We take an impossibly long bus ride into Herzegovina.
I watch out the window as we pass by clusters of partially completed houses dotting the impressive, mountainous landscape. There are gardens; wild plums, rows upon rows of cabbage plants, and pomegranate trees overfill front yards. Beautiful white marble Muslim cemeteries lay nestled below steep crags.
Behind a sturdy chain-link fence, an old man works on a rusty car. Packs of young boys ride bicycles two sizes too big for them.
I contemplate the changes these two generations have lived through.
In an instant, the years of 1992-1995 can be lost in a vignette of modern Bosnia. Despite the occasional blown-out house, to an outsider, the war remains something that was—a horrible atrocity that I vividly remember watching reports of on television as a pre-schooler, wondering (as I still do now) how it all could’ve happened.
As we drive along, it’s impossible to imagine the horrors and crimes against humanity that the hills, the fields—truly the stable facets of the country—have seen. Indeed, it’s hard enough to comprehend the country’s current political dysfunction, most notably its massive failure to form a central government ten months after the October 2010 elections, let alone such haunting terms as ethnic cleansing.
Still, the scars of the Bosnian war are nevertheless fading. Tall grass now grows in the fields formerly laden with landmines, rebuilt Sarajevo, full of bazaars and coffee bars, buzzes with the charm of a little Istanbul, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic have finally been apprehended by the post-war international tribunal created for the region, and the country, it seems, has largely moved on.
Or rather, the international community has.
True, there is peace—on the streets. Thanks to the Dayton agreement, major violence ebbed in late 1995. Order was restored, refugees were promised safe returns to their homes, and the West seemed set on building a country tolerant of Bosnia’s diverse population of 48% Bosniaks (Muslim), 34% Serbs (Christian Orthodox), and 15% Croats (Catholic).
But old rivalries and ethnic nationalism have not subsided easily. And in fact, the Dayton agreement may actually have stalled the reconciliation and healing process of what, long ago, was once an ethnically patch-worked Bosnia. Through the establishment of a tri-president system with two governing entities, the Bosnian-Croat Federation and the Serbian Republic, the Dayton agreement cemented ethnic divisions while forming, effectively, a 16-year emotional and political stalemate.
While Bosnia & Herzegovina remains a state in the eyes of the world, it certainly isn’t one nation. According to polls of the three ethnic groups in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) 53% of Serbs and 81% of Croats favor the idea of secession. More startling, only 53% of Bosniaks, the group traditionally most supportive of a united Bosnian state, still support the idea.
With an official census lacking (the last wasn’t taken since before 1991), it is widely recognized that a large number of Bosnia’s misplaced have not returned to their homes and that ethnic regionalism has put down firm roots. The failure of refugees to return to their homes and the lasting effects of ethnic cleansing have dramatically changed the pre-war demographics of the country.
As the European Union pushes hard for a census as part of BiH’s long path toward EU integration, tensions within BiH have risen. Some feel that a national census could be the final straw for an already weak Bosnian state as it would showcase how ethnically homogeneous its regions have become. Ultimately, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), the most prominent party representing Bosnian Serbs, blocked the census bill last summer. Major differences over the bill came as SNSD hoped to include questions regarding ethnic origins in the census, a particularly heated issue in regards to the composition of the Serbian Republic, whose president, Milorad Dodik, frequently threatens secession. Bosnian and Croatian parties opposed the idea for fear that before the refugee return process is completed, it would legalize the domination of Serbian population in areas where ethnic cleansing has occurred. As one Bosnian interviewee put it, “A census would show that ethnic cleansing actually pays off.”
Meanwhile, on the local level, ethnic segregation in schools and communities continues. As a July 2011 New York Times article illustrated, Bosnian schoolchildren are commonly separated and study different curriculums, not infrequently within the same school. While defenders argue that the system helps prevent the common breakouts amongst schoolchildren who squabble over religious and language differences (dispute speaking “mutually intelligible languages”), critics note that segregation only encourages ethnic tensions among BiH’s youth, most of whom weren’t even alive at the signing of Dayton.
In many ways, I disagree with the sentiment of authors such as David Bosco of Foreign Policy magazine regarding the present state of the Balkans. In his July 2011 blog post “The Gloom Over the Balkans,” he contends that in sum, stabilization efforts in the Balkans have been widely successful and that critics of the recovery have largely been too harsh. He is, of course, correct: mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, and massacre are horrors of the Balkans’ past. However, if the Balkans is “really as good as it gets” when it comes to nation building, I worry. Yes, Serbia and Croatia have made immense progress toward EU integration, however Bosnia has steadily declined both economically and politically over the past decade and ethnic nationalism, particularly in the Serbian Republic, has only risen. Hopefully an ethnically segregated BiH, without a national government, deadlocked by periodic threats of secession, and that votes down ethnic lines isn’t our model of successful nation building.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed BiH’s problems in her June 7, 2011 joint statement with UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague following the capture of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian-Serb Army Commander responsible for the massacre of some 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995. Stressing their unwavering support for upholding the provisions of Dayton and the need for continued international support to bring BiH out of economic and political paralysis, Clinton and Hague put to rest any belief that the West might tolerate an “orderly dissolution” of BiH. The statement’s sentiment was spot-on.
With NATO forces gone and international aid groups pulling out, the West should be sure to support the EU in developing a cohesive integration strategy for BiH that involves supporting nationalistic leaders while pressuring ethnically-charged leaders to step aside. There’s hope for BiH. It won’t return to war. And it doesn’t need to descend into utter dysfunction and disunity.
But with the West focused on problems in Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East, it might. Still, the issues in BiH (corruption, ethnic divide, regionalism) provide important lessons for other problem countries we’ve been caught nation building in over the years.
Let’s get it right in Bosnia.