SOCIETY-BALKANS: Time and Dollars Fail to Bring Togetherness

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BANJALUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Apr 28 2005 (IPS) - Ten years after the bloody war ended in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the country is far from what peacemakers hoped it would be.

A three-year war among Bosnian Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims of Slav origin ended in 1995 with the Dayton peace agreement. Both Croatia and Serbia intervened to tear Bosnia apart in the war.

Under the peace deal Bosnia-Herzegovina became an independent state comprising two entities, the Muslim-Croat Federation, and the Serb entity called the Republic of Srpska (RS).

Both entities remain poor and sparsely populated. Five billion dollars foreign aid seems mostly to have vanished into thin air. There is little economic revival.

"There is no improvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, no development, and no hope that it will get better," Petar Djokic, head of the Socialist Party of the Republic of Srpska told IPS. "Nothing has changed, and ethnic parties still remain in power."

Following the peace agreement, a complicated administrative and legislative structure sought to keep a federal state together, with representation from both entities. But each entity was given its own legislature, judicial system, police and army.

The division of Bosnia-Herzegovina followed the biggest migration of different ethnic groups in Europe since World War II. The politics of ethnic cleansing, besides taking the lives of some 200,000 people, most of them Muslims, meant that a certain ethnic group was forced into an area where members of the group prevailed.

Two million people of the pre-war population of 4.3 million were displaced, or fled abroad. Only a fraction ever returned to their pre-war homes. A million decided never to return, recent data from the central statistics office shows. A survey indicated that 77 percent of the youth of all nations who remain, want to emigrate.

"This is a country with little hope," says Sanel Majovic (35), a Muslim born in BanjaLuka, capital of the Republic of Srpska. He lives in Denmark where he fled in 1993.

BanjaLuka had a pre-war population of 195,000. Serbs made 54, percent, Muslims and Croats 15 percent each, and the rest claimed to be ‘Yugoslavs’ from a mixed ethnic background. Today, BanjaLuka is an almost entirely Serb town, with a non-Serb population of just 15,000.

"Young people have no chance of finding jobs, others (non-Serbs) are not welcome," Majovic added. He returned to his hometown only to settle a property issue.

"The economy of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole is in a very hard situation," head of the federal directorate for employment Huso Saric said at a seminar on work possibilities in Bosnia. "The number of employed has fallen to the minimum, and the current economic situation is having an effect on all segments of life."

According to federal directorate statistics, 496,660 people are unemployed in Bosnia-Herzegovina – an unprecedented 45.5 percent of a potential workforce of a million.

A similar situation prevails in Mostar town divided into Croat and Muslim areas across the Neretva river.

The population of the once thriving agriculture and industrial town has shrunk from more than 120,000 to less than 100,000. It had about equal representation of Serbs, Croats and Muslims in pre-war days, but now has only a few thousand Serbs, while Croats are the dominant group.

Croats live on the western bank of Neretva river, with Muslims on the other side. More than 25,000 Muslims were evicted from the western bank and forced to settle on the eastern side in 1992-95. Their part of town still remains largely devastated.

The two ethnic groups rarely cross the many bridges over river. They have separate hospitals, emergency services, firefighters and schools.

"This only shows how senseless the war was," Safet Orucevic, mayor of Mostar in 1994-2000 told IPS. "Everyone became a loser. It’s not about (inter-ethnic) hatred or reconciliation.. It’s about facing a simple thing that the war was unnecessary. It will hurt to admit on all sides and it will take some time, but it has to be done."

But reconciliation is hardly discussed. Some recruits to the small army of the Republic of Srpska recently refused to take an oath of loyalty to the whole of Bosnia Herzegovina.

"I could not swear my loyalty to something artificially created, to some people who killed members of my family in the last war," said Sladjan Jankovic (23) from the small town of Kozarac near BanjaLuka. Like other recruits, he said he would be afraid to sleep in the same barracks as Muslim or Croat soldiers. "I’d be afraid someone might kill me only because I’m Serb."

International representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina Paddy Ashdown said recently that the country should put its past behind and resume its road to Europe "in order not to become a black whole", but developments in the field continue to point in another direction.

RS strongly opposes the creation of a single police force for the whole country. It offers administrative explanations for this, but the real argument, says 55-year-old BanjaLuka resident Savo Janicic, is "why did we fight the war if we don’t have a separate entity and everything separate."

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has issued another in series of warnings on separate lives in Bosnia-Herzegovina. OSCE says there are 54 schools in the country that function under same roof, "but students and teachers are completely separated along ethnic and religious lines."

But despite such warnings, most groups find living separately in the same country works best for them.