Bosnia peace cracks under 20-year pact

The long-simmering frustrations of Bosnians erupted a week ago not only in Tuzla but also in a dozen other towns and cities across the country, including the capital, Sarajevo — resulting in the largest social unrest in nearly 20 years in the country.
Ethnic divisions fuelled almost four years of war in the 1990s. Today, if there is one thing that unites many of Bosnia’s 3.8 million people — Bosniaks (or Muslims), Serbs and Croats — it is their disgust with the hydra-headed presidency and multiple layers of government that developed to appease the nationalist sentiments of all sides.

Tuzla, an impoverished industrial city of 200,000, has the highest unemployment rate in the country — around 55 per cent — and it was the fount of the anger that erupted last week.

The system established under the Dayton Accords has only helped cement “corrupt, nepotistic and completely complacent elites”, said Damir Arsenijevic, 36, a psychoanalyst  who is now a prime mover in nightly Tuzla discussions about the way forward.

Workers in Tuzla had protested for months against the botched privatisation of four factories, once part of a proud array of industry stretching back to pre-Communist days. Pictures showing police officers beating protesters drew more crowds into the streets in Tuzla, Sarajevo and two other towns where government buildings were burned.

“Our leaders do not even take it as alarming that 63 per cent of young people here are jobless,” said Edin Plevljakovic, 23, a student in Sarajevo. “We have neither strong politics, nor a very potent elite,” he added.

John C Kornblum, a retired US ambassador who drafted the Dayton Accords as diplomat Richard C Holbrooke negotiated them, noted that the complex mechanisms they put in place were intended primarily to secure peace, but they were also supposed to be replaced in three years with a streamlined governmental structure.

A serious attempt at change in 2005, he said, was hindered in part by non-governmental organisations, reinforcing the Bosniak leaders’ desire for a unified state, which the Serbs and Croats will not allow.

Diplomats have tried in vain to get Bosnians to heed a 2009 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which in effect challenged the three-way set-up of the national presidency, made up of a Bosniak, a Serb and a Croat, as discriminatory. In addition to the presidency, the country consists of a Muslim-Croat Federation, a Serbian Republic, 10 cantons in the federation and the separate city of Brcko.

Until the 2009 ruling is observed, Bosnia’s structure means it cannot advance towards the European Union, which neighbouring Croatia joined last year and Montenegro and even Serbia are waiting to do.

“I’m a Croat Catholic, but that is what I am at home,” said Sonja Kladnik, 78. “I’m also a citizen. I am sick and tired of this Serb, Croat, Bosniak. We have seven or 10 or however many levels of government and three presidents. Enough with this nationalism!”

The protesters are demanding governance by technocrats outside Bosnia’s parties. They have prompted the resignations of four cantonal governments, but so far no broader change.

Emina Bursuladzic, 58, seems an unlikely rebel. Like many others in this largely rural country, with little tradition of street protest and an abiding horror of bloodshed after the war, she disavows the violence. But over the past seven months, she has fought to preserve the remnants of Dita, once the provider of detergent for all of Yugoslavia. She and her co-workers stood vigil outside the local government offices, trying in vain to sue the owner they say came in 2008-09 and stripped their chemical plant almost bare.

It was not just the months of unpaid wages, or the plundering of the workplace Bursuladzic has served for 38 years that stirred her ire, she said. It was the humiliation. “People inside this building used to look out the window and laugh at us,” she said.
Her co-worker Snjezana Ostrakovic, 29, bitterly recalled standing in temperatures well below freezing and accosting a local government worker, who she said simply ridiculed her pleas for help in feeding her two sons, 5 and 2.

Tuzla’s industry was built on coal and salt mines. The factories, now dilapidated shells, almost certainly had no future anyway. But locals are furious that they seem to have been sold off cheaply to the well connected, who then reaped profit by hawking scrap or land. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, privatisation has enriched a few. In Bosnia, what’s worse is that it followed a war.