Postwar Bosnia Still Battling Ethnic Hatreds

BRCKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  In the battle to win Bosnia’s peace, thousands of NATO troops join legions of foreign bureaucrats with a multibillion-dollar arsenal of tanks, helicopters and aid money. There is also a simpler weapon: the black felt pen.

In many Bosnian schools, it is not enough to teach history, art and grammar to the nation’s Croatian, Serbian and Muslim children; they’re also taught to hate those from other ethnic groups. So last year, the country’s foreign administrators ordered that all ethnically offensive words in textbooks be blacked out.

A commission issued a 24-page list of phrases, paragraphs and even whole pages. Teachers were instructed to find them in every textbook and make sure students couldn’t read the words anymore.

In a grammar text for Serbian seventh-graders, a lesson on the passive voice appeared under the heading “Tribute in Blood,” above a brief excerpt from the 1945 novel “Bridge Over the Drina,” by Ivo Andric, a Bosnian Croat and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.

It describes the medieval torture and massacre of Serbs by Muslim Turkish invaders who, according to the tale, kidnapped children ages 10 to 15 in wicker baskets strapped to horses. Teachers were told to rip out the two-page lesson.

Beneath a picture of a boy with an amputated leg, a caption in a textbook for Croats refers to an attack by “grand Serbian aggressors.” The phrase was supposed to be blacked out--though some teachers had trouble following instructions.

“In many instances, instead of using black markers they used yellow highlighters,” said Claude Kieffer, who sets education policy for Bosnia-Herzegovina’s foreign-run administration.

It is easier to censor words than change minds, a basic truth central to the overwhelming problems that Bosnia still faces five years after its war ended with an accord reached in Dayton, Ohio, on Nov. 21, 1995.

Years of complaints that the Dayton accord isn’t working have given way to arguments that it never will. Critics say Western governments allowed opponents to dig in and get control of local economies, keeping hard-line nationalism alive.

Although wounds have begun to heal, ethnic hatreds are still raw, and a united Bosnia is still just a dream waiting in the wings for the nightmare to pass.

Haris Silajdzic, one of Bosnia’s wartime prime ministers, argues that “Dayton has been abandoned” by the West, just as Bosnians were forsaken to “ethnic cleansing” and genocide during more than three years of a war triggered by the 1992 decision by Muslims and Croats to declare independence from the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation.

“Following the line of least resistance has wasted the chances Dayton created,” Silajdzic said in an interview.

The Dayton accord was a flawed compromise forced by a brutal stalemate on Bosnia’s battlefields and by the pit-bull diplomacy of U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, now the American ambassador to the United Nations.

With the eventual added persuasion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing, Serbs agreed to accept Bosnia as an independent but divided country: 49% of the territory went to a Serb-controlled substate called Republika Srpska.

Bosnia’s relative majority of Muslims settled for a federation with the Croats in the other 51%, with the promise that “ethnic cleansing” would be halted and that more than 1.4 million refugees could go back to prewar homes in areas where they were an ethnic minority.

But five years later, only 9% of minority refugees have returned, and hard-line nationalists in all three ethnic groups continue to obstruct efforts to re-integrate Bosnia’s people and institutions.

Despite a more aggressive effort to return refugees, most Bosnian Croats, Muslims and Serbs still live in almost ethnically pure areas, with three separate systems running schools, phone networks, power grids and other services.

Bosnia officially has two local armies, one in each of the substates. But the Croatian troops are so poorly integrated into the federation’s military that they are really a third army, U.S. analyst James Lyon said in an interview in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital.

The NATO-led peacekeeping mission, which includes several thousand U.S. troops, is a fourth force--all that is keeping soldiers in the other three armies from one another’s throats.

The nation-building experiment in Bosnia has cost nearly $6 billion in foreign aid, excluding the enormous bill for the peacekeeping troops. Critics such as Lyon say the payoff is minimal so far. But Dayton’s defenders, including Bosnia’s foreign bureaucrats, accuse critics like him of being too negative, of seeing a glass that’s half empty instead of half full.

“I’m willing to say the glass is full to the brim,” said Lyon, who heads the International Crisis Group, an independent watchdog in Sarajevo. “The problem is there are holes in the bottom and the water leaks out as fast as we can pour it in.”

Bosnia’s biggest success is its peace. However, without the approximately 20,000 NATO-led foreign troops, Lyon said, the war would start again. And the Dayton accord is still far short of fulfilling its main promise: a united, multiethnic nation that can survive on its own.

But the world’s eyes have shifted to other hot spots, such as the Yugoslav republic of Serbia and its troubled province, Kosovo, leaving many in Bosnia worrying that their best hope has come and gone.

“It’s the last black hole in Europe,” said Srdjan Dizdarevic, who heads the Bosnian branch of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights.

Ethnic Violence Flares Anew in Town

Few places in Bosnia were fought over more viciously than the northern town of Brcko, a choke point between the two halves of what became Republika Srpska, where the three warring sides battled along converging front lines, blasting whole neighborhoods to rubble.

Croatian, Serbian and Muslim nationalists each thought that their conflicting visions of Bosnia’s future depended on control of Brcko, so the dispute couldn’t be settled at Dayton. An international arbitration panel ruled in March 1999 that the three sides had to share the town.

The lingering ethnic hatred erupted into student riots last month when Serbian and Muslim teenagers rampaged for days.

Sanja Becirevic, 14, returned to Brcko from Germany in 1998 after six years as a refugee. She is one of only two Muslim pupils in a seventh-grade class of Serbs, with all Serbian teachers. The other kids make sure that she knows her place.

“I don’t think bad things about them, but they think bad things about me,” said Sanja, who was carrying a loaf of bread home to her mother. “They insult me because I belong to this nation.

“But since I’m a girl, I don’t get it as much as the [Muslim] boy in my class. I just stay silent. I don’t care what they say to me, I just laugh. Of course, it’s stupid when you insult other ethnic groups.”

On a side road less than a mile away, Duska Josipovic, a 13-year-old Bosnian Serb, was walking home with a classmate from an exclusively Serbian elementary school. She found it funny when asked if she had Muslim friends.

“They are people like us, but people cannot stand them--at least not me,” said Duska, a refugee from the central Bosnian village of Petrovo. “They are somehow different, somehow unusual.”

Muslims live three doors down from her, but the two families never talk to each other. The shy, polite seventh-grader sees nothing wrong in hating all Muslims.

“We could stand them before the war,” she said. “But after the war, people cannot stand one another.”

A Virtual Theocracy in the Interests of Pact

Under international control, Bosnia is part democracy, part benevolent dictatorship. When it comes to defending the sanctity of the Dayton accord, it is a virtual theocracy.

Bosnia’s analysts are allowed to challenge the principles of the accord, but its politicians are not. Those who do are banned and removed from office by the real ruler: Wolfgang Petritsch, the international high representative.

Voters select local and nationalgovernments, but the elected officials bicker so much that little would get gone if Petritsch, an Austrian diplomat, didn’t impose laws by decree. He has issued at least 175 edicts since Sept. 15, 1998, soon after the Western governments gave him the authority to do so and local leaders agreed.

Among the accomplishments, Petritsch’s orders allowed refugees to get their phones connected, imposed a new flag and national anthem, created a border control service and decided who can be a Bosnian citizen.

In 63 cases, he suspended or banned Bosnian politicians from office. Most were punished for making statements against the Dayton accord or for blocking its implementation.

Lyon, Dizdarevic and many other analysts here argue that the West was wrong to try to build a democracy so soon after the war. They maintain that power should have been handed over gradually to locals, after more refugees returned home and other promises made at Dayton were fulfilled.

Voters in all three ethnic groups gave surprisingly strong support to hard-line nationalist leaders in general elections Nov. 11, a serious blow to the struggle to wean Bosnia from foreign support and control.

Petritsch insists that newly democratic governments in neighboring Yugoslavia and Croatia, and the incentive of greater integration into Europe, will weaken nationalists and persuade Bosnians to overcome ethnic differences.

But efforts by the republic of Montenegro and the province of Kosovo to break away from Yugoslavia have kept the demand for self-determination alive in the Balkans and given fresh ammunition to Bosnia’s hard-liners.

Old-Style Nationalists’ Grip on the Economy

What puzzles many critics is Petritsch’s failure to use his sweeping authority to deny old-style nationalists economic control over state-run companies, black-market dealing and plain corruption, which finance their political power.

The World Bank estimates that 37% of Bosnian workers are unemployed, said Elaine Patterson, the agency’s deputy director in Sarajevo. Other analysts say the figure is closer to 50%, but the unofficial and often illegal “gray economy” is so large that no one can say for sure how many people need jobs.

Foreign aid, still the foundation of Bosnia’s economy and social stability, dropped by an estimated 50% or 60% this year compared with last year, when donors promised about $1 billion.

The sharp drop puts even heavier strain on a fractured country, and Bosnia’s rampant corruption, heavy taxes and meddling by political bosses make it unlikely that private foreign investors are going to rush in to fill in the gaps.

“Never. No chance. You would lose your money completely,” said Klaus Dieter Steinbach, the German director of Volkswagen in Bosnia, who is skilled at the sometimes dangerous, always frustrating art of doing business in the region.

“The transformation process is starting but very, very slowly,” he said. “And it’s very difficult for the international guys to change things because they are not insiders.”

Volkswagen’s auto plant in Vogosca, a suburb of Sarajevo, is one of few large factories that isn’t idle. Even it barely operates, and only because Steinbach learned how to play by the Bosnians’ rules during four years here before the war.

He employs about 100 Bosnian workers who assemble Czech-made Skoda car chassis and imported parts, such as exhaust pipes and shock absorbers. The plan is to have a full assembly line, with domestic parts, up and running by 2006. That’s a long shot.

Labor and other costs are high in Bosnia, but Steinbach still manages to turn a small profit on the assembly of about 2,500 cars. That’s enough to take 40% of the new-car market in Bosnia, where many prefer to buy cheaper stolen Mercedes-Benzes and other models smuggled into the country.

One Optimist Undaunted by Woes

Despite the nation’s economic and political problems, Zeljko Kopanja, a Bosnian Serb newspaper editor, remains an unflinching optimist--even though a year ago he was the casualty of a car bomb explosion that blew off his legs.

Months before the blast, Kopanja’s Nezavisne Novine newspaper had dug up proof of Serbian atrocities so that its readers could confront crimes committed in their name.

He remembers waking up a little groggy Oct. 22, 1999, from a party the night before marking his 45th birthday. He got into his car and was backing up when the vehicle exploded. He remembers staring at his severed foot lying on the seat next to him.

He almost died on the operating table. Now he walks on prosthetic legs and is pursuing criminals who he suspects are linked to Rade Markovic, chief of the Serbian secret police in Yugoslavia.

Kopanja thinks that many of his readers now want Serbian war criminals brought to justice so that a whole people aren’t held responsible for the crimes of the guilty. The democratic revolution that brought down Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic last month will double the speed of progress in Bosnia, he predicted.

One of the worst war crimes documented by Kopanja’s newspaper was the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the town of Kozarac, where survivors are slowly starting to come home. Fehim Trnjanin, a 74-year-old Muslim, returned to the town Nov. 11 for a few hours and faced agonizing memories.

On June 11, 1992, Serbian gunmen supervised by Yugoslav army troops rounded him up with other men for expulsion and then killed his mother, Cama, 90; wife Ema, 67; and sister Mina, 56, in their cellar, Trnjanin said.

Trnjanin showed a photocopy of a picture printed in the local Serbian newspaper during the war. In the photo, he is kneeling with his hands tied behind his back while men with automatic rifles look down, smiling.

As Trnjanin walked with a visitor to the deserted hillside where it all happened, he stopped to greet an old neighbor, Ibrahim Muratcehajic, 51, who had returned from refuge in Austria to start rebuilding his house.

Muratcehajic applied for aid money from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to start renovations two years ago. “They told us, ‘You are not in the plan. We do not have enough money,’ ” he said.

So the carpenter and his brother, Sabit, took out bank loans to pay about $25,000 to rebuild their homes.

Many of the Serbs in Kozarac who helped kill and expel the town’s Muslims still live nearby, Muratcehajic said, but that isn’t what’s keeping him from moving back for good. “There is no electricity, no jobs and no companies to work for,” he said.

Trnjanin’s refuge is the Bosnian town of Sanski Most, and he barely has enough money to feed himself let alone rebuild his house. He also was turned down for financial aid.

“Everything was so beautiful here,” he said, standing by the burned remains of the shed where his only cow once was sheltered, above a clear mountain stream in the foothills of Kozara Mountain.

After walking through the ruins of his home, and looking at the still sooty floor where his mother, wife and sister were slain, Trnjanin apologized and said he had to go.

The old man turned away, and when he thought that no one was looking, he raised the back of a fist to the corner of his eye and gently wiped away a tear. Then he walked off down a country road, alone.