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A woman weeps at Hrastova Glavica, August 2008
Prijedor is “a laboratory of ethnic cleansing“. The population of the third largest city in the Republika Srpska was, before the war, approximately half Serb, half Bosniak. The VRS’s campaign of murder, expulsion, and detention in concentration camps reduced Prijedor’s Bosniak population by half. 14,000 people are estimated missing from the Prijedor Massacre, an act of genocide in the Bosnian War second only to Srebrenica. Today refugees and internally displaced persons are slowly returning to the region, making it an ethnically mixed community, unusual in post-war Bosnia, and making Prijedor, a city where war criminals and victims pass each other in the street each day, a laboratory of the living memory of the war in contemporary Bosnia.
I traveled to Prijedor with a colleague from BIRN to cover memorial events for victims of Omarska concentration camp and Hrastova Glavica, a mass grave where 130 Omarska inmates were shot and buried following the camp’s closing in August, 1992. Most of the people we spoke with were former detainees or relatives of detainees. Their stories were horrific: starvation, torture, beating and random executions, all at the hands of their Serb neighbors and friends who had joined the VRS at the outbreak of the conflict. Nermin, an employee of Izvor (an remembrance and reconciliation NGO in Prijedor) was in his uncle’s apartment in 1992 when 13 Serb policemen came to arrest his uncle. He knew several of them well: “we were in school together and would get a beer and hang out quite often. They did not look me the eyes that day, and would not answer me when I spoke to them”. His uncle and grandfather were detained and later shot.
The analyses of victims and returnees is also dismal. Most feel that there are two separate societies in Prijedor with two separate views of history and the war. “There is no life together”, Ms. Alibegović, whose husband was in Omarska, told us, “Everyone is nice, but when you say your last name, people change”. The divorce rate spiked following the war; marriages between Serbs and Bosniaks, once common in Prijedor, are unheard of today. Up the street from a mosque in central Prijedor a stand sells pictures of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić with “Serbian Heroes” printed above them. The owner of the stand became nervous when my colleague took a photo. “I don’t know if you’re one of us or one of them”, he said.
Inmates at Omarska Camp, 1992
Ms. Alibegović told me that the Dayton accords allowed the division in the community to solidify: “In war you have to have a winner. The UN did not make a winner. Now nobody is wrong. There are only victims. No one is guilty. We are fighting the same fight, only without guns”. Even individual memories of the war have become sensitized and polarized by the divisions held in place by antagonistic narratives and political rhetoric. “My next door neighbor arrested me and sent me here”, a man at Omarska told me, “Today he calls me and invites me over for coffee. I cannot go. I cannot face him after what he and others did to me and our neighbors”. For Eldin, an inmate who escaped to England from Trnoplje, Prijedor is no longer his town: “I walk down my street and there are houses that international community has rebuilt. The street looks like it did before the war. But it is not the same. I cannot return. I have another life in England now. England is not my home, and Prijedor is not the same”.
Eldin said many refugees from Prijedor feel this way. Like many towns in post-war Bosnia, a poor economy and high unemployment makes returning to Prijedor unrealistic, and a disputed memory makes reconciliation and community near impossible. But many return. “This is my home and there is something special about that,” a kid my age told me. He lost his father and uncle at Hrastova Glavica, “I believe things can change in Bosnia; they have to”.
Celebrants in Prishtinë on February 17, 2008
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo, a formerly autonomous region of Yugoslavia under UN administration and a NATO protectorate since 1999, declared itself an independent and sovereign state. The declaration was celebrated by the country’s Albanian majority and vehemently denounced by Belgrade, who backs Kosovo’s 100,000 Serbs (5.5% of the country’s population) and views the region as the birthplace of the Serbian nation. Afghanistan was the first country to formally recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state, followed quickly by the US and most European nations. Today 43 countries recognize Kosovo’s independence.
Stuck in a political deadlock with Belgrade, isolated from the region (only one of Kosovo’s neighbors, Albania, recognizes it as a state), and now at odds with the UN administration (UNMIK), Kosovo’s future looks anything but rosy. As the poorest nation in Europe, 45% of Kosovars live below the poverty line, 15% on less than one Euro a day. Unemployment is at 53%. Remittances from overseas make up 15.2% of the population’s total income. Once a breadbasket of Yugoslavia, agriculture only accounts for a quarter of Kosovo’s GDP. 90% of Kosovo’s legal cross-border trade are imports.
The economy is bad, and it doesn’t look to be getting any better. Kosovo’s education system is struggling.
The country’s infrastructure is outdated and in disrepair after the war. UNMIK spends most of its $200m annual budget on “institution building” initiatives—training officials and politicians in the philosophies of internationalism and the rigors of bureaucracy. Efforts to mold Kosovo into an EU statelet don’t appear to have much traction. Jeremy Harding wrote that “because of longstanding attitudes in Albanian society, there is only a dim sense of the purpose served by the state or public institutions”. Mentor Agani, an academic in Prishtinë, told Harding “We [Kosovars] lived outside the state for years and became very good at subsistence. Statehood is not a skill we’ve had”.
Statehood is an experiment for Kosovo, and for the international community involved there. Like Bosnia, Kosovo is a country faced with the legacy of a brutal ethnic conflict never resolved and the persistent specter of nationalism. And like Bosnia, Kosovo is a country that must manage the sudden appearance of capitalism’s social and political dimensions.
But unlike Bosnia, Kosovo is a country free of prohibitive power-sharing agreements that make any political future unrealistic. Nationalism, kept alive in Bosnia by a constitution which subordinates the state to the sovereignty of the country’s three constituent nations (Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats), may fade quietly from Kosovo, a country with one majority (Albanians) and one minority (Serbs).
Last week several internationals admitted to my editor that post-war Bosnia—Dayton Bosnia—was an experiment. After 13 years it is clear, they said, that the West’s experiment of a Dayton-style, multi-ethnic state in the Balkans has failed. In Kosovo, a new experiment has begun: how a state can proceed out from under the perceived yoke of Western administration, an administration that has “infantilised” and “depoliticized” the Kosovar population, and effectively disenfranchised the Bosnians.
Milorad Dodik as Adolf Hitler on the cover of Slobodna Bosna
Yesterday morning a startling headline showed across The Guardian’s website. “Bosnia Is on the Edge Again” is the title of Paddy Ashdown’s Sunday op-ed. Ashdown, the former High Representative for BiH, architect of the Dayton Accords, and an outspoken advocate of military intervention during the Bosnian War, said the West has fallen asleep at the wheel in Bosnia, letting a nationalist demagogue “aggressively reverse a decade of reforms”.
Ashdown is referring to Milorad Dodik, the current prime minister of the Bosnian Serb “mini state” Republika Srpska, whose nationalistic policies have cost the RS its financial support from USAID and other Western organizations. Dodik is a member of a resented class: war profiteers (there is even a phrase: “nekum brat, nekum rat”, or, “someone’s brother is someone else’s war”). During the war he managed several cigarette brands in Bosnia and Croatia, earning him the nickname “Mile Ronhill“. Dodik has made RS autonomy and allegiance to Serbia his central platform, seeking to separate the entity from BiH financially, politically, and culturally. When Kosovo declared independence this year Dodik responded by calling for the RS to secede from BiH. The international community had none of it.
As sensational and empty as Dodik’s calls for RS independence are, perhaps Ashdown is not crying wolf by giving Dodik’s rhetoric a second thought. In 2005, two scholars, one Bosnian and one American, published a paper assessing reconciliation efforts in the former Yugoslavia. Offhandedly, the paper stated “if NATO and EU peacekeepers were to withdraw from Bosnia today, there would be war tomorrow”. A shocking claim given the trauma of the war and desire for “peace above all else” that it had created.
I asked my colleague what she thought about the claim and she agreed in full. If the international community didn’t hold the RS in BiH, then it would rapidly secede and civil war would break out. Dodik himself displays childish anti-Bosnian behavior, removing a Bosnian flag from a table at a press conference and saying “I do not love Bosnia” in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Dodik’s behavior in this respect is unique. There are few public figures in the former Yugoslavia who espouse an expressly anti-Bosnian ideology. Most opt for the more muted position of quibbling over whether or not Srebrenica was genocide, or whether the war was a civil war or a war of aggression. Few take a wholesale stand against the nations that emerged from the conflict, against the idea of the Bosnian nation, as Dodik has.
