Bosnia-Herzegovina Journal #3: Srebrenica By Peter Lippman
October 13, 2012
2012 Journal index
Journal 1:
Sarajevo. September 25 Journal 2:
Tuzla. October 11 Journal 3: Srebrenica. October 13 Journal 4:
Bratunac, Višegrad, Elections. October 26 Journal 5:
Krajina -
Banja Luka. November 6 Journal 6:
Krajina - Kozarac, Prijedor. November 12 Journal 7:
Guilt, Responsibility, and
Politics. November 20 Journal 8:Travnik,
Mostar, Animal Farm. December 13 Journal 9:
Activism in Sarajevo, Return to
Srebrenica, Prijedor Revisited,
December 19 Journal 10:
Krila
Nade; The Missing; Tycoon Arrested; March 1st Coalition,
December 26 Journal 11:
Macedonia and Kosovo, January 2, 2013 Journal 12:
The Roma of Kosovo, January 11, 2013 Journal 13: A
Visit to Germany, January 29, 2013
To contact Peter
in response to these reports or any of his articles,
Here’s a report on what I heard and saw in
Srebrenica, where I spent a week. The municipal elections on
Sunday, October 7 were the climax of that week, but they weren’t
the reason I went to Srebrenica. I went to catch up with old
friends and to update my impressions of life in the
municipality. My main interest was how ordinary people are
living and what they are doing about it.
As before, some of the names mentioned in this letter have been
changed to protect people’s privacy.
The upcoming elections wove in and out
through the story of my time in the municipality. For
background: between the end of the war (late 1995) and 2008,
displaced people from Srebrenica who were living elsewhere were
allowed to vote in the municipal elections in that municipality,
regardless of their place of residence. This year, however, the
rule was changed and citizens were required to vote in their
official place of residence. This change brought up the prospect
of the election of the first post-war Serb mayor.
The population of the Srebrenica municipality is not known, but
the balance between Serbs and Muslims is close. Muslims in
Bosnia and people around the world who care about the memory of
the genocide against the Muslims were very concerned about the
new voting situation. Someone pointed out that the objection was
not to a Serb victory, but to the victory of someone who denies
genocide. This was seen as unacceptable (and I agree, of
course). A few weeks before the election, Republika Srpska
President Milorad Dodik had visited Srebrenica and given a
speech in which he once again asserted that genocide had not
taken place there.
From the time of the new voting arrangement some dire
predictions were expressed. One of those was that the victory of
a Serb who denies the record of the genocide would, in fact,
constitute the “last stage of genocide.”
In the face of the new electoral arrangement, some activists
quickly organized a campaign to register people from Srebrenica
within the municipality. Some Muslims from Srebrenica are
registered there and have been voting there since they returned
after the war. Others live there but are registered to vote in
the other entity, the Federation, because it is there that they
receive their pensions and health care, and they have been
afraid of losing those benefits. A third, very large group has
never returned to Srebrenica, and those people still live and
vote in the Federation.
The Bosnian (Dayton) constitution gives people the right to live
and vote wherever they want to in Bosnia. In order to vote in a
particular location, however, one has to declare his or her
residence in that place and receive official identification from
there. The registration campaign, led by Srebrenica survivor
Emir Suljagić, helped displaced Srebrenicans do so. Activists
from that campaign also registered returnees to Srebrenica who
had continued voting in the Federation, or who had simply never
voted. A decision was made in the Federation at the entity level
and in the three Cantons where there were the most displaced
Srebrenicans, to allow continued health coverage of these people
even if they changed their place of residence. So members of the
“I will vote for Srebrenica” campaign worked night and day for
more than three months to make it happen.
*
I have written about Munevera in previous years. I met her and
her husband Salih soon after they returned to Srebrenica in the
early 2000s. Salih died a few years ago. I visited Munevera at
her house on the outskirts of Srebrenica, on the hill above her
farm. Her old dog Ringo sat peacefully nearby as we drank
coffee. Munevera still works with the cows; she has over 20 now.
She sells the milk to an outfit in Tuzla, as before. She gets
paid regularly by them. There is also a subsidy that the RS
government is supposed to pay, but they’re always late. Recently
she received the subsidy for April’s milk.
I reminded Munevera of what Salih said to me. Four years ago
there were difficulties with the Tuzla milk company, which was
not paying them for their milk. I asked, “Will they pay you?” He
said, “Yes, they will pay. When our eyes fall out.” But it turns
out that a Slovenian company bought the Tuzla-based milk
wholesaler and payments have been regularized since then.
Times have been hard; Munevera’s list of problems sounded
overwhelming. Last winter the snow, which did great damage in
many parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, knocked Munevera’s plastic
greenhouse. In the spring there were floods and they carried
away all of Munevera’s firewood that was stored by the riverbank
for winter. The flood took away the riverbank as well.
Then there was a killing drought - also pretty much throughout
the country - and the crops didn’t grow very well, or not at
all. Munevera had rented land down by the memorial cemetery to
grow corn. Last year she brought back 54 wagon-loads of corn;
this year she brought back 11. And there were forest fires above
Srebrenica in late summer, until recently.
Feed for the cows was expensive and it’s been hard going.
Munevera has been wanting to sell some of the cows but no one
will buy them. It’s going to be a hard winter, she says.
Munevera says that if she did not have to work she would only
last three days relaxing. She is used to working. She says that
other people have gotten used to not working and, during the
summer, she was not able to get anyone to help her with the cows
and the farm, other than her children. No one wanted to do that
kind of work.
Munevera said, “Do you know why Salih died? Because he couldn’t
take the disappointment anymore,” and she started to cry.
We began to speak about politics. Munevera said that the Serb
candidate for mayor, Vesna Kočević, is a good person, but that a
change in government won’t change anything. She was glad though,
that the two main candidates are both people who live here and
who have their families here. That’s the first time it’s been
that way. She concluded, “I don’t even really feel like voting.
But I guess I’ll do my civic duty.”
*
I visited Zahida at the kafić (a coffee house that serves
little or no food, mainly drinks), near where I was staying.
When I arrived she shook her head and said, “Patnje, patnje,
to ti je Srebrenica” - “Suffering, suffering - that is
Srebrenica.”
Zahida works at the kafić, little more than a shack, sixteen-odd
hours a day. She serves coffee and drinks, socializing with the
customers - all Muslim - when she’s not busy.
Giving herself as an example to illustrate her comment, Zahida
said, “My electricity bill is 100 KM, and I have other bills as
well. I can’t find real work. I don’t make any plans. I can’t go
see my relatives; I don’t have time. And I can’t send them any
money.
On the other hand, Zahida said, “It has been peaceful here for
many years. The young people here are about half Serb and half
Bosniak. They get along fine.”
I started to mention the elections to Zahida. She responded, “Joj,
Piter” (pronounced “yoy” - an expression of exasperation or
dismay), I said to her, “That’s a ‘joj’ worth a thousand words.”
She said, “To je ono bosansko ‘joj’ ” (That’s that
Bosnian ‘joj’).
*
A friend of mine from Srebrenica told me that the remains of her
sister’s son, missing since the 1995 massacre, had finally been
discovered and they were buried this year at the large funeral
at the cemetery at Potočari, where so far, over 5,000 massacre
victims have been reburied. My friend was the one who received
the news about the identification of her sister’s son’s remains,
and she had to break the news to her sister. She told me, “When
she learned the news, she fainted, and I thought that she was
dead. When she came to, she told me that she had never really
believed that her son was dead.”
The son’s remains had been discovered not in a mass grave in the
woods, but at the bottom of Lake Peručac, an artificial lake
created by a dam on the River Drina at the south end of the
Srebrenica municipality, and stretching further south from
there, almost to Višegrad. The
Drina, in fact, has been described as the “largest mass grave in
Bosnia;” I have heard the figure of some three thousand souls
killed and thrown into that river, mostly at Višegrad.
For fifteen years and more, the remains of many of those victims
lay in Lake Peručac, until the level of the lake was lowered in
2010 to allow repair work on the dam. At that time, activists
quickly mobilized to help the missing persons organizations
collect the remains, and that is how my friend’s nephew was
found.
Graves in memorial cemetery, Srebrenica
It may be news to some people, but besides all the politicking
and behind the patnje, there are capable people who care
about Srebrenica. Vahid (introduced in my previous report) is
one of those. Cvijetin Maksimović, who I spoke with in the
municipality building at Srebrenica, is another. Mr. Maksimović
is an advisor in the Municipal Department for Social Activities
and Public Services. Asked what this entailed, Maksimović told
me that he works on civil defense, education, health issues,
social work, coordination with local communities, culture, and
relations with NGOs. From 2005 to 2008 he was the head of this
department. That was a politically-appointed position and, due
to political changes, he was demoted and made advisor to the new
head of the department.
I asked Maksimović to tell me about progress in the economic
development of the municipality. He mentioned a business
training center in Potočari, and then turned to the critical
Guber spa, which Vahid had discussed with me. He said, “The
Guber spa, in spite of the recent court decision, still has
legal problems with ownership relations. This has not in fact
been solved. Radojica Ratkovac is majority owner of the
development rights of the Guber spa. But the Republika Srpska
government gave the rights for exploitation of the waters to
another company, “Argentum 09.” So there is still an obstruction
there.
“The government of the RS has not had the sufficient desire to
approve the development - I don’t know why. Perhaps it has to do
with potential competition with other spas, including one in
Laktaši.””
Laktaši is the town near Banja Luka where RS President Milorad
Dodik comes from. It may or may not be a coincidence that a spa
there gets preferential treatment, but this seemed to be the
implication of Maksimović’s statement. I do know that Dodik has
crony relationships with other businessmen from Laktaši, such as
the owner of a very successful road-building company.
When I asked Maksimović about progress in the mining industry,
he echoed what Vahid had told me: “The natural resources here
are in the hands of the central government. D.O. Gross from
Gradiška received the franchise to work the mine. The tax income
goes to Gradiška, not to this municipality. They should move
their headquarters to Srebrenica. And D.O. Lejn has the
franchise for the Boksit mine in Podravanje, and they are based
in Banja Luka. This doesn’t result in much employment here, as
they bring in machines and hire workers from Pale [a regional
center in the RS, on the outskirts of Sarajevo], not here.
“We have fixed a lot of roads in the last 12 years. But there
are problems with maintaining them - sometimes there are slides
or floods that hurt the roads. Lately the natural occurrences -
snow, drought, and flood - have been like a plague.
I asked if everyone in the municipality has electricity now.
Maksimović said, “Yes, everyone has electricity - unless they
don’t pay their bill.” He continued, “We have also created the
conditions for return: roads, and electricity. Before the war
there were 75 km of paved road. Since the war we have paved
another 100. But not as many people returned as there should
have been. This is due to the economic crisis, also to the
centralization of government in this entity. The high taxes from
Banja Luka discourage startups. Employment is low. It is better
in the bigger cities. This is not only the problem in
Srebrenica, but also in all the other smaller towns.
“After 2008 we weren’t able to keep up the same level of
development as before. This is a reflection of the political
situation in Bosnia. There are people in charge who are not
serious. The population in this municipality has been decreasing
and three schools have closed in the last four years - in Pale
[a village near Potocari - not the Pale mentioned above], Crvica,
and Toplica. There are no students there.
Q: Are there fewer young people in the municipality?
A: Every day.
Q: Is there any hope?
A: “Srebrenica has possibilities. There is a work force. But the
standard has gone down in the last four years because of bad
leadership. With the number of people living here, the income
could be much better. There are many natural resources and some
good companies, and much support from the international
community. There is still space for development. If taxes could
be reduced, business would stay here.
“Instead of being tied up in the politics, it would be better
for us all to work in the mutual interest. I want to live here.
I would like to compare this place with the bigger cities -
Sarajevo, Tuzla - and not with the other smaller places.”
*
The international community has invested millions of dollars in
Srebrenica since it lifted sanctions on the municipality in the
late 1990s. The destiny of those funds could be compared to the
water flowing through Srebrenica’s decrepit supply system that
was not repaired until recently; some of that money arrived at
its destination, and much of it disappeared. Although some of
the residents of Srebrenica are not aware of the cost of repair
of those kilometers of road, it’s true that much of the money
never made it anywhere near Srebrenica. My landlady commented,
“With all the money that supposedly was donated to Srebrenica,
they could have made the desert bloom.”
Speaking of her family situation, she told me, “My daughter
became a doctor but she couldn’t get work here in Srebrenica;
they wouldn’t hire her. So she got a job in a village in the
Federation.
“I was told that there were 1,700 Serbs who live in Serbia who
registered to vote here. But there’s so much trauma here, I’m
fed up with the local politics. I don’t get involved, I just try
and live my life. I believe that we can live together
peacefully; we lived together before.”
*
I visited Izet Imamovic, who was my landlord in Srebrenica until
his wife Zekira died a few years ago. He told me, “I’m 85, I’m
the oldest person in Srebrenica. I came here with my family when
I was 2. My father worked as a road builder. My mother died when
I was four, of poisoning from a mushroom. She was 32. My father
remarried. So, I’m an orphan. I only had four years of
elementary school. Then, World War II broke out.”
Izet asked me about the upcoming US elections and I told him,
“I’m to the left of Obama. I will vote for him if I have to.” He
responded, “I’m a leftist too, and you know, one day, maybe 100
or 200 years from now, socialism will come back to the world.
And it will come from the United States.”
I asked Izet for his view of the elections in Srebrenica. He
said, “I think the Muslims will win. We can’t elect the people
who killed us.”
Posters for independent candidate in Srebrenica
The Srebrenica Youth Center has been functioning since 2006.
Mikica Nikolić, the director, told me about some of its
principles and projects: “We are trying to maintain a space
where people can be encouraged to think differently and not be
considered ‘politically unacceptable.’
“We participated in a project, “Mladi za mir” (Youth for
Peace), supported by CARE, for three years, from 2009 to this
year, together with Odisej and a group from Vlasenica. This was
an educational project to train young people to do lobbying, to
organize projects, to strategize, and to be activists. We did
peace education. We worked on activities in the local
communities, and with a group in Sućeska, a registered NGO. We
also helped with an initiative in Skelani to clean the
riverside, unofficial garbage dumps, and the area around the
clinic.
“We have also worked with the Scouts. We got tents, scarves, and
t-shirts for them. There is a place in this municipality where
there is an old stone monument that was considered the
geographical center of Yugoslavia. The scouts made a picnic
grounds there, with benches and a cookfire pit, for outings.
“We have a program to encourage mobility of young people. Young
people need to travel. We arranged for some of our members to go
to Italy and to France. Wherever we go, we go to Youth Centers,
to see how their system is. In Italy we got training to work on
Internet radio. That project was supported by Youth in Action
and people in Italy. In France we worked on making film
documentaries, and in Germany there was an event with an
inter-religious dialogue.
“We ran the Silvertown Shine festival at the playfield by the
school, from 2003 to 2008. Then we were not allowed to use that
space anymore. After that, in 2009 and 2010, we had it at the
football field. Then we were prohibited from having it there;
their excuse was that it ‘hurt the grass.’ We assume that
someone feels threatened by our work. But we do not submit to
pressure.
“The festival has been good for stores and restaurants here. The
owner of one restaurant told me that the income from those few
days could keep him going for another two or three months.
“Last year we had the festival in a privately-owned location,
and we didn’t have it this year; there was the film festival
instead. Tomorrow, there will be a concert here. But we have no
money. So we printed up only these 20 posters [shows me a poster
advertising the concert]. Here is a photo of a volcano. That
symbolizes that we are like a force that can’t be suppressed.”
Speaking of the Youth Center’s financial problems, Mikica said,
“There is no budget for the Youth Center at the entity or state
level. At the local level, yes. We had support from the
municipality, but that changed in 2008; at that time, it went
down from 8,000 KM per year to 1,000 KM. So there has been no
sense of obligation towards us at any level of the government.
…we have only one paid employee.”
Together with Maksimović’s mention of negative political changes
in 2008 - the year the now-deceased Osman Suljić was elected
mayor - Mikica’s comments made me think that the last four years
have been a bad period for local government in Srebrenica. I
commented, “It seems to me that the government has its
priorities backwards if it can’t support the youth.” Mikica
responded, “Yes, but it’s the same everywhere. Everything is
decided elsewhere: in Banja Luka, in Sarajevo, and in the
international community. The number of young people who would
like to leave this place is high. I bet you that if you go out
on the street and ask people, 90% of them will tell you they’d
like to leave. That’s my impression.
“It’s ok to want a better life. But not everyone can live in the
big city. We need to fix things here so that people can identify
better with Srebrenica. As it is now, they are leaving because
they don’t have work. And there is no chance for people to get
work here without being connected to some political party. Ok,
it makes sense if it’s a political position - but if you’re a
cleaning woman?? And with the upcoming elections, there are
politicians who are offering 20 KM for a vote.”
I asked Mikica what she meant by “peace education.” She said,
“We educate young people, for example, about non-violent
communication. Our multi-culturalism is a wealth. I have many
identities. I love travel, music, activism, communication, I’m
not just a member of an ethnicity, which is something that has
been shoved into the foreground. We have more parts of our
identity that connect us than separate us. And we can learn from
each other about our customs and share, and spread this
knowledge around.
Dance party at youth center, Srebrenica
One more organization: Prijatelji (Friends) is another
one of the more solid non-governmental organizations in
Srebrenica. Director Dragana Jovanović told me that the
organization has two main programs: informational production in
the media, and employment assistance. The first, particularly
involved in the production of radio programs, has brought
changes to Srebrenica. For many years there was no radio
programming coming out of Srebrenica, and it tended to be up to
the whim of outside reporters to convey information about the
municipality to the outside world.
As Ms. Jovanović recounted, Prijatelji secured financial support
for a radio transmitter to be installed in Srebrenica. She said,
“The equipment can send a signal out throughout Bosnia, in the
Federation and in the RS, on radio and television. We have
correspondents who collaborate with twelve other media
institutions in both entities, including in Vogosca and in Tuzla
Canton [home to many displaced Srebrenicans].
“In this way we are trying to get out information that lets
people know that Srebrenica has to do with things other than the
July 11th anniversary. We produce between forty and
sixty reports a month. In improving the image of Srebrenica,
among other things, we hope that it can improve the possibility
of return to Srebrenica. There is a better exchange of
information now than there was before. We are also part of an
informational network throughout BiH. Our programs go to a
Bosnian radio station in Chicago called ‘Ritam.’ ”
Prijatelji was also instrumental in organizing a festival of
documentary films this summer in Srebrenica.
I asked Ms. Jovanović whether she saw positive progress in
Srebrenica, generally speaking. She said, “The good side is that
the security situation has been good. But on the other hand,
belonging to an ethnic group is still the main thing. As soon as
someone goes out of their own group, he or she gets labled.”
Regarding change and grassroots activism, she said, “People
don’t believe in the power of their own influence. We need a new
generation to get beyond these problems.”
*
With the elections approaching, I met with Emin and Nedim, two
activists who were part of Emir Suljagic’s campaign to register
Srebrenicans to vote in the local elections. They had been
living in the vicinity of Srebrenica since the campaign started,
and had been working overtime since then to organize the
turnout. Since I had received accreditation from the Central
Election Commission to monitor the voting, they gave me the
rundown on statistics and events leading up to the elections.
All told, the campaign had registered approximately 2,400 voters
in Srebrenica by the August 23rd deadline. Around 335
of these people were returnees who were already living in
Srebrenica but were registered to vote in the Federation, and
the rest were people who were still living in various parts of
the Federation. Emin and Nedim mentioned to me that, on the
other side, the Serbs registered about 1700 people who lived
here at one time, but who were not from here, and who now live
in Serbia.
The background on this is that, at the end of the war, many
Bosnian Serbs who were displaced from Sarajevo, Donji Vakuf,
Glamoč, and other parts of the Federation were moved to
Srebrenica in order to repopulate the municipality on an
ethnically-homogenized basis. Then, towards the end of the
1990s, property laws came to be standardized throughout
Bosnia-Herzegovina and, to some extent (all this under severe
pressure from the international community), the rule of law was
imposed. As a result, evictions of squatters from usurped
property began to take place, not only in Srebrenica, but
throughout the country. At this time many Serbs left for Zvornik,
Bijeljina, Banja Luka, and Serbia. Some of these people have
dual citizenship both in Serbia and Bosnia. There was a campaign
to register these people to vote in Srebrenica.
Nedim and Emin informed me that, prior to their registration
campaign, there were already about 2650 registered Bosniak
voters in Srebrenica. And there were about three thousand Serb
voters registered there as well. So, together with
newly-registered Serb voters (including an unpredictable number
of those registered on the fly), there were potentially more
Serb voters than Bosniaks. But Emin noted that there has been a
low turnout among the Serb voters. His hope was that with the
additional Bosniak voters, the Bosniak acting mayor Ćamil
Duraković, who took over when Osman Suljić died, would be
elected mayor.
The stories that Nedim and Emin told me of harassment during the
voter drive reminded me of the struggles of the civil rights
movement of the 1960s in the US. The police stopped the
organizers many times while they were driving back and forth
between Srebrenica and the Federation. Once they were stopped
twice within five minutes. Another time, the police even checked
the serial number on the engine of their car.
Nedim and Emin feared that there would be escalated harassment
of voters during the elections, along with fraudulent voting
from the other side. They explained to me that a voter must have
photo identification, and that many of the newly-registered
voters from Serbia do not have that. There were rumors about
voters being supplied with false identification, and even with
ballots that were already filled out.
Emin commented, “It is fine to have a fair vote, and let the
winner win honestly, but not through stealing votes.”
He also noted that, inspired by this registration campaign,
there has been a voter registration drive in Foca, where they
registered about 850 people, and in Visegrad, where they
registered about 450 voters.
*
I visited the office of the SDP campaign in Srebrenica. Some of
the activists there are old friends of mine and some of them
people who fought for return to the municipality when it was
dangerous to do so. Without their efforts, there would have been
no return. This does not pertain to the SDP, particularly - most
of these people were not members of that party fifteen years ago
and were not thinking about electoral politics.
I know that I seriously criticized the SDP in my first journal,
and I stick with that criticism. However, there are some honest
candidates in Srebrenica who are members of the local party, and
I would vote for them.
In the SDP office above the Robna Kuća (department
store), there are four photos of Tito, one of SDP leader Zlatko
Lagumdžija, and several of Hakija Meholjić, president of the
local party. His usual explosive self, Hakija called everyone
from the outside “fascist!”, and said that the voting campaign
is an intervention, and that local people should have the
opportunity to run things for themselves. He says, “What are the
people from out of town coming here to do? Who should run things
here?”
The characteristically calm Zulfo Salihović (who recently joined
the SDP), on the other hand, explained, “The parties that deny
genocide cannot be defeated without the outside votes of people
who are from here, but who live elsewhere. Unfortunately, when
there starts to be a campaign to register them all, then the
other side starts, and registers people who may have lived here
once, who were not from here, and who now live in Serbia. It
becomes complete chaos and manipulation.
“The parties that have run this place have always been pulling
the strings from outside, from Sarajevo and from Banja Luka. The
only hope here is if people who are living here locally can win
- that’s us (the SDP), and the SBB.
I ask, “What are the people like who are in the SBB here?” Zulfo:
“They are solid people.” I: “But I know things about the leaders
in Sarajevo…” Zulfo: “I’m talking about the local people. I
trust the local people; those outside, that’s a different
story…For the most part it’s almost impossible for us locally to
have any affect on our own lives, because of the way things are
run from the outside.”
*
There are some questions about this campaign, about the
situation in Srebrenica, and about the response of people from
outside of Srebrenica to that situation, that have been puzzling
me all along. I will try to reflect on those questions here.
One of the most obvious questions, it seems, is, “Shouldn’t
people vote in the place that they live?” You’ll note that the
complaint about outside interference in the affairs of
Srebrenica, and lack of local control, is nearly unanimous.
Shouldn’t this pertain to the voting situation as well?
Most of the Bosniak citizens of Srebrenica, and most people on
the outside concerned with justice after genocide, think that
the matter of which political party runs Srebrenica, as
determined by popular vote - is of global importance and that it
transcends day-to-day issues of governance.
I would go further than this: that the importance of outcome of
the elections resides almost completely in the symbolic realm,
with some possible long-term repercussions on the ground. I
believe the nearly-unanimous assessment that the elections -
even these in Srebrenica - don’t change anything materially in
people’s lives in the municipality. But I also believe, as
people say, that one shouldn’t “reward the deniers” (or
perpetrators) of genocide.
Here we see a conflict that has led me to believe that there are
two Srebrenicas. The first one is embodied in the day-to-day
life of ordinary people there who are, at this time, concerned
with problems such as how to secure a supply of firewood for the
upcoming winter. The second Srebrenica is populated by people
outside of the municipality, as far away as Washington DC and
Brussels, who perceive Srebrenica as a battleground for justice
and memory.
I can’t say that one or the other of these Srebrenicas is not
real. I can, however, say that they don’t meet; they are not
very well aware of each other. To a huge extent, people who are
rooting for the election of a Bosniak mayor (regardless of his
intelligence or abilities) are not thinking about that firewood
and they don’t know about the ancient pensioner I met who
receives a mere 90 KM per month. They are thinking about
principles, and principles don’t heat the house.
I have to compel myself to think about these two visions of
Srebrenica and to observe whether they will ever meet - will
they reconcile, remain separate, or edge nearer to each other,
like an asymptote, never to join?
I have argued with friends that it would make no difference (as
expressed by my friend Vahid in the previous journal) if a Serb
mayor were elected. But I have to modify that position. First of
all, the election of the Serb candidate would not just install
the “good,” and “honest” Vesna Kočević. It would also install
the party that pulls the strings, the party of President Dodik.
And it was expressed to me very plainly by one Srebrenican
activist for justice (who lives in the Federation) that he was
not going to feel comfortable coming home to a place run by a
Serb mayor - particularly one who is a member of Dodik’s party.
And I think that activists for justice and memory in Srebrenica
should feel comfortable there…as much as possible.
Meanwhile, I am visualizing a future in Srebrenica under the
rule of Dodik’s party. Dodik is a typical small-time strongman
whose overt agenda is to separate the Republika Srpska from
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The RS is an entity where the return of the
Bosniak population has been obstructed since the end of the war
and, where return did occur, the resulting “minority” population
has suffered ongoing discrimination.
One extreme example of the failure to rebuild anything
approximating the prewar multi-ethnic population is Višegrad,
where only a few Bosniaks have returned to the city and,
perhaps, a few hundred to the surrounding villages. Muslims have
no effective presence in Višegrad
and practically no say. In worrying about the outcome of the
Srebrenica elections, some outside observers talk about the “Višegrad
scenario.” In the long run, this could be where the two
Srebrenicas meet - when the real Srebrenica no longer has any
Muslim population.
There are already just about as many Bosniaks buried in the
cemetery at Potočari as there are living in the municipality, if
not more. And many of those who returned are elderly, like my
friend Izet. Furthermore, it is not a safe bet that absentee
voters will continue to tip the scales in future elections.
However, there are many young people in the town and in the
villages, and they still have some fight in them. This is hard
to predict, but I think it is a long ways to the Višegrad
scenario.
*
On the day before the elections, I took a ride up to Skelani
with my Turkish friend Hasan, who was in town to monitor the
elections, and Munevera’s daughter Mersiha. We stopped along the
way at Lake Peručac. It was a beautiful day and the lake and
surroundings - looking across to Serbia and Mt. Tara - were
beautiful as well.
During the ride Mersiha said, “If I didn’t have a job here I
wouldn’t stay here two seconds! I came back in 2002 and it took
me four years to get a job - and for low pay. Bosniaks can’t get
a state job here at the hospital. They hire Serbs from Serbia,
from Belgrade, or from Banja Luka.
“The problem with the voter registration campaign is that there
are people on the list who don’t live in Srebrenica. And then
the people registered from out of town [referring to Bosniaks in
the Federation] vote for the people who they know, who don’t
live here. Then those people who are elected only come to
Srebrenica for an hour before the municipal council meeting;
they collect salary and compensation for their expenses, and
then leave. They barely say hello, and they don’t ask about how
we are living here, what our problems are. They don’t know.”
We visited Daut Tihić, a local candidate on the SBB list, at
Skelani, a town right across the river from Serbia and heavily
populated by Serbs. He took us to his modest house. Walking up
the dirt road, he told us, “On these three roads every man was
killed.” There were a few wrecked houses, some in disrepair, and
a few rebuilt ones - most of them only partway rebuilt. Daut
also said, “All the war criminals are hiding here, and no one
does anything about it.” He told us that there are 3,500 to
4,000 people registered to vote in Skelani , but that only about
700 to 1,000 of those people actually reside there.
The road back along the river, through Bratunac, was smoother.
Most of the villages there are Serb-inhabited. You can tell by
the presence of churches or, if nothing else, by the campaign
posters from the Serb political parties.
Mersiha pointed out to us a location across the river in Serbia,
where there had been a tank emplacement. “The tank shelled a
village from across the river and destroyed it,” she told us.
Mersiha said more about the election campaign: “During the
campaign there were daily provocations from the Serb extremists
in the SRS. They would come and park in front of the municipal
building and play loud nationalist music from their cars. We
called the police and complained. The police said that they
could not do anything unless we filed a report.”
The SNSD slogan throughout the RS is “Srpska kuća do kuće”
(Serb from house to house) - the chilling implication is
saturation of the population with Serbs and, thereby, a
completion of the job of ethnic cleansing.
Lake Peručac, Srebrenica municipality
Most mornings and evenings in Srebrenica I frequented Zahida’s
kafić, which I affectionately think of as “the Shack.”
Throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina, these little establishments tend
to be divided not only by ethnicity, but by age. Younger people
will congregate in one kafić, and older in another. As a
consequence of this, you’ll hear different kinds of music in
different places.
One night I was passing by the Shack, when I heard someone
playing a saz. I dropped in and sat at the table where the
musician, Idriz, was playing. Being left-handed, he held the
instrument in the reverse position. Idriz hails from one of the
villages up in the hills. He works in the car-parts factory down
in Potočari. He wears a fedora and has a pale face that tells
you he has lived through far too much in his young years.
Idriz sang,
Mene, moja žena ne razujmije My wife doesn't
understand me
samo znade da plače i kune She only cries and
complains kune ona, da ne'jma sreće complains that
she is not happy kune da izlazim svako veče that I go out
every evening. On the night before the elections, Suljo came in with a
guitar and, after a while, started singing sevdalinke. He played
and sang, intermittently, for a couple of hours. My friend Vahid
showed up from Lukavac with his wife. Among a dozen or fifteen
people, there were three women. There was the very animated Gera,
who was shouting and telling jokes. Next to me sat Bahrudin, who
was singing along with Suljo. So was Gera, and sometimes almost
everybody else. Towards the end of the evening Suljo even played
a half-dozen old-town songs from Vojvodina, and everyone sang
along with those as well.
After an hour or so of this, my colleague Hasan turned to me and
said, “Looking at this, you wouldn’t know that there had been a
genocide.”
Gera had been a commander of the Bosniak defense in Srebrenica
during the war, and was now running for office on the SBB
ticket. I had seen his cruise boat, moored at Lake Peručac. He
showed me his wounds from the war, divots in his chest and legs.
He told how he had received military training in Istanbul in
1998. He said, "If I had known it was so nice, I would've gone
thirty years earlier! Then when I came back, they said, 'Now
you're smart. Go into retirement.’ Now, it's nice being retired.
If I had known it was this nice, I would've retired thirty years
earlier."
Center of Srebrenica
The elections took place, finally, on Sunday the 7th
of October. I have participated as supervisor or monitor in six
elections before, and it is always a grueling day. I was
stationed from 7:00 a.m. at the central voting location in
Srebrenica town, and my job was to watch - not to intervene -
but to register objections if there were any fraud or violation
of the rules.
The polling station where I was working was a special one,
because it was set up specifically to receive “tendered
ballots,” i.e., those of people whose names were not found on
the central voter list. There was a relatively small number of
legitimate tendered ballots expected, around seventy, to
accommodate people who had registered on time but whose names
had failed to be entered properly. Along with these ballots, the
polling station committee had supplied itself with some hundreds
of additional ballots to accommodate any other unregistered
voters who appeared. And as it turned out, those hundreds of
would-be voters did appear, and well over 90% of them were from
Serbia.
Given that the predictions about visiting voters from abroad
came true, and that many of them descended on the central
polling station, it was a day of extended chaos. From
mid-morning until 5:00 p.m., at any given time there were as
many as one hundred irate, frustrated voters waiting in a crowd
(no lines there) and yelling at the polling station committee.
At the onset of this situation, the chairman of the municipal
elections commission temporarily suspended the voting for a half
hour or so to decide what to do with these voters. This, of
course, only caused the volume of the yelling to increase.
The problem was that many of these people - none of whom were
properly registered - were appearing with a stamped certificate
of permission to vote, given to them by the local police
department in just the previous couple of days. Many of these
people did not have proper Bosnian identification with a photo,
just the certificates.
One older woman showed me her certificate and told me that she
had citizenship both in Bosnia and Serbia. I saw that her
official place of residence was a village near Skelani, but she
spoke in the dialect of people living across the river in
Serbia. She told me that she just wanted to come vote for her
grandson to be elected to the municipal assembly, and asked me
if I could “get them to stop the mistreatment.” I explained that
I was in no position to help.
The chairman of the elections commission decided to allow people
with identification to vote with tendered ballots, which would,
according to standard procedure, be placed in envelopes and sent
to Sarajevo to be counted (or rejected) later. So some of the
people were sent home without voting, but over 200 were allowed
to vote.
As the day wore on, there was another suspension of the vote
when the polling station committee ran out of official forms on
which to record voters’ names. That was resolved too, after
another half hour of irate yelling. Meanwhile I witnessed people
helping others vote, numerous times, and I noted the presence of
a couple of political figures (including candidate Vesna Kočević)
who were, according to the rules, prohibited from frequenting
the polling station.
The chaos subsided around 5:00 as the crowd died down.
Meanwhile, I heard from Hasan who was observing in Skelani. He
told me that it had been a tense situation up there, where
busloads of people were crossing the nearby bridge from Serbia.
Although their voting permits were the same as what I had seen,
few of them were sent to Srebrenica town. Hasan noted that there
was much drinking outside the polling station; that one of the
local polling station committee members was drunk; and that the
cars of several of the polling station committee members bore
license plates from Serbia. He also overheard a comment to the
effect that “We can’t do anything with this Turk hanging
around.” Apparently, Hasan had been keeping a close eye on the
identification documents of the voters. Daut later told said to
me that this was the first time that there had been monitoring
of any real quality at that station.
At my polling station, voting was closed on time at 7:00 p.m.,
and I observed the drawn-out process of ballot counting in a
neighboring station. There, Vesna Kočević won easily. I walked
out into the rain at midnight, depressed. The Shack and all the
other establishments that I could see were closed and dark, but
I heard from Emin that I should come over to the “Silver City”
kafić: “we’re all celebrating.” Indeed, counting on a victory
for Ćamil Duraković based on absentee ballots, the activists
from the registration campaign were letting loose at the kafić,
even though the official count was not to be released until
later.
As of today, six days later, everyone is still waiting for the
official count, and the Central Election Committee is appearing
more and more incapable. The numbers that we know about point to
a victory for Duraković, but the local count - not including
absentee votes - went narrowly to Vesna Kočević. Both sides are
claiming victory. This will be resolved some time next week, and
there are certain to be many unhappy people, on one side or the
other.
