Bosnia in Limbo : Testimonies from the Drina River 9783838271323

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Bosnia in Limbo

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.

Borja Lasheras

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.

Borja Lasheras

BOSNIA IN LIMBO

Testimonies from the Drina River

ISBN: 978-3-8382-1132-9

ibidem

ibidem

Borja Lasheras

Bosnia in Limbo Testimonies from the Drina River

Borja Lasheras

BOSNIA IN LIMBO Testimonies from the Drina River

ibidem-Verlag Stuttgart

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Cover picture: Road to Eastern Bosnia, through Trnovo, in winter, © 2010, Lasheras, B. Translated by James Badcock from the original Spanish book

ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7132-3

© ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press Stuttgart, Germany 2018 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

To my parents, Javier Ignacio and María Pilar Za Ifetu, Sakifa (r.i.p.), Biserku, Nefisu, Nerminu, Amira i Melihu

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ....................................................................9 Prologue by Carlos Westendorp y Cabeza ............................... 11 Introduction ............................................................................. 15 Part I: In the Drina Valley ........................................................ 21 The Road to Eastern Bosnia .............................................. 23 River of Violence ................................................................ 26 Srbinje ................................................................................. 31 The Office (Twin Peaks) .................................................... 36 Life in Foča ........................................................................ 39 The Foča of Zdravko Krsmanović ...................................... 43 The Arrest of Mladić .......................................................... 45 The Hodžićs ....................................................................... 50 Part II: The Forgotten Ones .................................................... 55 Three Fighters .................................................................... 56 The Enclaves: like Indians in the Reservations ................ 62 Žepa .................................................................................... 69 Easy Rider: Miodrag and Angelina .................................... 73 PART III: Memory, Amnesia and Geopolitics ........................ 79 Bakira and the Lukić Family: Hell in Višegrad ................. 81 Bilo, pa proslo and the Cacophony of Genocide ................ 88 Looking the Other Way: the Conspiracy of Silence ........... 93 Revisionism, Geopolitics and Stones in Srebrenica .......... 96 Amnesia and Reconciliation? ........................................... 100 7

Part IV: The European Spring that does not come ............... 103 Nights of Pussy Galore..................................................... 105 Babies without ID, Flames in Tuzla and Sarajevo .......... 108 Europe’s Eleventh Hour ...................................................114 Road to Nowhere: Edith’s Diary .......................................119 Epilogue: Return to Goražde ................................................. 125 Acronyms................................................................................ 129

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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.

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“The baja figure represents the entire class of war profiteers, small-time hustlers and crooked political peddlers who we euphemistically refer to as the ‘elite’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Mujanović, J., “The Baja Class and the Politics of Participation”, 2014, available at http://www.academia.edu/9018208/The_Baja _Class_and_the_Politics_of_Participation).

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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 the raison 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 11

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

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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                                                             2

The following names are fictitious, though based on real characters: Alidja, Naroia, Lejla, Petar, Ranko, Sanela and Velimir.

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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                                                              3

4

While čete originally referred to Balkan armed guerrillas at the end of the Ottoman empire, the Chetniks were mostly an armed Serbian nationalist group during World War Two. Nowadays, the term “Chetniks” is used in the Balkans, at times pejoratively, to encompass Serbian ultranationalists, radicals and paramilitaries, and sometimes Serbs in general. I will generally refer to Bosnia instead of the full official name, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which includes the southern part of the country.

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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.                                                              5

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Bosnian Muslims, one of the three main national groups in Bosnia (along with Serbs and Croats) and the most numerous (50% of the population, according to the 2013 Census, compared to 30% Serbs and 15% Croats). The idea of a defined ethnic distinction is somewhat misleading given that all three belong to the group of Southern Slavs (which gives rise to the name Yugoslavia). The 15 May movement (also referred to as the “Indignados”) was a Spanish civic movement. It started in 2011 with massive demonstrations against austerity measures and against the established political system, demanding broad changes.

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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 con-

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stant 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

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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.

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PART I IN 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                                                              7

Nowadays referred to by the standard denomination of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS).

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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. It was 2010 when I arrived there. Thus several years had passed since the war and massive reconstruction projects had taken place. You could still see, though, visible scars of war in the form of destroyed houses, riddled by bullets and caved in from mortar fire, especially in places such as Goražde, besieged by the Serbs from 1992 to 1995. Other areas had been only partly rebuilt. But the overall impression was mostly one of decline and socioeconomic depression, tellingly reflected by the ruined factories from the Tito era, once booming and where weapons manufacturing and chemical products had once driven the local economy. Like Yugoslavia itself, the economic fabric 24

collapsed and accelerated the demographic crisis in this part of Bosnia, with locals emigrating to Sarajevo and other urban centres, a process that predated the war. While nowadays’ Bosnia as a whole suffers from structural unemployment, and statistics tend to put it between 30% and 45%, it is even worse in this region, with minorities most acutely affected. The deficit-ridden and overburdened system of social benefits inherited from communism somehow has to attend to pensioners, war veterans and disadvantaged sections of society. And just like under the previous system, not all social strata are treated fairly; specially war veterans still perceive way more assistance than other groups in need. With Alidja’s foot pressing the accelerator, the landscape sped before my eyes in a blur. By the sides of the road, mocking skulls indicated the presence of mines, a warning not to let one’s guard slip when facing this magnificent tract of nature and what can be hidden within it. With time I realised that this was a metaphor for the region and its past. The valley is extraordinary in its beauty yet with a terrible recent history.

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River of Violence The valley is a draw for adventurers and tourists who come for rafting in the stunning canyons of the Sutjeska Park, bordering Montenegro, or admire Višegrad’s Ottoman bridge, a setting from Andrić’s novel. Not far from the bridge, the eccentric film director Emir Kusturica designed the monumental site Andrićgrad in the writer’s honour, inaugurated on 28 June 2014 to mark the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip. Visitors also enjoy the fresh fish and lamb served up by the local restaurants in the river banks. Yet for many Bosnians the majestic Drina and its greenish waters are somehow cursed. The valley has witnessed several waves of ghastly violence and ethnic cleansing. In World War Two Ustashas,8 Chetniks and partisans fought out here a ruthless civil war, on top of that against the Germans, which plunged the valley into a spiral of massacres and reprisal killings. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s brought with it the next wave of violence to the valley. This took place in a climate of political irresponsibility, fanaticism and media propaganda campaigns: Yugoslav Muslims, most of whom were not very devout and partial to tobacco and the local rakija brandy, were cast as »Turks« with genocidal designs against the local Bosnian Serbs, who felt in turn threatened by fascist Ustachas. Overall, key politicians and the media heightened fears (such as the status of Serbs in a future independent Bosnia) and stoked the embers of the past to justify aggression in defence of the nation. In Belgrade, the security apparatus of Slobodan Milošević’s

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Ustaša was the fascist and ultranationalist Croatian movement during World War II, attributed the murder of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Romani, members of other minorities and dissidents. The name is often used in the Balkans to refer to Croat nationalists.

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regime designed a strategy9 which essentially paved the way for homogenous Serbian regions inside Croatia and Bosnia, joined to a Serbian rump Yugoslavia. For Bosnia this meant partition and the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats. In conjunction with the SDS Bosnian Serb nationalist party led by Radovan Karadžić, which was in favour of remaining as part of Yugoslavia, Belgrade started to arm Serb communities in Bosnia and paramilitaries during 1990 and 1991, sometimes with support from the Yugoslav’s People Army (JNA). The JNA had key army bases in Bosnia, also heart of core military industries of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Milošević and the Croatian president, Franjo Tuđman, while they waged war against one another, negotiated the division of Bosnia in Karađorđevo, in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. The Drina valley took on a major strategic importance in these designs, having a symbolic value too in the imaginary of both Serb and Croat nationalism. When the war finally broke out, the dramatic images of Sarajevo under siege by Serbs overshadowed the fierceness of the fighting and killings in rural areas across the country, virtually inaccessible to TV crews and aid workers. In its findings relating to the Drina, the Hague court’s sentence against Karadžić in 2016 established that the »joint criminal entreprise« hatched by Karadžić, Ratko Mladić, Vojislav Šešelj (leader of the ultranationalist Radical Serbian Party) and others, aimed at a definitive removal of Muslims and Croats from the Drina through deportations, extermination and rape as an instrument of terror, a finding confirmed a year later in its sentence on Mladić. In Eastern Bosnia, three years before the fall of Srebrenica in 1995, these plans for ethnic cleansing were carried out with near total impunity. UN reports and Hague verdicts establish the pattern with which such cleansing took place. Serbian paramilitaries backed by the                                                              9

This has often been referred to as the RAM plan. Then federal Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, Ante Marković, revealed its existence in 1991 and leaked a conversation of Milošević ordering General Nikola Uzelac, head of the JNA Banka Luka Corps, to release weapons to Karadžić. (See Glenny, M., “The fall of Yugoslavia”, Third Edition, 1996).

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army would take control of the municipalities, destroy mosques and the homes of Muslims and Croats, and unleash terror through assassinations, rape and looting. Non-Serbs were stripped of their properties and public positions, and transferred to places where the abuses continued and massacres often took place. Such massive violations of human rights in the Drina region were mainly perpetrated by the army of the pseudo-republic Republika Sprska, RS (Vosjka Republike Srpske or VRS)10 led by Mladić, and paramilitary groups such as the Serb Volunteer Guard of Željko Ražnatović (»Arkan«), and the White Eagles of Šešelj, linked to the security apparatus in Belgrade and organised crime. Though on a smaller scale, there were also human rights violations against the Serbian population. These included reprisals and attacks on Serb villages and other forms of retribution, including summary executions. Such acts have generally been attributed to groups of Bosniak irregulars tied to the Republic of Bosnia, whose area of official control was at some points of the war essentially limited to Sarajevo. In 1993 the UN set up several »Safe Zones« in the besieged Bosniak enclaves of Goražde, Žepa and Srebrenica. Their aim was to provide protection to populations overwhelmed by thousands of refugees, creating humanitarian corridors that would be guarded by UNPROFOR, the UN »blue helmets«. In a context of anarchy, impunity and zero international credibility, this protection was minimal. Srebrenica and Žepa fell in the summer of 1995, shortly before the Croats’ Operation Storm11 and NATO’s decisive bombing of the VRS positions, leading to the signing of the Dayton peace accords that November.                                                              10

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Created in 1992, the VRS was mostly made up of Serb units which had been discharged from the JNA, in numbers ranging 80.000 troops, and foreign mercenaries from Orthodox Christian countries and the post-Soviet space. This massive operation (Operacija Oluja in BCS) by the Croatian army, in early August, led to the defeat of the Serbs in Krajina and a massive of exodus of Serb refugees. While definitely ending the war in Croatia, it also had a crucial strategic impact on the outcome of the war in Bosnia. In 2015, the ICJ ruled out Serbia’s accusation of genocide against Croatia, but did establish that war crimes had been committed in the context of the operation.

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The Drina River crossing Foča, © 2014, Lasheras, B.

The Dayton design for Bosnia’s institutional structure after the war largely reflected the balance between the forces on the ground. The Accords established a very weak central government and two autonomous entities, the wartime RS and the Bosniak-Croat Federation (itself divided into cantons, federal units with their own prime ministers, governments and parliaments), plus the special district of Brčko. To some, Dayton amounted to a de facto partition while allowing for some form of united country. The main organisational principle was ethnicity, with provisions for the sharing of power between Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats (excluding the country’s minorities) and veto options at all levels of government. Some refer to this as »ethnocracy«. The Accords also created the post of an international High Representative, eventually granted with executive powers over local elites and institutions. Such powers were backed up by a substantial peacekeeping force, overseeing security, initially led by NATO and since the mid-2000s, by the EU, through its EUFOR Mission. For many the Drina is therefore a river of blood. An acquaintance of mine who lost relatives to ethnic cleansing refused to bathe in those waters for years. When I arrived in Bosnia, human remains from the 29

Višegrad massacres and other killings, including corpses dumped from the war in Kosovo, were still being fished out of Lake Perućac where the Drina ends. Like the rest of the country, the valley is divided along national lines: majority Serb towns belonging to the RS on the one hand, and the Federation city of Goražde, capital of the Bosnian-Podrinje Canton Goražde, on the other. At first glance, the segregation would be almost imperceptible were it not for the well-placed sign marking the Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL) and the minefields.

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Srbinje »The Balkan Peninsula is dotted with obscure towns and villages, high in the mountains or hidden in deep valleys, which emerge from quiet obscurity for a few months to face the furies spawned by a historical process in which they have until then played only a minor role« (Misha Glenny, The Balkans, 1804–2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers). During my final days of work in Vienna with the Spanish delegation I eventually received the notification of the field office where I would be posted as an OSCE Human Rights Officer: »Foča«. The name meant little to me, and I was actually surprised at first. I had been told that I was likely to be posted in Mostar, so I had prepared for that, looking at documents on the Bosnian Croat question, the status of that city, etc. For some Foča is a backward and isolated place, on the road to nowhere. For others it brings to mind images of war criminals running wild and the Chetniks ruling the roost, a black hole best avoided. Such stigmas take time to wash away. When I turned up in Bosnia, the Foča area was still classified by the international missions as a »challenging region« and »sensitive«. The training provided by the OSCE in Vienna for work in such places was somewhat generic and it focused on crisis situations, communication codes, and so on, coupled with programmatic briefings and courses on minefields, already in Sarajevo. The Vienna staff provided me with a thick manual with ideas on how to cope with feelings of anxiety, stress and depression in a place far from home, especially in environments classified as »challenging«. It included detailed recommendations concerning the need for regular sport, yoga and sex. I skimmed through its pages but overall did not pay much attention at the time. Yet a year on I found myself rummaging through the untidy piles of boxes in my Foča apartment in search of the manual.

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Shortly before my arrival in Bosnia, I found out that my predecessor, another Spaniard, had abruptly left the position due to a combination of demoralisation, anxiety and weariness with the atmosphere of the office to which I was being sent. Though cordial and helpful, he was not very encouraging the few occasions when we spoke over the phone. Apparently, high up in the mission they thought that someone young and motivated could achieve something there, without expecting me to last more than a year anyway (something that our then director, a former British officer who ran the human rights department like one of his NATO platoons in the 90s, candidly told me later on). Among the unfinished reports, my predecessor had left me a handover note. The last sentence preyed on my mind: »Get out of the Upper Drina Valley regularly or you will go mad!« Thus I arrived in the valley with some vague notions about local history and the legacy of the war in the Drina region. What in the mission jargon was referred to as »Area of Responsibility« encompassed a vast territory with poor transport infrastructure. It included municipalities such as Goražde and Višegrad, not far from Srebrenica, and a host of scattered hamlets and remote villages in the mountainous areas along the border with Serbia and Montenegro. I soon realized it was simply too big for my small team of one or two assistants. Our mandate, drawn from OSCE commitments and annexes from Dayton concerning human rights and the process governing the return of displaced persons and refugees, was too ambitious as well. Besides, we had to monitor the security situation. Our job mainly consisted of providing advice and back-up to local authorities and social agents as part of a process of stabilisation, institution-building and democratisation which had already been going on for some years. That is, trying to amend the legacy of the past, rather than delving too deeply into it, and thus help putting Bosnia on a better footing to face the future, as a European country.  

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House ruins in the old Čaršija area of Foča, © 2016, Lasheras, B.

But the past was still present. Foča prior to 1992 had been very different, and nationally and culturally diverse. Of its then 40,000 inhabitants, more than half had been Muslims and some 45% Serbs. It had enjoyed periods of prosperity, like other towns along the Drina located on trade routes from Istanbul. Some old engravings show a city centre somewhat similar to that of Sarajevo’s old town, and all around minarets rose from mosques such as the 16th-century Aladza, then one of the most important religious sites in the Balkans. This mosque used to be located not far from our OSCE office. Huddled around the Clock Tower was the čaršija (from the Turkish for bazaar). Muslim Foča was destroyed in the spring of 1992 after quickly falling into Serbian hands. One journalist who managed to enter the city described a »nightmare landscape of shattered streets and burning houses…restaurants reduced to cinders and twisted metal; apartment blocks charred… (Muslims’ houses) destroyed or on fire«. Foča was controlled by »gangs of gun-toting Serbs…a motley assortment of fierce-looking bearded men carry Kalashnikovs and bandoliers…Some are members of paramilitary groups from Serbia, selfproclaimed crusaders against Islam and defenders of the Serbian nation…About 100 of them belong to the Serbian Guard, an ultra-nationalist paramilitary group based in Belgrade, while a further 150 33

came as volunteers from Serbia…Others are wild-eyed local men, hostile towards strangers and happy to have driven out their Muslim neighbours«. In a climate of propaganda, locals and paramilitaries said that »Islamic fundamentalists« had been planning to create a »new Mecca« and Foča’s Serbs shared a conviction that they had »narrowly escaped genocide« at their hands. Yet »the only remaining Muslims appeared to be some 300 men in the town jail…who claim they were rounded up…after the fighting began, beaten and brought to the prison«.12 Most of the Muslim population escaped, while those who were held in detention centres suffered torture, sexual abuse and summary executions. Some estimates give the figure of some 2,000 murdered people. 13 out of 14 mosques were dynamited. Foča is also strongly associated with sexual violence against the Muslim women held in camps such as the well-known Partizan pavilion, near my apartment, or the notorious Karaman House. In the surrounding valleys of the area there were also attacks, retributions and reprisals mounted against Serbian villages. Serb nationalists often mix civilian and military casualties. Serbian victims’ associations of the region with whom I discussed judicial processes to investigate war crimes often spoke about cases such as Josanica, a village nearby where Serb sources claimed dozens of people were murdered in 1992. These associations and other local Serbs who told stories of cruel killings of Serb civilians, pointed the finger at armed groups— Bosniak paramilitaries or, many times, »foreigners«, in reference to the so-called mujahedeen mercenaries from Iran and the Gulf who came in support of Bosnian Muslims. After the war, the new Serb nationalist authorities in power in Foča renamed it »Srbinje« (place of the Serbs), a name declared unconstitutional by Bosnia’s Constitutional Court, in 2004. The Bosniak population is today less than 10%, concentrated in remote rural areas, well away from the urban centre. In recent years, Muslims have rebuilt a mosque on the site of the čaršija, and work is also advancing on a                                                              12

In Glenny, Misha, “The Fall of Yugoslavia”.

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new Aladza, with its nearly finished minaret once again rising amid the trees by the river. But few of the faithful remain in town to answer the loud recorded call of the muezzin. A few metres away stands a new Orthodox church, which is sometimes visited by the RS president, Milorad Dodik. He is keen on cosying up to Serbian church as he emulates his much-admired Putin, whose protection he seeks and needs. The coexistence of places of worship should promote harmony but it is often no more than a competition for the hegemony of one’s own narrative.

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The Office (Twin Peaks) The Twin Peaks theme pulsed out again and again from Petar’s mobile phone. The insistent melody broke the silent monotony of the office, reaching my desk and working its way into my head before Petar’s hoarse, hungover voice answered the call. When he was not on a field trip with me or Naroia, the head of the office, Petar spent hours surfing the internet or on businesses that seemed to take him to the local bars and cafés. An inveterate smoker like the good Bosnian he was, his growing alcoholism was obvious, although we all pretended not to notice. A coarse figure with a large, rounded head, which he wore shaved like many other Serbs, bushy eyebrows and light blue eyes, Petar was not a bad guy. Like the rest of the local staff of just over ten people, he did the minimum amount of work: following the news, attending meetings with authorities and NGOs, filing reports and so on. All of them came from the area, mostly Bosnian Serbs from the RS and Bosniaks from the Federation side. It was not always clear how objective they were in their political analyses, although they kept up appearances. They shared a lack of ambition when it came to delving into awkward issues regarding our area or changing things in any major way. This was partly a logical strain of pragmatism that advised against getting really stuck into controversial problems in the place that would still be home when the foreigners like me left. Many of them had entered the OSCE and other organisations long ago mostly because of their ability to speak English. The mission bureaucracy and a rigid normative contrived to protect these »veterans«, and almost no one in a position of responsibility wanted to tackle issues of discipline, performance or ethical behaviour of some such staff heads on. Looking the other way was the default stance, at least during my time there, certainly at the management level of Naroia and higher up in the echelon too. This also made it nearly impossible to hire more dynamic and capable individuals such as Jasna. A smart, young girl from Dobrinje of ever-changing hair colour and a strong personality hidden beneath

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a smiling pair of full lips which she used as a saxophonist in a band, Jasna worked with us on a temporary contract. In a way, it was perfectly understandable that Petar, Ranko and the other veterans did not have the same motivation as other, younger workers. The golden age of the international presence and its great ambitions were now history. With some significant exceptions, the overriding attitudes by long serving staff in such missions often ended up combining the worst of both the Bosnian system and the multilateral machinery. The passivity of much of the population at large had seeped into the international community and its bureaucratic inertias. Far from working for any notional common good, in my experience, some of these Bosnians tended to abuse their small but visible personal estates of authority and status. At the office, Velimir, the clerk, embodied these vices to perfection. He could turn the most insignificant administrative process, such as the regular filing of mission vehicle requests, into an agonisingly torturous saga. With his sly smile, small, darting eyes and prematurely bald head at his thirty years, he had the look of a mediocre Stasi agent taking notes as he eavesdropped on private lives through the walls. You always felt you could never lower your guard with him, no matter his eventual pretences of friendliness. At times, when he felt like teaching me history, he would talk about the great medieval kingdom of Serbia, which, he argued, at one time extended across the entire Balkans. His personality was somewhat childish, and he liked model airplanes and other toys. He was also a computer expert and had set up a small business on the side. The boundaries between that business and his official capacity with the OSCE were never very obvious. The staff all had that survival instinct that I have found to be so typical in the post-Soviet and post-Communist Europe. An instinct which became even more acute as successive budget cuts, which increased during my time there, in the midst of the financial crisis, put their way of earning a living into question. In the Balkans, that day-today need to prevail is the wall against which international plans regarding power sharing, reforms and the peace agreements, essentially based on long term interests, slam, one after another. 37

At first, I tended to crash headlong into this mentality that no one had warned me about; I was possibly a threat to their internal order and power relations. But I ended up understanding much of their apathy and scepticism. Bosnians watched as foreign diplomats and experts passed through, many engaged in the acquisition of experience as one might go to the gym to work out, with an eye of nowadays more prestigious postings such as Afghanistan. But the country was not progressing. Thus, after a time, I grew accustomed to the hostile attitude my initiatives were met with by the office staff. I adapted to that atmosphere, smarting up to achieve results in some areas while fitting in as best I could, eventually leading to a peaceful though often awkward coexistence with other staff at the office. Petar liked to brag. He boasted of tough days of fighting with Bosniaks in the Maglic mountain nearby and of having set mines in the areas we drove through. To Vlado, Petar fantasized. With his sad blue eyes like those of a Saint Bernard and his permanent leather jacket, Vlado was a quiet type. His time amid VRS ranks, like for other local Serbs, had been essentially forced upon him, or so he said and I heard from Naroia. The only things that seemed to bring him any joy were music and British TV comedies, which he consumed incessantly, sharing the jokes in his perfect English with me during office hours and on our driving journeys. He was a professional, loyal individual, with a fairly good temper, although he dragged his feet on many of our field projects as he thought—perhaps rightly—that they were doomed to failure. Over time, I tried to persuade him to leave the office and find a steady job as either a guide, given his English skills, or in a local business, before the day came when the OSCE shut up shop, but he had no ambition. He used to say that, after the war and having three children to bring up, he had accomplished his goals in life. With a sardonic smile, he added: »I will be waiting when they come for me.«

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Life in Foča Nestled amongst mountains, Foča comes into view after a bend on the road that snakes along beside the Drina. As the fog lifts, columns of smoke from coal fires can be seen rising from houses dotted along the river and on the hillsides. The air reeks of burnt coal, one of the first sensations that you get used to in Bosnia. It is a small town with a huddled centre of those often greyish blocks so typical of this part of Europe, coupled with groups of simple and colourful small houses. Many of these, especially when you leave the centre, have been hastily rebuilt, leaving bricks and plaster in full view. On a sunny day, the inhabitants spend a few Bosnian marks (the local currency) chatting and watching the passers-by from their seats in cafés and on terraces. The shops all sell identical wares and groceries, and there are not enough customers for so much of the same stuff. The municipal area of Foča is extensive, encompassing scattered villages only reachable by country lanes (makadam) that are often unpaved, when the snow allows for it. Foča has the ambience of a Yugoslav town, stuck in that era. It also has a certain sordidness, despite the efforts to lend it an air of modernity. The more sophisticated cafés that have appeared in recent years seem out of place, and end up attracting many of the exact same types that hang around in the town’s dives and the municipal gymnasium: young or middle-aged men with shaved heads or very short hair, wearing a combination of leather jackets, tracksuits and sweatshirts, showing gym-rippled chests and beer bellies, all intent on displaying their masculinity. They are a mixture of gangster and town thug who loiter around, drink and smoke unceasingly, their gaze moving lazily from their mobiles to the goings-on in the street; sometimes hostile to outsiders, other times jovial.  

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Jasna in Goražde, after one of our winterly visits to Biserka, © 2011, Lasheras, B.

When I lived there, the atmosphere in Foča indeed brought to mind the Twin Peaks series whose music sounded on Petar’s mobile, and which became a common reference when Rachel, a friend at the mission, and I talked about Foča. That is: that classic kind of tranquil, small and isolated town in a magnificent natural setting, yet hostile to human life. A place in in which normality reigns and nothing ever happens; where everything seems to occur at a slower pace. A deceptive normality, though, for it tends to occult something twisted and corrupt, which is threatening to rise to the surface. Perhaps my knowledge of the recent past of Foča and the questions hanging over some of its inhabitants made it difficult to simply see this place in a positive light. Or because of those long nights watching the silent invasion of the fog rising from the river that smothered the dim light from the streetlamps, and listening to the roaring waters of the Drina. Perhaps it was inevitable in a place where there had been so much violence and suffering. But the fact is that this sense of something latent and dark stayed with me the whole time 40

until my last day there, although it sometimes bore down on me with less intensity. I lived in a flat above a restaurant by the entrance to Foča, immediately after crossing the main bridge. Opposite, there stood a stone monument to the VRS, a gathering place for Serb nationalists. The flat was let out by Sanela, the restaurant owner’s tough and at times abrupt wife. She ran a shop in the basement where I went to pay the rent. At that time, I was practically the only foreigner in the region. Naroia, the office head, spent almost all of her time in Sarajevo, especially during her divorce. She was absent minded even when she was there, and used to shut herself up in her office, smoking compulsively. The only other foreigners were a dozen soldiers from the European Union’s EUFOR military mission, often on patrol; in my time, Germans, then Slovaks, who were relieved on a regular basis after a few months in the area. Socialising in this valley was no easy task for the likes of me. Mistrust was the order of the day. Bearing the international stigma was no help in an atmosphere marked by conspiracy theories about spies, NATO, and so on. Even so, I was offered cordial treatment by the authorities and many locals. They appreciated a different attitude to one of condescension, and an attempt to speak their language, though one still felt like there were invisible barriers and unwritten rules that barred the forming of close relationships. Still, at times, diplomacy based on alcohol, tobacco and football, while badly regarded within the mission and in the international settings in general, opened doors and sources, and was far more useful than the etiquette of Western envoys and politicians that means little there. In such a small town, and the area in general, there was no way of going unnoticed, and the concept of privacy did not exist. The relationships between men and women seemed to epitomise what was an intrusive and conservative rural environment. Women were often still viewed by many as a property of sorts and had to make a display of both their virtue and sensuality. In places such as Foča this was even more apparent. This context added an extra frisson to any genuine opportunity to converse with local women, such as the nice girl in the 41

baker’s or the cleavage-displaying but seemingly cold, blue-eyed cashier in the Konzum, always half empty and with its repetitive muzak playing in the background. The town felt a bit more normal in the summer, with some life being brought in by the rafting season in the Tara river and the return of university students from Belgrade, Banja Luka and Sarajevo. During those few weeks with busier streets and terraces, Foča could have been any other Balkan town, even a relatively nice one. The valley filled with colours and life, while the Drina’s waters ran a clearer shade of blue. The anxiety and claustrophobic sense of living among those murky mountains lifted a bit, along with the melancholia caused by frequent contact with the misfortunes of others.

The author by the bridge in Višegrad, © 2012, Pekić, J.

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The Foča of Zdravko Krsmanović Zdravko Krsmanović was a short, thin fellow, with bushy and arched eyebrows. He was the proud, new mayor of Foča when I took up my posting. In his fifties, he was a man of great charisma, an ego of commensurable proportions and the glamour of an Italian operetta, somewhat out of place in that valley. As he spoke, he tended to raise an eyebrow and smilingly reveal wolfish teeth. He was seductive and attractive without being handsome. It had all worked well for his personal style of politics, and he had won two elections in a row. His modern message of reconciliation and tolerance meant he was a favourite with the international community, desperate as it was for positive role models. Krsmanović became mayor in the mid-2000s, with the aim of closing the chapter on the sanctions Foča was still labouring under. He strengthened ties with neighbouring Bosniak districts such as Goražde and condemned incidents of nationalist violence. Foča emerged from its ostracism and Krsmanović was praised in the West. He spoke of turning Foča into an oasis of tolerance, a model for a country destroyed by ethno-nationalist politics, as well as of attracting tourism. He came up against the almighty Dodik, who, in his day, had also enjoyed the favour of the United States as he was not linked to war criminals and the SDS clique of Karadžić. Yet Dodik was now keeping the country in a state of constant tension with his ultranationalist rhetoric against Bosnia as a united State. Typically for the personality-based politics of the Balkans, a constant clash of macho egos and testosterone ensued. Krsmanović called Dodik a dictator and the latter accused the former of being a traitor to Serbs and a puppet of the West, effectively marginalising him from the circles of power in Banja Luka, the RS’s capital. The mayor enjoyed a public life similar to that of a rock star, not that of a Drina politician. Unless you happened to be an ambassador or a top journalist, you had to perform a miracle to gain direct access 43

to him. Meeting Krsmanović was quite an experience and worth the efforts, though. He was a good speaker and loved to wheel out anecdotes and personal stories of youthful dalliances with Muslim beauties of Foča, winking his eye and smiling at Jasna, who giggled. He said what needed to be said about tolerance and multi-ethnicity, an uncommon discourse in Bosnia. I was never sure whether I had got his support for our proposals because he had taken me seriously, merely received me politely for appearances’ sake, especially with the international community, or all of these things at once. In a highly symbolic gesture, in late 2011 Krsmanović attended the Ramadan celebrations organised by the Muslim community. He greeted me warmly and made a couple of flattering remarks to me and Jasna, coupled with a toast, chatter and jokes. I barely saw him again after that. Nonetheless, he fulfilled his commitments and led an official municipal declaration in condemnation of sectarianism and nationalist violence together with proposals for the strengthening of local bodies to prevent such incidents, that I had suggested to him. I have never managed to work out to what extent his convictions were genuine. Most of my Bosnian friends think they were. The Americans valued his role but seemed to have had doubts about some of his political views, according to the contents of cables revealed by Wikileaks. Like any figure exposed to non-stop confrontation, Krsmanović eventually lost his lustre. After years in power and amidst corruption allegations (which he claimed as politically fabricated by Dodik) and in spite of striking a more nationalistic tone, he lost the 2012 elections to a rival coalition supported by Dodik. Later on, he would return to the battlefield and planned to regain the mayor’s office in 2016, but lost again. Dodik triumphed over Krsmanović from his throne in Banja Luka, where he still keeps an iron grip on his small and impoverished pseudo-country with a discourse which is increasingly hard to distinguish from that of Karadžić in the 1990s.

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The Arrest of Mladić One morning in May, 2011 in Lazarevo, Serbia, a special police unit arrested another famous citizen of the Foča region: Ratko Mladić, »the butcher of Srebrenica«. A fugitive since approximately the end of the 1990s, he had been living in hiding. After the war, Serbia’s security apparatus had protected him for years, a situation which became one of the main points of conflict in that country’s negotiations with the European Union. Time had taken its toll on Mladić. He no longer looked anything like the tough and burly Serb military who in July 1995 bullied the timid Dutch commander, Thomas Karremans, who was then in charge of the UNPROFOR contingent in the Srebrenica enclave. The videos of the conversations between Karremans and Mladić in the Fontana Hotel, close to the enclave, are a sad reflection of the UN’s submission in Bosnia. Mladić, shorter than his interlocutor, repeatedly raises his voice, accusing the Dutch of shooting at the VRS in what appears to be a kind of court martial. At times, Karremans’ voice goes shaky rather pathetically as he apologises; he seems to be begging rather than negotiating, while trying to stick to military etiquette in that context. The body language could not be more eloquent as Mladić corners him against the wall, like a predator with his prey at hand. Occasionally, he allows Karremans a momentary respite by offering him a cigarette, only to go back on the attack, with scorn, arrogance and contempt. Mladić also plays the role of a severe but magnanimous general whose only genuine wish is to protect the people from injustices perpetrated by others. He solemnly guarantees the protection of the civilian population, a ruse to cover the plan then already underway for the elimination of Srebrenica’s male Muslim population. It is all done under the façade of a good-natured military cordiality that hardly hides the complete humiliation of his adversary and which he concludes by inviting Karremans and his men to drink

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a spritzer. After a futile attempt to resist, the battered Dutchman accepts the offer. After his arrest, Mladić was sent to The Hague to join his fellow famous fugitive, Karadžić, co-founder of the RS in 1992. If Mladić had been The General, a charismatic military hero for Serb nationalists, then Karadžić was The Doctor, a politician and pseudointellectual with a penchant for poetry. He had had a mediocre career as a psychiatrist at Sarajevo’s Koševo hospital, a time from which some say he bore a grudge against Muslims, whom he blamed for his professional frustrations. In the 1980s he was jailed for fraud and embezzlement in Belgrade before throwing himself into Bosnian politics toward the end of the Yugoslav era, founding the SDS. After the war, he lived clandestinely in Belgrade until he was captured in 2008. He had metamorphosed into, of course, another doctor, Dragan David Dabić, a specialist in alternative medicine with a thick beard and long white hair, like a mixture between some New Age guru and an aging hippy. Apart from a pattern of ultranationalism, it is telling how the war empowered a cast of characters who—cultivating an impression of profundity, in some cases, and epic national liberation heroics, in others—were actually notable for their mediocrity, cynicism and, at times, personal frustrations elevated to political and war dynamics. At once opportunistic and fanatical, often petty criminals and gangsters (Karadžić is said to have been connected himself to organised crime and drug trafficking) turned politicians, to whom war gave power and international projection. Other social, structural factors also played significant roles in this context and in the cleavages at the basis of conflict, including a certain clash between the rural and urban worlds, also present in the other Yugoslav wars. The stagnating Serbian countryside filled the ranks of the VRS bombing cosmopolitan sarajlije: that is, Sarajevo urbanites, Serbs, Croats and Muslims, who initially viewed Karadžić and his clique as buffoons and reactionaries, then outright criminals. Mladić was born in a small village of the area of Kalinovik, Foča. Kalinovik sits on the bare high planes near Treskavica, a tough and arid lunar landscape, wracked by the wind and cold. As part of our 46

monitoring and outreach activities, I visited that place a few times, and remember it as an awkward experience even for the Twin Peaks’ standards of Foča. Beyond the typical graffiti messages in alleys and ruins, as far as I could tell, Mladić was, and is, clearly a popular figure among Serbs from the Drina valley. News of his arrest spread like wildfire throughout the whole world, but silence reigned in the streets of Foča that morning. I was unable to savour such a historic moment as we were on the alert for possible violent incidents involving radical groups. Our own safety was unofficially a cause for concern too, though there had not been attacks against the office and its staff since the immediate years after the war. Hardly one year since my arrival, I felt a gust of renewed idealism that we needed to go back to the basics of our mission; we were in Bosnia precisely because of the violence meted out by Mladić and others of his ilk. Instead of staring at our computer screens writing reports or holding routine meetings and going back and forth through the region, this was the moment to really take a risk. We had to go out there, I thought, when things were edgy and give dignity to those human values that we were meant to represent and that Mladić and others had violated with impunity in that very town, in that same valley. But the rest of office did not respond, or only with an anti-climax: the daily monotony, murmurs and passivity. Naroia, gripped as always in such situations by a lack of decisiveness, opted for a low profile and risk avoidance. Looking at me with apprehension through mouthfuls of smoke, she suggested that we remain in the office and follow the situation from there. Petar, Velimir and the others, Serbs and Bosniaks, kept their thoughts to themselves or discussed trivialities. They were unwilling to watch close-up the nationalist demonstration called in support of Mladić, probably preferring not to be identified as OSCE, and thus »the West«, amongst their neighbours on a day like today. With resignation, I decided to go out in search of the information we had been asked for by Sarajevo and coordinate security issues with EUFOR. I did manage to finally get Naroia out onto the street, though, where she dragged her feet and kept her dark glasses on, remaining resolutely incognito. 47

The demonstration was big, with thousands of people from all over the region packing the streets. At the front in nationalist attire were some of those underemployed or otherwise idle men loitering in bars and cafés whose paths I crossed every day. They were proudly flying the Serbian flag, as well as the banners of paramilitary units with shady reputations. The arms supporting the flagpoles were extended as if in fascist salutes. Middle-aged women and the usually kindly-looking grandmothers were angrily clutching Orthodox icons or portraits of Mladić. Children ran joyful to and fro among the streams of people, enjoying such a rare festive occasion. On their way towards the VRS monument that stood opposite my house, the crowds sang songs praising the general and the Serbian nation while the men performed the three-finger Serb salute, which inspires so much terror, hatred and contempt among other Balkan peoples. I should have been able to recognise some of the faces, but they all seemed to merge into one blurry mass. Foča, I thought to myself, might have got its constitutional name back, but some things had not changed much at all. It was not a time for any sort of moral momentum either. I would still be working and interacting on a daily basis with people from the valley without distinction: some as obtuse and devious as Velimir; others as affable and goodly as those ladies cradling their icons and photos of Mladić, blending religion with the myth of the hero of an aggrieved nation. Sometimes, though, I was haunted by an Orwellian anxiety over whether maybe I was the one suffering from a moral confusion, and that perhaps Mladić had just been the product of his time and context, a person with whom in other circumstances one would gladly share a drink in a noisy tavern. Mladić will never return to the Drina. In November 2017, The Hague Tribunal sentenced him to life imprisonment for the genocide at Srebrenica and other war crimes, such as those committed during the siege of Sarajevo. The Tribunal attested that his commands were so instrumental to the perpetration of these crimes that, without them, they would not have happened the way they did.

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Nowadays, far from the valley, I ponder the dilemma of being offered a spritzer or a shot of rakija by the eventual Mladić; of being Colonel Karremans in the Fontana Hotel or Colonel Stauffenberg inside the Wolf’s Lair, in a different July. Alas that you can never know until you find yourself unexpectedly face to face with Mladić and his meaty, outstretched hand.

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The Hodžićs Ifeta Hodžić was waiting in the plot of land opposite my flat. This good woman of brown eyes, prominent cheekbones, slightly hooked nose and wavy brown hair was my landlady in Sarajevo. I met her at the start of 2011 as I looked for a place to stay in the capital. I had started to feel the need to get out of the Drina valley at weekends and on days off, and Ifeta was renting out part of her house on a hill in Bistrik, one of Sarajevo’s most special areas. The sense of peace in the Hodžić household was palpable every Friday at dusk as soon as I crossed the threshold of the large outer door and went through to the interior with the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer. Ifeta was usually working earnestly in the deep and well-kept garden of flowers and fruit trees, together with her husband Sakif, a thin tall man, with balding white hair and bright blue eyes. After another hard week by the Drina, this moment was my balm. In summer the Hodžićs abandoned sticky Sarajevo to spend their weekends in a house in a fertile farmland area on the banks of the Drina, not far from Foča town. That day they were passing through Foča on their way there, and they asked me to spend the afternoon with them. I knew they wanted to provide human warmth in a moment of personal loss for me. Ifeta and Sakif were there with their son, Amir, who was always jovial with a smile on his face and, like much of the Balkans, a fan of the Spanish Liga. He had brought his wife, Meliha. Amir worked as a night-time rubbish collector and Meliha was in one of Sarajevo’s Konzum supermarkets. They did not have any children. The Hodžićs did not usually talk about Foča, where Ifeta had been born and part of her family had lived until 1992, the outbreak of the war. It was a sensitive subject, but not something they avoided altogether either. Sometimes, in springtime or summer evenings, as we sat  

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Ifeta and Sakif (r.i.p.), on their patio, © 2013, Lasheras, B.

in the sunshine with a thick Bosnian coffee in the patio of their home in Sarajevo, Ifeta shared memories of the war, without hatred but with unmistakable pain. That day in Foča, Ifeta talked about that past time in more detail. Several Bosniak families and relatives of Hodžićs used to live near the monument where thousands of people had gathered few weeks before to honour Mladić. Ifeta told how before the imminent arrival of Serb forces in 1992, Muslims had fled from that place, stuffing as many of their belongings as they could into plastic bags. The Serbs destroyed the houses and took away one of their relatives, who was never heard of again. With tears in her eyes, Ifeta recalled how they had also wounded a girl, who died shortly afterwards. Nothing is left of those houses, and new buildings had been put in their place. Amongst some nearby ruins, overgrown with weeds, I recently found new red graffiti all about 1389, the date of the battle on the Kosovo field against the invading Turks, a legendary event in the collective Serbian nationalist imagination. The Hodžićs were separated by the war. Amir, then a schoolboy in Sarajevo, lived through the siege for more than two years as much

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of the city was reduced to ruins. In 1994 they got him out through the so-called Tunnel of Life, which passed underneath the airport and connected Sarajevo to the outside world. It was critical both for guaranteeing essential supplies for the city and allowing thousands of Bosnians to escape. Amir was reunited with his family in Germany, the country Ifeta and Sakif had ended up in after a time spent displaced between Herzegovina and Macedonia. Their eldest son, Samir, joined them later on. At the end of the war, like many Bosniaks coming from areas where they now had become a minority, the Hodžićs stayed in Sarajevo and rebuilt their lives. There was no point in returning to a Foča they now associated with so much pain and where they had become virtual foreigners. In spite of everything, the Hodžićs did not feel hatred, something which would have seemed logical and even justifiable. Instead, they transmitted human empathy and affection. I never heard them speaking bitterly about Serbs, even in that poisonous political atmosphere. Sakif recalled the Tito era with nostalgia, a common feeling for members of his generation, and some young people too. Unlike many Bosniaks, the Hodžićs were devout Muslims who neither drank nor smoked. They shared religious festivities with me, such as the end of Ramadan. Ifeta used to leave food for me and my partner of the time, Andrea, on the table in the patio or on the doorstep: hot soup when I was ill, chicken or homemade burek. They became my Bosnian family, and it was very hard to say goodbye to them in 2012 on my way to Albania, where I was to assume a new posting. On subsequent visits to Bosnia, it took me some time to go and see them, partly due to scheduling problems, but also because it was difficult to cope with all those memories. But one July night in 2015, I rang the doorbell, which still included a nametag with my name and that of Andrea, some five years after doing so for the first time. I planned to give them a surprise. An unbelieving Ifeta popped her head out from among the tall plants and flowers in the garden. Her appearance had barely changed, but her eyes were sadder. Good old Sakif would no longer emerge from his beloved garden to greet me or wake me up early during the weekends, for lending a hand in the garden. He 52

had died suddenly that winter of a heart attack. I cursed myself for not returning sooner. Since then, I always drop by when I return to Bosnia. With Samir married in faraway Cologne, Amir and Meliha have now moved in with Ifeta to look after her and relieve her loneliness. That July night their small son (Allah had finally listened to their prayers) looked at me curiously as he played with the spoons for the coffee that Ifeta served on Bosnian trays just like old times. The boy smiled, ignorant of the past, joyously free of the load of adult life and the memory of those who no longer sit at the table.

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Al Mejdan Park, Bistrik neighbourhood, Sarajevo, © 2017, Lasheras, B.

                 

PART II THE FORGOTTEN ONES

Biserka and the author, © 2011, Pekić, J.

Three Fighters Biserka Vukasinovic was just one of so many case files relating to social work, help for the displaced and discrimination that arrived at Nefisa and Nermina’s simple office in Goražde on a daily basis. The place was piled high with papers, files, cups of coffee and photos from years of work, and random souvenirs from poor but enormously grateful clients. Nefisa and the white 4x4 that she confidently threw around muddy and snowy country lanes were all that was then left of the UNHCR presence in eastern Bosnia. Nermina was the region’s sole representative of the Bosnian human rights NGO Vaša Prava (Your Rights). Both women had been working on the ground for roughly two decades with dedication, elegance and bravery. Nefisa had stylishly short black hair with brown highlights, her brown eyes shining mischievously from her pleasant face. She could tell you the story of each displaced family and the situation in the most remote towns and villages of the area. In those places, everybody knew and respected her. Nermina, a formidable woman with long, curly blonde hair, combined the toughness borne of adversity with the sense of humour of someone who loves life and has a deeply romantic streak. With their daily dose of empathy for others’ lives and circumstances, these two admirable women were a ray of light and humanity in the Drina valley. Biserka, a woman who had returned to Goražde after years as a refugee in her native Serbia, was fortunate enough to knock at the door of their humble office. The house that had been Biserka and her late husband’s before being destroyed in the war was still awaiting reconstruction, held up by bureaucratic wrangling. Biserka could end up living in one of the area’s godforsaken collective centres for displaced and those left behind in general, riven by poverty. Nermina and Nefisa worked hard so that the house was eventually included in a project run by Catholic Relief Services, allowing for its reconstruction in 2010; another big little success story in a region with a long list of inconclusive cases and failures. 57

Biserka (right) and Nefisa (left), in a restaurant by the Drina River, © 2017, Lasheras, B.

In February 2011 Nefisa invited me to a meeting of women activists at Biserka’s home by way of a housewarming, welcoming her there so she felt supported. She wanted me to meet Biso, with whom they had already struck up an affectionate and close relationship. I decided to stop by Goražde on my way to another meeting in Rogatica. Damage from the war still remains visible in Goražde and that was certainly the case in my time there, particularly in the more exposed neighbourhoods next to the mountains and hillsides from which the Serbs used to shoot. Cut off by a Serbian belt within eastern Bosnia, as Foča and other towns fell rapidly under Serb control, from 1992 to 1995 the city of Goražde was subjected to a siege that was almost as long and cruel as that of Sarajevo, if less well known. Nefisa told me how they had spent months on end trapped, barely leaving their cellars, during periods of ceaseless bombardment and sniper fire. At times, with resignation, they would go out onto the streets where the next projectile might land. It was »God’s will whether it was your turn or not«, she said. Many such houses remain riddled with shrapnel fire, scarcely covered over by layers of cement.

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In its day, Goražde was an important economic centre. Today it is trying to regain that status, with some recent success as investment comes in from companies that also employ the Serb minority and the city hopes to attract tourism. Goražde has been led for years by its mercurial, business oriented and seemingly perennial mayor Muhamed Ramović, sometimes called by locals as »Rambo«. I met him on few occasions, in the context of our confidence building and anti-discrimination initiatives. He struck me as an engaging, charismatic character, with his own share of ego; perhaps the Bosniak equivalent of Foča’s Krsmanović. Biserka’s house stands in a depressed area of washed-out grey apartment blocks damaged in the war. As I parked opposite the house that first day I went, it was raining and the whole scene was covered in dirty snow. Like many rebuilt dwellings, the house had a desolate feeling. The atmosphere inside was nonetheless very different: a score of Muslim and Serbian women seated together in a room that served as both living room, kitchen and diner, where they were enjoying tea, coffee and kolaci (cakes) as they chatted cheerfully or knitted. Some young volunteers and activists were sorting out the food packages they had brought for Biserka. In the midst of all of this, Biserka was insisting on greeting everyone as a dignified host. She was very fragile in appearance. Thin and with a somewhat worn face although still in her sixties, she had grey hair, dark eyes and a grim demeanour then, softened by a pleasant smile. She was originally from Kragujevac, a town in southern Serbia, and came to Goražde in the 1960s on a work trip. There she met Aleksander, Aco, a handsome Serb who owned a cosmetics-packaging company that operated all over Yugoslavia. Biserka describes how, on that first occasion, as soon as they looked at each other, »there was no need to say much else«. Aco asked her to marry him and they were wed the second time they met, a few months later. They were happy for many years, but they did not have children. Things began to change in 1990, when he told her that he could sense that he was approaching the end, and he began to organise the business in a way that she could run things

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by herself. He also said that difficult times were coming for the country and that Biserka should be prepared. Aco died shortly after, suddenly struck down by a heart attack in the doorway to the house; Biserka’s world fell apart. She worked hard to keep the business and its employees going, hardly sleeping over the following two years because of the pressure and her sorrow. Then came the war that many did not expect but Aco had foretold. She had known another war, being a little girl when the Germans occupied Yugoslavia. She remembers how, when she was three years old, a German party had abruptly interrupted a local feast where their family was participating, scaring the villagers. Then, a German soldier had put her on his knees and cried, saying that he had a daughter her age. Biserka sometimes shows black and white pictures of that time, including one of a teacher of her school in Kragujevac; he was one of nearly 3000 civilians, including pupils, murdered by the Germans in October 1941, in retaliation for a partisan attack. Her family had to live in hiding because the invaders wanted to send her father to a copper mine, which, given his weak condition, was tantamount to a death sentence. Biserka remembers how during that furtive childhood she learned to make beautiful gobleni (embroideries), something that calmed her at times of upheaval. She was going to need this after that fateful 1992. Among a Muslim majority population under Serbian siege, Biserka had to abandon Goražde and Bosnia, which by then had become her country. They say that the mujahedeen killed Aco’s parents in a nearby village. At the end of the 2000s, she returned to the place she had missed so much only to find a mound of rubble where her house had stood and a tree amongst the ruins. There was nothing left of the office and the machines. During the war, there was also a lot of petty crime and contraband, networks which survived the war. It was a heavy blow, but she took it. Aco had taught her to overcome adversity. Visiting the cemetery, a little later to see her husband’s tomb and finding it destroyed was too much, however, and she fainted. Her health declined notably after that. Biserka battled to rebuild the company and recover

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the machines, saying she knew who the thieves had been, and starting a lawsuit that has gone all the way to Strasbourg. That February 2011 visit was followed by others. Nermina, Nefisa and Biserka were to me in the Drina what the Hodžićs were in Sarajevo. I celebrated Islamic feasts with them; and Orthodox ones with Biserka, joined by Nermina and Nefisa, who were Muslim. One night in the winter of 2013 when I was already living in Albania, Jasna phoned me urgently from Bosnia: Biserka had had a heart attack, she was in the hospital and wanted to speak to me. Her voice sounded weak and lifeless, but not complaining; that was not her style, and I gathered that she wanted to bid farewell just in case. She was somehow able to recover, even though she has a pacemaker now and walks around Goražde are harder for her than before. She completed a magnificent goblen for me after starting it in 2013, before the heart attack. It shows a beautiful peasant girl who is lying in the grass next to a ravine with the sea at the bottom, watching the sun set on the horizon, wrapped in thought. When I visit them now, we meet in Biso’s house, just like old times. She greets me with copious amounts of homemade food that I cannot refuse, as well as fruit, sweets and typical Drina plum alcohol that later I have to devise how to take on the plane or else give to a local friend. She has not given up on the idea of marrying me to a niece who lives in Montenegro. Aco is always a presence in our conversations, as if he were still alive. Theirs was an unusual love. In 2015, during one of those lunches, I told Biserka that I planned to write about Bosnia, about the valley and the lives I had come to know, such as hers. She stood up from the table, went to her room and came back with some poems she had written in her youth and a book in Cyrillic about Che Guevara—so I would continue practising the language. With that expression of hers halfway between serious and joking, she urged me to finish the book »so that I will get to see it«.

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The Enclaves: like Indians in the Reservations Kratine is one of the Bosniak enclaves in the Foča region. Enclaves are areas with a concentration of a national group distinct to the majority in the surrounding region. They came about as a result of ethnic cleansing, expulsions and, in general, the deep turmoil that the conflict wrought upon the country’s social fabric. Kratine is not usually mentioned on the map. It is in a mountainous area, covered in forest as far as the eye can see. The only way to get there is in a 4x4, zigzagging along a terribly twisty mountain track. In winter it is one of so many districts that becomes inaccessible. I visited a few times in 2011 with Nefisa and Nermina as part of our routine work in the field. Our arrival in modern white vehicles emblazoned with the letters »UN« and »OSCE« caused somewhat of a stir among the inhabitants of these isolated villages, barely used to seeing international representatives anymore. Some of these people still harboured the hope that you could solve their problems and improve their situation by bringing influence to bear on local authorities, often controlled by the opposing national group. Nonetheless you were also met with some sceptical attitudes, a logical result of years of comings and goings by »internationals« without things changing a great deal. Managing expectations was, therefore, a challenge. In such cases, the presence of Nefisa and Nermina was a great advantage, owing to their down-to-earth nature and the trust they had earned with these people. These visits presented me sometimes with dramatic scenes of poverty and destitution, but also moments of warm humanity, the kind which arises when good intentions, mutual curiosity and a sense of humour are all put into the mix. They also provided an intense experience, bringing one into contact with the most backward and rural Bosnia, with its customs and a genuine sense of hospitality. After taking your shoes off, the families would receive you in their humble dwellings with a soft drink, tea or water, which was appreciated in the

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summer’s sticky days and after the bumpy driving uphill. The Muslim women tended to wear veils and traditional attire. These folks were generally eager to tell you about their circumstances, posing questions for which immediate answers were often not available, such as where were the tractors promised by such and such donors, problems of schooling in remote areas and so on. Kratine epitomized the average enclave in eastern Bosnia. The houses were mostly rebuilt shacks, scattered around the hillsides next to plots of arable land, with a mosque as the social hub. There were problems with electricity supply (much of the power grid was destroyed in the war). The sparse population mainly comprised middleaged and elderly people, and the odd young family whose toddlers would follow us persistently, eyes wide open. Pretty much no one had a proper job; the families mostly lived off the soil, livestock and, at times, projects funded by international agencies that were now on the way out. The few children that remained went to school in Goražde and Sarajevo, but generally not in Serb-majority Foča—or vice versa if they happened to be Serb settlements in Goražde area. Two decades afterwards, furthering the process of refugee and displaced-person return is officially still a key objective of the stabilisation of the Balkans, and it was one of the most important parts of my job when I worked there. As with all the other unsolved files, I found out that little had been done by our office for several years. This was due to a lack of continuity in the necessary work, saturation in terms of projects and objectives, and the staff’s general apathy, together with frequent turnover of internationals like myself. The huge challenge of refugee return in Eastern Bosnia was beyond our capacity. And yet it was a priority, and I strongly felt that I had to try to make a small contribution, within our mandate and limited resources. Joining forces with Nefisa and Nermina, we focused in particular on the biggest and most sustainable enclaves, and on socio-economic rights and issues where the OSCE could make a tangible contribution through fact finding, advocacy, facilitation and the eventual pressure on the local authorities. 63

Ancient tombs scattered across the hill, Kratine enclave, © 2011, Lasheras, B.

Hence, beginning in late 2010 and for roughly 18 months I travelled to most of the enclaves and hamlets in that part of the Drina valley. While as OSCE we could generally not provide finance for assistance projects, this constant fieldwork allowed us to establish close up the inhabitants’ real situations and evaluate the options for the sustainability and viability of the enclaves, which was the key question. The goal was to guide the decisions of international agencies such as UNHCR, EU and the Council of Europe (CoE), which had less of an established presence in that region, and authorities whose policies were often designed far from the ground. We were actually in the early stages of a comprehensive reassessment of the state and future of the return process. Moreover, such visits to the enclaves, which we tended to refer to as returnee settlements, also fed into our immediate role in the field regarding human rights vis-a-vis local authorities. Enclaves and hamlets such as Kratine were a tangible, sobering reminder of the myriad of challenges involved in the return process in Bosnia and the Drina valley a decade and a half after the war. One of 64

the pillars of the Dayton Accords was the right of refugees and the internally displaced to »return freely to their places of origin«, recover their property or, otherwise, be compensated. Authorities (all) had the duty to guarantee a safe return, protect human rights and create the right conditions for the integration of refugees and the displaced. The underlying logic was one of undoing or mitigating the ethnic cleansing and the driving out of hundreds of thousands from their homes. However, Dayton suffers from, in my view, an almost hopeless contradiction. On the one hand, it consecrated the reality caused by ethnic violence by recognising the RS and reaffirmed—and even strengthened—the nationality principle as the key foundational factor of the post war Bosnian state. On the other hand, it attempted to reverse or counteract all of that by setting up powerful instruments to protect human rights and minorities, such as the direct application of international human rights treaties, a High Representative with executive powers and a military presence as guarantees against abuses by radical, ethno-centric elites. In this vein, Dayton also laid out substantive provisions regarding refugee return. In the early years after the war, restoring seized property to its owners—with some 230,000 initial requests—was generally achieved and is considered a success. Yet, more intent on turning the page than considering their roots, many owners then sold their homes while others only ended up returning during holiday periods (what we internally referred to as »summer returnees«). Then there also were cases and circumstances that were not accounted for in the grand post-war designs, like the house in Pale that belonged to the mother of my friend Jasmin. Jasmin’s parents left Sarajevo and Bosnia at the start of the war, and he grew up as a refugee in Canada. His father is a Yugoslavia nostalgic. His country having disappeared, he does not want to return to this Bosnia that he sees as misgoverned by nationalists. With one of the most brilliant young minds in the region, Jasmin told me in a Sarajevo bar how he had recently accompanied his mother on a singular journey to Pale. That small mountain town, 20 minutes from Sarajevo and today part of the RS, was once a bucolic place of leisure where the 65

city’s middle classes got away from the pollution to enjoy its magnificent views over the valleys or ski on the slopes of Jahorina, made iconic by the 1984 Olympic Games. During the war, however, the name of Pale took on a more sinister tone as the capital of Karadžić’s RS, and the place from where the Serbs led the siege of Sarajevo and planned their operations. Nowadays, the VRS command centres and bunkers that were bombed by NATO remain interspersed by bustling cafés and the Jahorina’s busy chairlifts, with simple stands offering a shot of rakija before going up again. Jasmin and his mother headed for their old holiday home, occupied since the war by two Serbian brothers approaching old age, and the son of one of the pair—all three of whom were displaced from the Federation. There was not much left of the old house, the visitors finding instead a rickety shack covered by metal sheets and piles of tyres. Sitting around a simple wooden table in a smoke-filled room after a few glasses of homemade alcohol and an awkward conversation about who had started the war, Jasmin’s mother got to the point and asked how they were going to solve »the problem«. With their pensions of a few hundred marks, the tenants could not afford to buy the house, even at a very reduced price. Nor could they swap it for a flat owned by one of the brothers in Sarajevo, as she then proposed as an alternative option; it had in turn been occupied by strangers. To the question of where they would go if she evicted them, the brothers pointed matter-of-factly to the nearby house, also abandoned. In the end, Jasmin’s mother accepted a symbolic sum of money. A few moments later, Jasmin pensively turned the key in the car’s ignition, looking in the rear-view mirror at those two strangers. He did not feel resentment, but something closer to sympathy or even pity, as they would stay behind in that God forsaken place. Overall, the truth is that, as the years passed, the reality on the ground shifted ever further away from that initially designed by lawyers and diplomats in the faraway US base at Dayton, in late 1995. Many of the displaced who decided to return avoided population centres such as Foča, and instead concentrated in isolated rural areas like

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Kratine or Tjentiste, another enclave near the border with Montenegro, where they could be a majority. The return process began to stagnate as the political initiative fell away, resources were diverted elsewhere and international influence diminished. The displaced did not really return, or did so in derisory numbers; furthermore, they were mainly old people who wished to die in their places of origin. Local authorities tend to measure the process in terms of the number of rebuilt houses (even though many of these may be empty) and thus implicitly declare mission accomplished, focusing instead on issues they care more for. Therefore, today the process is probably terminal, in spite of officialdom’s statements to the contrary. There is no real political interest, and, above all, it is far from clear if the objective laid down in 1995 is still possible anyway. The demographic, economic and social reality in Bosnia, and especially in areas such as the east and the Drina valley, is obstinately what it is. Rather than return, recent international initiatives talk about the »sustainability« of places such as Kratine and the »integration« of the displaced who cannot or do not wish to return home. Kratine and the like are certainly a freeze-frame of the paralysed return process in much of Bosnia, but they also are an illustration of the issues that bear down on the whole country. Given the lack of real progress, symbolism is the rule—even though it changes nothing. In this vein, new mosques appear in Bosniak enclaves, often thanks to Turkish or Arab funding. I found out that they are sometimes viewed with suspicion by local inhabitants, more concerned by social necessities than religious inclinations. Outside these mosques, their proud green flags ripple in the wind, but the interiors are largely devoid of the faithful, with the possible exception of the very elderly. The enclaves and their inhabitants, the perennially displaced and families who still live in run-down collective centres as a result of war and social collapse are, in a way, the big forgotten peoples of Bosnia: the blurred, fleeting human face of unresolved problems. They are the unwilling protagonists of another dead-end casefile from international

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politics and diplomacy, despite the polite obligation to mention them in declarations and statements. Some way away from the rough access roads in Kratine and Tjentiste, hidden amongst the undergrowth are some unmarked ruins and monumental stones. Nefisa said they were tombs dating from the first Ottoman era in Bosnia, at the end of the Middle Ages. I developed the habit of pulling the car to one side of the road and looking at them for a while, walking between the ruins with due caution owing to the constant fear of forgotten mines and explosives. Looking at the scattered villages from there, I could not help feeling that they were heading for a similar fate, unless things changed dramatically: disappearing in silence in spite of so many efforts to the contrary. But it is not only the multi-ethnic pre-1992 Bosnia that could end up like those moss- and earth-covered ruins, but also this entire rural realm. Both are forgotten testimonies of a previous era, like Indians on the NorthAmerican reservations.

Making home-made rakija in Tjentiste, Foča, © 2011, Lasheras, B.

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Žepa The enclave of Žepa lies in the deepest depths of a valley besides a tributary of the Drina. It can be reached via a winding road from Rogatica that usually becomes impassable when it snows. During the war, together with Goražde and Srebrenica, Žepa was one of the UN’s »safe areas« in this region. Mladić’s forces besieged and bombed it in spite of the UNPROFOR presence. The defence of the enclave by lightly-armed Bosniak forces was led by Avdo Palić. With refugees from the surrounding areas crowding inside, the humanitarian crisis within the enclave became acute. In 1995 Karadžić included Žepa in his Directive 7, which ordered the »creation of an unbearable situation of total insecurity, with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica«. After the fall of Srebrenica, representatives from Žepa agreed with Mladić to the surrender and the evacuation of thousands of civilians. Palić, a hero for many Bosnians, is partly credited with averting a massacre. In the midst of the evacuation process, he decided to return to Žepa in spite of warnings to the contrary; he was arrested by the Serbs and disappeared. After a search lasting years led by his wife Esma, his remains were found in a mass grave, not far from the one I saw being opened in Ivan Polje. I first arrived in Žepa with Nefisa and Nermina in the asphyxiating heat of July 2011. As in Kratine and other remote villages, it had been several years since an OSCE representative had visited the enclave. It was a constant source of frustration to me that the international presence could be so intrusive in some areas, and yet so fleeting in others of such importance. Work on some of our casefiles would grow or slacken on the basis of internal rotations, the interest shown by political and institutional leaders or specific experts, and our very individual commitment. All of this, coupled with the context of socioeconomic stagnation, guaranteed that we would find ourselves with more or less the same circumstances as in previous times and visits, or possibly an even greater deadlock. Thus sometimes one felt embarrassed at the 69

inevitable fanfare of turning up in EUFOR or OSCE vehicles, although we tried to keep a low profile. Amongst the different Bosniak enclaves in the region, Žepa was of great symbolic importance in the reconstruction period and had received significant aid funds and assistance in general. The village as such is small, with a central mosque, a simple café, an elementary school and an Ottoman bridge next to a lake. A few surrounding hamlets complete the panorama of an enclave in which roughly 2,500 people lived before the war, a majority being Muslims, with two or three small Serb communities. The old make up most of today’s population. When I arrived in Bosnia, Žepa was often held up as a success for the return process, but there were virtually no children and no jobs. This was the first thing brought up by Mustafa, the local representative. With his military cap, boyish face, grey eyes and unruly fair hair, Mustafa somehow reminded me of Tuscarora, the confederate in the film »Rio Bravo«. Municipal authorities were constantly criticised in such meetings with local actors of the enclaves. Naturally, mayors and councillors had their own perspective, and they pointed me to the limitations of their financial and human resources, noting that the social needs were equally pressing for all, without national distinction. They sometimes hinted that the inhabitants of Žepa and similar places had become over-dependent on international aid, a view also expressed by the Bosniak representatives in Rogatica proper. Nor were there any doctors in Žepa, which constituted a serious problem given the elderly nature of its inhabitants and its isolation. Those there had been had stopped coming for a series of reasons symptomatic of the limbo this country finds itself in. Bosnia is not only segregated along national lines, but it is also a nightmarish legal labyrinth that further hinders cohesion and, above all, stands against common sense. Although these people of Žepa lived in the RS, many still resided officially in the Federation, where they had lived as displaced persons. Among the reasons for this was the latter entity’s more generous system of pensions. In such circumstances, the RS municipalities could not guarantee free healthcare for these individuals who refused to register with the local administrative bodies. On top of this, 70

there was great mistrust in the enclaves towards Serb authorities, stretching to doctors. Beyond legal and administrative absurdities, there was also an underlying and serious problem of mentality. International assistance had contributed to the reinforcement of a dependency syndrome, partly inherited from the previous State, together with a sense of victimhood. Notions of rights and responsibilities proper of State-based rule of law were difficult to implant when faced by such an ingrained mindset that extended even to our mission. This way of seeing life is, in my opinion and beyond the legacy of the war, at the root of many of Bosnia’s problems as a modern society. I collided head-on with that mentality after months of talks and facilitation between the authorities in Rogatica and Žepa’s representatives with the aim of restoring the provision of basic healthcare, which would also be a step in the right direction towards better coexistence. Essentially, the then mayor of Rogatica, a polite man from Dodik’s party, promised to send a mobile medical team several times a month, covering the costs, as a transitory arrangement. Meanwhile, the local health care bodies would start to carry out a needs assessment of the enclave and similar areas, for future healthcare planning. Mustafa agreed that it was a good deal and the basis for a more sustainable health care provision, and offered to put it up for public discussion with the locals after Friday prayers. That sounded in principle like a good idea to me, though perhaps I erred a bit on the side of naivety. So, for the umpteenth time, we returned to Žepa, on an overcast day of March 2012. After slowly making our way along the snow-covered road, we reached the enclave just as the fog was lifting. The men were coming out of the mosque and chatting in groups. The grim local café where Mustafa had fixed the citizens’ meeting was shrouded in smoke from the fireplace and tobacco. The place filled up with middle-aged men and a few elderly gentlemen who were seated on benches. No women were present. We drank thick Bosnian coffee, as there was no rakija served there—although, in retrospect, it would actually have been a great help. Presently a young man with sideburns and short hair entered, dressed a little more fashionably than the rest,

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in a leather jacket and high-necked sweater. He acknowledged me politely and sat down on the opposite side. I noticed that he received shows of respect from those present. Mustafa presented him to me as Žepa’s imam, and I wondered, somewhat uncomfortably, how come I had not met him before. After a few phrases in the local language, I used English to explain the bases of the agreement with the mayor and why I thought it was an opportunity, also underlining the benefits of abiding by the legislation and administrative processes of the RS. Mustafa backed me up, stressing that in the long term Muslims would have to take an active part in local politics in the RS and thus boost their influence. Some saw it differently, harking back to the war again and again, and how the Serbs wished for the complete disappearance of Bosniaks. Suddenly, an old man wearing a beret got to his feet and, walking stick aloft, he raised his voice to recount in detail how they had survived the bombardment of Žepa and how now they would »hold out to the end«. At some point I thought he would beat me with the cane. Then the imam courteously asked to be allowed to speak. Without waiting for the answer and without a break in his kindly smile, after praising my interest in Žepa, he announced in a sterner tone that they would accept the deal »for the moment«, but that there would be no more »concessions« regarding their rights. There is the real authority in this town, I thought, above and beyond elected local representatives like Mustafa. And he was subtly marking his territory before me. Long story short, my transitory agreement survived a little while after I left Bosnia. The medical team returned to Žepa and tended to its inhabitants, who, I heard, seemed to appreciate this. But later I learned that things ended up returning to the starting point, once there was no one there to mediate between one side and the other, bothering both.

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Easy Rider: Miodrag and Angelina He wore the only black cowboy hat in the Upper Drina Valley. He had intensely blue eyes and a look that oscillated between intelligent and sardonic that revealed the young bounder hidden behind that wrinkled face. His untamed and voluminous grey hair, with some uneven brown streaks, was joined to a long beard, trimmed to a goatee on special occasions. Cigarette in mouth as he toured the Rogatica area on his old black Honda, Miodrag was a remarkable character. His life revolved around the motorbike, his roof-mending skills and the rabbits he sold for a few marks apiece. He was more like something out of the film »Easy Rider« than the ramshackle and claustrophobic collective centre where I met him in early 2011. He was living among displaced persons, homeless old people and those with no resources whatsoever in a lost village in the Drina valley. Miodrag was among those who were squatting the old Zgrada Narodnog Univerziteta in Rogatica, which had been a school in another time. This desolate building looked as if it might collapse at any moment, and conditions inside were unhealthy and utterly squalid. The chipped walls of the corridors were full of damp patches and cracks that criss-crossed the faded paintwork. The inhabitants shared the old public toilets, from where they obtained water, and lived in rooms converted into family flats. Spending some hours in there amidst the lingering malodour and hearing close up the life stories of those left behind was a brutal reality check. You felt seized by anxiety and an impulse to run out of there, out into the morning sunshine and fresh air, as Senada, one of our Office’s staff, had eventually to do in one of our visits. Nefisa and Nermina seemed nonetheless oblivious to it all.

Miodrag and his motorbike, in Rogatica, © 2011, Lasheras, B.

Collective centres were the other side of the deadlocked return process coin. Many of their inhabitants—around 7,000 when I arrived in the country—were originally displaced persons who had not returned to their places of origin, and were instead living in these precarious circumstances. Apart from the visible columns of refugees crossing borders that filled TV screens, the war had also seen buildings and public centres opened up in the countries involved to shelter those internally displaced. Years passed and what had been a temporary solution became permanent. Many of the people in those centres had been unable to rebuild their previous lives, losing contact with their birthplaces and often also the legal status as displaced persons, required in order to benefit from financial aid. Such people stayed put with the clock of their existence stuck in the 1990s, together with others who were from no place in particular and the socially disadvantaged in general. Some displaced families who lived in such places did eventually return to their towns and villages, but others, for different reasons, failed in that integration process and ended up going back to dives such as 74

»Zgrada«, now their only real home. For municipal councils, still having collective centres on their patch was a kind of stigma, sometimes leading them to shut one down hastily and move its occupants to places that were similarly bad and euphemistically called »alternative accommodation«. The inhabitants of these centres were also among Bosnia’s forgotten ones. You were unlikely to bump into them in a town centre and bustling social areas. Instead, they tended to remain stuck in slum-like conditions, some still waiting for assistance to arrive; others indifferent and sunk into their world, or frustrated by their circumstances. Some would receive you with curiosity and expectation, grateful for the mere fact that there was still someone prepared to listen to their story. In hindsight, I think that we were like plumbers of broken countries; mending pipes and plugging leaks in an endless series of inadequate and temporary fixes for problems that depended on higher levels over which we had close to zero influence. In fact, mending drains was literally one of the few practical achievements I managed in these collective centres and similar places, interceding with and pressuring local authorities when water pipes burst, or sewage inundated the least salubrious of centres. These communities suffered acutely from the country’s chronic deficiencies in infrastructure and public services. With the pressure we applied and a constant balancing act between severity and rakija, the authorities would finally take some form of action—but not before making you pass through Byzantine processes that would disorientate anyone. The reports we wrote then about these collective centres fed into a broader international process joining together institutions such as UNHCR, EU, CoE and the countries affected. It aimed at their definitive closure and the creation of »sustainable« solutions for their inhabitants, especially the most vulnerable. The project seemed to advance remarkably slowly, probably due to international bureaucracy and the specific dynamics of the Bosnian limbo. For years of visits afterwards, I felt depressed in view of the lack of progress, thinking that many of these inhabitants I had met could end up stuck there 75

until they die. By 2017 the definite closure of the remaining collective centres finally seemed to move forward, albeit slowly: perhaps one potential positive story amidst general paralysis and the otherwise failure of the return process in Eastern Bosnia. There are, though, other big little, if less known, success stories. The actress Angelina Jolie, very involved with Bosnia, visited Zgrada and met its inhabitants in 2010 in her capacity as UN Goodwill Ambassador. Her arrival caused a stir in a country, let alone a region such as the Drina valley, which is hardly over-accustomed to glamour. Several ministers travelled in atypical haste all the way from Sarajevo in their official cars with dark-tinted windows just to meet her during her tour of the Drina. Jolie attracted funding from an American NGO and other donors, to build a social shelter into which Zgrada’s inhabitants would be moved. Miodrag’s new home, »Villa Angelina«, opened in November 2011. Jasna and I were at the act in representation of the OSCE, and during the speeches by the mayor and various ambassadors, I heard a cry which appeared to say my name and then saw Miodrag running towards me among the crowd. He had neatened up his beard and was wearing his cowboy hat, as always. In the midst of his effusive embraces, I realised that he had anticipated the toast, and he invited me to drink from his hipflask, smiling all the while. At last he was going to get out of »that hole«, as he put it, thanking me repeatedly. I confessed that he owed his gratitude to the beautiful Angelina, and also perhaps to Nefisa and Nermina, and other NGO activists, who had followed his case for some time, providing info to donors. But Miodrag’s smile did not waver and he insisted; he said that he appreciated that I had cared about his situation, a message I also got from other inhabitants of the Zgrada. I went back to »Villa Angelina« in mid-2012, taking Miodrag some coffee cups with our photo of that day together printed on them— Jasna’s idea. The noise of his Honda anticipating his arrival, Miodrag was not wearing his cowboy hat but was instead sporting a yellowed bandage that covered half of his hair. Apparently, he had fallen from a roof he had been cleaning a few weeks earlier. As manic as ever, and 76

after the obligatory hugs and jokes, he said he wanted us to see more of each other and drink rakija together—and by the by I could also buy the odd rabbit from him. I smiled over the sorrow I felt inside. I was mainly there to say goodbye, already with one foot in Albania. But I didn’t want to spoil the moment, so I kept mum over my leaving Bosnia.

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Miodrag and the author at the opening of the Angelina centre, Rogatica, © 2011, Pekić, J.

PART III MEMORY, AMNESIA AND GEOPOLITICS »Let us govern ourselves, as if nothing bad has happened« (Isocrates)

Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge (Višegrad), in winter, © 2012, Lasheras, B.

Bakira and the Lukić Family: Hell in Višegrad Wrapped up inside her brown coat, Bakira Hasečić gesticulated furiously. The look on her face hardened, at times erratic, her blue eyes shone darkly and the wrinkles on her forehead stood out. She had straight, blonde hair and broad cheekbones. On the rare occasions in which she smiled, vestiges of an erstwhile beauty now drowned in bitterness appeared momentarily. Dragging intermittently on her cigarette, Bakira ranted about how the authorities in Višegrad and the RS wanted to complete »the genocide«. To her rear stood a house of several floors, derelict and overgrown with weeds that clambered over the bare bricks and the grey-black walls, like those left behind after a blaze. On that cloudy December day, the house was a sombre presence. Arms crossed in defiance, Bakira said that that tottering »gallows« would be demolished only over her dead body. Women from her NGO and TV cameras ferried in from the Federation recorded the scene as if it was a reality show. A few neighbours looked out of their windows for a second before popping their heads back inside. The occasional passer-by paused briefly before walking on. I was there taking notes, feeling uncomfortable due to the presence of cameras registering every second, every word. Bosnia’s sensationalist press thrives in and feeds off real or imaginary controversies, further straining situations that are delicate enough as they are. Sucking deeply on one cigarette after another, huddled inside his leather jacket, hands in the pockets of his jeans, Vlado stood beside me, listening to Bakira’s diatribe and keeping his thoughts to himself. His melancholic blue eyes seemed more vacant than ever, although you could read his expression once you got to know him. His house was just a few blocks away. I suppose it was an awkward situation for him, or perhaps he felt indifference after going through these same experiences over and over again. The Bosnian routine.

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We were in Višegrad as representatives of the OSCE in a public process regarding the expropriation of that house in Pionirska street that the authorities wished to demolish to build a road. Bakira and her organisation, the Udruzenje Žene Zrtve Rata (Women War Victims Association), opposed the plan and accused the RS of trying to wipe away the memory of this site. The Pionirska ruins were of great symbolic value; in that place dozens of Bosniak civilians had been burnt alive in 1992. I had only a tenuous grasp on the facts. I often found myself mediating in matters in which I did not always have enough information and, moreover, there was no corner of eastern Bosnia without its quota of tragedy, anyway. Both that ruin in Pionirska street where Bakira was making her stand and another in nearby Bikavac street are still famous in the modern history of international crimes. In June 1992 Milan Lukić and his cousin Sredoje, both from Višegrad, together with other Serb paramilitaries, shut dozens of Muslims into those buildings, including women, children and the old. They threw grenades inside, set fire to the houses and shot anyone who struggled to escape. Zehra Turjacanic, the only surviving victim from Bikavac, testified how on getting out of the flames she saw Serb soldiers lying in the garden, drinking as they watched the scene unfold. On sentencing Lukić in 2009 to life imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity for these and other grotesque offences across the region, Judge Patrick Robinson said: »In the all too long, sad and wretched history of man’s inhumanity to man, the Pionirska street and Bikavac fires must rank high. At the close of the 20th century, a century marked by war and bloodshed on a colossal scale, these horrific events stand out for the viciousness of the incendiary attack, for the obvious premeditation and calculation that defined it, for the sheer callousness and brutality of herding, trapping and locking the victims in the two houses, thereby rendering them helpless in the ensuing inferno, and for the degree of pain and suffering inflicted on the victims as they were burnt alive.« In 1992 Milan Lukić was a member of the Beli Orlovi (White Eagles), a paramilitary unit that has been linked to Šešelj’s Radical Serbia 82

Party, and to which some of the worst massacres in Croatia and Bosnia have been attributed. Just as in Foča, ethnic cleansing in Višegrad had a profound impact on a population that had been majority Muslim. Between two and three thousand are considered to have been killed in the massacres of Višegrad. The 16th-century Ottoman bridge of Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha—who came from the region—around which the generations of Andrić’s novel revolve, is picture perfect; majestic under the snow, and magnificent on bright spring days when the surrounding mountains and hillsides burst into colour after yet another winter. The proud arches have withstood centuries of fortunes and adversities, from the natural world and that of mankind. At rainy times, brown waters surge downwards, dragging trees and other detritus which smash against the bases of the arches. On calm days the waters regain their greenish hue, lapping at the blackened moss-covered stone, foaming into eddies. After praising the vizier, the words on a plaque in the kapia13 ask of Allah that the bridge »be strong, its existence spanning happiness and never knowing sorrow«. Sadly, the bridge has known sorrow indeed. These river waters have inspired legends of vilas (fairies) but some phantoms are all too real. A visitor might not read this in the tourism guidebook or on information websites, but this old bridge bore witness to the sadistic murder of many Muslims by Milan and others, who threw them over the parapet. Typing the names Milan and Lukić into an internet search will elicit images of a young man of strong build and an arrogant smile. He appears along with other paramilitaries in wartime photos, emblazoned with skulls and other Chetnik symbols, proudly posing for the camera with their automatic weapons hoisted over their shoulders. In other lurid photographs those paramilitaries can be seen dealing brutal beatings to a group of people, undoubtedly Bosniaks, who lie on the floor, covered in blood and visibly terrified. Years later in The Hague,                                                              13

In his novel, Andrić refers to the kapia as the part of the bridge located in the middle where »it widened out into two completely equal terraces placed symmetrically on either side of the roadway and making it twice its normal width« (Andrić, Ivo, »The bridge on the Drina«, Dereta). In BCS, it means gate.

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where he was sent after his 2005 arrest in Argentina, Milan seems to have aged, with thinning hair and a sunken face. But he still has that expression that hovers between dangerous, vain and slightly stupid. The personalities of the Milan Lukićs who proliferate during these conflicts calls to mind Hannah Arendt and her vision of the banality of evil—but not exactly the meticulous civil servant along the mould of Adolf Eichmann, who conscientiously draws up the procedures and plans for trains carrying victims to Auschwitz without feelings in one way or another. Rather, Milan seems a different beast: he is your fairly normal or even quite friendly neighbourhood guy, often out of work, struggling in female matters too and dabbling in petty crime. One character you would easily run into the local beer hall. Just like in the Suva Reka massacre during the Kosovo war (1998–1999), recently recreated in Depth Two by the Serbian director Ognjen Glavonić, some of the victims know him and even have had friendly dealings with him. Once he has power, though, he transforms into a mixture of a demon and a gangster transfixed by an orgy of slow-motion violence, absurdly gratuitous and with no hint of mercy or hope for victims consumed by anxiety. The war did not only empower the baje, the kleptocratic caste from the final years of Yugoslavia. It also gave rise to one of the—many— great tragedies of the conflict: it gave identity and power to villains such as Lukić, the like of whom people may otherwise never have heard. One of the fundaments of Serbian and Croat irredentism, like for most nationalisms, is the myth of the hero of a threatened people. Many Serbs honour, often with official support, Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices in the Sarajevo assassinations. Princip merchandising is on display in Belgrade, nowadays along with images glorifying Mladić, Putin and the Russian annexation of Crimea. The historian Christopher Clark says in The Sleepwalkers that Princip and those young men of 1914 were »made of that sombre, youthful stuff, rich in ideals but poor in experience, that modern terrorist movements feed upon«.

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Those in the Black Hand14 and the Serbian deep state of the early 20th century did this very effectively. Coming from unhappy homes and stern backgrounds, they were imbued with the romantic sense of the martyr’s sacrifice against tyranny. However, the Lukićs of the 1990s were different from the Princips of 1914, despite coming from the same region, drinking from the same irredentist stream and also being backed by Belgrade. They were sadistic criminals and mercenaries, many times clang to the bottle, and who for some reason or another had this streak of extreme, fascistic xenophobia in their DNA. More than waging war, the Lukićs and their kind engaged in extortion, organised crime, mass murder and rape. They raped Muslims like Bakira and her daughter. Because, in this conservative society, rape carries with it the irreversible stigma of dishonour, many victims do not admit to it for fear of being ostracised. In Višegrad, the rapes are associated with places such as the Vilina Vlas hotel, today a spa devoid of any reference as to what took place there, and also the setting of the film For Those Who Can Tell No Tales by the Bosnian director Jamila Žbanić, which tackles the issue. A number of rape victims ended up committing suicide. Bakira is a highly controversial figure. She attacked Carla del Ponte, then The Hague’s prosecutor, for not including charges of sexual violence in the Lukić case (due, it seems, to procedural errors). She also stoked the controversy surrounding the Angelina Jolie movie In the Land of Blood and Honey, which portrays a love story between a VRS officer and a female Bosniak prisoner in one of those centres. Apparently, she had not read the script before criticising it harshly. Some victims blame her for monopolising the concept of rape victimhood. Others say that she has a damaging impact on Bosnia’s already polarised politics. They might have a point. From my perspective of brief encounters with her, I saw a broken woman who, unlike the Hodžićs and others, felt hatred or rage, or both at the same time. Her fury did                                                              14

Also known as Ujedinjenje ili smrt (unification or death), the Black Hand was a Serbian nationalist organization created in 1911 to promote unification of all territories inhabited by Serbs. Working as a secret society, it was connected with the Sarajevo murders of June 1914.

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not relent over time. In one of our conversations, my friend Jasmin described Bakira as a kind of Malcolm X of Bosnian victims. »We prefer silent victims, like those silent African children so far away; easy and manageable. You might disagree with Bakira, with her inflexibility and her actions. But she points straight at the wound,« he said. That wound was still open years after the war, becoming gangrenous rather than healing. During that 2011–12 period, Višegrad’s authorities, then led by Dodik’s SNSD, eventually agreed to exempt Pionirska from the expropriation order. I do not know whether they did so due to our presence, because all they actually wanted was to build a road, or as a gesture of respect for the victims’ memory. In any case, in Bosnia and the Balkans, these kinds of cases tend to fester and are rarely resolved, reappearing or taking a turn for the worse every now and then. In 2012 the SDS returned to power in Višegrad. To be honest, these days, there is no difference between Dodik’s SNSD and the SDS when it comes to Serbian nationalism. Nonetheless, the new authorities ditched the approach of distant, ambiguous silence of the former municipal team and embarked on an active offensive against history. Some such local politicians began to more openly espouse that vision of parallel reality in which victims such as Bakira were the killers who had tortured Serbs in a Višegrad assaulted by Bosniaks. The expropriation process started again, and Bakira returned to Višegrad to defend the ruins. Normally so slow to react to social problems, the local authorities and civil servants took effective action in defence of the nationalist narrative. When victims wrote the word genocide on a plaque in the nearby Muslim cemetery of Straziste, the town hall apparently mobilised dozens of riot police to stand guard while their staff painted over the forbidden word. The victims struck again, this time writing with lipstick, and the authorities erased it once more. This symbolic duel with paint brushes and cosmetics in cemeteries is a pathetic metaphor for one of the key problems in the former Yugoslavia; the absence of a shared memory, with the resulting visceral confrontation of narratives. Through so many battles and controversies, the indomitable Bakira is wilting like the dry flowers that can be seen nowadays at the

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entrance of the Pionirska house, now restored and made into a monument to the victims. The charred walls and overgrown ruins on that plot that I knew have disappeared. In their place, there is a house painted brilliant white with curtains in the windows. This battle, with the symbolism of flowers of memory, has, for now, ended in a victory for Bakira, even if a Pyrrhic one at that.

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Bilo, pa proslo and the Cacophony of Genocide These days, many young Bosnians see things differently to Bakira and her generation. Consumed by the present, like their politicians, their concerns are different and more pressing than a past they do not know all that well—and, what’s more, what they do know tends to be a biased take provided by Bosnia’s segregated education. The fact is that in a country where it is almost impossible to find work on the basis of personal merit and without stela15 survival and making ends meet counts for more than a dramatic and confusing past, one that generates so much controversy. The largely apolitical majority of the populace focuses on guaranteeing their way of life and that of their immediate circle within Bosnia, or prepare emigration to the West. Moreover, many Bosnians also prefer enjoy the material, if uneven, perks of modern consumerism that is also part of their lifestyle nowadays, rather than wallow in bygones—especially if these do not immediately affect them. Moreover, at the political and civil society level, some emerging voices favour a fresh start and promoting a Bosnian identity that does not have the war, victimhood, the genocide and its stigma as its sole reference points. Campaign groups, such as a cosmopolitan Sarajevo minority prioritising the antiauthoritarian struggle or LGBT rights, do not really wish to live constantly weighed down by the past. There is a popular saying that you often hear and that goes bilo, pa proslo (something akin to »let sleeping dogs lie«), reflecting a mentality that is rather predominant. Either because of resignation, apathy or indifference, many Bosnians do occasionally shrug their shoulders at the usual controversies related to the war and the past.                                                              15

Bosnian term referring to the intricate network of contacts and personal favours that lead to jobs, promotions and so on.

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But still the public space is dominated by an entrenched, vicious circle formed by ethnocracy, xenophobia, political passivity and structural tensions that impedes the development of a truly democratic culture. And certain interest groups and forces keep stoking the embers of the past. This dynamic of constant tensions and division over the war is very damaging to Bosnia, and it also works as an excuse and a brake on the tackling of problems such as the social crisis and poverty, or democratic pitfalls. Whilst in Foča I ended up thinking of a certain pattern of a cacophony of genocide. At its bottom: the mediatisation and manipulation of the war and events that happened then, by political and religious elements linked to ruling classes in order to keep their grip on power, creating an atmosphere where everything was easily dubbed as »genocide« or an attempt to exterminate the other. As a result, the odd, random act of vandalism or the least significant act was presented so, in the most sensational way possible. Media outlets controlled by politicians or their oligarchic connections, tended to blow such events up out of all proportion; and likewise, though with exceptions, some Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim religious authorities. In my time there, many of these community leaders all too often behaved like arsonists during a fire, keeping the narrative (and their faithful) under control just as the politicians controlled their discourse (and their voter, clientelist base). This atmosphere also silenced those voices in favour of concord at a local level, undermined the positive experiences of coexistence, and made reconciliation even more difficult. Such polarisation contributed to an atmosphere which, like a selffulfilling prophecy, could lead to a rise in incidents and acts of retribution and reprisal against enclaves, minorities and vulnerable groups, putting at risk a coexistence that was imperfect indeed—but often less toxic than what you read about in the news. Several years afterwards, this kind of politics still retains its undue influence in the country. It is a manifestation of another facet of the banality of evil described by Tony Judt in The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe: the frivolous abuse of terms describing absolute evil, such as terrorism, Nazism and gen-

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ocide, which, upon constant, smothering repetition, ends up devaluating them and hindering our understanding of their deeper meaning— and, with it, thereby our ability to prevent them. Cases like, say, Pionirska may thus be emptied of substance by the welter of sensationalist headlines that, in addition, sometimes twist the facts. To make matters even more difficult, there really were, and are, what in the legal jargon are known as »hate crimes« and overall racist violence in this country, commensurate with high doses of hate speech. We had to remain on alert in the OSCE and its regional field offices, for these types of incidents and possible attacks against minorities and the displaced, especially at election time. The tide was against us because the rhetoric of the past and nationalism of Dodik and others were already gaining ground, once more unbound. Beginning around the late 2000s, the West and its institutions were losing influence and credibility with the elites, who calculated, rightly, that the internationals and EU leaders had other more pressing priorities, in the midst of the euro crisis and a shifting foreign policy agenda where Bosnia and the Balkans did hardly feature anymore. The economic situation was also dreadful, so the placebo of nationalistic politics was too tempting an option. Whether justified or not, the fear of conflict and ethnic violence eventually returned to some political and diplomatic levels. Foča and the Drina region, even if mostly a forgotten area, periodically gained visibility again as »sensitive«, along with places such as Mostar. This was the case when, shortly after my arrival in the Drina valley, we had to follow up on a series of hate incidents, including vandalism in the Muslim cemetery at Tekije, in Foča, and several of the region’s mosques, including the Ali Pašina, at the time the only one in the town centre. The press tended to inflame the situation, and, in these circumstances, it was common that the institutions and police either shut themselves off or belittled the significance of the events. Concern over political and mediatic manipulation was logical and patent. In turn, among multilateral organisations and Western diplomats, the fear of any recrudescence of any form of conflict and distrust as to whether a section of the political class would act responsibly were and are still .

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factors to be borne in mind. On the ground, we partly shared that fear and partly felt it was sometimes overdone. Uncertainty better captured our mood regarding the appearance of stability and indolence in the valley. Be it as it may, you could not underestimate any incident, particularly in an area like the Drina, with the perhaps remote but distinct possibility of being ultimately responsible for unpardonable errors of calculation further down the line. But you could never be sure who was telling you the truth when these cases happened, tensions flared up, and you had to go out there to establish who did what and why, and work on prevention accordingly. Many of the incidents we followed up on in our region seemed inchoate. Some cases were not what they appeared at first glance, less so as depicted by the news. Rather, they seemed to spring from local power struggles, poisonous personal relations or need by some actors to draw public and media attention, or all at the same time. These inconvenient stories you would not find out through police or court reports, but from putting in overtime with local informers and other sources, even police chiefs who did trust you, fitting rumours with established facts—almost the only things you could trust. Many other incidents in our region and other parts of Bosnia, were basically episodes or variations of the nihilistic, often random violence similar to what you can find in many European capitals. The culprits tended to be local youths for whom a Muslim or a Serb are the unknown and loathed Others, or drunken hooligans or social groups alienated from society. True, there was and is plenty of that violence in the Balkans, but so there is in the rest of Europe. At work in Bosnia there were also additional factors such as the mutual ignorance of neighbouring communities due to segregation, a profound socioeconomic deterioration and a political system that ultimately glorifies xenophobia. These were probably the root causes of such incidents, the elephant in the room that, sadly, we only approached tangentially in what is yet another absurdity of the international framework of post-war Bosnia. After a time monitoring such incidents across the valley like a powerless investigator, I decided to somewhat shift the focus. We had to invest more decidedly in projects aimed at boosting cooperation to 91

prevent such incidents and the ensuing tensions, including measures and proposals that could promote social cohesion between different communities and actors—and, also, on naming and shaming those who manipulated ethnic incidents. Some of these proposals did raise some eyebrows, as they went somewhat beyond our mandate. Squareminded staff at the mission seemed to see their areas threatened by new approaches, or just did not see the point. Nevertheless, I enjoyed support from other corners at the HQ and even, occasionally, from other departments at our office. These initiatives ended up being a priority for me, together with return process and the work on collective centres, especially in the final stretch of my time in Bosnia. They joined civil organisations, young people and authorities from both State entities, bringing together Krsmanović and his counterparts from the Federation, with greater or lesser success. Our local partners, the police and, most notably, young Bosniak and Serb activists from places such as Foča, Goražde or Višegrad placed a higher value on these encounters and grassroots initiatives than other projects of institution building and else, we spent considerable time and money on. Alas, as with other areas I worked hard on, they probably died down once external engagement disappeared. It is unfortunate that the international community has not yet committed itself more to reconciliation and inter-community relations in Bosnia, de-ethnicising politics and building upon specific success stories and experiences—albeit isolated ones—at a local level. Stories just like the ones we worked on with civil society and authorities on both sides of the IEBL. It is all too easy for such positive stories to go unnoticed by the media. They are drowned out amid the cacophony of war, which serves more powerful and influential interests than ephemeral good intentions.

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Looking the Other Way: the Conspiracy of Silence If it was a cacophony of war that ruled over the polarised political realms of Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Mostar, in the small towns along the Drina, and particularly in the RS, mostly silence reigned. The war as such was hardly ever discussed, let alone the crimes of the past. In retrospect, I think of it as a sort of conspiracy of silence, unconscious or instinctive, which could be seen and gathered both from official language and the daily attitudes of ordinary people; Serbs, for sure, but also many Bosniaks. In a way, it reminds me somehow, with all due nuances, of the context of Germany after World War Two as portrayed in the 2014 film, tellingly titled »Conspiracy of Silence«, about the relative silence concerning Nazism’s crimes at the dawn of the Cold War. The idea at the bottom seemed to be that forgetting and non-commemoration would help to heal wounds, laying the foundations of a new future. Several years later I wonder what was really behind the silence in these rural communities in eastern Bosnia, periodically broken by the eventual controversy, each one’s tributes and the incidents I referred to. Fear and anxiety may have been a probable cause in some levels. Another factor could be the logical tendency of a society that had barely emerged from a destructive experience, a collective reaction of shock, and the concomitant denial of unconceivable crimes, especially when they are attributed to relatives, acquaintances or otherwise characters seen as role models and heroes. Within this siege mentality and particularly when the pressure comes from external actors, most Bosnian Serbs still see themselves as the principal victims of the conflict.

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Ruins of Mehmed Paşa Kukavic mosque, Foča, © 2016, Lasheras, B.

Through wilful disbelief, ignorance, delusion or simply as a result of swallowing whole the nationalist logic peddled by the media and politicians, many Serbs in the Drina either do not believe crimes were committed by the VRS and paramilitaries, or on that scale or they relativize them, comparing Srebrenica with cases such as that of Josanica, near Foča. Surprising developments of international justice regarding war crime cases against Serb civilians, involving the KLA (UCK in its Albanian initials) and the Croat leadership during the 1995 Operation Storm contribute, logically, to feed such perceptions. But beyond these controversies and the positions of Serb victims’ organizations I met, my impression is that many RS citizens basically seemed to look the other way when the issue of massacres came up, or when people like Bakira came to the region. Like those folks briefly peering through their windows in Pionirska street when we were at the spot, only to soon pop back inside. Perhaps it is just a self-defence mechanism. The writer Stephan Hermlin described how, in Frankfurt cinemas during the brief period of denazification imposed by the Allies, many in the audiences looked away during the entire screening of films and documentaries about Nazi atrocities. To be sure, the Serbs are by no means alone in looking the other way: many in the other

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nationalities in the Balkans do that too. Focusing on your own suffering and that of your loved ones while denying or minimising the experiences of others is a widespread attitude in conflicts (and essentially an inherent part of the human condition). This is especially the case when the Others’ pain and suffering rock some of the fundamental convictions of our very existence, including the notion of a higher moral ground. For example, Bosniak victims’ organisations such as the Mothers of Srebrenica do not seem to consider cases of crimes against Serb civilians in the region between 1992 and 1993, often attributed to groups of irregulars and units connected to the Bosniak commander Naser Oric. A hero for many Bosnians for his defence of the Srebrenica area prior to July 1995, he was cleared by The Hague on most, though not all, of those charges. Together with one of his subordinates, in 2017 Oric was also acquitted by a Bosnian state court for the killing of three Serb prisoners of war in 1992, on grounds of insufficient evidence. This ruling came to the dismal of many Serbs (and not only) who think he should be jailed for war crimes, while strengthening Dodik’s narrative against Bosnian state institutions. Likewise, in Kosovo the idea of trying crimes committed by the UCK against the Serb population in a new court in the Netherlands has met with wide social and political rejection. In Pristina you also hear remarks that these were »past issues«, uttered by members of the new generation otherwise active against the corruption and abuse of their own ruling elites. In hindsight, perhaps there was no great mystery beyond that logic of denial, also reinforced by an incipient revisionist tendency in the Balkans. Perhaps it was just a big dose of that brutal and primitive part of human nature called survival, with the additional particularities from the Drina context. The past was too uncomfortable to be talked about and it called the current order of things and stability into question. If in post-war Germany many Germans half-watched those films because it enabled them to get more ration cards for bread and soap, Drina valley people learned »generation after generation, not to mourn excessively what the surging waters had washed away«, as Andrić narrates.

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Revisionism, Geopolitics and Stones in Srebrenica It is, however, a fact that there are political leaders and sectors in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and beyond who seek to stir those waters, and live off the results. Their aim is often not to protect memory, but rather to alter what the Drina carries downstream and rewrite the past, thus controlling the present and shaping the future. Historical revisionism is an old phenomenon from Europe’s darkest times but it is relevant again today, not only in the Balkans, but also in the rest of the continent. In the so-called post-truth era, it is part of a broader confrontation with geopolitical and ideological dimensions, and which finds fertile conditions in the Balkan wars of the 90s, or even earlier conflicts in the region. Rewriting and altering established historical facts, this revisionism creates a parallel pseudo-reality that blocks any chance of a minimally shared narrative and thus of reconciliation. It reinforces that brand of extreme and xenophobic nationalism, which, discredited after the war, seems now unbound again. Dodik is a leading exponent of this phenomenon. Well briefed by Western lobbyists and with his canny knack of transmitting populist messages that keep the international community at bay, he denies the Srebrenica genocide, in his own words, »the biggest lie of the 20th century«. Dodik constantly puts forward the idea that »all« sides committed crimes during the war (true) as a basis for absolving the VRS and its then leaders in Pale and Belgrade of responsibility for some of the most heinous war crimes, even if these have been firmly established by courts. Promoted by a media machine and other tools common in an autocratic regime, on other occasions this discourse focuses exclusively on the suffering of the Serb population and cases such as Josanica or killings of Serbs in Bratunac and nearby villages in 1992. These would also be genocide and therefore similar to Srebrenica, the massacres against Bosniaks in Foča and Višegrad and their systematic, 96

comprehensive ethnic cleansing. Hence, this political language blurs the singular nature of these atrocities while their architects, great and small, are exonerated or recycled as heroes. Dodik spoke out in favour of Karadžić as a role model for the RS on the eve of the latter being convicted by the Hague in 2016, and he participated as a witness in Mladić’s defence case, denying at The Hague that there was an official policy of ethnic cleansing. Along the lines of nationalist and right wing parties in Serbia, Dodik called Mladić a »war hero« and a »patriot« after The Hague tribunal issued its ruling, which he predictably derided as an »insult« and a »slap in the face against Serb victims«. The objective is often the same as that of all major nationalist leaders since the collapse of Yugoslavia: absolute political control via the defusing of any threat to their power, through the cynical recourse to nationalism and populism. In nowadays’ Bosnia, this takes place against the backdrop of heightened confrontation of Dodik with State institutions over corruption cases affecting him, while the RS gets poorer. Dodik and other demagogues are joined in their historical reinventions by Croat apologists for the other big criminal scheme against Bosnia: Greater Croatia. In neighbouring Croatia, today a European Union member State, there are also political forces and historians who justify or glorify the fascist Ustashas and related groups, in spite of their crimes. These voices are apologetic of war crimes committed in the 90s by Croats against Serbs or against Bosniaks during their internecine war (1992–94). Hence, while some Serb leaders deny or minimise Srebrenica, other Croat figures play down the Croat concentration camp of Jasenovac, set up during World War Two—the equivalent of Auschwitz in the eyes of many Serbs and other nationalities— or deride, in similar terms to those used by Serb nationalists, The Hague’s rulings against Bosnian Croat war criminals (rulings that also confirm the role of Croatia under Tudjman in the Bosnian war).16 Beyond the Balkans, well into the 21st century, revisionism has returned to Europe with a vengeance, reminiscent of earlier periods.                                                              16

A extermination camp run by the Ustashas during the Second World War, with most victims being Serbs, Roma and political opponents.

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With Donald Trump in Washington and Vladimir Putin in Moscow as their points of reference, Europhobic movements sweeping a weak European Union propagate similar visions of History, which also periodically include the end of Yugoslavia and the war. This phenomenon is a threat to Europe’s pluralist democracies and to stability, and it also has global ramifications. It is a sad pattern that anytime the Balkans make one of their fleeting returns to the international stage and high level diplomacy, it is almost always as part of a ferocious, broader power clash, including history as a geopolitical weapon. In this regard, the role of Putin’s Russia, rewriting the history of the USSR and also the pillars of European security with its annexation of Crimea and its fanning of war in Eastern Ukraine, is key. In July 2015 and in response to a request by Serbia, Russia vetoed alone a Security Council resolution that aimed to mark the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre and, in accordance with established jurisprudence, called it a genocide. This came shortly after Russia had also been the only country to veto the creation of an international court to deal with more recent historical developments—the MH17 aircraft shot down over Ukraine, blamed on Russian sponsored mercenaries (and eventually Russian military proper) using Russian heavy weaponry. Anyway, with the arm of the then Russian ambassador, the late Vitaly Churkin, raised to say nyet, the UN once again failed calamitously in Bosnia, the more nationalistic and less democratic Russia and Serbia scored, and Moscow drew a red line again on the Balkans, putting the West and the EU on notice. Churkin’s raised hand triggered ripples far from the refined diplomatic circles of New York and the rich décor of the Waldorf Astoria’s Salon de Vile, though. Rural Bosnia awoke from its slumber a few days later in greeting Serbia’s prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, with a hail of bottles and stones as he arrived at ceremonies held amid great tension in Srebrenica, today part of RS. Vučić had to be shepherded away. On a visit more or less at the same time, I could sense palpable tension in the country after months of controversies on Srebrenica, involving the RS and Serbia, followed by the UN hammer blow. Perhaps many Bosnians do not see the Vučić hailed by the European Union as a 98

statesman, despite growing concern over his authoritarianism. Maybe they still see and hear the young member of the Serbian Radical Party—the towering, dauphin of Šešelj who visited the besieged Sarajevo during the war and famously said that »for every dead Serb there will be 100 dead Bosnians«. Occasional gestures such as depositing flowers in Srebrenica, while valuable (whether sincere or calculated, or both, that is a different topic), as Vučić did, do not easily balance out that whirlwind of controversies and negative language. It is a difficult case to make that international justice has helped to turn the page on the war or pave the way to reconciliation. Despite some heavy sentences in the convictions of Karadžić, Mladić or Lukić, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia could leave a bittersweet legacy after its effective closure in late 2017. The final years of its existence will be, rightly or wrongly, also remembered for surprising sentences, such as the questionable acquittal of Šešelj, also in 2016—barely a week after the sentencing of Karadžić—of all charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This decision was harshly criticised by democratic forces in Serbia, the UN prosecutor and other international lawyers, who argued that it contradicted previous rulings. As a general rule, all Balkan nations share a perception of partiality and selective justice. In fairness, perhaps this is inevitable after several brutal wars, with trauma still so near at hand and political elites many times keener on these festering wounds than on public service. In those circumstances, full, comprehensive justice is probably chimeric and, as such, will irremediably disappoint all concerned. I see the aged Mladić shouting pathetically at the calm but steadfast judge Alphons Orie, »Vi niste sud!« (This is not a court!). Just a few days later, I see Slobodan Praljak, one of the Bosnian Croat leaders of the wartime pseudo-republic of Herceg-Bosna, braying, in front of the Hague Tribunal that was confirming the guilty verdict against him and other Bosnian Croats, how he is not a war criminal as he swallows the poison that kills him. A televised suicide that gave him worldwide notoriety. And with these final acts of drama, the curtain comes down on The Hague Tribunal. 99

Amnesia and Reconciliation? In Postwar, Tony Judt wrote that Europe’s surprising recovery would not have been possible without the collective amnesia that predominated after World War Two. A shared and selective forgetfulness was the price to be paid, although he did warn that part of that past would return »in discomforting ways, fracturing some foundational myths of the post-war era«. Traumatised societies pass through periods of intellectual vacuum and silence. Many in Bosnia do not really know how to discuss the 1990s, just as their parents and grandparents were unable to talk about that World War whose tracks were quickly and superficially covered over. At this stage, it is worth pondering whether Bosnia could make progress with a certain dose of selective forgetfulness, aside from justice being done in emblematic cases such as those of Karadžić and Mladić. Such a turning of the page would not be based only on justice or only on forgetting, but on a commitment to different processes of reconciliation. Some Balkan civil society organisations try something of this nature, and join forces across the borders between Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Ideally, this should be coupled with a wholesale reform of the education system that helps erode the toxic blend of segregation and nationalism, with future kids growing up in environments that do not glorify war criminals and that imbue them with values of diversity and tolerance. To mitigate that past would maybe help strengthen a new agenda that tackled the democratic deficit and social issues, paving the way for a different politics. Perhaps the answer partly lies in the passage of time and the emergence of new generations who will one day approach the past with a sense of perspective, just as those young Germans in the 1960s and ‘70s challenged the conspiracy of silence that then reigned in their country.

Martyrs’ Memorial Cemetery Kovači, in Sarajevo, © 2010, Lasheras B.

Sadly, current tendencies in Bosnia, the Balkans and Europe as a whole do not invite much in the way of optimism. The collective amnesia described by Judt does not seem possible in a hegemonic political system that partly lives off the polarisation of memory and, what is worse, the revisionism that I have described. Even if Serb and Bosnian locals working together these days in Goražde do not wish to talk about the war, and prefer to focus on jobs and ordinary life, some of their political and religious representatives do not seem to wish to do anything but. Over in neighbouring Srebrenica, the young Mladen Grujičić, elected in 2016 as the first Serb mayor since the war, sticks to the mainstream nationalist and spin by his boss Dodik and denies that a genocide took place there, in the very scene of the crime. He does strike a conciliatory, inclusive tone when international media are around. Alas, he predictably condemned the ruling against Mladić,

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noting that the Serb nation was »grateful to him for saving it from persecution and extermination«. Many young Bosnians grow up in essentially parallel societies, lacking memory and absorbing nationalism, though they do question at times. There are thus clashing narratives at play: Srebrenica, Josanica, Oluja, the NATO bombings in 1995 and 1999, etc. Such profound clash of narratives is brilliantly captured in the few minutes’ discussion, on a hotel roof, between Vedrana, a Bosniak journalist, and a modern day Gavrilo Princip, in Death in Sarajevo, a 2016 movie by Danis Tanović. Within the thin layer of Balkan civil society, very differentiated voices can be heard. And nowadays you also see politicians such as Serbia’s Vučić and his equally tall Albanian counterpart, prime minister Edi Rama, promoting together a fraternal discourse and tapping each other in the back in front of cameras. But the different sides’ hooligans still create conflicts and are trapped in that default logic, just like the usual violence at football matches. It is hard to gauge whether Balkan societies are accepting of this new, inchoate rhetoric, whether sincere or practical. And, notwithstanding gestures between Albania and Serbia to kickstart their relations, the real reconciliation should take place between the warring parties: Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and between their different national and social segments. Perhaps, memory can be only the flowers at Pionirska; good and bad memories evoked on winter nights and passed down from generation to generation through the testimony of people such as Ifeta and Biserka, or written on lonely plaques, dulled by the passage of time. It may be, however, that the only real way to a better future is via a social and political change that eradicates the most rotten elements of a system that churns out war, kleptocracy and oppression; a change that delegitimises revisionism too. A true spring revolution.

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PART IV THE EUROPEAN SPRING THAT DOES NOT COME

Romanija road through Ivan Polje, in Fall, © 2017, Lasheras, B.

Nights of Pussy Galore In the movies Pussy Galore is the mesmerising and attractive woman of wavy blonde hair, deep blue eyes and fleshy lips that stares straight at a James Bond made groggy by some narcotic in Goldfinger. In Sarajevo it was a bar frequented by the underground minority, the LGBT community and foreigners like me. It could be found at the bottom of some narrow steps in a dark alley in Baščaršija, next to the river Miljacka. It was a meeting place for Balkan youths who belonged to underground culture and society. With its vanguard and provocative style, rather like bars and joints in Madrid’s Malasaña and Chueca districts, the Pussy (as we called it) existed in a wholly different dimension to the paralysed country outside its door. It was not stuck in the past of inconclusive dramas, but rather appealed to the spirit of Warhol, pop culture, hedonism and sexual liberation. The Pussy was a haven in many ways for a goodly number of people, Bosnians and foreigners. For gays and lesbians, it was a freedom shelter where they could show their affections without fear, something that remains difficult in the asphyxiating public sphere of that nationalistic and xenophobic Bosnia outside the Pussy’s door. It was also a refuge from the dictates of the community, that have so much influence over people’s lives in Sarajevo, sunk between mountains and wrapped in a thick layer of fog, coal smoke and high pollution; a city overwhelmed by another layer as thick as it is invisible, made of tedium and existential frustration. In Bosnia, and especially in Sarajevo, the Turkish word mahala, meaning community or neighbourhood, is used to essentially describe the rumours and gossip that circulate in a small setting where you always end up meeting the same people, and where privacy is at a premium. Sarajevo has great charm, but its other side is a mixture of postwar sadness, boredom and a small town style, greedy desire to know the secrets of other people’s lives and infidelities. There is also a certain superficiality about some of the social bonds. Less cosmopolitan and progressive than before the war, in nowadays Sarajevan society 105

there are unwritten rules forcing to keep up appearances and adhere to social and religious conventions, just as in any provincial town. Everyone’s tawdry realities are perhaps common knowledge, but they must be kept hidden, just like many of those Bosnians who are permanent fixtures at the same café terraces do, even though they may live hand to mouth, hardly earning enough to pay the gas for the old German cars they drive back and forth. Or like those Muslims who are God fearful, public mosque-goers by day and adulterers by night. The truth is that this atmosphere ends up impregnating foreigners too. In a way, the Pussy was thus an escape to all that. I discovered the Pussy through my second year in Bosnia, at a moment of personal crisis in which I needed an escape valve from life in the valley, Foča and all of those people’s lives that had so deeply entered into mine, absorbing it completely. The winter that brought the 2012 Great Snowfall, burying Sarajevo and cutting off many towns and villages, worsened my state of mind to the point that not even the Hodžićs’ harmony and kindness was enough. Days were short and dark, and anxiety was there constantly. For a time, Sarajevo’s underground nightlife and, especially, the Pussy filled that void, often in the company of Toribio, a Spanish diplomat, great friend, charmant and lover of life, Bosnia and Bosnian women (the attraction was mutual). The contrast between rural Bosnia, the Drina and my work in the field, and the demi-monde of the Pussy and other joints was colossal, and often counterproductive. But I still waited eagerly for the moment when, on Fridays, I could drive to Sarajevo and, at midnight, cross the river and make my way down those snow-clad steps that led to the green, red and purple neon lights. With the sound of indie music in the background, the mysterious door would open—it always did— and invite you to lose yourself in a bohemian ambiance full of smoke, sensuality and chemicals. I met figures from modern, underground Bosnia who also popped up from time to time in social protest movements, like Lejla, the friendly lesbian waitress, engaged on human rights causes while struggling with her own tendency to nihilism. At other times, some of these people were rather indifferent to the politics outside, so absorbed were they in their individualist bubbles. Part106

bar, part-nightclub, the place attracted also many wandering souls, often times Westerners allured by the Balkan region and its distinct reality: a Balkan dimension where everything seems to flow to a different rhythm and yet where you can perhaps feel life and be alive more intensively than that which you call home. Some of those souls end up staying years, lose any notion of time and become locals, while others depart, though still looking back now and then. There are, of course, other kinds of atmosphere in modern Sarajevo. This is the case of the conservative Islam, now in fashion, of those narguile bars where no alcohol is served, where women dot veils and profuse make up, and which seem to imitate the social conventionalism of Erdogan’s Turkey that Bosniak ruling elites court, even if they do so with mistrust. A feature also in other Eastern European countries, there is also the shady underground that has grown up around the mafia and organised crime, which often brings together excombatants and former paramilitaries, powerful during the war and after it. That realm can be found in some the city’s clubs, bars and discotheques where until recently rows and shootouts were commonplace and that are thus best avoided; places which Toribio and I did roam around now and then, in the midst of drinking bouts with some of our Bosnian friends. The Pussy vanished sometime after I left Bosnia halfway through 2012. The club reopened in a different venue, with a new name and where I hear that drugs and outcasts are still the order of the day. But every time I return to Sarajevo and take my nocturnal walk by the Miljacka, I cannot help pausing awhile beyond the railings of that little street in Baščaršija, gazing anxious at those stairs and that door, now closed in silence, showing growing signs of decay and neglect. I cannot say whether I look in the hope that the neon lights will flicker back into life and that The Knife’s »Pass this on« will play again, or with the suspicion, like Bond before the dazzling Pussy Galore, that it was all a dream.

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Babies without ID, Flames in Tuzla and Sarajevo Berina Hamidovic’s was one of those anonymous lives that are destined to play an important, if ephemeral, role in certain political and social moments in history. Lives emerging momentarily from the darkness and the indecipherable network of Matrix, often against their will, they contribute to igniting a chain of events that then follows its own dynamic. These initial protagonists tend to be swallowed up once more by anonymity and often forgotten altogether. In 2013 the nationalist factions in the State Parliament were clashing, as is their custom. On this occasion, it was over a reform of the law governing ID documents. The dispute was centred upon the 13 digits that make up the Jedinstveni matični broj građana (JMBG), on the basis of which ID documents and passports are issued. Essentially, the Serbs wanted a numerical formula that recognised the distinct nature of the RS, something the Bosniaks opposed. Due to the resulting paralysis, the legislation annulled by a previous ruling of Bosnia’s Constitutional Court could not be renewed and babies born during those months did not receive their documents. On their very arrival in the world, the ethnocratic Bosnian State was abusing their fundamental rights as new citizens. This could have been just another of the Bosnian system’s long list of political controversies that border on the absurd and whose only logic generally lies in petty calculations by elites, that add up to the country’s paralysis. It would have given rise to the usual declarations followed by the predictable and impotent diplomatic condemnations before culminating perhaps in a midnight deal that changed just enough to ensure that nothing really changed. But, just this time, something unexpected took place, momentarily breaking the pattern and catching the main actors wrongfooted. Mothers and babies took to the stage to play their unrequested parts in this tragicomedy and 108

suddenly roused the otherwise apathetic Bosnian society into the first wave of fury of its kind since the war. That June the mother of Belmina Ibrisevic, a girl who urgently needed a stem-cell transplant abroad and had no passport, blocked the doors of Parliament, demanding a solution from the political representatives. Some three thousand people came out fast in support of her cause. The protest grew; even though the authorities offered the issuance of temporary IDs and thus an ad hoc solution to cases such as Belmina, demonstrators demanded lasting solutions and broader political changes. Taxi drivers and other citizens blocked off the building’s exits and pushed back inside anyone trying to escape, leading to pathetic situations such as the then PM of the state government, Vjekoslav Bevanda, sneaking out of the parliament by a back door. Meanwhile mothers with prams stationed themselves in front of Parliament. Berina, however, was less fortunate than the other girl, dying in Belgrade at the age of just three months after waiting for hours in an ambulance at the border due to a lack of papers. Her parents blamed the Bosnian authorities for her death and the fury mounted further. In death Berina won the identity that the State would not grant her while she was alive. This was the start of the so called »Baby Revolution« (also referred to as JMBG protests or Bebolucija), ignited by the abusive nature of the ethno-nationalist system made plain with something as essential and as basic as babies. The context was one of deep, pent-up frustration amid mass unemployment and lack of better prospects. The social segments that participated in these protests ranged from leaders of NGOs to young activists and ordinary citizens, coming together in a movement of peaceful civil disobedience and direct pressure against politicians who were unused to it. I happened to be visiting Sarajevo after a long drive from Albania, to join Toribio’s farewell party and felt curious looking at the crowds in front of Parliament, which included my Pussygalore’s Lejla. It was the first time I had seen Bosnians in the streets protesting matters that went beyond their own particular or sectorial interests, whether protests from war veterans to retain their social stipends or nationalists gatherings. The demonstrations 109

nonetheless petered out after a few weeks, without a single political resignation. Yet the spark flared up again soon after, this time literally and with violence. In early February, 2014, the flames rose first in Tuzla, then in Sarajevo, Zenica and other cities. This second wave of fury put Bosnia briefly back in the international news spotlight, of course with the predictably hollow associations of the country to »conflict«. Very significantly, the biggest protests in the country since the war had nothing to do with nationalities, but with latent social problems. This »Bosnian Spring«—such was the term used by some—initially kicked off with the protests of workers in Tuzla affected by the controversial privatisation of factories in an area that had once been an important industrial centre with a relatively harmonious multi-ethnic environment (during the war Tuzla was probably the only town not ran by nationalists). They were demanding compensation and overdue wages, and accused the authorities of blanket acceptance of privatisations with a high social cost. Somewhat similarly to what was going on at the Maidan protests in Ukraine then and other anti-government mobilisations elsewhere, tensions between protestors and the police rose, in large part due to initial violence on the part of the latter. The demonstrations spread and earned support and shows of solidarity from other parts of the Balkans. Rage was unleashed against public buildings and symbols of the system, such as the headquarters of the Tuzla canton government, the Bosnian presidency and official cars, thrown into rivers amid calls for the »thieves« to resign. For many Bosnians taking part in the protests and riots the flames seemed to represent a moment of catharsis and empowerment, with the irony that in the war they had defended several of the buildings affected, at great sacrifice. The protests widened in scope and diversity of participants, catalysing people’s weariness with politics, the social crisis … and hunger. The activist Sumeja, looking at several banners waved at peaceful demonstrations outside the Ali Pašina mosque, said that Bosnia was »a hungry nation that had lost its dignity«. Several ministers at the canton level resigned, an unprecedented event.

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Public discussion at the plenum in Sarajevo, during the protests of 2014, © 2014, Lasheras, B.

The political elites started to react, first with a newfound surprise and alarm, then with the usual incompetence and clumsiness; and later by predictably trying to delegitimise the protests and the groups behind them. Dodik claimed to detect a Bosniak nationalist tone against the RS and, like a good autocrat, mobilised »popular« counter demonstrations. The Bosnian Spring fast developed into experiments with radical and utopian democracy, similar to those experienced in other quasirevolutionary protests or moments. It did remind me of the 15M movement in Spain, in 2011. In the sports halls and arenas of several cities, plenums, or popular assemblies, were rapidly constituted and became one of the most fascinating elements of the process. Their shared purpose was to unify positions and draw up a collective political and social agenda, alternative to the dominant one in Bosnia until then. The social spectrum within those plenums was a wide one, from leftist groups and activists to workers, pensioners, the unemployed and citizens in general. Their demands were manifold and included the elimination of the cantons and formation of technocratic governments. Much of nowadays’ Europe, embroiled by the populist logic 111

and the loathing of technocratic EC and IMF troikas intervening countries’ politics and their sovereign budgets, has contempt for technocrats and experts. Yet some in Bosnia would rather be governed by them than by politicians. To wit, the panorama was not entirely one of idealism and revolutionary concord. Different political and social perspectives were made patent, from what I witnessed listening to the diverse grievances paraded at the plenums. The weeks went by and the street protests gradually died away. Fear of instability was there too. The lower classes and social groups most affected by marginalisation were, largely speaking, the protagonists in incidents that called to mind other episodes of urban violence seen in Europe. Brief but intense, this early violence was met with anxiety and rejection by a large section of the population. This was true of the Hodžićs, for example, who, in our conversations about this, evoked images of other flames fresh in their memories. But, predictably, as the violence ebbed, so did the fear among the ruling elites. For their part and in what some of their participants criticized as a strategic miscalculation, the plenums steered decidedly clear of the institutional path and established parties, which allowed those elites to reorganise effectively. As in other contexts, once the initial binding moments among different groups and individuals passes, merciless normalcy re-asserts itself. Perhaps such an effort in democratic and social radicalism was too ambitious for a young and fragile Bosnian protest movement. Perhaps post war Bosnia lacks a sufficiently shared social fabric, with its sense of purpose. Perhaps the measures that the plenums demanded were not realistic given the amount of powerful interests lined up against them and the country’s generalised political passivity. The latter was clearly what most seemed to irritate Sumeja, seeing powerless how the numbers of protestors diminished while Sarajevo’s café terraces remained as busy as ever, in that unusually sunny February. Of the three and a half million people in Bosnia, according to the 2013 census, more than one million are employed in some capacity by the various public administrations that proliferate here. Additionally, some note that around half of Bosnia’s households depend one way 112

or the other on the stela system, meaning they are reliant for their socioeconomic wellbeing on favours or contacts with someone somewhere in one of the various levels of government, related companies or friends’ businesses. These people have little reason to wish for sweeping changes to such a clientelist system that they rely on in order to subsist and perhaps thrive. Probably, the political elites were just waiting for the waters to run smooth once more. And, ironically, they were aided in this regard by the holding of elections later that year. Holding elections is a totemic checklist item for many international diplomats and mercenaries of conflict management. Yet in much of Eastern Europe and the postsoviet space, bar profound reforms of the rules of the game, given clientelist networks, oligarchic media and high abstention rates, elections tend to cement powerholders. They often put a brake on any challenges, rather than paving the way for social and political change. Key Bosnian leaders also expected that the West and the European Union of today, still fearful of conflict in the Balkans (an Achilles heel), weary of renewed problems from this region which distract them from priorities, and uncomprehending of the Bosnian context, would sooner or later decide to make some form of accommodation with the ruling classes. That is what they usually do, and what pretty much seems to be happening on this occasion again.

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Europe’s Eleventh Hour »So what you are trying to put into action is a French Revolution!« These were allegedly the words of a worried diplomat visiting the plenum in Tuzla, along with a high-ranking EU official in February 2014. European reactions to the protests oscillated between anxiety, calls for »political leadership«, appeals that »the will of the citizens« be heard and deadlocked reforms be carried out, together with calls to refrain from violence. There were also a few extemporaneous references, symptomatic of the total disconnection from the significance of the moment. In the early days of the protests, the current High Representative, the Austrian diplomat Valentin Inzko, famously hinted that the European Union would have to send more troops to Bosnia. Some European diplomats in Sarajevo I met with those days did see the demonstrations and plenums as a moment of opportunity to straighten things up with the country’s spoilers and perhaps reinvigorate a democratic reform agenda. On the whole, the other side of the coin in those flames that February was the unacknowledged failure of years of international and EU’s policies in Bosnia; a failure both of excess and absence. The former due to not having turned Bosnia into an even minimally functional and well-governed State despite two decades of intense tutelage (a protectorate even), Dayton and, in later years, the continued accommodation of the elites, with massive funds, political perks and high maintenance. And then there was also the failure borne of absence— of »Europe«. Around the same time in the Maidan of Ukraine—thousands of kilometres away in a country still outside the scope of EU enlargement—Europe was a relevant, galvanizing concept and a model to emulate. No such thing was really present in a Bosnia officially with a »European perspective«, that is, part of the enlargement and integration process. The EU was a secondary factor in what arguably was the country’s first political moment since the late 1990s.

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Worse still, for many protesters the EU as such was part of the problem, perceived as being accepting of or even in cahoots with the very system the demonstrators planned to eradicate. The Bosnian Spring brought to the fore the winter for the international community in that country and its political bankruptcy. Apart from questions pertaining to the EU specifically, overall the protests represented yet another serious warning as to the dangerous dead end reached in Bosnia. The flames and unrest confirmed that there was something amiss in the country’s state of affairs. Hence »something« had to change, and that had to mean a new international approach, among other things. That was as far as the consensus among Western and European actors went. For some EU member States, the solution was to accelerate the process of Bosnia’s integration into the EU, still viewed as a panacea for such ills. For others, deep political reforms were needed first, including insisting on fundamentals such as rule of law and good governance, as well as socioeconomic measures aimed at tackling social unrest. While the protests briefly reignited debate at some policy levels over a possible reform of Dayton and its institutional labyrinth as a solution, few supported the idea of a sort of »Dayton 2«, even a limited version of that. It was not seen as politically opportune, either in Brussels or in Washington; and, more importantly, there was no will to do it. The last factor remains key; there is presently no real political ambition to get truly involved in Bosnia again. The West that spawned Dayton has disappeared, although there remains its legacy in the region that no one knows how to handle. Nowadays’ priorities are different. Still, after the Bosnian Spring, officials and governments felt that the EU had to articulate some kind of response—perhaps an intermediate path—also as an act of self-reaffirmation amid concern over the renewed influence of Moscow in Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans. In the autumn of 2014, Germany and the United Kingdom took the initiative and came up with what in diplomatic jargon was presented as a resequencing of the EU’s priorities on Bosnia, which would now mainly focus around socioeconomic reforms. Strict human rights 115

compliance and the demand that the Bosnian State comply with the famous Sejdić & Finci vs Bosnia sentence from the Strasbourg court— hitherto a core EU condition for Bosnia’s accession process—were unofficially relegated to secondary importance. The EU would leave aside for the moment the more »political« and constitutional questions and, essentially, apply further its customary approach to transform countries in transition, for which the commitment of elites to reform is crucial as they are granted a leading role in the process. Under this approach, carrots and incentives are seen as the main way forward, instead of sticks—seen as counterproductive and unnecessary. The renewed focus on socio economics, it was argued then, would be crucial to tackle other inherently political matters—labour laws, etc.—and thus eventually boost change in subtler and less controversial ways. Once measurable progress in reforms in these areas was confirmed, the blocking of the EU’s Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) would be lifted. The proposal, though officially welcomed, was met with very mixed reactions. For some local activists, foreign pundits and some European governments it felt like déjà vu: here was the EU again bargaining cheaply with its basic standards of rule of law, such as nondiscrimination, in order to placate a Bosnian elite who would give nothing in return. The sentence in Sejdić-Finci, a case brought and won by a Sephardic Jew and a Romani, meant the need for a reform of the passive suffrage system enshrined in Bosnia’s Dayton Constitution that, per its ethnocratic inspiration, still discriminates against minorities and even Bosnians who only wish to register themselves as such, thus belonging to the Ostali group (Others, that is, citizens who declared themselves as non-Serbs, non-Croats and non-Bosniaks). To some that targeted reform could be the seed of a more civic constitutional system that would help to overcome the worst elements of Dayton and evolve towards a more citizen based system. Other diplomats countered, not without cause, that eternal constitutional debate was counterproductive and actually strengthened the hand of leaders like Dodik and his Croat equivalent, Dragan Čović, with his campaign from Mostar for a third entity in the Bosnian State. 116

The emphasis of recent years on Sejdić-Finci as a red line of the EU’s conditionality had yielded no result, while the country’s paralysis worsened. A Plan B was therefore needed. Pundits noted that it was actually the umpteenth plan laid out by the EU since it assumed institutional leadership in Bosnia in the mid-2000s and that it was more of the same approach that had failed. By the same token, others privy to the European Commission (EC) led facilitating efforts on the implementation of Sejdić-Finci said with scorn that EU officials had not tried that hard to cajole Bosnia’s leaders and then got distracted with Ukraine. There were also doubts over whether the initiative was really designed with Bosnia’s needs in mind or rather as a function of internal, self-referential European politics. Whatever the case was, truth is that the European approach gave virtually complete control of the reform process to the same elites that had been blocking them for years. Advocates of the initiative argued that this would help put them directly in the spotlight and enhance public accountability. But apart from eleventh-hour pressure from the IMF, there were no new, EU measures in place to prevent the usual political games of Bosnia’s ruling elites. So the EU was asking Bosnia’s leaders to be true statesmen swayed by the common interest, and not by their clans and sectorial concerns—in a nutshell, to be both better leaders and better persons. A friend from Sarajevo summed up the difficulty of this idea in the Bosnian context: »What is the point of promoting leadership among the elites when their politics borders on fascism?« In any event, at the end of 2014 the EU formally ratified this »new policy« and since that time has argued for a firm rooting of Bosnia’s destiny in the EU’s enlargement process. Upon an initial declaration by the Bosnian leaders—largely drafted and negotiated again by foreigners—that they would commit to reforms requested by the EU, the SAA entered into force in 2015 and EU »re-engaged«. The last few years have seen the same old Bosnian politicians adopting various commitments and declarations after major pressure—some say supplications—from key European leaders when they visit Sarajevo and Banja Luka. Alas, in Bosnia such documents are »worth the same as 117

toilet paper«, as one veteran activist puts it. The actual priority is to retain »the momentum« and, above all, the European script, even though those who blocked agreements over the 13 ID card digits remain unmoveable. In a way, the »hour of Europe«, as described in an ill-fated declaration by Luxembourgian politician Jacques Poos in 1991 that the then new EU could manage the unravelling of Yugoslavia, repeats itself, but without a climax. For now, a EU in Brexit and self-doubt era seems so far determined to avoid another official failure in Bosnia, but in a subtle and more pragmatic way: just talk about success and not the factors that actually undermine it, spinning the lack of any alternatives to »Europe«. Politics which, just as in the euro crisis, seems synonymous with a lack of genuine ideas and with a bad management of crises and unexpected twists when the script unravels. So, blinded some, besieged by doubts others, Bosnia, member States and everyone else march behind that policy in time to the music, as in the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

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Road to Nowhere: Edith’s Diary »This is a historic day for the European journey and future of BosniaHerzegovina, and especially for its young people«, the State prime minister, Denis Zvidzic, declared in September 2016. Noting »substantial« progress in reforms, the member States of the EU had at last agreed to process the membership application presented with great pomp the previous February by Čović in representation of the collective Bosnian presidency. The country was officially advancing toward the Union, leaving the past behind and distancing itself from the problem-country group of Kosovo and Macedonia. But as tends to be the case in international politics and diplomacy, the key lies in what statements do not say as well as in the small print. It was ironic that the prime minister should refer to the youth because they have been voting with their feet for years now and emigrating from the country. That same week, crushing figures were published on emigration in 2015, which was particularly high in the 25–40 age group. Almost one-third of the unemployed was less than 30 years old in a country where the average salary is around 400 euros. The lack of jobs and an appalling, segregated education system are crucial factors in young Bosnians’ emigration to »Europe«, which in fact, for many of them, as well as for many Serbs and Kosovars, tends to mean Germany, Italy and Austria. At around the same time EU leaders gave that green light trumpeting progress, literacy statistics emerged showing Bosnian rates to be similar to those of a developing country, and worse than those of its neighbouring States. According to these data, scarcely 12% of the population has been through higher education and almost a third is practically illiterate, in a country where agriculture is still a prominent sector. Such a social structure would seem more appropriate in a semi-feudal system rather than in a post-industrial development stage.

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Despite some economic growth, a series of additional reports, also in 2016, threw up yet more worrying data about Bosnia’s structural problems and cast yet more doubt on its future if things don’t change substantially. Bosnia may be moving towards the Union, but internally disunity is being consolidated. In June 2016 the results of the 2013 Census—the first since the war, and the ethnic cleansing—were finally released. Not recognised by the RS authorities, the census paints a dramatic picture of a country with a reduced population and completely segregated in ethnic terms—with changes in the negative of between 50% and 100% in the Bosniak population of eastern Bosnia and the Drina, confirming the effectiveness of ethnic cleansing. A country almost unpopulated in rural areas in the east, south and parts of the west. Meanwhile, acting as if it did not exist, EU ministers made no mention in their statement of the elephant in the room: Dodik’s referendum held shortly afterwards, in September 2016, on the maintenance of the RS holiday on 9 January (founding day of the RS and also an Orthodox festivity) that had been ruled by Bosnia’s Constitutional Court to be discriminatory of minorities. Dodik went ahead despite warnings from the High Representative, who stated that this vote amounted to a breach of Dayton, and, more importantly, despite Bosnia’s Constitutional Court. Though actual figures are unclear, turnout was low but those who voted overwhelmingly backed the RS’ stance. To some, this would be the gateway to another referendum on state institutions Dodik opposes, and even on the entity’s secession. Others posit that such secession threat is a bluff. The United States slashed personal sanctions on Dodik in the last days of the Obama administration. The blow struck by the RS leader confirmed the near demise of any international authority in Bosnia, including that of the EU, which refrained from any sticks (this would have meant a failure of its ongoing »new« approach), and also of the notion of effective state authority in Bosnia. Indeed, as is often the case with such plebiscites and in spite of its democratic façade, the referendum was indicative of the law of the jungle imposed by Bosnia’s autocrats and populists. There is little 120

rule of law in this country officially on its way to joining the EU but where neither international nor domestic human rights sentences or constitutional court rulings are complied with. On this one also, Dodik is not alone. Looking to the future, these developments may be a warning sign, or confirm a pattern in politics elsewhere, especially in view of the EU’s perceived impotence regarding authoritarianism in politicians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and his Polish counterparts. Putin’s Russia has increased its influence in Bosnia, and the RS in particular, through a mixture of ties with elites, business and structures—including the security apparatus—and historical revisionism. It blocks the country’s Euro-Atlantic perspectives as it backs—though not unconditionally—characters like Dodik, tools and puppets in Moscow’s pulse with the West. Turkey and the Gulf States are also embedded in the political and social life of Bosnians; and the jury is still out whether they are transforming society’s customs and making it less cosmopolitan. In the end, the »Europe« that is visible is not that much the EU, but rather Germany, Austria and perhaps Italy, just as it used to be in the old days. Real influence comes not from normative conditions, grandiose statements and EU’s multi annual programs, but, it seems, with money and the IMF’s loans, upon which Bosnian politicians and oligarchs depend to keep their system working and clients in business. Discussions in recent years to lever this financial pressure when reforms are blocked, as a more practical alternative to Dayton sticks or sanctions, have so far led nowhere. The West—in particular the EU—is therefore trapped in the Bosnian limbo too. Trapped between a flat-lining Dayton that is still applicable in all of its negative aspects but in none that helped keep Bosnia afloat and contributed to progress in the post-war period, and a Europe that is not there, self-absorbed. Alas, true, a Union which promise does remain relevant somehow for the country and region as a whole (whether to stir progress or prevent matters from going worse, it is a different discussion). For its part, the EU continuously reiterates its commitment to the enlargement process in the midst of Brexit, Europhobic parties, outbreaks of anti-immigrant sentiment and with its 121

eyes on Trump and other foreign policy crises. At the same time, it talks about »reforms« but fears French revolutions and Bosnian springs. It wants stability, almost at any cost. In these circumstances, the disconnect between the rosy EU jargon on »progress« and actual developments on the ground seemed to widen in the years after the 2014 policy reset which followed the protests. By 2017, as I learned in one of my visits to Bosnia, there was a growing recognition that the so called reform process was essentially dead, with local commentators referring dismissively to the main EU rhetoric and the way some senior European officials spin it »like Soviet apparatchiks«. A point shared by some Sarajevo based European diplomats too, who noted with sarcasm that Bosnian leaders had seen »many Mogherinis coming and going«, and were skillful at fooling VIP foreigners, while doing business like always. The hollowness of any solid EU approach these days is amplified by the self-interested actions of several of its member states, not least Croatia. Zagreb meddles in its neighbour’s politics as any other spoiler, while some of its most senior politicians defend Bosnian Croat war criminals as heroes. I walked around Sarajevo reflecting on how none of the German, British or French diplomats I had met during the 2014 and early 2015’s considerations of the new policy were no longer in town nor worked on Bosnia anymore. Meanwhile, the common folk in the square around the BBI center and across Marshala Tito avenue seemed completely aloof from all this, I learned, sceptical of any change and of their country’s future. The crowds of February 2014 in the same streets were long gone and seemed a distant, unreal memory. It is difficult to conceive that things will change a great deal in this Bosnia run by the same caste of autocrats and populists, boosted again by the 2016 local elections amid even higher abstention rates. For new voices like Jasmin, the system is essentially one of mafia capitalism designed »to accumulate wealth in the hands of political leaders who

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Views over polluted Sarajevo, from the fortress of Bijela Tabija, © 2014, Lasheras, B.

are united, despite their pretend differences, in impoverishing the people they rule«. I recall a scene in the novel written by Andrić—a Yugoslav, above all else, although many people nowadays try to claim him as theirs—, set in 1913, of a political conversation between youths on the kapia of Višegrad’s bridge. The young nationalist Stikovic is arguing with Herak, a socialist, and, boasting in front of the girls, paraphrases all of the pamphlets that were swallowed whole in the cafés of irredentist Belgrade at that time. Proudly, he says: »The social problem in the Balkans has always been resolved by national liberation movements and wars«. Herak contradicts him and expresses a fear that, without changes in social and economic structures, »like a deadly contagion, the new States will be controlled by an exploitative few and their parasitic and reactionary mentality and their antisocial instincts«. One hundred years on, the socialist was clearly right. At this stage, international policy on Bosnia has atrophied. As a Spanish diplomat who knows the region well pointed out, the Orwellian language on Bosnia of today’s EU is ever-more similar to that of the character in the Patricia Highsmith novel Edith’s Diary. In the book, Edith describes in her diary an ideal life that has nothing to do 123

with a reality in which her husband has left her for another woman and her son becomes a drunkard. So far, the difference lies in the fact that at least Edith shows some signs that she does not wish to be completely disconnected from the reality which is inexorably forming around her.

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Epilogue Return to Goražde Some time ago I returned to Goražde with my friends Vanessa and Marc to visit Biserka, Nefisa and Nermina. It was a sunny spring day, unlike that grey wintry day in which I first arrived at Biserka’s house. Her balcony was once again bursting with flowers and plants, and the living room irradiated feminine elegance, with photos of us and of Aco displayed on a chest by the window. She was older but she still smiled broadly when she saw us getting out from the car. Nefisa, with the same shining face and dark eyes, had attained the singular beauty possessed by mature women. She spoke hopefully about Serbs working for some of the local companies and new investment in the region. But she frowned on mentioning the political tensions in the country, just around the time of the referendum called by Dodik. Shortly afterwards, UNHCR terminated her contract, and Nefisa had to register for the Employment Bureau, five years before her retirement age. After lunch and toasting to everyone’s health—Muslims, Serbs and Bosnia itself—Biserka came up with another request. She wanted me to help her win her case in Strasbourg, and being a smart businesswoman, she let a proposal drop: »Borja, if you sort out this Strasbourg thing, I’ll give you a car. Think it over now. There could be a car for you, here.« Later on, I started the motor, reversed and took a last look at Biserka, standing in front of her house and the basement where she and Aco had their business. Heading in the opposite direction to that which I took to come here that distant day in 2010 with Alidja, we took the highway towards Sarajevo, via Romanija. We passed by the Serbian Novo Goražde, with its Orthodox cemeteries and its victims, and with its shelters, inhabited by families fully dependent on social welfare. The posters of Mladić, which had popped up after his arrest in 2011, had gone. The road twisted and twined next to that River 125

Drina that first widens and then narrows, casting the banks by the towns into shade. From houses with low-hanging wooden rooves, barns and workshops, and the odd rebuilt mosque, blurred faces gazed momentarily towards our rental car. The sun was setting when we the reached the high planes of Romanija, heading for the mountain pass that leads to the capital. We drove through Ivan Polje, the place where I had visited a mass grave in woodland years back. I could recall with exactitude the track leading to that clearing. On the radio they were talking about another of Dodik’s provocative speeches, and the recent trip to Brussels and Berlin by Čović, described as »crucial« for Bosnia’s European process— and, above all, I thought, for continuing the financial flows that keep the system alive. I turned off the radio and put on a music CD as I accelerated, listening to Under the Pressure by The War on Drugs. I thought about the damned past and those who exploit it unscrupulously, inside and outside Bosnia, playing with fire and with others’ misery. I wondered if there would be more protests like those that were starting up at that time in Belgrade, by the Ne Davimo Beograd movement. But in any case, I mused, the tentacles of power penetrated too deeply in this rotten system; even though many Bosnians despise the politicians and oligarchs, they do not seem to truly want more change after several failed models. I thought about what bad luck it was that some Europeans cannot have their French revolutions, even though ours clearly prove insufficient too. Perhaps the sensible thing was to leave this country and start a new life abroad, as so many young people were doing; or maybe I was being too negative. But above all I thought about Biserka, about the forgotten people, and how in a few years’ time they would all be vague memories, like my own memory, whose testimony would be reduced to little more than these lines. I also thought about people like Nefisa and Nermina, who carry on earning big little victories, in spite of everything and everyone. I thought about the lives that were tied to those greenish Drina waters with no escape, like in Andrić’s novel. I kept accelerating, despite the risk of another fine from the merciless RS traffic police, or 126

equally those of the Federation. The needle swung further across the gauge, but deep down I knew I was fooling myself. However fast I went in the hope of leaving the Valley behind, I knew that a part of my life and my youth had long since been claimed by these people, down by the Drina. Lasheras, 2016–2017

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Romanija road through Ivo Pole, in winter, © 2012, Lasheras, B.

ACRONYMS CoE

Council of Europe

BCS

Bosnian-Croat-Serb language or lokalni jezik

EC

European Commission

EU

European Union

EUFOR

European Union Force (in Bosnia)

15 M

15 May Movement in Spain

ICTY

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

IEBL

Inter-Entity Boundary Line

JNA

Jugoslavenska narodna armija (Yugoslav’s People Army)

KLA

Kosovo Liberation Army

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

OSCE

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

RS

Republika Srpska

SAA

Stabilization and Association Agreement

SDS

Srpska Demokratska Stranka (Serb Democratic Party) 129

SNSD

Savez nezavisnih socijaldemokrata (Alliance of Independent Socialdemocrats)

UN

United Nations

UNHCR

United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees

UNPROFOR

United Nations Protection Force

VRS

Vojska Republike Srpske (Army of RS)

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