Walking home with her two classmates after a morning’s lessons, Mirjana looks dumbfounded when asked if she has any Muslim friends. Ask a silly question, her expression says.
The 16-year-old Bosnian Croat girl has grown up in a country at peace. Her 10 years of schooling in this small town of 10 000 in central Bosnia coincide exactly with the peace that broke out a decade ago at the end of Europe’s worst bloodletting since World War II.
Zepce is split 50-50 between Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims. But the two do not mix. Mirjana wants to keep it that way. ”The Bosnians want to have the same schools and the same curriculums, so that they can impose their culture, language and programmes on us,” she says.
”We don’t want that. We don’t want the same schools and we don’t mix outside school either. That’s very rare.”
A few weeks ago, the Croatian parents, pupils and teachers of Zepce reacted furiously when the regional education authority in Zenica, 20 minutes away, tried to introduce a common school curriculum in the town. The parents pulled their children out of school. A few days later, the authorities yielded. Segregationism triumphed. ”We do the first shift — the Muslims do the second shift in the afternoon. It’s much better to be separate,” says Dario (15).
While the Croatian and Muslim children of Zepce are growing up to know little of one another, the Serbs of Bosnia have long been fighting tooth-and-nail against any common upbringing, values or loyalties.
A few weeks ago, when Bosnia played neighbouring Serbia in an international football fixture, the Bosnian Serb opposition leader and former prime minister, Milorad Dodik, was asked which side he was supporting. The only time he ever supported Bosnia, he replied, was when it was playing Turkey, the Serbs’ ancient foe. A declaration of contempt for your own country might mean political suicide elsewhere. But among his nationalist constituency, Dodik’s popularity profited.
A group of Bosnian Muslim women — all victims of rape by Serbian forces during the 1992-95 war — recently returned to the scene of their torment, the southern town of Foca, to mount a memorial plaque on the building where they were abused.
They had to run a gauntlet of foul-mouthed Bosnian Serb males, some of them identified as rapists, threatening a rerun of the 1990s. The men acted with impunity, and the women were unable to put up the plaque.
Such incidents attest to the bitter divisions that continue to scar Bosnia long after American arm-twisting forced its feuding leaders to sign peace accords 10 years ago. ”These schoolchildren are growing up with the knowledge that their neighbours are their enemies,” says Jakob Finci, a Bosnian loyalist and the head of Sarajevo’s Jewish community.
”There’s no goodwill between the political elites in this country. We’ve got 86 political parties, 14 Parliaments, 14 governments, hundreds and hundreds of politicians [in a country of 3,5-million] — but not a single statesman thinking of the country as a whole. They can’t agree on what kind of country they want.”
The Dayton deal brought a truce, the division of the country into Serbian and and Muslim-Croat sections and tens of thousands of Nato peacekeepers. It turned Bosnia into an international protectorate overseen by an international high representative — now Paddy Ashdown, who leaves in January.
Bosnia became a giant laboratory — a testbed for western notions of nation-building in failed or dysfunctional states. The results have been mixed.
”The signs of a debilitating future are already visible,” a study by an international commission on the Balkans reported recently. ”With no real stake in these territories, international representatives insist on quick solutions to complex problems. They dabble in social engineering, but are not held accountable when their policies go wrong.”
Mladen Ivanic, Bosnia’s foreign minister and a Serb, maintains that much has been achieved in the decade of peace. To be sure, Ashdown can claim credit for a raft of initiatives aimed at unifying the partitioned country. He has engineered agreement on a single military, created from three rival armies. He has bludgeoned the Bosnian rivals into forming one police service. He has overseen the establishment of a single intelligence service, unified fiscal policies, judiciary reforms and other attributes of a modern state. The central government a decade ago comprised a cabinet of three. Now it is nine and growing.
Many international officials give Ashdown credit, while voicing exasperation with the obstacles thrown up by many in the local political class. ”They’re good at blocking everything and doing nothing,” says a senior United Nations official. ”The question is: do they really want to have this country?”
Bojan Bajic (28) a political activist and satirist from Rudo, a small Serb town, certainly wants the country. He has been beaten up by thugs several times for his anti-nationalist campaigning. Undeterred, he ran for mayor of Rudo last year and took a creditable 10% of the vote, suggesting that even in Serb strongholds things are changing.
”I point out to people that we’re living in misery. There’s not a smile on anyone’s lips,” he says. ”Rudo is 99% Serb and they won’t let any Muslims back. Is that the national interest? I’m a Serb, but my loyalty is to Bosnia. The problem is that most Croats and Serbs would rather not have this country.”
However, there appears to be a growing mood of resignation that Bosnia is here to stay. A survey by the Balkans commission this year found Serbian separatism waning. Half the Serbs in Bosnia neither wanted nor thought it likely that the Serb half of Bosnia would split and join Serbia. ”Bosnia is no longer a contested state,” the study found.
Last weekend in Brussels, the leaders of eight governing and opposition parties of all ethnicities haggled over a constitution drafted by a thinktank affiliated to the US state department. They did not reach agreement, but the fact they showed up to discuss a settlement for a unified Bosnian state would have been inconceivable even a year ago.
And after years of insisting that the Dayton recipe of ethnic partition and weak central government was untouchable, all the main international players, including Lord Ashdown, suddenly agree that Dayton is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
”We need a new deal for the 21st century,” says Zlatko Lagumdzija, a social democrat and former prime minister. ”But this country is run by people with 19th century minds. Inclusion or exclusion, patriotism or nationalism, unification or segregation? These are the questions we have to answer.”
Backstory
Bosnia’s peace deal, known as the Dayton accords, was concluded at a US air base in Dayton, Ohio, on November 21 1995.
The agreement, which followed US-led intervention to end the war, paved the way for 60 000 Nato-led peacekeepers, created a weak Bosnian government and vested most powers in nationalists running a partitioned Bosnia — split between Bosnian Serbs and a Muslim-Croat federation
An international high representative, overseeing the peace, was later given sweeping powers. There have been four high representatives, most recently Ashdown, who leaves in January, probably to be succeeded by Christian Schwarz-Schilling of Germany, who is expected to reduce and transform his office into an EU role. – Guardian Unlimited Â