A Bosnian account
The muffled news reports of the recent protests in Bosnia and Hercegova have been received by the European spectrum with a typical anxiety concerning the potential for ethnic violence in the Balkans.
Hugely participated and occasionally violent, these demonstrations first took spark in February, when workers in the north-eastern city of Tuzla came out on to the streets in significant numbers. From there, the wild-fire of discontent caught on to all the other main urban centres in Bosnia (mostly within the Federation), and beyond (with demonstrations in the Serbian-majority city of Banja Luka, as well as in Zagreb).
Starting off as an indignant critique of the critical economic situation faced by Bosnian citizens (youth unemployment is at over 60%, and the average salary at the lowest in the region), the protests were further flanked by a broader dispute over the country’s dysfunctional institutional setting.
Almost twenty years after the Dayton Peace Agreements, the supposed ethnic guarantees provided by the two entities within which the country has been divided (Federation of BiH and Republika Srpska), together with the fragmentation and malfunctioning of the municipal entities have proved a catastrophic lack of coordination between the state’s economic institutions.
However, this “institutional” focus diverts attention from the issues at stake on ground level, as concisely presented by the citizens’ plenums. While the EU is already hinting towards a diplomatic, if not a military intervention to prevent the situation from escalating towards an ethnic conflict, it is necessary to why the phantom menace of ethnic clashes is closer to Europe’s obsession with Star Wars, than it is to reality.
Once a prominent industrial town, Tuzla has been at the heart of Yugoslavia’s mining and manufacturing production. The break-up of Tito’s Federation, followed by a civil war that was gravely mis-managed by international forces, brought together a ruthless process of privatization and de-industrialisation, sided with issues of corruption at almost all levels.
Tuzla’s working class has been historically characterized by a legacy of positive inter-ethnic relations going back as far as the Austro-Hungarian period, and subsequently solidified by its left-wing, pro-Yugoslav tradition – which renders superfluous, even today the talk of “ethnic coexistence”. The city’s collective memory as a (non-ethnic) unicum, together with its still strong Yugoslav identity finds its codification in the survival of a rather solid working-class identity.
And it’s no coincidence that the “spark” from which “the fire flared up” has precisely been lit by Tuzla’s workers, protesting against the failed privatization of many of the city’s main industries, and claiming back their unpaid salaries, pensions and healthcare.
Workers’ and citizens’ movements across the country quickly internalized these claims, and began a series of protests questioning the mismanagement of economic resources at large. Political elites and governmental institutions have been confronted for the failures of their economic reforms. Hence, the very structure of governmental and institutional “three-entities” framework has been widely questioned.
There is, therefore, a direct link between the economic issues at stake and the arguments for a long-term institutional renovation, and it doesn’t take an expert to notice that.
However, when looking at the immediate reactions among the Jedis of EU diplomacy, they seem to stick to their processed and digested understandings of “the Balkans”. Not only are “the Balkans” a powder keg of never-soothed ethnic tensions, but also their peoples are somehow stuck in a never-ending process of inexplicable trauma-recovery.
A widespread paranoia for a return to uncontrollable ethnic tensions is precisely what’s moving EU diplomats towards diplomatic, if not yet military intervention. According to Stefan Fuele, EU Enlargement Commissioner, “The European Commission will focus on new initiatives to promote better economic governance, a national economic reform program and action to tackle the country’s […] unemployment”.
What the Commission does not specify is exactly what has led people to take to the streets: How will these reforms be carried out, and towards which model? The EU has already provided a striking and straightforward example of its economic programmes for stability; Greece is not far from Bosnia, neither temporally nor spatially.
What is more insulting, however, is the philanthropic attitude with which the EU distracts us away from the core of these protests. The EU, in its economic mission, has already taken upon itself to carry the “white-man’s burden” on behalf of the local work-force which it deems politically juvenile, but it does not want to stop there. It is also determined to provide emotional support to the forever traumatised Bosnian population. The continuing recurrence of themes of genocide and ethnic cleansing are bound to evoke an idea of a permanently traumatised population. The by-product of this discourse is the pathologisation of an entire population, which, as a consequence, requires permanent and close assistance to overcome its own violent past.
It seems that the unspeakable horrors of the events in Sarajevo, from the 90’s way back to 1914 have crystallised Europe’s collective memory on a faded snapshot of Bosnia as a suffering nation. Even now, when Bosnia makes it to foreign newspapers, is usually through the lens of a traumatised body of people on which we can still see the scars of an imposed unity. Only in this way can we be reminded – on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – of the evils of their socialist past.
Even here in Pakistan, a country that once considered itself inseparable from the plight of Bosnian Muslims, these recent protests have not received any coverage at all. To this day, Bosnia is reduced to superficial mentions in religious sermons and drawing-room conversations, seldom invoked without the talk of the violence it endured in the 90s.
In the 90s, however, Bosnia was Pakistan’s poster-nation for its adventurous expeditions in Indian-held Kashmir. In an effort to recruit guerilla elements to meet its goals against the Indian occupation of Kashmir, the inflictions of Sarajevo were advertised to inspire resistance across the Islamic world, which felt increasingly encroached upon by forces of globalisation. However, somewhere along the line, Bosnia ceased to be a political orphan in desperate need of help, and took a more nuanced position between imposed narratives, and in doing so, it has now become an irksome candidate for imperial molestations. As a result of this inconvenience, the rest of the world has cryonically frozen a conflict-ridden version of Bosnia in a purgatorial imagination, reprising it whenever Bosnia expresses self-autonomy in front of its ‘liberators’.
Bosnia has been flaunted as a symbol of socialist failure, as an example of the global oppression of Muslims, and now as an irrelevant and pitiful country, incapable of overcoming its traumatic past without being shepherded by its proxy ‘allies’.
The uprising there is a fight back, not only against 20 years of imposed political and economic failures, but this interventionist attitude as well. Bosnians are now refusing to be typecast as victims of their own nature, and have realised that behind the Jedis of neo-liberalism, lies the Empire of Evil.