Bosnia in Limbo E-Book

Borja Lasheras

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 168

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

To this day, almost all narratives on Bosnia focus on the 1990s, the war, and the labyrinth that Dayton’s institutional system represents. They also tend to be imbued with a perspective that often overdoes the ethnic and religious element. The truth is that, beyond the causes of war and its manifold tragedies, we actually know very little of its forgotten consequences, once the CNN effect is long gone. As importantly, we know very little of Bosnia today: a society shaped by the past, yes, but also exposed to shifting 21st century dynamics. A society haunted not only by war tragedies but also by a long-standing and long overlooked social crisis. This revealing book thus tries to provide a somewhat different picture of Bosnia, twenty years after the war. Largely based on the author’s experience in the field, it is to some extent an account of rural Bosnia, in particular of the Drina River Valley, which bore the brunt of the ethnic cleansing in the 1990s. Yet, and starting off from that isolated region of open wounds, unfinished issues and a cast of characters that range from displaced persons and victims to committed women, the book aims to overall provide a portrait of modern Bosnia as such, while also looking critically at the workings of the international community and European diplomacy. The book, with its landscape of activists, Western diplomats, and an underground world in Sarajevo for LGBT and youths, shows a country of so far failed Springs and leaders who go on with their bad governance. Meanwhile the “Europe” towards which Bosnia theoretically moves, drifting between a poor understanding of the country, a fear of conflict that acts as its Achilles’ heel, as well as lack of genuine interest, seems unable to really change things. In a way, therefore, a country in limbo.

Leseprobe

ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Title Page

To my parents, Javier Ignacio and María Pilar

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Introduction

Ivan Polje

»When I am hungry, I lose control«

The Bosnian Limbo

Part I In the Drina Valley

The Road to Eastern Bosnia

River of Violence

Srbinje

The Office (Twin Peaks)

Life in Foča

The Foča of Zdravko Krsmanović

The Arrest of Mladić

The Hodžićs

Part II The forgotten ones

Three Fighters

The Enclaves: like Indians in the Reservations

Žepa

Easy Rider: Miodrag and Angelina

PART III Memory, amnesia and geopolitics

Bakira and the Lukić Family: Hell in Višegrad

Bilo, pa proslo and the Cacophony of Genocide

Looking the Other Way: the Conspiracy of Silence

Revisionism, Geopolitics and Stones in Srebrenica

Amnesia and Reconciliation?

Part IV The European spring that does not come

Nights of Pussy Galore

Babies without ID, Flames in Tuzla and Sarajevo

Europe’s Eleventh Hour

Road to Nowhere: Edith’s Diary

Epilogue

Return to Goražde

Acronyms

Impressum

Endnoten

To my parents, Javier Ignacio and María Pilar

Za Ifetu, Sakifa (r.i.p.), Biserku, Nefisu, Nerminu, Amira i Melihu

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to: James Badcock, for his faithful, elegant translation of the original Spanish text; Valerie Hopkins, for her most valuable review of the draft manuscript, between the Balkans and Brussels airport; Jasmin Mujanović, for our many conversations on the social question in Bosnia and the Balkans, on revolutionaries and baje;1 Marc Casals, Daniel Gascón (fellow 1981 militant of the Aragon Front and hetman of that island of free thought called Letras Libres), and Álvaro Imbernón for their comments on earlier drafts of the Spanish version; Jordi Juste, Roser Leal and the team at Editorial UOC, for their support to the Spanish version and its promotion; Valerie Lange and ibidem for supporting the work of a complete stranger; Fermín Córdoba, for his model of in the struggle for human rights in Bosnia; Dr. Andreas Umland, a great connaisseur of Ukraine, also under the spell of modern Kyiv; Vanessa Ruiz, for rediscovering to me the Sephardic culture of Sarajevo; Bosco Giménez Soriano, Spanish Ambassador to Bosnia, for our inspiring exchanges on Bosnia, diplomacy and History; Max Richter, Greg Haines, The Foals, Hans Zimmer and The War on Drugs for inspiration, and, last but not least, to Anna, for her unwavering support.

Prologue

The book in the reader’s hands is an eyewitness account of someone who watches helplessly as, in a country of stunning beauty, the ordinary folk labour under the persistent presence of poisonous ethnic nationalism to which the international community has failed to provide a suitable antidote. An international engagement enthusiastic after the war, then sceptical and now demotivated in the face of local elites with their grip on power and who artificially divide the population.

In Bosnia the ethnicity is generally the same: Yugoslav, meaning South Slavic. What differences there may be are historic-cultural and religious. When such differences are taken to extremes and become theraison d’être of political action, the adversary disappears, becoming instead the enemy; sympathisers become believers; respect for other points of view becomes exclusion or even elimination of the opponent. Political parties there no longer represent various ideological options, but rather exclusive nationalist groups—Croats, Serbs and Muslims, often led by the same clans since the 90s. In such zero-sum game politics, deals can be made with adversaries, but not with enemies. That would be considered treason. For this reason, we at the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, which I headed in the late 1990s, had to unblock institutional crises and take vital decisions for the functioning of the country. In that post-war period these decisions were gladly accepted, notably by citizens, but also, grudgingly, by political leaders, whose power games require the presence of a »benevolent foreign protector«. Two decades on, the majority of these solutions which allowed Bosnia to function are still in place, although forces do militate against them.

We were aware that all that we did should be of a temporary nature, and that those who came after us would have to give back responsibility to local leaders and avoid a damaging dependence syndrome. And so it was. But identity-based division still hampers the normalisation of the country. People such as Milorad Dodik, leader of the Republika Srpska, who then were not openly rabid nationalists, are now the most toxic ones. Governance is poor; the economy relies on external assistance; institutions do not work; refugee return to their places of origin is limited, consolidating the impact of ethnic cleansing; and, one generation later, reconciliation has not taken place. At this rate, Bosnia will only drift farther from that EU which it claims to be approaching.

This is the atmosphere described for us in such an intelligent and beautiful way by Borja Lasheras in this tale. He shares with us his experience, humanistic vision, affection for Bosnians and a genuine frustration at the inability to do away with the demons in that unique land. A land traversed by the Drina, which, as Ivo Andrić told us, »flows through narrow gorges between steep mountains or through deep ravines…«

Carlos Westendorp y Cabeza

Former Spanish Foreign Minister

 

INTRODUCTION

Ivan Polje2

The rhythmic sound of earth-digging tools and machines and the words exchanged in low voices by the workers removing mud, stones and roots at the bottom of the pit broke the silence in the clearing. The snow slowly melted in the spring sunshine. Dotted around on the earth were paper markers with numbers indicating human remains. Wrapped up in a brown raincoat and deep in thought, the representative of the Bosnian prosecution office oversaw the exhumation. Few meters away, an enormous policeman with a red face from the sun or, perhaps more likely, the effects of alcohol stood guard stoically beside the plastic tape restricting access to the site. A little farther, some relatives waited on top of a hill. Peering into the sunshine from amongst the trees, it was impossible to make out their faces in any detail. An elegantly attired young woman observed the process seated on a fallen tree trunk, resting her head on her hands. A man next to her stroked her hair. I thought about looking into their possible connection to the corpses in the grave, something that went beyond what was strictly necessary for my report. I decided not to. My role here was a small one; we could not take on board individual victims’ cases. And I did not want to play that part of the international representative who barges into other people’s lives and miseries, creating false hopes before suddenly moving on.

In any case, my Bosnian Serb assistant Ranko was not up for it. Staring at my notes, I was doing my best to ignore the persistent messages from his body language urging us to finish up as soon as possible and get out of that clearing, out of that wood. He had groused all the way along the road from our office. Workshy at the best of times, Ranko did not like our human rights duties. A few weeks earlier during a rare occasion on which we had spoken about the war, a tongue-clicking Ranko had expressed doubt about Foča’s Muslim women being raped by Serbian Chetniks3. His remarks were made with the same lightness with which many people deny or downplay war crimes in Bosnia,4 and the Balkans in general. Removed from his routine of coffee, cigarettes, office chatter and mornings spent staring at the computer, Ranko could not bear supervising exhumations at mass grave sites for hours on end. Like so many others, he did not see the point in turning over the earth of the past and the uncomfortable truths hidden in it. Best left alone.

I felt that this was Bosnia in its essence. On the one hand, the beauty of the forests which cover this country and its magnificent nature, intertwined with the raw death and violence which has marked its recent history. On the other, a rather dehumanised State, with its relentless procedures, form-filling and, above all, generalised indolence, typical of this part of Europe and which logic and inertias no mass grave can seem to alter.

The grave was situated hundreds of metres from the road which passed through Ivan Polje, a miniscule village in the municipality of Rogatica, eastern Bosnia. That place, already in the region of Romanija, is on the edge of a plateau, a somewhat unusual feature in this mountainous and uneven land. With rickety electricity poles running alongside a road that cut through plains and low copses, the landscape reminded me of the American Midwest. The dark mountains on the horizon seemed to loom even larger. Driving back to Sarajevo for the weekend, I would sometimes stop next to a small, wooden Orthodox church on the top of a hill to watch the sun setting over the valley, deeply carpeted in snow during the winter. That plain relieved the anxiety that lurked in the Drina river valley and which I often felt there. The gentlest and most beautiful places nonetheless may harbour the cruellest dark secrets, as was the case with these woods in Romanija and the Drina valley.

After taking a couple of hours to verify the details with the prosecutor and taking some photographs of the grave, we left. I wrote the report for the OSCE central office in Sarajevo, marking it as one to follow up on as a case regarding possible war crimes. Soon afterwards we learned that the remains in Ivan Polje belonged to over a dozen or so Bosniaks5 murdered in 1992. Much to Ranko’s chagrin, we had to return to Rogatica on several occasions and for the same reason during that spring of 2011 as more mass graves appeared.

»When I am hungry, I lose control«

Kad sam gladan, nisam svoj (when I am hungry, I lose control) was the message on one of the many posters taped onto the hard asphalt in front of the emblematic Ali Pašina Mosque on Maršala Tita avenue. Twenty years earlier, Sarajevans had protected that mosque from Serbian mortar fire with bins, tramway cars and buses riddled with bullet holes. Other posters screamed out Europo, naša djeca su gladna (Europe, our children are hungry), and demanded the resignation of politicians and the formation of technocratic governments. It was an unusually warm February 2014, and the environment was very different to the one in that forest in Romanija three years earlier.

I moved among the few hundred people who had gathered, my curiosity aroused by perhaps the first real political movement in Bosnia since the post-war period. The media and a handful of commentators were talking about a Bosnian Spring, and the demonstrators espoused similar symbolism and messages to those seen previously in the »Occupy« movement, Kyiv’s Maidan protests and 15M6 in Spain.

Eastern Bosnia in winter. © 2010, Lasheras, B.

There was a generalised rage against the political class, which had been caught completely off guard by the protests a few days earlier in Tuzla.

Tired from several sleepless nights, Sumeja offered me coffee and sandwiches in her shabby office. As an activist, she was spending her days moving from one police station to another, offering legal assistance to those who had been arrested and investigating cases of beatings, while also attending plenums (popular assemblies) at which these new movements were trying to get organised. She spoke bluntly in the way of someone who has no time to lose. Bitterly, she admitted that those hundreds of protestors were too few and that the plenums were riven by divisions. But, above all, she railed against her fellow citizens who remained sat at the sunny terraces and cafés in Baščaršija, in Sarajevo’s old quarter, just like any other day.

The Bosnian Limbo

Virtually all books, accounts and reports relating to Bosnia focus on the 1992–1995 war: the siege of Sarajevo, civilian suffering, the constant dithering and divisions of the international community, the Srebrenica massacre and NATO’s intervention. Much has also been written about the convoluted institutional framework designed by the Dayton Accords in 1995 and its impact on the country’s paralysis. It is not the intention of this book to contribute much to these aspects of the conflict, nor to investigate the causes of the war, but perhaps to cast some light on its neglected consequences, several years afterwards. The conventional take on such matters, sometimes helped by the pervasive influence of the notion of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia as a result of »ancient ethnic hatreds«, has a tendency to be very reductionist, magnifying the prism of ethnicity and framing Bosnia only through the lenses of the 90s and the conflict—sometimes, perhaps too much so. As a result, key elements in terms of power and class are completely ignored, such as the role of political elites in the final Yugoslav era up to the present day. Moreover, the social question has also been relegated to a secondary condition despite its relevance in any real understanding of nowadays’ Bosnia, the poor democratisation in the region, and some of the protests of recent years.

In my view, there is thus a vast intellectual and knowledge vacuum over Bosnia today as a country and as a society after the conflict, when the CNN effect has long worn off and the cameras are pointing at Syria or Ukraine. Twin questions are raised. On the one hand, how is a society marked by a past it still deals with, but also affected by the convulsive dynamics of the 21st century’s globalised world? On the other, what is left behind gigantic international designs and State reconstruction projects when the international institutions lapse into decadence, the country drops off the global agenda, and yet the same challenges remain?

In this book I try to address these questions sharing my experiences on the ground as an OSCE human rights officer from 2010 to 2012, and my continued engagement since, keeping close tabs on both the country and European policy and diplomacy towards it. I do not take Sarajevo as the sole or even main reference point, but above all rural Bosnia—for some, the real Bosnia. To be precise, the eastern part of the country and the famous valley of the River Drina that inspired Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina, and is also the area which suffered most of the ethnic cleansing inflicted overwhelmingly on the Bosniaks in the 1990s. For close to two years I lived by the Drina in the small town of Foča, part of the Republika Srpska (RS), one of the entities created by the Dayton Accords. Working in isolation in that borderland, I immersed myself in Bosnia’s problems. It was an experience of straddling two different worlds: on the one hand, life and field work in rural Bosnia and the Drina, and on the other, Sarajevo’s political bubble full of diplomats, activists and the alternative underground scene of young people drawn to causes such as antiauthoritarianism and LGBT rights—but not the past.

Covering developments up to late 2016 and part of 2017, the finishing point is today’s Bosnia, a country in theory advancing towards the EU but which is wracked by tensions stoked by local political leaders and often by foreign actors too, that neither the international community nor the EU are able to manage. The flames of the 2014 Bosnian Spring appear to have died down for now, but not the underlying social conflict. An Orwellian political discourse, shared by both local and EU elites, constantly talks about »reforms« while poisonous ethno-nationalist policies remain the order of the day.

So this is the context: the Drina, rural Bosnia and today’s European diplomacy. The perspective is notably widened by accounts from the people I met or found myself working with: victims, the internally displaced, activists and other peculiar personages, some of them very dear to me. They are the main characters of this book, anonymous lives, often seemingly forgotten: the blurry detail, though with its own substance, for the camera lens as history’s Great Photograph is taken.

PART IIN THE DRINA VALLEY

Heading to work (Foča area), © 2011, Lasheras, B.

»For the greater part of its course the river Drina flows through narrow gorges between steep mountains or through deep ravines with precipitous banks. In a few places only, the river banks spread out to form valleys with level or rolling stretches of fertile land suitable for cultivation and settlement on both sides. «

(Ivo Andrić, »The Bridge on the Drina«)

Canyon in the area of Rudo, bordering Serbia, © 2011, Lasheras, B.

The Road to Eastern Bosnia

The route from Sarajevo to the Foča region in the Upper Drina Valley (eastern Bosnia) brings to mind the Borgo Pass from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The narrow, winding roads snake through mountains and along perilous ridges. After the thaw, rocks tend to fall down onto the road or roll furiously towards the rivers and streams farther down. The transition from Sarajevo to eastern Bosnia is abrupt and the panorama changes dramatically once you take the road for Trnovo, leaving behind Mount Igman, the scene of so many confrontations during the war.

That rainy day in autumn 2010, I looked out of the window of the car taking me to Foča for the first time so that I could take up my position in the OSCE office there. The first snows were on the ground. The image of a phantasmagorical Borgo grew in my mind over the following months with the arrival of relentlessly cold winter and increasingly frequent snowstorms blocking the roads. The darkly unreal landscape was wrapped in the thick fog which is so typical of Bosnia. On occasion, sunlight succeeded in piercing this mountainous barrier and the fog, lighting up the villages along the banks of the Drina. But the fleeting light soon grew faint and the penumbra returned.

Fortunately, I was not Dracula’s imprudent guest, nor the driver a pale, tall and silent individual in a dark, horse-drawn carriage. Alidja, a chauffeur from Goražde, was a rather short, stocky guy in his fifties. He barely spoke any English but he insisted on teaching me my first phrases in lokalni jezik (the local language),7 pointing to specific elements in the landscape. Beyond that friendly exchange, our conversations never struck a profound note for, amongst other things and as I was soon to realize, there was no profoundness in him. As commonly occurred with new foreign faces in the mission, this initial cordiality diminished after a few weeks.

Bosnia is the quintessential Balkan country. Its climate, infrastructure problems and geography conspire to create a strong sense of isolation. Bosnia seems far removed from events taking place in the world outside as if time here had stopped. Yet, from time to time, history comes crashing into these valleys and their self-absorbed inhabitants, like the floods which periodically come down the Drina, destroying everything in their path. The country’s stability has deep fissures like the cracks which split the mountain roads before the earth swallows them altogether. And yet Bosnia eventually ends up returning to its monotonous and indolent state.

The sense of isolation is even greater in the Upper Drina Valley, bordering Montenegro and Serbia. This area has a life of its own, deeply linked to the river. Nature is savage here, producing a myriad of canyons, virgin forest and mountains dotted by occasional hamlets. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires passed this way, soldiers and viziers setting up towns and trade routes, building bridges, mixing peoples, bringing prosperity and destruction; the change and continuity, life and death described by Andrić in his novel set in the small city of Višegrad, down the river. Andrić was actually born in Travnik, central Bosnia, towards the end of the 19th century during the Austrian occupation, but he grew up in Višegrad and would capture better than anyone else the way of life, customs and mentality in the then rural, often backward Bosnia, between East and West.