Bulletin LIAISON > LIAISON Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1997 - Articles

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Bosnia: The Long Road to Peace

I met Avdo and Raska over luke-warm turkish coffee and slivovitz at their home in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Dobrinja. Within spitting distance of the Sarajevo airport, Dobrinja was on the front lines during three-and- a-half years of war in Bosnia. Avdo toured me through what had once been a comfortable middle-class family room upstairs, complete with TV, VCR, and a well-stocked bar. Standing in the rubble of what remained, I could watch airplanes taking off and landing through the holes the tank- shells had made in the walls. Avdo showed me when he and his wife had been standing five minutes before one of the shells had hit, one of several miracles that allowed the couple to survive the war. Beyond the airport, I could make out the outlines of Mount Igman, from which those shells had come, and from which Serbian gunners beseiged the city through three winters.

When I met them, Avdo and Raska were living in less breezy quarters, but had returned to weatherproof their home as best they could from the coming winter. Rebuilding was out of the question, at least for now. With the average post-war salary in Sarajevo the equivalent of about $200 per month, extensive house reconstruction remains out of reach for most. That, combined with worries that renewed fighting may undo any rebuilding efforts, means that a year after the seige was lifted, Sarajevo hasn’t changed much.

In many ways, Avdo and Raska’s house seemed an apt metaphor for international efforts to bring peace to war-torn Bosnia. Since the Dayton Peace Accords ended the fighting in December of 1995, the main international response to Bosnia has been akin to throwing a tarp over the wreckage in the hopes that, with time, conditions for rebuilding will improve. The coverage has been provided by IFOR, the 54,000-strong NATO Implementation Force which has been charged with keeping the peace, with force if necessary. IFOR has now been transformed into the Stabilization Force (SFOR), which will do the same job for the next 18 months with half the peacekeepers.

While SFOR will probably continue to keep a lid on renewed hostilities, it cannot by itself create peace. As it has for the past five years, the central question bedeviling would-be peacebuilders in Bosnia is whether a just peace is more easily obtained through the creation of three ethnically- pure ministates or through efforts to recreate a multicultural Bosnia. The Dayton process, which culminated in national elections last September, paid lip service to the second option while allowing a continued drift in the direction of the first.

Dayton divided Bosnia into two provinces - the Serb entity of Republika Srpska and a Muslim-Croat federation. In reality, however, the inter-entity boundary line feels more like the Iron Curtain than an interprovincial boundary. You still need a satellite phone to place a call from Sarajevo to Pale, the Bosnian Serb capital some 30 kilometres away. Over a year after hostilities ended, inter-ethnic fear is still palpable on both sides of the line. On the one bus I took which crossed the inter-entity boundary, the vehicle’s Sarajevo licence plates had been covered up in an effort to avoid harassment or worse on the Serb side.

The territorial divisions created by Dayton also further encouraged the same process which during the war came to be known as ethnic cleansing. During the elections, I worked in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilidza, which had a majority Serb population before and during the conflict. After control of Ilidza transferred from the Serbs to the Muslim-Croat federation as part of the Dayton agreement, however, most Serbs left. Their abandoned homes were taken over by mainly Muslim refugees who themselves had been driven out of former UN ’safe areas’ such as Srebrenica and Zepa.

The elections also served to reinforce the nationalist ethos that dominates Bosnia and is responsible for so much of its suffering. Muslim refugees voting for candidates in what is now Republika Srpska, for example, found that they were able to vote only for Serb presidential candidates. As one Muslim woman from Banja Luka put it to me: "How can we vote when the only candidates on the ballot are war criminals?" Nor was freedom of movement, supposedly a pre-condition for the elections, a reality by voting day. Few refugees had returned to their homes from which they had been cleansed, and fewer still were brave or foolish enough to take the buses back to their former homes to vote.

Most of us who worked on the elections recognized these problems, but consoled ourselves with the fact that even if the elections weren’t perfect, at least people had stopped killing each other. And even with improvements in both the timing and structure of the electoral process, the results of the September 14 vote may have been inevitable, with the only question being the nationalists’ margin of victory. In each entity, the ruling nationalist party dominated the media and allowed little room for alternate voices promoting a multicultural Bosnia. Those who did present a non-nationalist vision, such as former Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, found themselves harassed or beaten. Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic has argued that the result was a foregone conclusion since after four years of war, the majority of Bosnia’s people - Serb, Croat, and Muslim - no longer wish to live together. "No agreement and no elections can coerce togetherness in everyday life," she wrote in The Nation during the lead-up to the elections. " The Bosnian state will therefore be only an empty shell, a nonfunctioning federal government under which the three divided nations, or ’ethnicities’ will live in their ethnically cleansed territories, with their own ruling party, army, police and religion."

Events in the aftermath of the election seem to confirm this view. The rotating three-member presidency, made up of a Serb, a Muslim and a Croat, got off to a shaky start when the Serb President-elect refused to attend the swearing-in ceremony in Sarajevo, and remains largely dysfunctional. Attempts by Muslim refugees to return to their homes in what is now Republika Srpska have sparked a number of violent incidents over the last several months, and many Muslim-owned houses on the Serb side have been blown up as a means of deterring the return of their owners.

Permanent ethnic apartheid in Bosnia is not, however, inevitable. A week before the September elections, 60,000 Sarajevans turned out for the International Athletic Day of Solidarity, a reminder that Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics only a dozen years ago. The meeting of athletes from all over the world was also a reminder that Sarajevo was once one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, a working model of tolerance and inter-ethnic harmony. Many people I met in Sarajevo remain in a state of transfixed disbelief that a war of ethnic intolerance could have engulfed their city.

For now, however, ethnic intolerance and isolation remain in the interests of those in charge. After nearly four ghastly years of ethnic conflict, and a peace settlement that institutionalizes the ethnically- divided reality of Bosnia, the opportunities for the outside world to encourage former neighbors to live together in peace again are relatively limited. The best that can be hoped for is that NATO forces will continue to keep the peace, that international donors come through with the $1.8 billion in development assistance they pledged last year, and that over time, the voices for tolerance and reconciliation within Bosnia can compete with those promoting ethnic division. In the end, the best hope for a sustainable peace may lie in the creation of conditions whereby people like Avdo and Raska can have the resources and the confidence to rebuild, put the war behind them, and get on with their lives.

Timothy Donais is a former UNA-Canada Communications Officer. He was in the former Yugoslavia last September as part of an international team supervising elections in Bosnia.