Bosnia and Herzegovina: A State Under Threat

By Peter Lippman

Following two years of rule by a non-nationalist alliance, nationalist government returned to Bosnia with a vengeance this winter. Since October's national elections, ethnic hate crimes are on the rise, and ordinary Bosnians wait without much hope for their grim economic situation to improve. Meanwhile, the representatives of the international community responsible for attending to Bosnia's post-war revival tolerate the dishonest operators who hold most of the political power in the country.

Last October, the tenuous power of the alliance headed by the Social Democrat Party (SDP) was broken when that party was voted out of office in favor of the Muslim nationalist Party of Democratic Action (SDA), whose former head, Alija Izetbegovic, led Bosnia's Muslims through the war. The defeat of the SDP left Bosnia's government open to rule by the same three ethnic-based parties that had been running the country at the beginning of the 1990s, and who then fought a ferocious war against each other between 1992 and 1995.

After the obligatory months-long bargaining period following the October elections, Bosnia's new government shaped up as a de facto alliance among the SDA, the Serb nationalist SDS, and the Croat nationalist HDZ. The latter two had not, in fact, been voted out of office during the SDP's rule, merely temporarily outnumbered at the state level by the moderate alliance. The real political change reflected in these elections was the loss of faith in the SDP on the part of some of the Muslims who were the party's main constituency.

The SDP lost, among other reasons, because it was overwhelmed by the social problems it faced. The alliance it led was unable to cobble together enough new jobs, return enough displaced persons, or make enough headway against the lingering animosity to convince a plurality of voters that it would be worthwhile to retain it.

The revival of nationalist rule is a depressing turn of events for those who believe in multiculturalism and a unified Bosnia, because the infrastructure of profiteers represented by the three nationalist parties owes its life and fortune to ethnic hostility. Only by manipulating their mono-ethnic constituencies can these warlords-turned-"statesmen" continue to profit. The war that divided Bosnia was essentially an assault by the elite against the ordinary people, and the former—whether lapsed communists, religious fundamentalists, or simply opportunists—clearly were the victors. There is no reason why, today, they should not want to continue to pursue their wartime goals by other means.

The Dayton agreement signed at the end of the war set up two "entities": the Serb-run Republika Srpska (RS), and the Croat-Muslim Federation. Much more political power resides at the entity level than at the state level. Bosnia and Herzegovina thus remains a crippled non-state, a semi-protectorate run partially by international diplomats who care more about their careers than the welfare of Bosnians, and partially by people who actively work against that welfare.

There is a lifetime supply of scandals illustrating this assertion. One of the more fresh and notorious of these is the case of Hercegovacka Banka, a Mostar-based bank run by the HDZ, the shady cabal that leads the Croat nationalist party. HDZ members long have agitated for a "third entity," i.e., a legalization of the wartime breakaway Croat Republic of Herceg-Bosna. Although this separatist entity was outlawed with the creation of the Federation, nationalists who would like to see Bosnia further divided have flouted the postwar two-entity system set up by Dayton by continuing to call for its resurrection.

The HDZ was supported after the war by its patron party of the same name in Croatia and, until he died in 2000, by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. Tudjman funneled vast funds to the HDZ to support its separatist campaign. One of the ways he did this was by granting large sums to the HVO, the Croat component of the Federation's armed forces. In turn, much of this money was diverted by HDZ leaders to capitalize the bank they set up in 1998. When in the spring of 2001 the international community was informed of illicit practices in the funding of the Hercegovacka Banka, it took over the bank and temporarily shut it down.

After a period of investigation that stretched on for almost 20 months, international officials revealed that at least some $110 million of these funds intended for the HVO had been diverted to illegitimate uses. Part of this money, for example, was lent to bank officials, who used it to buy stocks in the bank. The bank also made interest-free loans to private companies run by cronies of the bank managers—and, even then, the principal was not called in. At times borrowers were given new loans that they simply used to pay back their old ones. By late 2000 the bank was registering massive losses, but the managers took no steps to repair the situation—other than engaging in "creative accounting."

Among the bank's managers and major stockholders were a former Federation minister of defense and other senior ministry officials, as well as Ante Jelavic, HDZ leader and ex-member of the Bosnian presidency.

The Hercegovacka Banka case is but one example of the corruption widely practiced in Bosnia—nor are the Croat nationalists the only practitioners by any means. An example could just as easily be chosen from the practices of nationalist Serbs or Muslims. It is safe to say that all those profiteers who learned to take advantage of the weakness of others during the war have had no reason to give up their lucrative routine. Their fingers firmly in the till, they have mastered the art of distracting their constituency with admonitions of the danger posed by the other ethnicities.

This dynamic of ethnic animosity recently has been exacerbated by a rise in the number of violent incidents. Last Christmas, a Muslim member of an extreme nationalist organization murdered several Croat returnees in Konjic, in central Bosnia. Croats in Stolac have repeatedly harassed Muslim returnees, and there has been a string of violent attacks against Muslim returnees to the Serb-controlled areas around Bijeljina and Zvornik. In Kozarac, near Prijedor, one of the few rebuilt mosques in the Serb entity was bombed, and a Muslim cemetery in the same municipality was desecrated.

A particularly shocking incident of hate speech occurred at a football match in Banja Luka last fall. There, fans of the local Serbian team, competing against a predominantly Muslim team from Sarajevo, held up a banner that read, "Noz, Zica, Srebrenica" ("Knife, Wire, Srebrenica"). This chilling slogan has since reappeared as graffiti on the houses of Muslim returnees to eastern Bosnia, together with "This is Serbia," and "Turks, we will slaughter you." Croat hooligans voiced similar threats against Muslim fans in west (Croat-controlled) Mostar, and Muslims harassed visiting Serb fans to Zenica.

Local authorities promise that "investigations are underway" into most of these incidents, but conclusions are never reached, and culprits never apprehended. This carelessness is not surprising, considering that the same officials are illegally distributing state-owned land (and sometimes even privately-owned land belonging to the minority ethnicity) to displaced persons of their own ethnicity, obstructing the repair of religious buildings belonging to the minority, and generally discouraging return of the displaced.

There are very few exceptions to this pattern of solidification of the wartime achievement of ethnic homogenization, and most of those exceptions are found in the Muslim-controlled areas. As a result, return of displaced persons to their prewar homes is merely inching along—certainly showing no promise of the recreation of Bosnia's rich pre-war multiculturalism.

In November, as in previous postwar years, Bosnia's Croat and Serb leaders avoided acknowledgment of Statehood Day, the holiday that commemorates Bosnia and Herzegovina's World War II declaration of unity and independence. And, in a survey held in the Serb entity at that time, more than half of the respondents declared that they do not consider Bosnia their state.

Meanwhile, the response of international officials, who wield great influence in the country, has been ineffectual. It certainly is not calculated to inspire anxiety on the part of the nationalist leaders who are guiding the ongoing rejection of Bosnia as a unified state. Upon the reestablishment of the de facto nationalist alliance that rules Bosnia, the international community's High Representative to Bosnia, Lord Paddy Ashdown, declared that it did not matter that nationalist parties were back in power, because they had modified their agendas and could now be trusted to cooperate with the agenda of the international community.

The High Representative's agenda includes ridding Bosnia of corruption, restoring multi-ethnicity throughout the country, and leading a peaceful modern state into 21st century Europe. But Ashdown has declared that in Bosnia today corruption is a greater danger than nationalism—as if one could flourish without the other. This ignores the fact that it is the nationalist figures who are implementing "ethnic privatization," which puts enterprises formerly owned by the state into the hands of the mono-ethnic postwar mafia. Such practices hardly encourage minority return and reunification.

The Office of the High Representative, in the end, spends much of its time going through contortions that make it appear to be fixing Bosnia, without really fixing much of anything at all. Thus Julian Braithwaite, chief spokesman for the OHR, is capable of stating that "the nationalist parties will accept reform, because that is what their constituencies want." Sadly, there is precious little evidence to support this assertion.

Bosnia, if it even survives as a unified state, will not be able to march into Europe without a serious rearrangement of the political structure legitimized by Dayton and affirmed by successive High Representatives. The recent assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in neighboring Serbia sheds light on this problem. The assassination took place because the reformers who replaced Milosevic could not or would not remove the old corrupt nationalist infrastructure. Their inability proved fatal.

In Serbia, the only help forthcoming from the international community was the leverage that international aid could provide. International officials have much more power in Bosnia, but have failed to use it robustly—and Bosnia continues to suffer for this.

Peter Lippman, a native of Seattle, Washington, is a field project coordinator for the Advocacy Project (www.advocacynet.org), a human rights organization that supports grass-roots advocates in countries in crisis or transition.