ODDS & ODDS
For
me, Bosnia-Herzegovina is a complicated place. When I went there after
the war, people asked me why I was there. Most foreigners were going
because it was a career move. I answered, “I want to understand.” Not
necessarily understanding my response, people said, “Oh, you can’t
understand this place, when we hardly understand it ourselves.” I
resolved to keep trying.
I have realized that in any place and in any situation, it is good to
ask the same question of several people in order to get different
answers. There is always something that someone either does not know,
does not understand, or simply does not want to tell you. In some
places, I consider a specific person my “third answer,” the one I can
present with odd information that he or she will help me sort out.
There is Nerin in Stolac. Huso in Mostar (unfortunately for me this
year, he was out of town). Jadranka in Sarajevo is one of those as well,
my “third answer.” I have written about the grassroots level of
activism in Bosnia and my impression that it is in a slump. Some of the
people who had previously been involved in edgy activism have moved into
institutional work. Jadranka concurred. She told me that a certain
prominent activist has been traveling from one Western European country
to another, meeting with the Bosnian diaspora, and urging them to vote.
Maybe that is important work, but it is hardly the front line.
Jadranka also criticized another grassroots group I have visited, that
more recently has “come indoors.” They are conducting a charity project
that, according to Jadranka, could be done by any NGO. There’s no risk
in it.
I recounted to Jadranka a factoid I had heard: that Muhamed Ali Gashi
was one of Alija Izetbegovic’s pallbearers at his funeral in 2003. Gashi
is the Albanian mafioso I mentioned in my reports in 2008-2009, one of
the few who has ever actually been sentenced for his crimes and is now
doing time in jail (click
here).
Among other things, his group is suspected of having killed gang leader
Ramiz Delalovic “Celo” in 2007. Jadranka said, “Of course Gashi was
Alija’s pallbearer. They were all there, Celo too.”
MOSTAR
Mostar
is one of the most compelling places in all Bosnia, probably because of
its astonishing beauty, but also because of its particularly tormented
recent history. You go to the old section. You walk above the rushing
Neretva. You take the same photos every time, and new ones.
There is the beauty, and there is the climate -- I felt like I was
baking the whole time I was there in early July -- and the humor of
local people.
The (reconstructed) Old Bridge, Mostar
Then, if you are not just a tourist, you walk over to Bulevar and
Santiceva streets, which divide east and west -- it’s not the river that
divides. You feel the completely different atmosphere of the two sides,
one dominated by the Croat nationalist political infrastructure, the
other by the Bosniaks. You see how the Bosniaks, with fewer weapons, got
the worst of it -- even today you still see the rubble. You see how west
Mostar looks and feels like a Zagreb suburb. And if you read a little or
talk to local folks, you hear about how the division exists in the minds
of the inhabitants and is cemented by cooperation between the two
political machines. Here is Mostar, in the words of some people I talked
with.
Pedestrians walking by destroyed apartments on Santiceva street, Mostar
I have known Kreso Krtalic for quite some years, since the time of the
campaign to rebuild Santiceva Ulica (Street). An architect, Kreso was
instrumental in that struggle, together with Silva Memic. They succeeded
in pressuring local authorities and the international community to fund
the reconstruction of this street, the heart of modern Mostar. Kreso
says, “We all fought to return to Santiceva. Ninety percent
returned. We planted new linden trees there. No one sold their apartment
because of nationalism; some sold because they needed the money. I would
never leave here; I was born here.
“There are a couple of buildings on Santiceva that are not fixed. Many
of the buildings are fixed on the outside, but not on the inside. They
are supposed to be fixed, but the money is lacking. Meanwhile, they are
building a sports hall and a new bridge.”
“Everyone needs a place to live, social coverage, and health care. But
people are hungry and poor. And they vote unrealistically. The
dissatisfied just think about ethnic problems… The political parties
should make plans and programs, and they should be required to quit if
they do not fulfill them within a year…The international community
should have taken over and built factories. In a half year, people would
be working, not hating. When we work, we don’t talk politics.”
Kreso advocates development and environmental protection. He says, “The
economic crisis divides people; for example, if we could open 10,000
work places in Mostar, then the tension would disappear; there would be
no problem. We all work together in building; we keep occupied together
from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and we don’t think about politics.
Rebuilt apartments on Santiceva street, Mostar
“Mostar needs to protect the water and the environment. There are more
plastic bags in the river than in the supermarkets. The government must
comprehend that the environment is an urgent issue.”
Summing up his outlook on local development, Kreso said, “If qualified
people were to lead Mostar, we would be the first in the Balkans in five
or six years. Because we have the resources, the people, the culture,
the environment. For example, we could export water. Money should be
directed towards technical development, to reconstruction, not to the
politicians and the economists.”
Looking back at the 1990s, Kreso said, “It was hard to come out of the
war with a clean conscience…All of the politicians from 1990 should
receive between five and fifty years in jail. They are all criminals. If
they were against the war, they should have resigned. They all won, and
there is no state.”
*
I talked with Marko Tomaš, who works with the youth group Abraševic
Cultural and Artistic Society (“KUD Abraševic”). Abraševic works with
media and produces concerts and other cultural events. It strives to
create an atmosphere of normality, of young people collaborating
regardless of ethnicity, in a city where Croats and Bosniaks are
expected to conduct completely separate lives.
We talked about activism in the city. Marko said, “As for grassroots
movements, unfortunately, there is very little that is sincere, that
people can believe in. I am skeptical towards the movements. They tend
to be a way of money laundering, self-promotion. They are not focused.
They do not have a clear idea or plan. They are involved in raising a
fuss without a goal. This describes ‘pokret Dosta.’ As for Nasa Stranka
[the relatively new non-nationalist party], I have heard good things
about them, but they are politically illiterate. I agree with their
goals, but they lack a strategy. You can’t change things suddenly; you
must go step by step.”
Q. Is there anything positive happening in Mostar?
Marko: “Very little. Most of the change is going to take place in the
political realm. But the present situation will continue as it is until
the political operators sell off the entire city. If the politicians
were compelled to behave legally, they would not have room for the murky
business. These corrupt operations have nothing to do with ‘national
interest,’ but with financial interest. So there is a situation in which
chaos is maintained. But the day will come when all this will become
illegal.
“Change must take place in the political structure. In this situation,
there can be no civil revolution, because of the manipulation. In the
media, there are people who produce forgetfulness. In politics, people
are voting from fear. There is a construction and commercial lobby that
backs the politicians, who are stealing as long as there is something to
steal. It is a ridiculous situation, but the reality is as clear as
day.”
*
Finally, I talked with Predrag Zvijerac, a young journalist for the
independent daily Dnevni List. Speaking of the divisions in Mostar,
Predrag said, “Here in Mostar it is absolutely divided. The youth don’t
meet each other. The older people only do if they work together. The
water system is divided, the public maintenance companies as well, the
fire company -- all the public companies. Private firms are segregated
as well. If I as a Muslim work on the east side and my kids go to school
there, then it is easier for me just to move there.
“Young people can meet in a kafana, or at the movie theater. But
everyone has their favorite kafana, and they are divided by the
geography. There are the two separate football clubs. There are fewer
fights these days. [Sports events have often broken out into violence].
There are 1,500 police, and they are strict. But just the fact that
there have to be that many police is bad.”
The situation of the (non-existent) movie theater illustrates the
problem of Mostar: “The theaters are all closed except for the big
Kazaliste, which opens occasionally,” says Predrag. “There is no movie
theater. The local politicians are not interested in having one. They
are all corrupt, and they can’t agree how to divide the money. Everyone
has to pay for permits. A movie theater would be a place where young
people could go to meet each other. The population of Mostar is 150,000.
The city has no money for a movie theater. So the question is, who will
build it? Here, you only get permits via political connections.
What happened was that one man who had the money to invest came to town,
but he gave up in ten days. He saw that he had to bribe the mayor and
both sides, too many people.”
On the subject of the upcoming national elections in October, Predrag
said, “The youth are not interested in politics. In the elections, only
about 40% of them will vote. More vote in the general elections than in
the local ones, which is absurd, since local politics affect us much
more. Youth are not interested because the candidates are either
unknown, or they have something bad on their record. The parties like
young and stupid candidates.
“The young people are only interested in politics if they are directly
involved, for example if they work in the media, or they are in politics
themselves. Or if they are seeking some benefit for themselves. For
example here, the Elektroprivreda [regional electrical distribution
company] only hires people who are members of the HDZ.
“Eight out of ten university students never vote, because they don’t
like our politicians. Or, among the Croats, there is no alternative. The
differences between our (Croat) politicians are not political, but about
money. That is, they are just involved in a struggle for power. The
young people can see this. There are 40% unemployed, and they see when
they are looking for work that people connected with the parties decide
who gets a job and who does not. So they don’t vote. And that leads to
minority rule, because it’s a minority that votes. So the parties must
change.
“Most of the people who do vote are from the village or they are the
less educated people. They vote according to tradition. All they know is
to circle one party.
“There is a real Catch 22 situation: We choose our government, and then
a month later we are against them. Then in the next elections we choose
the same people.”
Political power in the city and the region is maintained through ethnic
division. Where there are Croat and Bosniak students in one school,
they study under the apartheid system called “two schools under one
roof.” Based on what Predrag says, it appears that ethnic mistrust is
still strong: “There was a survey in west Herzegovina, in Posusje,
Siroki Brijeg, Grude, Citluk, and Ljubuski, that is, mainly Croat
places. The question was, ‘Have you ever been to Sarajevo, and would you
go there?’ Ninety percent of the young people never went there, and are
not interested in going. So it is easy to convince people that Sarajevo
is Tehran, and that they beat up nuns there.
“If you order ‘kafa’ or ‘kava’ [the latter being the Croatian
pronunciation of the word for coffee] in the wrong place, it’s not a
problem. But people very rarely go to the other place anymore. Among
Croats in Mostar there is the stereotype that ‘if you go to Sarajevo,
you must order ‘kafa.’
“The politicians use this ignorance to push people into corrals on an
ethnic basis. So my conclusion is that we will always have these
nationalist parties, and they will always win. The only exception is
places where there has been less conflict, such as in Tuzla.”
View from the Old Bridge
STOLAC
Stolac
is an idyllic, pleasant town with a brook rustling through it, the
Bregava. It is another one of those small towns of Bosnia, older than
Sarajevo, with its own history and culture. In fact, Stolac is one of
the oldest continually inhabited settlements in the Balkans.
The idyll was destroyed by the war when, in mid-1993, extreme
nationalist Croat forces drove out all of the Bosniaks, who had been the
majority in the town. Bosniaks started returning bravely towards the end
of the decade, and Stolac is somewhat resettled now. In the core of the
city the mosques and some of the old estates are rebuilt, although there
are still ruins along the river and up into the hills. Apartheid is the
order of the day in Stolac, with Croat nationalists controlling the
politics and the economy. As in Mostar, what power the Bosniaks have is
in the hands of the SDA, the nationalist Bosniak party, which cooperates
with the Croat lords of separatism.
Activists struggle in different ways to assert Bosniak rights in Stolac.
The reconstruction of the ancient mosques says, “We are still here.” I
happened to be in the town for the “Days of Stolac Mosques,” when solemn
ceremonies of prayer celebrated the reopening of one of the mosques. The
prayer reverberated across the center of the old town. Catty-corner to
the Czar’s Mosque sits a kafana that is popular among the Croats, who
have erected a monument right on that main corner. That monument, topped
by a Catholic cross, honors the Croats who died in the 1990s war. As the
amplified call of the Imam filled the air, Stolac Croats drinking coffee
across the street, whether they wished to or not, listened and looked at
the green banner strung up in front of the mosque, announcing the event.
Such is coexistence in apartheid Stolac.
View of Stolac from the
ancient Old Town on the hill
I talked to Minva Hasic of the Stolac women’s organization “Orhideja”
(Orchid). This organization helps disabled people, offers various social
services for women, and conducts workshops on such topics as health
issues and street violence. It also runs a mixed-ethnicity youth club.
Minva says, “There is a larger rate of returned Bosniaks to
Stolac than to all the rest of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Stubborn people have
returned. Then, there are also Croats in the region who were forced to
leave central Bosnia, and the local Croats do not support them. We
[Bosniak] returnees and those displaced persons have the same problems.”
The high school in Stolac has long operated under the “two schools under
one roof” system. On this situation, Minva said, “People are
losing knowledge, and there is no development of the culture. There are
two sports clubs for each sport…We conducted a survey of high school
students’ plans for the future. The Bosniak director had it filled out
and sent back to us. The Croat director returned it, saying he could not
understand it because it was ‘not in Croatian.’ This just adds to the
frustration and the heating up of nationalism.”
I visited with Nerin Dizdar, a prominent young leader of grassroots
activism against apartheid around Stolac. His organization, the Youth
Forum of Stolac, has been active in all kinds of projects over the past
eight or ten years, including guerrilla actions like removing emblems of
Croat dominance around the town. The Forum also holds an annual camp for
young people from all over Bosnia and abroad. And the group tries to
restore and protect architectural and cultural symbols of the old Stolac
-- not only mosques, but the Serbian Orthodox cemetery as well, and the
ancient pre-Ottoman tombs known as stecci (stecaks).
The municipal government of Stolac tries to obstruct the Forum’s
multi-ethnic summer camp. When the Forum requests permission to use
centrally-located property, the municipal council withholds electricity
and permits. They tell the Forum, “Get permission from Jozo Peric
to use that property.” But Jozo Peric, a pre-war gangster, is in hiding,
wanted for war crimes, tax evasion, and other post-war crimes.
The Forum has gotten around the obstruction by getting funding from
abroad and by holding its events on private property that supporters
made accessible. Meanwhile, Nerin and his colleagues continue to fight
against discrimination and nationalist domination. For example, last
year some high school students took down symbols of Catholic ethnic
dominance in the school, and the Forum supported this action. The
struggle is ongoing in that school where, until last year, a former
member of the Croat nationalist militia (HVO), accused of war crimes,
was principal of the school. He was removed last year. There has been
pressure from the Federal Parliament to end the segregation of the
school, but it has not happened yet.
When I asked Nerin if he could still characterize the situation in
Stolac as “apartheid,” he said, “Yes, this is apartheid. They put a
cross up in a public space (near the entrance to town). This is a
monument to the ‘Croat defenders.’ It was approved by the SDA [the
dominant Bosniak nationalist party]. Cikotic [Bosniak Minister for
Defense] was ok with this. Soldiers from the Bosnian army came when it
was unveiled, carrying the banned Herceg-Bosna flag [of the wartime
Croat parastate] and singing the Croatian anthem.
“When you ask about justice, you are called ‘radical.’ No one has said
they are sorry [for the war crimes that the Croat nationalists committed
against the Bosniaks of Stolac during the war]. In fact, people are
still celebrating the crimes that happened. But if you suppress history,
it comes back.
“I do not believe in collective guilt, but there is collective
responsibility. I feel responsible for what the Muslims did in Grabovica
[a war crime committed in a Croat village in central Bosnia, where
Bosniak troops killed thirteen villagers]. We need to resolve that
history. Now, war criminals are treated as national heroes. It is
unacceptable to diminish the victimhood of anyone.”
Nerin spoke of the collaboration between the leading Bosniak and Croat
nationalist parties, the SDA and HDZ, respectively. He noted that the
old principal of the high school, Ivo Raguz, had been appointed after
approval by the leaders of those two parties, Sulejman Tihic and Dragan
Covic. “Tihic is close to Covic. There are too many old politicians in
position…A stable state with transparency and rule of law would put an
end to those politicians.
“There is a great project of corrupting the public; for example, there
are a half million “defenders” [a number that has been inflated so that
more people can take advantage of pension rights] of BiH, and another
large number of war disabled. This is a way of buying people off. There
are people who get donations, say, two tractors, so they can sell one of
them. The parties make extra donations to corrupt NGOs, which are not
required to give receipts for the donations.”
In the midst of all this corruption, the HDZ obstructs real economic
reconstruction of the municipality, and the SDA goes along with this
obstruction. Nerin gave me several examples of projects with promised
donations from international sources, but roadblocks to the projects
were thrown up by the local authorities.
“The Croats are not comfortable with what the HDZ is doing,” Nerin said.
“They know that we are just asking for equal rights. But they are still
disciplined voters for the HDZ. They never raise their voices against
what is happening.”
In my last visit to Stolac, in 2008, I had met with Zvonko Peric, head
of the youth section of one of the Croat nationalist parties, the
HDZ-1990 (a splitoff from HDZ). I wrote about him in a journal after
that visit -- click
here
(there’s more there about Mostar and other stories about Stolac as
well). Peric had discussed problems of post-war recovery with me, and he
called for the establishment of a “third (Croat) entity.” Towards the
end of our talk his discourse devolved into a repetition of various
crude conspiracy theories.
Soon after I arrived in Bosnia in May this year, I heard on the news
that Zvonko Peric had been arrested for drug trafficking. Together with
seven other people, including a police inspector from nearby Capljina,
Peric was arrested for possession of over 25 kilos of marijuana. A
(Croat) Stolac high school professor was involved as well, as were a
couple of Serbs from Banja Luka and Montenegro. In organized crime as at
the heights of nationalist politics, multi-ethnic collaboration remains
alive and well.
(See
here
and
here).
This all reminds me of one of my favorite comments from an old friend,
that the postwar regime is a manifestation of the “revenge of the bad
students.” I mentioned this phrase to Nerin, and he said, “Zvonko Peric
is an example of the revenge of the bad students. It is their policy to
choose such people.”
Looking for comment on the state of activism in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
I also mentioned to Nerin what I had written about Pokret Dosta earlier
in this series, that they are “apparently not in a dynamic phase.” Nerin
replied, “They have never been in a dynamic phase. They have only
organized protests that would have happened anyway. They print
t-shirts.”
TREBINJE
Trebinje is but an hour’s ride from Stolac, but I had not been there for
thirteen years. A friend mentioned to me the names of a couple of people
it would be interesting to talk with in Trebinje, so I decided to take a
day trip to the southernmost town in the Serb-controlled part of
Herzegovina. I got up early one day and took a ride with Stolac’s only
taxi driver, a friendly man who doubles as the newspaper delivery link
for Trebinje.
Herzegovina is like California -- only more Mediterranean in culture --
and you feel this especially in Trebinje, with its warm and sunny
climate, its fig trees and kiwi and grape vines, and its broad main
square lined with kafanas. On the morning I arrived there, a couple
dozen local farmers, merchants, and craft workers had set up their
tables and were selling fruit, vegetables, books, and dry goods on the
square. Having a couple of extra hours, I walked over the hill above the
Trebisnjica River and down to the old Arslanagic Bridge, built by the
Ottomans.
Arslanagic bridge in Trebinje
The town, sitting under the Leotar mountain, felt peaceful and quiet. I
walked among the stone buildings and into the walled Old Town, where I
noticed that the old mosque had been rebuilt. It was a bit spooky,
however, knowing that Trebinje had been “cleansed” of its Bosniak
population early in the war.
It’s easier to be a tourist if you don’t know any history.
I met with Nikola Sekulovic, a local opposition politician who had been
president of the municipal council for some years. He has distinguished
himself by opposing the hegemony of Prime Minister Dodik’s party and the
local mayor Dobrislav Cuk, one of Dodik’s men. An economist, Sekulovic
is the leader of a bloc of swing voters called “Movement for Trebinje.”
Not long after Dodik’s party [the SNSD]
and Cuk replaced the old hardline SDS rule, Cuk began replicating the
corrupt behavior of the earlier party, selling off concessions to his
cronies for exploitation of local resources, and appointing his
relatives to various government positions.
Sekulovic described the local situation for me: “There are deals
being made, blackmailing, corruption, criminality. In 2009 there was a
development strategy paper released that dated from 2008 to 2017, but
there is still no development. The budget was 22 million KM in 2008, and
now it is around 15 KM.
“We are borrowing from Austrian banks. There could be chaos; we will be
paying for this for years. When the SNSD came to power, companies here
started disappearing. They destroyed the lumber industry. They made
deals for corrupt projects. There have been no capital projects except
Intereks (the department store), if you can call that development.
“Former communists, from the fourth echelon of the politics of those
days, are in the SNSD now. They don’t know how to create employment.
There are two or three Bosniaks in the local government; they are for
show, to satisfy the international community.
“Ordinary people are living worse than ever. Corruption and criminality
have increased, as has nepotism. People have been threatened and
followed. This is reminiscent of 1948, when there was the break with the
Soviet Union and much repression.”
Echoing a theme from Nerin Dizdar and Marko
Tomaš, Sekulovic said, “Dodik
does not like smart people. He is only looking at where he can steal
more.”
The regional bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Bishop Grigorije,
excommunicated Nikola Sekulovic (See
here).
Grigorije presumably took this extreme move because of Sekulovic’s
outspoken opposition to Dodik’s and Cuk’s corruption and regional
hegemony. Since Grigorije is based in Trebinje and is a close
collaborator with Dodik, Sekulovic’s criticisms affect him as well.
Of his problems with the church, Sekulovic said, “I am a religious
person. I was baptized when I was little. The church played a very
negative role in the war, and now, instead of uniting people, it has
worked to create disunity.”
Q: Why were you excommunicated?
Sekulovic: “I asked uncomfortable questions: Why did you sell church
land to [a local politician]?; Why don’t you pay the priests’ pensions?
Grigorije also made corrupt deals with other local personalities. The
Church buys companies here. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Q: I heard that Grigorije is leaving for Belgrade.
Sekulovic: “He already stole what he could here.”
I asked Sekulovic about refugee return to Trebinje: “It has been
weak. Many Bosniaks went to Scandinavia. There were 5,500 Bosniaks here;
now there are between 100 and 200.”
Assessing the overall situation, Sekulovic said, “We need a lot
of time for things to change. In a way, the youth are worse than the
older people, since they are infected with nationalism. We could need
another twenty years, to forget the war.”
I did not have the impression that Sekulovic was concerned as much with
the correction of historical injustices in Trebinje as he was with
stopping local corruption and, probably, getting into a position of
power. He reminded me of the phenomenon of a certain political type that
appears periodically among the politicians of Bosnia: someone who rises
up and calls for a stop to the corruption among his own ethnicity.
Usually that person fails and disappears. Sometimes they succeed because
people believe in them. Then, sometimes, they go on to become corrupt
themselves. Such was Biljana Plavsic in 1997; she ended up in a Swedish
prison (until recently), convicted of war crimes. Her protégé was
Milorad Dodik.
One thing that reinforced my impression of Sekulovic was how he showed
me a raft of photographs of himself with former US Ambassador Clifford
Bond, and any number of prominent Bosnian Serb politicians.
As I left his office, I asked Sekulovic what happened with the
excommunication, and he told me he had been pardoned. He was wearing a
cross around his neck.
Central plaza in Trebinje
*
I had also been advised to meet Blazo Stevovic, a local Serb activist on
a more grassroots level. Blazo had gained media notice over the past few
years for calling attention to corruption and the war criminals residing
in Trebinje. He has declared against “Greater Serbian hegemony,”
campaigning to remember the Bosniak victims of the ethnic cleansing that
took place in the eastern Herzegovina region early in the war. For his
efforts he was, like Nikola Sekulovic, excommunicated from the Serbian
Orthodox Church. Stevovic has also called for a public admission of
genocide in the RS and an official apology to the victims. It is
extremely rare to find a Serb in the RS who will behave like Stevovic,
so I felt compelled to go meet him.
(For a couple of articles on Stevovic, see
here
and
here.)
Stevovic greeted me with a smile and an expansive affect in the main
square in Trebinje. As we sat at a kafana, he told me that he had been
involved in Otpor [the youth organization that helped dump Milosevic] in
Belgrade in 2000, and that he is now engaged in theater work in Trebinje.
Stevovic painted a picture of the
situation in Trebinje: “There are big problems. Life is very
hard. There are war criminals in power. No one has tried them. And there
is no real opposition. There were twenty people [Bosniaks] killed here
during the war, and 5,500 deported. There is no civil society. Those who
attacked Dubrovnik from here [during the war between Serbia and Croatia
in 1991] have also not been prosecuted.”
On corruption, Stevovic elaborated, “Many development and construction
projects here have been contracted without tenders. Serbian Telekom
bought the RS Telekom illegally. Then, there were chests of cash
delivered to Radovan Karadzic in Serbia via Bijeljina [he names two
operators who channeled the money to Karadzic] …In the last year and a
half more than 100 city functionaries broke the law. These criminals
have to be put in jail. This is a regional problem. There is much drug
trafficking coming through Trebinje. But the police inspectors in charge
of investigating trafficking collaborate with the drug dealers…We need
to make some surgical cuts to establish rule of law here.
“There needs to be court processing of the criminals and the corrupt
actors. I am in favor of creating a civic, unified Bosnia-Herzegovina
without entities, cantons, or districts. One state with a strong central
government and local self-government.”
I found Stevovic’s discourse to be roughly appropriate, politically, but
a bit airy and conspiratorial, with statements like, “Goran Zubac is the
chief of police here. I have evidence against him.”
Stevovic told me that his apartment was burglarized as retaliation for
his activism, and that he knows who did the crime, and who ordered it:
“There was a newspaper called Prst [finger], a tabloid. They attacked
me, calling me a queer, and an agent. Cuk [mayor of Trebinje] ordered
the burglary. Since that happened, I sleep during the day and stay awake
at night.”
Stevovic works with an organization called “Trebinje Alternative Club.”
He hopes to establish a free newspaper, a blog, and a Facebook page in
four languages. He also talks of initiating a festival as a cultural
collaboration with nearby Dubrovnik. “I see the development of tourism,
a demilitarized region, and multi-ethnic society,” he told me, “We have
a good strategic position here, because we are close to Dubrovnik,
Nikšic, and other attractive and interesting locations. Tourism could be
developed. But I talk to all the politicians, and they do not have
vision about what should happen in one month, let alone five years from
now.”
It takes time to assess the scene in any locale in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I
have been going to most of the places I have reported on for over a
decade, but I don’t have deep connections in Trebinje. I don’t have a
“third answer” there yet. So it is still hard to get a perspective on
what’s real and what’s hot air coming from Sekulovic and Stevovic -- but
this is a start.
Stevovic’s talk about war crimes and apology was refreshing -- I had
heard nothing of that from Sekulovic. But I don’t have a sense of how
solidly Stevovic’s feet are on the ground, how much he has a local base.
I asked him if he had local support, and he answered, “I have no
support, but 80% of the people here agree with me. There is a network of
corruption and criminality, and people are afraid to talk about who has
robbed whom in this city.
“In 2004 I ran for office. I talked about the need for ‘de-Nazification.’
I was called a traitor, and I received 84 votes in the election. If I
had been elected, things would be very different here today.”
On religion, Stevovic said, “I come from a religious family. There is no
five-pointed star [symbol of socialism] in my village, only crosses.
Grigorije excommunicated me because since 2003 I have been calling him a
criminal. He helped bring the tycoons to power.” I asked him what the
status of his excommunication was. He said, “The Church pardoned me, but
I will accept that when Grigorije apologizes.” When I mentioned that I
had heard that Grigorije was going to move to Belgrade, he repeated
Sekulovic’s assessment: “He has to, he has stolen everything he can
steal here.”
Rebuilt mosque in old
town, Trebinje
YUGONOSTALGIA
Before
the war, all kinds of tacky things used to happen when you would take a
bus ride in Yugoslavia, especially in the poorer, less-organized parts
of the country. For example, I remember traveling the length of Serbia
and the whole busload of passengers getting getting dumped in the middle
of the night with no explanation other than that “nema guma,” there are
no “wheels.”
After the war, in Bosnia, the Croat-owned or Croatian buses tended to be
the nicest, some of them even with two stories, or air-conditioning. The
Bosniak-owned lines were ok, average. The Serb-owned buses were old and
run down. They were getting the least money.
Back in Srebrenica: After we were done with observances and visits, we
rushed to the little bus station in Srebrenica to catch the 4:30 to
Sarajevo. It was the only bus of the day.
However, when we got to the station, the bus that was to take us had run
into the overhanging roof of the station. The driver had forgotten about
the air-conditioning unit projecting up from the back of the bus. It was
spewing water and hanging off the back. The back window was broken too.
Local police were making their investigation and announced that this bus
wasn’t going anywhere. That seemed reasonable. So we waited an hour for
another bus. After an hour, a wretched Zvornik (Serb-owned) bus with its
dirty windows and smelly vinyl came to take us away.
We hung a left at Bratunac and headed towards Kravica when there was a
loud “PSSHHH” and a flat tire. We stood by the side of the road. Sarah
and I discovered a plum tree. After half an hour the original bus, with
the broken back window and now no air-conditioning unit, came to get us.
I was wondering what the third problem was going to be, but there wasn’t
really one. Except that it was stifling in the bus, and predictably, a
woman behind us would not allow us to leave the skylight open -- she
said the draft was “killing her.” Instead, we breathed fumes coming in
through the back window.
CRITICAL THINKING
I sat
in a Croatian bus to Vukovar with tables like breakfast nooks. The bus
had two stories, but I never went upstairs -- no driver up there. A
middle-aged woman from Tuzla sat across from me and we became
acquainted. She told me that she had seen a French documentary that
proved that the whole moon landing was filmed in a studio in Hollywood
or somewhere.
After a while she asked me, “Do you believe that the moon landing
happened?” I said that I was inclined to believe it. She asked me, “Then
why were all the people who filmed it in that studio killed later?”