Refugees in Berlin defied a municipal eviction order in June 2014 with a nine-day hunger strike on the rooftop of a vacant school building using the slogan “You Can’t Evict a Movement” which today has become the rallying cry of the refugees’ movement in Germany. Credit: Denise Garcia Bergt

By Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, May 21 2015 (IPS)

In a move to take their message of solidarity to refugees across the country and calling for their voices to be heard in Europe’s ongoing debate on migration, Germany’s asylum seekers have taken their nationwide protest movement for change on the road under the slogan: “You Can’t Evict a Movement!”.

Earlier this month, in a twist to conventional protest movements, refugees organised a Refugee Bus Tour across Germany, turning action into networking through mobile solidarity.

“We wanted to go out and bring a message of solidarity to all corners of Germany, to meet other refugees and tell them not to be afraid, to take life into their own hands and above all that you are not a criminal,” Napuli Görlich told IPS, tired but relieved after a month of travelling."In dictatorships, young people suffer systematic oppression for a mere criticism of the regime. Faced with joblessness and lack of freedom of expression, they will seek legal or illegal emigration following the lure of the foreign media's often empty slogans of justice and freedom" – Adam Bahar, Sudanese blogger and campaigner for Germany’s refugee movement

On the morning of Apr. 1, Napuli had stood on this same spot, flanked by fellow campaigners Turgay Ulu,  Kokou Teophil and Gambian journalist Muhammed Lamin Jadama, staring at the burnt-out refugee Info Point in Berlin, victim of one of a number of disturbing arson attacks this year, including one on a refugee home in Tröglitz, in the eastern state of Saxony.

Until the day before, the Info Point had functioned as a social solidarity base in the heart of Berlin’s Oranienplatz square, known here as the O’Platz. The square holds a symbolic importance as the central stronghold of the nation-wide refugee movement.

“That was a very sad moment for us,” said Napuli. “Such brutal attacks hit us where it hurts most, in our sense of vulnerability, precariousness, and invisibility,” she continued, vowing that the Info Point, registered as an art installation in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, will be rebuilt.

One of the most vocal and resilient personalities of the German refugee movement, Napuli was born in Sudan and studied at the universities of Ahfad and Cavendish in Kampala.  A human rights activist, she suffered torture and persecution for running an NGO and fled to Germany, where she has been with the refugee movement ever since.

From the start, she has also been associated with the O’Platz “protest camp”, which became her home and that of 40 other refugees in October 2012.  They had pitched their tents in the square after a 600 km march from what they termed a “lager” reception centre in Würzburg, Bavaria. The refugees stayed, on braving the elements, until the district council ordered bulldozers to tear it down in April last year.

“When they came to clear the camp I had nothing, absolutely nothing, only a blanket on my shoulders,” Napuli recalled. For the next three days, she took her blanket, her protest and her rage at the lack of an agreement with the Berlin authorities up a nearby tree, literally.

Germany’s refugee movement was sparked by the suicide of a young Iranian asylum-seeker Mohammad Rahsepar who hanged himself in his room at the Würzbug reception centre on Jan. 29, 2012.  En route to the German capital the marchers stopped by other “lagers”, starting to raise awareness about the inhumane conditions of isolation for asylum applicants, inviting them to leave their camps and join the march for freedom to Berlin.

Since then, the movement has been calling unequivocally for abolition of Germany’s enforced residence policy, or “Residenzpflicht”, a lager system which effectively denies asylum-seekers freedom of movement.

Other demands are an end to deportations, and rights to education, the possibility to work legally and access to emergency medical care, so far unavailable to asylum seekers.

After the O’Platz protest camp was razed to the ground, many of the prevalently African refugees occupied a vacant school building in Berlin, the Gerhardt-Hautmann-Schule in the Kreuzberg district’s Ohlauerstrasse, where they ran social and cultural activities until June 2014.

The local authorities attempted to enforce an eviction order, flanked by a 900-strong federal police force, and barring all access to visitors, press, voluntary organisations and even Church groups were denied access to the school or delivery of food.

Refusing to leave the building, some of the refugees took to the school’s rooftops for a nine-day hunger strike and standoff, waving a banner with the slogan “You can’t evict a movement”, which has now become the rallying cry of the refugees’ movement.

Some, like Alnour, Adam Bahar and Turgay Ulu, continue to live here, still hopeful that the district will agree to a proposal to set up an international refugee centre here and that they may be able to receive visitors.

Angela Davis, the iconic U.S. civil and human rights activist, was denied access when she tried to visit them on the premises recently.  “The refugee movement is the movement of the 21st century,” said Davis, referring to the plight of migrants worldwide.

During her May 2015 visit to Berlin, Angela Davis brought a message of support to members of the German refugee movement outside an occupied school building in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. Credit: Francesca Dziadek/IPS

“The Polizei can come at any time of night and snatch us away; we are under constant threat of deportation. I am feeling very stressed, I cannot sleep very well,” Alnour told IPS, explaining how they have had to make do with one, cold, defective shower for 40 people.

Undeterred on his return from the Refugee Bus Tour, Turgay Ulu, a Turkish journalist who was tortured and imprisoned as a dissident for 15 years, published the refugee movement’s magazine and is an active network organizer, has a very busy “working” schedule.

“There is a lot to do, from organising sleeping places for the homeless, writing and producing video content, organising spontaneous demonstrations and occupations, musical events, theatre performances, and consciousness-raising on national and international refugee bus tours,” Ulu told IPS.

“We have two choices, we either sit in the lagers and eat, sleep and eat again and go crazy, or we protest.”

Germany’s problem has been the exceedingly long waiting times necessary for processing asylum applications.  The United Nations has reported that in 2014 the country had the highest number of asylum applications since the Bosnian War in 1992. There are reportedly 200,000 asylum applications still outstanding and it is being predicted that this will have risen to 300,000 this year.

Adam Bahar, a Sudanese blogger and one of the refugee movement’s campaigners, told IPS that his dream of a better life of freedom and wealth evaporated when he reached Europe, where he soon realised that freedom and human rights are not for everyone to enjoy.

“In dictatorships, young people suffer systematic oppression for a mere criticism of the regime,” he said. ”Faced with joblessness and lack of freedom of expression, they will seek legal or illegal emigration following the lure of the foreign media’s often empty slogans of justice and freedom.”

Today, continued Bahar, who is in demand as a speaker and gives seminars at Berlin’s Humboldt University, “colonialism, which was born in Berlin in 1884, is being implemented by starting wars and marketing weaponry.”

As politicians busy themselves with strategies and programmes and allocating resources to more programmes to hold back refugees, they should be naming and shaming the real culprits instead, he said. “Change begins by uprooting dictators who are clandestinely colluding to misuse their nation’s wealth and remain in power thanks to the support of the pseudo democracies of the first world.”

Meanwhile, the refugee movement’s unified front appears to be making some, albeit limited, headway. The forced residence system, for example, has been abolished in a number of federal states and the Berlin Senate has just announced plans to provide refugee shelter accommodation to be completed by 2017 in 36 locations for 7,200 asylum seekers spread out across Berlin’s local districts at an overall cost of 150 million euros.

Germany is currently walking a tightrope between honouring its international humanitarian responsibilities, pursuing its international economic interests, including its remunerative arms sales contracts, and handling dangerous right-leaning swings in public opinion against immigrants.

At the same time, Germany is pursuing a risky carrot-and-stick immigration policy agenda which is sending out contradictory signals – a 10-year-old immigration law which placed Germany on the map as a land of “immigration” for highly skilled foreigners, while tightening restrictions for those who are not deemed to be candidates for economic integration.

At issue is the divisive policy which places refugees in “asylum-worthy” categories. “In Germany there are three categories of refugees,” Asif Haji, a 30-year-old Pakistani asylum seeker, told IPS.

“The first are Syrians and other Middle East refugees who are awarded permits and education. Second come the Afghans and Pakistanis, who have to struggle a bit but are allowed language school and work permits. But then there are the Africans who are widely perceived as economic migrants leeching on the system and petty criminals dealing in drugs who are not particularly welcome anywhere.”

“This is unfair,” he said. “Human tragedy should not be classified.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Young inclusion leaders participating in a workshop session to discuss the setting up of a diversity and inclusion network for future leaders from among Germany’s ‘people of color’, Berlin 2014. Credit: Ina Meling/Integration Commissioner Büro Tempelhof-Schöneberg

By Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, Dec 23 2014 (IPS)

A unique initiative – the Network Inclusion Leaders (NILE) project – has just held its second workshop here to set up a diversity and inclusion network for future leaders from among Germany’s ‘people of color’, or persons from different ‘non-white’ cultural backgrounds.

The event was held from Dec. 9 to 13in Berlin’s Rathaus Schöneberg, where John F. Kennedy delivered his iconic “Ich bin ein Berliner” freedom and solidarity speech to 400,000 West Berliners in 1963.

The workshop brought together 15 talented game changers aged between 18 and 28 from Afro-German, Turkish, Kurdish, Latin American and German-Asian backgrounds, selected from across the country to engage with illustrious key speakers from Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom in sessions designed to discuss instruments for promoting anti-racism, diversity and migrant-friendly agendas."Democracy needs strong, well-networked minorities. When you look around Germany, from parliament to media, public and private sectors, well it's still pretty white, there's a lot of work to be done" – Gabriele Gün Tank, Commissioner for Integration in Berlin Tempelhof-Schöneberg and co-founder of Network Inclusion Leaders (NILE)

The speakers  included Simon Woolley, Director of Operation Black Vote (UK), Mekonnen Mesghena, Director of Migration and Diversity at Berlin’s Heinrich-Böll Foundation, Kwesi Aikins, Policy Officer at the Centre for Migration and Social Affairs, Nuran Yigit, expert in anti-discrimination and board member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Migration Council, Terri Givens, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a specialist in the politics of race, and Professor Kurt Barling, a BBC special correspondent.

NILE is the brainchild of two alumni of the 2013 German Marshall Fund’s (GMF) Transatlantic Inclusion Leaders Network (TILN) – 35-year-old Gabriele Gün Tank, Commissioner for Integration in Berlin Tempelhof-Schöneberg, and 28-year-old researcher and social activist Daniel Gyamerah, head of Each One Teach One (EATO), a black literature and media project in Berlin.

“Democracy needs strong, well-networked minorities. When you look around Germany, from parliament to media, public and private sectors, well it’s still pretty white, there’s a lot of work to be done,” Tank told a GMF alumni reception.

NILE was set up through collaboration with NGOs, top institutions including federal ministries and assistance from the influential Heinrich-Böll Foundation which is affiliated with the Green Party, the U.S. embassy and the Eberhard-Schultz-Stiftung (Foundation for Human Rights and Participation).  

“We are moving forward with inclusive governance, inclusion best practices and empowerment training,” said Tank.  “This is of critical importance if we are to bridge the migration gap for a fairer, social and political representation of minorities at all levels.”

Engaging young Muslims within a climate of hostility

Mersiha Hadziabdic, aged 25, said that she joined the NILE initiative confident that networking and coalition building plays a crucial role in steering change relevant to her generation.

Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, she came to Berlin as a three-year-old refugee when her family fled the Prijedor massacre, one of the worse war crimes along with the Srebrenica genocide perpetrated by the Serbian political and military leadership’s ethnic-cleansing drive, which killed 14,000 civilians.

“My background means a lot to me, and for this reason I am involved with the Bosnian community in Berlin, my home town,” she told IPS.

Wearing a headscarf in Berlin, Mersiha is often mistaken for a Turkish woman, with its attendant stereotypes of submissiveness and low expectations.

But, like 25-year-old Soufeina Hamed, a Tunisian-born graduate in intercultural psychology from the University of Osnabrück, who is active in Zahnräder Netzwerker, an incubator for Muslim social entrepreneurship, Mersiha is an internet savvy and project team member of JUMA (Young Active and Muslim), which offers management, rhetoric and media skills training to young German Muslims.

”I see myself as part and process of this vibrant, committed and capable Muslim youth which has something important to contribute and wants to be involved in the conversation,” she said.

Just like Ozan Keskinkilic, an MA student in international relations from a Turkish-Arab background who is active in the Muslim-Jewish Conference (MJC) for peaceful inter-religious dialogue, she noted that this conversation involves engaging in a climate of anti-migrant and refugee hostility.

That hostility is currently finding expression in populist rallies, such as the Dresden march on Dec. 8, where 15,000 anti-immigrant protesters, mostly from PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West), marched to the former 1989 freedom rallying cry of “Wir Sind das Volk” (We are the People).

Young, talented and ambitious, Mersiha, Soufeina and Ozan are part of Germany’s four million Muslims residents and citizens, about five percent of the country’s population, of whom 45 percent have German citizenship.

According to the Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s intelligence agency, approximately 250,000 Muslims live in Berlin, 73 percent of whom are of Turkish background and one-third of whom have German citizenship. They belong to that population sector whose qualifications and skills are raising inclusion and access expectations which demand more level playing fields.

Creating a critical mass for change

The NILE initiative aims to channel personal issues relating to emotional damage inflicted by racism, discrimination or the traumas of fleeing from conflict zones into a process of empowerment towards common, personal and professional goals.

Empowerment and leadership tools are taught as means of engaging with the world as it is, gaining an understanding that ‘persons of color’ are neither powerless nor invisible.

Kurt Barling, who has carved a role of influence for himself by exposing stories which shape communities but too often remain hidden by a majority oblivious to the perspectives of others, had a clear mentoring message:

Group photo of participants in the Network Inclusion Leaders (NILE) 2014 workshop held in Berlin’s Rathaus Schöneberg, where John F. Kennedy delivered his iconic “Ich bin ein Berliner” freedom and solidarity speech to 400,000 West Berliners in 1963. Credit: Ina Meling/Integration Commissioner Büro Tempelhof-Schöneberg

“Take control, shape your narratives with the new digital space available and build trust relationships with the authorities to change how the media frames and reflects our communities and our issues.”

Participants learned to be part of a critical mass for change, a “majority complex”, to build strategic coalitions to reduce marginalisation, reframe the migration debate as a socio-economic asset, and challenge discrimination and racism with the tools provided by human rights instruments such as the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), a monitoring body of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

“Freedom of speech definitely stops at racial slander and incitement,” explained Kwesi Aikins, “and you can challenge that in the courts. Even human rights education is a human right.”

“Martin Luther King did not just have a dream, he had a plan,” said Simon Woolley of Operation Black Vote (UK). Woolley was invited by NILE to explain to the young participants how they can take advantage of the torch handed to them all the way back from the civil rights movement, including harnessing their own electoral muscle because the black vote counts. “The bottom line,” he said, “is that power talks to power”.

NILE workshop participants agreed that the challenge facing young leaders is to find their role within the constraints of conflicting choices on offer between blending, assertiveness and the tiring fight for a fair share.

Maria-Jose Munoz a native of Bolivia, whose research interests focus on the Madera river energy complex on the Bolivia-Brazil border, knows she has an uphill struggle ahead of her – emerging in a white, male-dominated energy policy field.

Wrapping up her experience at NILE, she said: “We are all just looking for belonging and a way to engage in a personal and public dialogue, building bridges between our often conflicting identities.”

“As minority communities, we often find a blocked path towards common goals. NILE helped me understand that I can be strong and that, by coalescing with others, I can tear down these walls.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The 100-year anniversary of World War I (1914-18) may have come and gone, but the role of Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip – the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – remains controversial in the turbulent history of the Balkans. For some he was a terrorist, for others a hero.

The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo marked the 100 years since assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie over the weekend in series of ceremonies dedicated to the event that triggered the 1914-18 war, and numerous messages of peace were delivered with calls that history should not be repeated and that violence should be excluded from the modern world.

But if many are looking to the future, historians agree that the tragic event of June 28, 1914, still haunts the region, after Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were plunged into an atrocious inter-ethnic war more than seven decades later.Historians agree that the tragic event of June 28, 1914, still haunts the region, after Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were plunged into an atrocious inter-ethnic war more than seven decades later

“Unfortunately, it is possible to link World War I and its influence to recent events in the Balkans,” historian Danilo Sarenac of the Belgrade Institute for Modern History told IPS in an interview.

“World War I led to the creation of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated in the 1990s; there is a predominant idea among its former republics that this state was a sort of illusion, a mistake, a kind of ‘dungeon of nations’, and that it had to disappear,” he said.

When Yugoslavia fell apart, six new states – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia – were created. Ethnic Albanian-populated Kosovo declared unilateral independence from Serbia in 2008, but has not yet been widely recognised as a state.

Socialist Yugoslavia itself was an heir to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, created at the end of WW I. Its biggest portion, Serbia, an ally of Great Britain and France, was rewarded for participation in victory over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany by obtaining South Slav-populated areas of Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia.

The assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was Gavrilo Princip, a 20-year-old Bosnian Serb and member of Young Bosnia, a revolutionary movement seeking the unification of all South Slav nations. He claimed to be “a Yugoslav (South Slav) nationalist” at his trial in 1914. At the time, Bosnia was part of the Austro-Hungary Empire that disintegrated in WW I.

According to Sarenac, “Princip’s action is being interpreted differently, depending on periods we observe in consecutive Yugoslavias.”

“When needed, Princip is a hero who helped create Yugoslavia; but, as newly carved out states (former Yugoslav republics) renounce Yugoslavia, they describe him as a ‘cruel Serb nationalist’. Divisions along such lines were visible in World War II, and came full circle in the 1990s. They were used or abused by everyone at will,” he added.

Princip is blamed by many outside Serbia as the man who triggered World War I, but historians say the world was practically ready for a major war due to many complicated circumstances.

“Princip’s act was just an ingredient that was needed to ignite it,” says Sarenac.

History books say that the Austro-Hungarian Empire blamed Bosnia’s neighbour Serbia for masterminding the assassination of the Archduke; Germany backed the Empire in declaring war against Serbia on June 28, and in a matter of days Russia, Great Britain, France and many other nations were drawn into an unprecedented conflict that took 16 million lives and left 20 million wounded.

For university history professor Predrag Markovic, there is a paradox among the states created by the disintegration of former Yugoslavia.

“They deny that Yugoslavia was created as a deliberate project after World War I, that it was a secular state, designed to bridge religious and regional differences between its new member nations,” Markovic told IPS.

“At the time, Yugoslavia was created much like the European Union today, as a union of entities that share same values. It is absurd that newly created states (since 1991) deny its progressive essence, because many of them – like Macedonia or Slovenia – would not exist had there not been the Yugoslavia after the WW I and Serbia’s victory in it,” he added.

“Their people would cease to exist or would be blended into the ethnicity of the country they’d gone to; Croatia would have been split by Italy, Hungary and Austria,” according to Markovic.

However, he points out, Yugoslavia was a “noble idea”, but with inadequate solutions and deficiencies.

“It inherited all the problems of the empires it helped bring down – Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman (Turkish) state: large numbers of minorities, and an inability to efficiently steer and govern”, he says.

The inter-ethnic problems continued until the Communists took over after World War II, but the two pillars of their regime – late leader Josip Broz Tito and socialist ideology with a human face – helped Yugoslavia to survive.

Markovic says that when these two pillars collapsed, with death of Tito in 1980 and the end of cold war in the 1980s, nationalisms revived and took over in Yugoslavia, setting the scene for the disintegration that began with secession of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991. Bosnia followed in 1992. The secession was opposed by the largest republic of Serbia which was engaged in bloody wars that took more than 100,000 non-Serb lives.

“The experience of Yugoslavia is very ominous for the European Union, bearing in mind the differences that are arising now between the member states,” Markovic argues.

“The circumstances of 1991 were poorly understood by many, the European Union in particular,” The independence of the newly-created states “was hastily acknowledged without any exit strategy or awareness on the consequences, on the next steps; it is much like the rush into the war in 1914, or recently in Iraq,” he added.

In a recent essay on ‘Shots fired by Gavrilo Princip’, Bosnian historian Slobodan Soja summed up the political abuse of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by saying that there is a paradox in recent efforts to establish “whether Princip was a terrorist or not.”

According to Soja, a university professor and former Bosnian ambassador to several countries, “the noble idea of liberation of oppressed and unity among Slav nations is giving way to manipulation” in the deeply divided Bosnian society, where its Muslims, Serbs and Croats are still not mentally at peace.

“Had they known what kind of people would live 100 years on, I doubt that the members of the Young Bosnia movement would give their lives for the generations to come,” Soja wrote.

“The majority of people living today in Bosnia are simply not up to the task of criticising or praising the Young Bosnians. Those were the idealists whose ideas we badly need today,” he added.

Thousands of people have rallied in streets of major Bosnian cities since last week, demanding social justice, decent living conditions and resignation of top officials who they openly blame for unprecedented poverty and the country’s economic decline.

The first protest rallies since the end of the bloody 1992-95 war began earlier this month in the north-eastern town of Tuzla, where thousands of workers from five major privatised companies had received no payments in years. They were joined in following weeks by thousands of unemployed young people and pensioners."The biggest fear of ruling elites all over and their nightmare is for ordinary people (of all ethnicities) to unite."

Backed by social networks and informal groups, the protests spread to capital Sarajevo and to Zenica, Kakanj, Travnik, Jajce, Brcko, Bihac, Mostar and several other towns. International media immediately dubbed the protests, some of them turning violent, the “Bosnian spring”. Some call it “the winter of Bosnian discontent”.

“It’s still winter here and we’d rather describe the events as an expression of widespread discontent and an introduction to ending the arrogant, unemotional and even scornful behaviour of authorities towards most people, who live in poverty,” Kemal Kurspahic, co-founder of the Media in Democracy Institute in Bosnia, told IPS.

Data from the central Bosnian statistics office puts the unemployment rate at 44 percent. It says that one in five out of 3.8 million people in Bosnia live below the poverty line. For the employed, the average monthly salary is 570 dollars.

“More and more people live in misery and poverty. They are hungry,” Vahid Sehic from the NGO Forum of Tuzla Citizens told IPS.

After the bloody war of the nineties ended with the loss of some 100,000 lives, the country’s industry came to a standstill. It seemed at first that recovery could be at hand, but the slow transition into a market economy entailed a complete change from what used to be former Yugoslavia with its deeply rooted social benefits.

“There are practically two decades of economic devastation, where private interests of the ruling elite, masked as ‘protection of national interest’ served as an excuse for unfair distribution of wealth among the privileged,” said Kurspahic.

The complicated regulation of the internationally sponsored Dayton Peace Accords, that defined the power structure for former warring ethnicities – Bosniak Muslims, Croats and Serbs – had a devastating effect on any possibility of creating an efficient state with a positive investment climate.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided into two entities – the Bosnian Serb Republic of Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat Federation, both topped with a Sarajevo-based central authority. Vetoing decisions at the central level have often blocked any initiatives for reforms.

Both entities have their own governments and parliaments, plus a central one in Sarajevo. The Federation is divided into 11 cantons created on ethnic lines for areas with a Muslim or Croat majority. This in practice means that the Muslim-Croat Federation area has 11 local governments with 11 prime ministers.

Most political leaders now are those who were leaders of major national parties during the 1992-95 war. That is “about 80 percent,” said Kurspahic. “Approximately half of Bosnia’s budget goes to salaries in administration.”

Privatisation of major industrial complexes was mostly hasty. It enabled newly born tycoons, close to people in power, to size down or even shut dozens of companies and make quick profits by selling their assets before declaring bankruptcy. Bosnian media has widely reported that new owners often failed to comply with privatisation contracts and failed to pay workers for years.

One of the worst instances is the Sodaso factory in Tuzla. It produced 80 percent of the table salt consumed in former Yugoslavia, amounting to 208,000 tonnes in 1991. In 1999, it produced 21,000 tonnes.

Besides, Tuzla had an additional burden to cope with. After the fall of the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces executed some 7,000 men and boys, their family members adding up to some 35,000 children, women and the elderly were transported to Tuzla.

Since protests began, several cantonal prime ministers, including Tuzla’s, have resigned. Sarajevo protestors have been offered negotiations by authorities over the modifications of certain laws, and new elections. The authorities have agreed to create ‘plenums’ in major cities such as Sarajevo that include representatives of political parties and leading civil society organisations in order to negotiate possibilities of fresh elections or other peaceful means for ending the protests.

“This is the first time we saw fear in people in power,” Sehic said. “They worry that the social unrest will spread, and that the story of ‘endangered ethnicity’ will go down the drain; this means they go down the drain as well.”

Several analysts point out that the protests in Bosnia carried no ethnic dimension. “It was more solidarity of people with no rights, the poor and unemployed, regardless of their nation,” said Zarko Papic from the Sarajevo-based NGO, the Initiative for Better and Humane Inclusion.

Svetlana Cenic who teaches economics at the University of Banjaluka in the Republic of Srpska says there can be no serious changes in Bosnia Herzegovina without the social unity of all ethnicities.

“The hungry belly is mine as well as yours, it does not differ between ethnicities,” she said. “The biggest fear of ruling elites all over and their nightmare is for ordinary people (of all ethnicities) to unite.”

That does not seem very likely. Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik visited Belgrade almost immediately after the unrest in the Federation began, and told journalists after his meeting with first Vice Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic that there were no reasons for Bosnian Serbs to join the protest, claiming that “the RS will remain calm” as “some forces from the Federation want escalation of unrest into the RS.”