The bitter joke in Sarajevo, during the war-torn 1990s was “Only
the odd-numbered world wars start here.”
World War I, for sure, was triggered there -- by the
assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo
Princip in 1914. And, if you consider
the spate of sectarian, tribal, ethnic and nationalist wars in places like
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Mali, Ivory Coast, Somalia and
Nigeria, over the past 20 years to be a kind of conglomerate World War III, think of Sarajevo. That's where the
tone (and some of the strategies and tactics) was set during the devolutionary
wars of the Former Yugoslavia, whose flashpoint and moral nadir was the Siege
of Sarajevo.
Right now, this week, Bosnia balances on a knife-edge of
temporary quiet, suspended between two global antagonisms, the old one of “national”
or “ethnic” conflict (I use quotes because the claim that Serbs, Croat and
Muslims in Bosnia represent separate “nations” or “ethnicities” is at best
questionable if not largely bogus), and the newly-recognized world-wide fracture
line, between self-sustained oligarchies of wealth, force and political power
and the general populace who are sinking into poverty and desperation..
The present peaceful pause follows a week of violent and
large-scale protest that burned significant government headquarters in Bosnia’s
4 largest cities: Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica and Mostar.
Caroline Hopper, a veteran human rights worker in the
Balkans, calls the demonstrations “the
largest anti-government protests since the war; unprecedented, not only in
size, but also in their very nature.”
But,
you may be surprised to hear, she adds,”These protests offer a real sense of
optimism that is so uncommon for the suffering state.
“Masses
have organized themselves behind universal grievances regarding severe economic
woes that are the fault of both individual politicians as well as the system of
government as a whole. Resolutely non-ethnic, these protests have crossed both
social and physical boundaries, occurring in both the [Bosnian-Croat] Federation
and in Republika Srpska, and in rural and urban areas alike. Fires lit around
the country should not be seen as signals of pending warfare, but if anything,
as an embodiment of the universal rejection of embedded nationalism, and with
it stagnation, corruption, and nepotism.”
In
Hopper’s judgment, frequently repeated by scholars in Europe and America, and
citizens across Bosnia, (and yes, asserted previously in my blogs) the
failures, the “stagnation, corruption, and nepotism,” are direct consequences
of American diplomatic irresponsibility, or as the one time UN High
Commissioner in Sarajevo, Miroslav Lajcak has asserted, Bosnia is “a prisoner
of Dayton.”
The 1995 General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as the Dayton Agreement, driven principally by
the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, ended an almost 4 year war of savage
ferocity (estimates range between 100,000 and 200,000 Bosnian civilians were killed,
at least twice as many driven into exile).
Unfortunately, it did so, by
handing power back to the very armed hyper-nationalists guilty of most of the mass murders. Dayton set in place a “temporary”
governmental structure that ratified and institutionalized rivalries exploited
and magnified by the crooked politicians and criminal mafias who misled and
exploited Bosnia’s Serb, Croat and Muslim minorities (the Muslims, now called
Bosniaks, make up an estimated 40% of the population).
Then, with equally uncaring
cynicism, the political leaders of the US and Europe looked the other way as
the grafters and thugs harrowed the whole society.
As Bosnian scholars Aleksandar
Hemon and Jasmin Mujanovic wrote in the NY Times:
“[Dayton] effectively awarded to the cleansers their
ethnically cleansed territories, and was practically designed to prevent the
state it defined from functioning as a civic society.
“In a country smaller than West Virginia and with a
population the size of Oregon’s, there exist 142 municipalities, two highly
autonomous entities, 10 cantons, a special district, a national government and
an internationally appointed high representative to oversee them all. It
amounts to approximately 180 ministers, 600 legislators and an army of about
70,000 bureaucrats.”
This infestation of faux-governors has had one over-arching
product: impunity for the political-criminal elite.
“What the war didn’t destroy,” they wrote, “has been
wrecked by Mafioso capitalism, practiced with equal zeal across ethnicities, in
which private initiative is expressed in the form of corruption and cronyism.
The political system’s primary function is allowing wealth to be amassed by the
leaders of political parties, fully united, despite their presumed cultural and
ideological differences, in their commitment to impoverish the people they
lead.”
Finally, it seems, the Bosnian people have had enough.
Most important, the protests seem to include
representatives of all the Bosnian peoples, Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Roma, and Jews
protesting, not as oppressed and mutually hate-filled minorities, but as an
oppressed majority whose hatred is focused not on ethnic groups, but corrupt
government officials, violent paramilitary gangs and their beneficiaries, a
cohort of super-rich oligarchs.
Predictably, the progenitors of minority abuses are the
first to warn that the protests aimed at them are actually signs of ethnic
pandemonium. Equally predictably, they
have been the first to call on their European and American enablers to
intervene.
Council on Foreign Relations researcher Amelia M. Wolf calls out
Bosnian police director Himzo Selimovic.
If protests
turn violent again, Wulf quotes Selimovic as saying, “The international
community and the EU should consider [deploying] international military forces in Bosnia.”
Then she adds,
“Selimovic resigned shortly thereafter. [He] represents the
Directorate for Coordination of Police Bodies, one of the institutions against
which Bosnians are protesting. An estimated 62 percent of Bosnians believe the police,
including Selimovic’s agency, are corrupt or extremely corrupt."
Polls show that 98% of
Bosnians – that’s right, 98% -- believe corruption is a serious problem,
reports Wulf, and 70% say the government has failed to control it. The man presently on top of this despised
regime Prime Minister Vjekoslav Bevanda told Reuters he’s not worried.
The recent unrest in Bosnia is a local "fire," he told Euro-bankers he was begging for more money to misspend. "We will be able to extinguish it very quickly."
Maybe not.
Hemon and Mujanovic report, “The Bosnian people have
found a voice. In Tuzla, after the initial chaos and police violence, the
protesters forced the resignations of the cantonal prime minister. They formed
a plenum — an open parliament of citizens where everyone is welcome, and which
has by now gone through a number of sessions. They formulated demands,
including establishing a cantonal government of non-party-affiliated experts
and a thorough investigation of the privatization process. In Sarajevo, the
first plenum had to be rescheduled when the organizers were overwhelmed by the turnout.
Or as Alida
Vracic, executive director of the Think Tank Populari in Sarajevo told USA
Today, "The political elite feels fear and is insecure about its position for
the first time in 20 years.”
“For
the first time,” Vracic said, “people see that they have to take power in their
hands.”
This is
a perception that is also alive (and under monumental challenge) in other
places around the world where government and all its political elements have
failed the people: Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Venezuela, even (if less
violently) in Scotland.
As the
Bosnian scholar Igor Stiks wrote in The Guardian:
“This is not a rebellion of discriminated and ghettoized
groups, territorially contained on the outskirts of big cities. It is a
rebellion of the whole population that has been subjected to economic
impoverishment, social devastation and political destitution.”
The Nobel
prize winning Bosnian novelist Ivo Andric, from my years in the area, still the
most authoritative source on Bosnian culture, called his homeland, “the land of
endless hatreds.” But he also showed in his novels what history has shown, that
for every outburst of communal killing and alienation, there are intervening
decades when all factions live together civilly.
Notwithstanding expectable attempts by the
political and community “leaders” who have benefited from the dissonance to
push their peoples to mindless conflict again, there are signs that many people
remember that history, and embrace their capability to live as a single Bosnian
nation.
Some
people see similar signs in Ukraine, that persistent, consistent political
failure and exploitation of historic fault lines have robbed both politicians
and fractional populisms of all credibility and allegiance, driving once
disparate groups together in a campaign for real democratic, rule of law
reform.
Please,
God, let it be so.
In the
new world of instant, ubiquitous global communication confronting rampant
impunity, injustice and inequality, people do find themselves with lots of new,
and newly collective power in their hands.
Using it against their political and economic oppressors relentlessly as
well as civilly may shift the balance of yet another global struggle. Call it World War IV (the better one): of common
humanity against greed and exploitation.
Corruption in the Balkans? It is as much in the Balkans DNA as it is in so many other places in the world. Nothing new there. Finding faults in the Dayton accords is a verdict that Richard Holbrooke would agree with. It took the full force of his forceful and unpleasant personality to bring the parties kicking and screaming to the negotiating table and then force an agreement through threats and bribes and yet more threats. But the point is he put an end to the killing. Putting the baddies back in control after conflicts is often a given. See WW II. The losers who have experience at running governments are often the only ones available to put humpty dumpty back together again after a war or similar insurrection has torn a country apart. Looking back the view is bleak, and there were mistakes made. The current demonstrations may or may be a precursor. But there is a somewhat cynical view that says: Its the Balkans with their long history of strife and conflict. Tito held Yugoslavia together with the force of his will (and the size of his army). But once he left the scene the forces that seem destined to split the Balkans took hold, and opportunists like Tudjman and Milosevic raised the nationalists flag ad attendant hatreds to break up the House of Tito and set the peoples against each other. Will it happen again? I doubt it. There are new economic interests that can trump the old madness. Nevertheless it never takes much to bring factions into the streets of any of the Balkan countries, including Greece. That doesn't mean armies need to be sent in to keep the peace.
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