple dozen have returned. If there was ever a place in
Bosnia-Herzegovina that's nasty, poor, miserable, and brutish,
that's Bileća. There, they recently tore down a monument to the WWII
Partisans, and erected a statue of Draža Mihailović.
*
And the Muslim-dominated garnitura (political elite) in
Sarajevo conducts its own kind of conformist pressure as well.
People who visit briefly can't feel this unless they get information
from the locals.
For example, my friend Miki had a story. He told me that the
elementary school administration was requiring parents to declare
what "language" their children would study in. They had a choice of
Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian. All are the same language, but
Serbian is presented in Cyrillic, and each politically promoted
variant has a small component of its own ethnically-linked
vocabulary.
Those pupils who did not declare for one language or another would
not be allowed to receive their report cards at the end of the
school term. The question is, why should parents be compelled to
drive their children into one ethnic flock or another? Sure, many
are more than ready to align with the designation representing the
religion of their ancestors. But there's a respectable contingent of
people who prefer to think of themselves as citizens of a secular
state and to be treated that way.
The school administration of Sarajevo Canton is thus trying to
compel parents to identify with one sectarian community, because
that's the way politics (read: profiteering) is conducted in
Dayton's Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Miki and his wife and many of his friends chose to enter "neopredjeljeni"
(undetermined). As it happened, some 20% of the parents responded
the same way. Miki said, "The poll was more to see how people were
defining themselves. There was a whole discussion of this. They were
putting pressure on us. The new Minister of Education is
discriminating because the children won't be able to get their
report cards. I still can't figure out why they would do that
survey; if I had checked one of the boxes, would the curriculum have
changed? No. But there are 20% of us who disagree. We're saying we
don't need those report cards. We’re the hard core."
*
There's a harsher system of educational separatism that's been
practiced ever since the end of the war, in the cities in the
Federation where there's something approaching a mixed Croat and
Bosniak population. That's the system, in something over 50 schools,
called "Two schools under one roof." It's as close to our old Jim
Crow system as it gets, with Croat and Bosniak pupils studying in
the same school, with different teachers, in different shifts, and
sometimes using different entrances.
Children who have not been thoroughly indoctrinated to mistrust and
shun people of the other ethnicity have, here and there, rebelled
against the idiocy promoted by their elders. A prominent example is
Jajce, where pupils mounted a movement opposition to the segregation
some years ago. Students at the high school succeeded in compelling
the administration to allow Croats and Bosniaks to study together.
One young activist said, "You're brought up being taught that others
are no good and you don't spend a single hour learning about their
culture, beliefs or values...Often, students are taught to hate by
their parents in their homes, because the parents went through the
war. If they're taught to hate others at home and then go to
segregated schools, they will know nothing but hate."
The high school students in Jajce broke down the barriers imposed by
their parents. That movement lives on in the elementary schools,
where kids even play on separate playgrounds. Bosniak teachers
oppose this system, but the Croat teachers tend to support it,
saying things like, "Bosnia has three different peoples with three
different languages, who have the right to express their cultural or
ethnic identity." But Asja, a Croat elementary school pupil in Jajce,
resents the fact that she can only play with her Bosniak girlfriend
on the weekends. She says, "I would like us all to be together and
mixed. To me, it's wrong they're dividing us and I'm really sad
about it."
*
Back among the grownups, there's been an ongoing struggle among
demobilized war veterans for better treatment at the hands of their
government. In the Federation, Croat and Bosniak veterans, former
enemies from the 1990s, have drawn together as they have been
ignored by the entity government. Over recent years they have
campaigned together for better pensions and against falsification of
war history. Apparently, tens of thousands of people who were never
involved in the war have registered as veterans in order to apply
for pensions. And there are dozens of "veterans' associations"
taking advantage of benefits that their members did not earn.
The veterans have been calling for an increase in their pensions to
a more livable rate. They are also demanding the unification of all
veterans' associations and a careful investigation of the lists to
determine who really earned a veteran's pension and who did not.
These demands are still outstanding, and the investigation has not
been undertaken. But finally, in July the entity's Parliament passed
a law to increase the benefits due to veterans, especially disabled
persons and those nearing retirement age. The veterans' struggle
against manipulation and corruption continues.
*
One other important form of activism, the campaign to memorialize
sites where people were mistreated during the war, has been carried
on by young activists working with the Sarajevo-based Center for
Nonviolent Action. The young peace activists call their campaign
"Unmarked Suffering Sites," and they are targeting locations
regardless of which ethnicity was abusing the other. They have left
signs in Kazani, a ravine in Sarajevo where renegade Bosniak
soldiers murdered some Serb citizens; a detention facility in Vogošća
on the outskirts of Sarajevo, where Serb soldiers abused non-Serbs;
and at the Bijeli Brijeg stadium in Mostar, which Croats converted
into a detention camp during the war.
The activists have marked over 75 sites so far; one of them
commented, "Memorialization is a path towards building peace...to
prevent such unfortunate events from happening again. Those
[victims] were mainly civilians and innocent people who had nothing
to do with the war. So, it would be good to do this as a warning—so
such things never happen again in this area”
*
I look to my Sarajevo friend "Denis" for a lucid assessment of the
possibilities for activism in the Sarajevo area. He says (as I
paraphrase), "There are just fragments of activism, without real
solidarity. For example, there's the Hastahane Park, where the
military hospital used to be. After the war they demolished the
hospital, and during the winter, there has been a bazaar, and
entertainment for the public. Now the municipality wants to take
that away, to build a building, there, a bank. There was a campaign
against this, some public discussion. And two different groups of 5,
up to 10 people, showed up to protest. And beside them there were
100 ominous-looking guys wearing masks, from the municipality. This
is the fascist way that our authorities deal with the public.
"They call activists traitors, and say, 'Where were you during the
war?', diverting the discourse to that kind of narrative. In my work
around the country, I have sat down with the people I worked with in
the field. If you touch any topic politically, regarding
demographics or any real situation, their voices go from loud to
very low. You can feel the fear of repression.
"There was a place where an unidentified company took gravel from
the river, excavating for 10 years. They created big changes in the
land downstream from there, because they didn't give a damn. They
have the power! And if you say something in protest, they'll knock
on your door, and ask your name. There is no opportunity for you to
deal with these things in an effective way. If you go to court, it
takes 10 years, 15 years, to come to any resolution. The cronies
running things go to the hoodlums for physical support, people who
are involved in black market and drug dealing.
"This is part of the political and social dynamic of Bosnia.
Actually, the best example of this dynamic now is in Serbia, where
repression is harsher. I don't know how, but we're in a better
situation than them. They had the 'One in five million' protests
against their regime. And in every town where people were
protesting, they got beaten; every reporter was beaten, or they
torched their car. That, of course, creates fear, and we haven't
escaped that fear here, and that's why people are leaving the
country.
"At present we have no critical mass to start any big protest; the
last big ones a few years ago were just in Tuzla, Sarajevo, and
Mostar. While the rest of Europe is slipping into fascism, it is as
if we haven't learned anything; not from history, and not from the
1990s war. People died for nothing! There are not a lot of smart,
brave, honest people. A lot of them died in the war. Those who
remained were not smart, not brave enough. No one wants to be a
footsoldier in activism. During the widespread earlier protests, I
thought there was some hope for the future. But now, the younger
generations don't have a clue. They kill them during the education
process. That just entails repetition, not real knowledge. In
knowledge is power, but they don't have real knowledge. There is no
meaning, and it's a shame.
"In the virtual dimension, we have some kind of struggle, but in
real life, nothing. It's down to the parents. My grandmother lived
through World War II; she was tough. She always said 'bravo' when I
went out to a protest, while my mother was asking, 'Why do you do
this, why you? Let others do this, don't be so loud.' Now everything
has changed, in just two or three generations."
*
I have seen grassroots activism ebb and flow over the years since
the war. It decreases, but never dies. There are always some brave
people, notwithstanding Denis's words, but you can't predict where
they will organize. The next big thing in Bosnia will be the gay
pride parade in Sarajevo, tomorrow (September 8). Given what
happened in 2008, when some religious fanatics and common "football
hooligans" vamped on activists of Pride Week violently as it was
barely getting underway, this next attempt will take nerve. There
are some people who are up to it.
Winding up my stay in Bosnia, I chatted with my friend Valery, who
had come back recently from over a year in Serbia. She said (as I
paraphrase, again), "I'm an optimist. I feel like Bosnia has more
potential than Serbia. There, they've done nothing to come to terms
with the past. Some 60% to 70% of people say don't know anything
about the siege of Sarajevo."
I commented, "It sounds like you're talking about the Republika
Srpska."
Valery: "But in the RS, there's more effort to talk about it. You
should take the level of denial there, and multiply it by 10; that's
what you have in Serbia.
"In Serbia there is such a centralized system of political
operations. Serbia has been fantastic at lying to the international
community that they're progressive. What has been done here in
Bosnia hasn't been institutionalized to the degree that it has been
in Serbia.
"Yes, it is an extreme situation here as well. Either people are
going to leave, or they will have to become active. There is no
other alternative," says Valery.