The Crisis in Bosnia-Two Articles: A Grass Roots Solution

...THE CRISIS IN BOSNIA-1 A Grass Roots Solution BY BATIC BACEVIC Belgrade So far there have been two Yugo-slavias Tire first, called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes until 1929, was fashioned from the ruins of the Hapsburg and Turkish empires at the end of World War I Amid an outburst of romantic nationalism, it was nurtured by "South Slavians" (Yugoslavs) determined to build a state whose independence could be preserved among powerful neighbors Twenty-two years later the Balkan nation was overrun by Nazi Germany and its partners After World War II the second Yugoslavia—the Federal Peoples Republic—was built on the rubble of the first in accordance with the principles of Marshal Josip Broz Tito's "eternal Communist ideology" Both South Slavian entities were formed with the best intentions, but without any precise understanding of the concerns of the peoples within their borders Now we have the crisis in Bosnia, the remnant and quintessence of the second Yugoslavia, and again there is no shortage of good intentions Creating the modern, prosperous, multiethnic society envisioned in the Dayton Agreement, however, will require thousands of steps Many of them will undoubtedly strike Western politicians and journalists focused on the Balkans as trivial or irrelevant But the election on September 14 of one Muslim, one Croat and one Serb nationalist to Bosnia's three-man Presidency, not to mention the problems that immediately ensued, underlined the need for intricate new approaches It showed, too, that the first priority of diplomats seeking to pi eserve the fractious country" must be to promote real democracy in Serbia and Croatia The ambitions of those neighbors have been crucial to Bosnia's stability throughout its history, and to some extent the reverse has also been true Unfortunately, well-meaning outsiders too easily lose sight of that complex reality, or simply fail to compi ehend it The Dayton Agreement and other actions suggest that Western politicians believe the most effective course in the former Yugoslavia is collaboration with the very leaders who tore it apart Thus they virtually ignore indigenous moderate political figures and truly democratic groups striving to positively influence events Batic Bacevic is a senior writer and editorialist at NIN, Serbia s leading weekly Yet if the would-be peacemaker s are to succeed, they must seek out these lesser-known individuals and organizations One example is the Liberal Party, which survives in both the Muslim and Serbian sectors of Bosnia, and with the cessation of the fighting is trying to reunite Similarly, the Union of Social Democrats, though severely weakened during the last six years continues to operate in the areas under Serbian and Muslim control Western stereotypes about the Serbs' uniquely vicious nationalism are contradicted by their membership in such groups but few seem to notice As Mio-drag Rivanovic, a moderate, open-minded Serbian leader from Banja Luka has pointed out, a distressing proportion of foreign journalists has failed to distinguish between war criminals like Radovan Karadzic and the Serbian population as a whole This has helped to strengthen the hand of hardliners in Karadzic's Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) the dominant political force in the Repubhka Srpska that Dayton carved out of Bosnia and Herzegovina To call for a more balanced media approach, I want to stress, is not to urge any false symmetry It is merely to request recognition of the truth that there have also been a significant number of Serb victims in recent years Mutual reconciliation lequires an atmosphere able to foster a gradual return to some semblance of the normal relations that once made a genuinely multiethnic state here viable And that can only be achieved if all war cnmes...

...no matter who committed them, are roundly condemned In addition, economic cooperation will be critical to rebuilding a unified Yugoslav society The way Tito organized the economy for instance, a mere dozen factories were totally self-sufficient, in the sense that they prov ided all the components of their finished products the rest were interdependent I have no "red nostalgia" for a centralized economy, but the re-establishment of broken economic ties is surely logical and deserves the assistance of international financial institutions Dunngthepast summer, in what amounted to an admission of failure by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's regime, his Prime Minister, Mirko Mar-janovic, announced a Five-Year Plan to bring the average salary in Serbia back to where it was 10 years ago That Milosevic and the leaders in every other republic are desperate for economic impiovement makes it likely they will eventually agree to join in building the former Yugoslavia's economy and in-frastructure This, in turn, will slowly lead to the lenewal of cultural, sporting and, finally, political ties The "only over my dead body" stance will become less popular in the Balkans A victorious Mom-cilo Kiajisnik declared after the Septem-ber election that Serbs still wanted separation from other ethnic groups but were now more "realistic" about theu position "Utopia has cost us too much blood," he said At the same time, the hostility that he and his Croat counterpart, Kiesimir Zubak, have exhibited toward Ahja Izet-begovic, the chairman of the three-man Presidency, is hardly encouraging Indeed, the situation will remain volatile until certain questions, sure to be wrestled with for many years, are finally resolved How to forgive...

...The initial source of the answers will be those who refused to participate in the Yugoslav slaughterhouse Over a million Bosnians of every ethnic stripe chose not to hate their neighbois and staunchly lived up to the highest human standards Whether they decided to defy military drafts and leave country, job and home, or decided to stay and try to stem the hatred and destruction, they are the nucleus of the Bosnian and Yugoslav future They have much to teach others about forgiving, and should be given unstinting support It is a little known fact in the West that, in Serbia as well, the vast majority of the youth refused to go to war, preferring to risk arrest, job loss and othei depnvations of then civil rights The extent of Serbian pro-peace, pro-democracy sentiment made itself clear in March 1991, when students from Belgrade and other Serbian universities, together with opposition parties, organized the antiregime demonstrations that posed a serious challenge to the power Milosevic had been consolidating since 1986 The President had tanks from the Yugoslav People's National Army fan across Belgrade, but fearing that the protests would spread through the entire country, he met some of the demonstiators' demands He promised increased press freedom, including broader political coverage, and sacked both his biutal Minister of Internal Affairs and the extremely influential editor in chief of the state television station Nevertheless, the students failed to bring down this shrewd politician They allowedthemselves to be distracted when he insisted the spoiadic fighting just begun with Croatia was so giave a danger to Serbs there that it amounted to a national emergency The protesters were seduced, too, by promises of greater de-mocracy and even an entirely new political course—vows Milosevic predictably forgot after a few weeks Behind the scenes the old head of the state television, a close friend of Milosevic's, continued to exer-cise control When the wars with Slovenia and Croatia heated up in the summer of 1991, most participants in the protest movement received draft notices Seventy-five per cent dodged the call-up, usually by leaving the country More than 200,000 remain abroad Among them are many of the former Yugoslavia's young engineers and scientists They reject Milosevic's politics, and see no future for themselves in their country so long as he is running its economy (He is unwilling to loosen his grip on large factories and accept the principles of a market economy, and he routinely prints money when elections are appioaching ) An amnesty for draft evaders announced by Milosevic's party has therefore lined back few of the people the country needs to reconstruct itself As for the expatriates, even when they land jobs paying far more than the $120 per month those with university degrees receive in Belgrade, they struggle with a mixture of depression and the old cravings for political change at home Moreover, they are disappointed and perplexed by an inability to find allies in the West, where the bias against Serbs is such that virtually no one sees their desire to do good If the skeptics are really interested in the solution to the Yugoslav conflict, they should visit a "Yugo club" in Amsterdam, London or Berlin There the young still maintain close, friendly relations across ethnic lmes They do not need reconciliation They want the opportunity to build a decent, promising future, and to transfer their "virus of good feeling" to their homeland All poetic scenarios aside, there is a "down-to-earth" benefit this educated group will bring if and when it returns, namely its firsthand familiarity with democratic cultures and political systems Meanwhile, Western negotiators have to keep in mind that reconciliation is far too complicated a matter to be accomplished through some hastily drafted protocol It will take a substantial amount of time for the former Yugoslavia's republics to digest the tragic events of the last decade, and to again live, if not as a single country, then at least m mutual respect According to a Chinese proverb, one who would move a mountain must begin by removing small stones The question is Who in or out of Yugoslavia has the fortitude and vision needed to carry out the enormous task, pebble by pebble...

...How to admit one s own responsibility for not reacting to what was happening...

...How to compensate for crimes and heal wounds...