REPORT #3 from BOSNIA
By Peter Lippman
June 16, 2010
Bijeljina
Report index Report 1: Kozarac,
Prijedor. June 2, 2010 Report 2: Banja
Luka, Doboj. Tuzla
June 5, 2010 Report 3: Bijeljina,
June 16, 2010 Report 4:
Srebrenica and Bratunac,
June 18, 2010 Report 5:
Visegrad,
June 25, 2010 Report 6:
Roses and Walnuts,
June 28, 2010 Report 7:
Sarajevo and Travnik,
July 7, 2010 Report 8:
Srebrenica,
July 25, 2010 Report 9:
Herzegovina and wrap-up,
August 12, 2010
To contact Peter
in response to these reports or any of his articles,
.
Before I left
Tuzla, I ran into my friend Zoran, a displaced person from Bijeljina, a
mid-sized town in the northeastern corner of the Republika Srpska. He
was sitting with his friend Mustafa, and I sat with them for a while.
Zoran, 70, was expelled from Bijeljina at the beginning of the war. So
was Mustafa. Neither were of Serb origin, and that fact doomed them to
exile. Zoran told me he has not gone back to Bijeljina for nine years
and that he will never go back. He owns land there, and he won’t sell it
for a low price. Mustafa goes back once in a while.
Practically the
first thing that Zoran told me was, “If I had an atom bomb, I would drop
it on Belgrade.” His mother is Muslim. Mustafa’s brother, sick and on
crutches, was killed in Bijeljina. Zoran helped his brother-in-law
escape from Srebrenica by getting a Serb to take him out. That person
lost 76 relatives, from age 3 to 89. Neither Zoran nor Mustafa has any
relatives in Tuzla except for their wives. Mustafa’s sons are in
Germany; his grandsons don’t know the Bosnian language. Zoran said,
“It’s the end for us, we’re finished.”
Zoran told me how
is mother saved nine Jews during WWII. He pulled a worn piece of paper
out of his pocket, a certificate from Germany, stating in German that
his father had been in a labor camp in Germany during that war. He said
his father was in a camp, as was his grandfather, and then he was in a
camp in the recent war in Bosnia.
BIJELJINA
I took the bus to
Bijeljina and walked over to the main square to meet my friend Salem
Corbo. Nearing the square, I heard music. Salem told me that there was
some kind of military demonstration. I said that I thought the music
sounded like religious music. He said, “Oh, now the military and
religion are one and the same.”
Salem is the
director of “Povratak,” a regional organization for refugee return to
Bijeljina. “Before the war,” he explained, “the region around Bijeljina
had a population of about 60,000 people, and there were about 35,000 in
the city. The population of the city was about 2/3 Bosniak. I was
expelled from my work place in April of 1992. Around 35,000 people were
expelled from this municipality; we had to sign documents that said we
were giving up our property. We had the right to carry one plastic bag
of our belongings. Some women were subjected to gynecological
examinations to make sure they were not carrying out gold.
“At the end of the
war, there were only around 5,000 people left in the city; that is,
about 25,000 Bosniaks had been expelled, and about 5,000 other people
left as well. Then people from nearby villages, and displaced Serbs from
other areas, came to the city. Around 6,000 to 7,000 Bosniaks have
returned, and between 1,000 and 2,000 Roma. Now there are between 50,000
and 60,000 in the city. But there were more children in school before
the war than now. There has been a lot of emigration, and it is the
older people who are staying. And the villages are emptying.”
I commented, “It
looks like returnees have had to start life over again from point
zero.” Below point zero,” Salem said. “There is no one who was born in
Bijeljina who is in an executive position in the government. The biggest
obstruction to return is the lack of work. 99% of the property has been
returned, but few of the returnees have work. In ElektroBijeljina there
are 765 workers, and only one of them is a Bosniak returnee. Before the
war, 75% of the workers there were Bosniaks.
“Another problem is
fact that few of the war crimes cases have been processed, especially in
this region; there has only been one case processed in Bijeljina, in all
these fifteen postwar years.”
The non-Serb
population of Bijeljina suffered attacks and expulsion in the spring of
1992, even before the war arrived to Sarajevo. Salem said, “Bijeljina is
the most important city for the Republika Srpska (RS). It was the number
one target at the beginning of the war. Today, most goods from Serbia
must come in through Bijeljina. This is the cornerstone of the RS, and
the SDS [Serb nationalist party Radovan Karadzic] has had a hold on this
town for twenty years. Serbs from the countryside and other towns are
flooding into this city; every day more of them arrive, around 8,000 to
9,000 per year.”
In the last four
years RS prime minister Dodik and his SNSD (Party of Independent Social
Democrats) have consolidated control over most of the entity and, in the
process, put pressure on the SDS mayors who control a few
municipalities, notably Bijeljina and Doboj. The leaders of the two
parties compete for the title of “most corrupt.” An SNSD candidate in
the 2008 municipal elections nicknamed incumbent mayor Mico Micic “Mico
Trecina,” that is, “Mico One-Third,” because, allegedly, he takes
one-third of the profit from every major sale or infrastructure project.
Salem says that in Bijeljina municipality, Micic’s friends receive the
contracts for all infrastructure development (just like Dodik at the
entity level).
The atmosphere of
Bijeljina, as I have noted before, seems to have been “cleansed” of any
non-Serb cultural influence, and it seems a conscious policy to
discourage healthy inter-ethnic coexistence. Salem recalled, “In the
activities May 9th, observing ‘Day of European Culture,’
there was no mention of anti-fascism. They have removed the monuments to
anti-fascism here. They changed the name of ‘Trg zrtava fasistickog
terora; [Square of the Victims of Fascist Terror] to ‘Trg
Djenerala Draze Mihajlovica’ [General Draza Mihajlovic Square] after
the WWII Chetnik commander. It is as if a bust of Hitler were put up in
Berlin. But there, it would only be an incident; here, it is the
opposite, an ongoing provocation that we can do nothing about.”
Nor does Salem have
favorable words for the leading party of the Bosniaks, saying “The SDA
is the worst thing that has happened to the Bosniaks. It was good that
during the war people were united around one group to defend themselves,
but everything they have done since then has been a mistake.” He
mentions competition among Bosniak returnees, who should help each other
in solidarity, but there are some who cooperate with the local
government to the detriment of their own people.
Salem is not a
gloomy man; he is interested in everything alive, it seems. We talked
for hours about language, history, film. But his prognosis is dismal. He
says, “Economically, we are on the edge of desperation. People are poor;
it is hard to live. 90% of the people here (returnees) are unemployed.
People lack money to put their children through school. There is social
exclusion; we do not exist in public life. What is this refugee return?
There is the mosque; people come back, they die, that is all.”
Salem’s return
organization coordinates volunteer work to help people. He said, “Serbs
come to me too -- everyone has the same problems. This is a strange
thing, the way people become united. People see that we all have the
same problems. We all lived together before, after all.
“Ninety percent of
the Serbs in town think like this. There is a substrata of good, normal,
quality people who didn’t agree with Radovan Karadzic. In fact, there
was a big part of the RS army that refused to take part in the
massacres; that’s why they called in the special forces to Srebrenica.
In ongoing court proceedings, the main witnesses are Serbs who saw
corpses. They aren’t blood-drinkers, but the system of nationalist
exclusion is perpetuated under the name of the Republika Srpska.
“Our relationships
with other people are ok. There are villages where people [Serbs and
Bosniaks] are roasting lambs together, as if there had never been a war.
The problem is with the state. This is not a serious state. We have the
laws, but we must respect them, and establish a meritocracy. We have
lost our moral values and our sense of responsibility. Only little
crimes are prosecuted. The courts only get involved in thefts up to
2,000 KM.
“This all leads to
more violence. Problems are possible in Bosnia. It is a sick society.
There is less and less laughing and enjoyment of life. The speed of
disintegration of morals is faster than I can follow. There was a
culture of neighborliness here, where relationships with neighbors are
even more important than with brothers. Traditionally, each house had a
courtyard, and there was a big gate in front. But on the side, opening
to the neighbors, there was a small door in the wall where the neighbors
could enter. Neighbors had priority -- until the war. You used to sit
under the grapevines and talk; it was a sort of social therapy. The
connections were strong. Now there has been too much suffering.”
Before the war
Salem held a position in a local cultural institution. Among many other
things, he had run a film club there, and organized art film festivals.
I asked him if he could do something similar now. He answered, “They
don’t allow such a thing. And this city is a village now; people don’t
have that kind of interest. Now I work for the return organization, and
we have a million problems. The government makes the problems, not the
people. They exacerbate ethnic tension in order to divide the voters. If
things were normal, then people would understand what the politicians
are doing.” Salem expects that the upcoming national elections in the
fall will be a period of turbulence.
*
I spoke with Jusuf
Trbic, a leading journalist in the region before the war. Now he serves
on the municipal council, and runs a kafana as well. The kafana is a
gathering point for some of the returnees. Jusuf describes the general
situation of returnees for me: “The only people who have work are those
who are farming; otherwise there is nothing. People are looking to
leave. The only positive thing now is the security situation; there are
no more incidents. The ordinary people are much better than those in the
government.”
Trbic is as
pessimistic about the upcoming elections as is Salem: “In the elections
there aren’t going to be changes. The same people, or similar, will win.
Essentially, there won’t be any change without a change in the
constitution. A stronger state could guarantee equal rights. This state
has accepted international conventions that put human rights above the
constitution, but that is not important [to the domestic politicians who
could implement the conventions].”
On the current
political state of affairs in the RS and the much-discussed and long,
drawn-out EU entrance process, Jusuf says, “Dodik’s pockets are full
[from corrupt practices]; he and those like him could would only go to
the EU if they could continue to behave as they do now; otherwise they
will not consent to go. Dodik has made himself equivalent to the state.
So any change would amount to a loss of power for Dodik.
“We have always had
strong leaders, and people were happy with that kind of situation; they
are not politically mature. Unfortunately, that is not democracy; maybe
in one hundred years they will be ready, but we don’t have that much
time. It is too bad for someone to talk that way about one’s own people,
but that is the way it is.”
Trbic places his
hopes on international pressure for change: “There should be a new
international conference where they impose new governmental
institutions; then there would be cooperation.”
I asked Trbic if
international pressure would make a difference. He answered, “Believe
me, it would take so little to change things. There will be no change
without some pressure. It is good that things are peaceful, that there
are no incidents. But…if Dodik’s position were under question, he would
make problems. It is easy to make problems in the Balkans.”
I asked further if
Trbic thought that there were any chance for grassroots activism to
change things. He said that there was is “no possibility,” and
elaborated, in his orderly journalistic fashion:
“Vasilija Andric
Vajo is the chief of the police now, and he was during the war. What can
we expect from him? He was involved in Srebrenica. Dragan Davidovic is
the director of RSTV; he was the minister of religion during the war,
while they wrecked all those mosques. Imagine what kind of government
this is, when they have that kind of media and police chief.
“There has been
almost no prosecution in this district, only one. Novak Kovacevic was
the military prosecutor in Srebrenica during the war; now he is the head
prosecutor. There are no Bosnian directors in the RS; none in the
television, and there won’t be. So if you have that kind of system, what
kind of hope can you have, what can you expect? These problems can’t be
solved in the present system, where there is no punishment.
“Bosniaks with
children are sending them to school in Tuzla. The people in power here
think that if it stays like that, they will succeed in their long-term
ethnic cleansing project. It looks like that is true.”
Hearing this
vividly pessimistic evaluation, I said to Mr. Trbic, “That is
astonishing.” He just shrugged, in a gesture that here expresses
profound fatalism.
For more information on Bijeljina, see my
report from 2008
here .