Archive for June, 2007
International Community’s Options for Bosnia and Herzegovina
This time last year, Mr. Christian Schwarz-Schilling - the High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) – announced his goal to close down the Office of the High Representative (OHR) by June of 2007. His plan was actually to radically transform this office into the EU Special Envoy, thus drastically reducing the executive powers that the OHR currently enjoys. Those powers – called the Bonn Powers – were the key instrument in passing some of the country’s most important legislation and removing certain individuals from the position of power. Under Schwarz-Schilling’s plan, the future EU Special Envoy’s job will not include such powers. In fact, the position would be merely advisory – to help guide Bosnia and Herzegovina toward EU and NATO membership. Luckily, that plan failed. OHR as an institution has been extended until June 2008 and most likely be extended beyond that date. The post will be filled by Miroslav Lajcak – a young and energetic Slovakian diplomat with experience of working with transitioning societies in both his country and in Serbia and Montenegro. He supplemented that experience with a tour in Japan as Slovakian ambassador. His early statements point that he, unlike his predecessor, will take an aggressively proactive role, relying on the Bonn Powers if necessary, to put BH back on the reform direction. In today newspapers (Dnevni Avaz, 29 JUN 2007), he correctly stated that the current BH Constitution is a product of war and should be radically replaced. For the fans of the radical and meaningful reforms to BH Constitution, Lajcak’s statements are very encouraging, indeed.
Continue reading ‘International community’s options for BiH’
Regarding this post: I wrote this essay yesterday (27 JUN 2007) at work. It is an unrefined and uneditted thinking about the departure of the old High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina (Christian Schwarz-Schilling) and the arrival of new HR -Slovakian diplomat Miroslav Lajcak. I welcome your comments and thoughts.
Vanja
Facing Reality: Lajcak’s Introduction to Politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina
The current High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina – Mr. Schwarz-Schilling – will be remembered for a few things. When he came to this country to replace Lord Paddy Ashdown, he inherited a political climate that was, for Bosnian standards, civilized and optimistic in its outlook toward meaningful reforms in defense, police, education, and even the Dayton constitution.
This climate quickly eroded as Mr. Schwarz-Schilling pronounced his hands-off approach thus enabling domestic political factors - eager to assume leadership role based not on prudence, temperance and willingness to work towards the common goal – to climb to power by exploiting and deepening ethnic divide (the quickest and surest way to power in these parts of the world).
Those who follow the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina will note that during Schwartz-Schilling’s mandate the country has lost all of its positive momentum towards stability, reform and integration into EU and NATO and has, in fact, severely retreated into ethnic intolerance and bickering that is becoming a crisis of pre-war proportions.
As if the situation has not become tense enough, the outgoing HR has made two decisions that will severely affect the incoming HR, Mr. Miroslav Lajcak, in most negative terms. The first decision was Mr. Schwarz-Schilling’s announcement that he would remain in Bosnia and Herzegovina past his termination as the High Representative. Although he explains such a move as merely wishing to avoid rushed departure from the country, it is highly unlikely to expect that Mr. Schwarz-Shilling will remain a passive and uninvolved person – a tourist perhaps – in Sarajevo for an unspecified period of time. Indeed, after learning that his mandate as HR would not be extended, Mr. Schwarz-Schilling floated an idea that he would like to remain as an adviser to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s transformation effort to meet EU standards for ascension. This idea, however, was quickly shut down.
Facing the possibility that he would go down in history as Bosnia and Herzegovina’s worst High Representative, Mr. Schwarz-Schilling may be contemplating that he still has time to preserve his legacy in a positive light acting as an unofficial advisor. It would be hard to imagine that the new HR and key ambassadors to Bosnia and Herzegovina would not return well-meaning, advisory calls from Mr. Schwarz-Schilling. It is even harder to imagine that Mr. Lajcak would deny his predecessor an open-door policy to the institution he once ran.
Despite Mr. Schwartz-Schilling’s best intentions, his presence will serve as nothing more than a distraction to hard decisions and course corrections that Mr. Lajcak – and international community - must take in the coming months in order to reverse negative political and security trends in the country.
Mr. Schwartz-Schilling’s second antagonizing decision that would come back to haunt Mr. Lajcak’s policy direction is the proclamation that the memorial park – cemetery – of the Srebrenica victims would be placed under the state protection and administration at the expense of the RS government and police. Mr. Schwarz-Schilling’s rationale was to give a token reward to demands placed by the Srebrenica survivors and to remove Srebrenica as a political issue (a dead-end, desperate attempt by the Bosniak politicians to cash in on the ruling by the Hague Tribunal that RS was complicit in the Srebrenica 1995 massacre).
Although his action may be seen as positive, it’s timing was completely wrong. Within hours of the announcement, the RS government and the RS National Assembly each condemned this act as another attempt to strip RS from its powers and territorial jurisdiction using unconstitutional means. Instead of removing Srebrenica from the political agenda, Mr. Schwarz-Schilling’s decision regarding the memorial will make this town a rallying cry for all RS political forces resisting meaningful reforms in the country. Indeed, Srebrenica survivors would have been better served as citizens if the HR had focused on larger strategic reforms aimed at benefiting all citizens, rather than micro-managing war memorial’s administration.
The situation with the memorial will undoubtedly serve the Bosnian Serb recidivists to argue against HR’s further reliance on the Bonn Powers, which very well may be the only remaining instrument at HR’s disposal for passing through deadlocked legislation and removing unruly politicians. If this happens, not only would the international community lose important administrative powers, it would forego the remaining shreds of influence over RS Prime Minister Milorad Dodik – who is already openly taunting HR to remove him if he dares – and elevate him to a de facto RS ruler-for-life.
This scenario, however improbable, pessimistic or alarmist, is more than just a Serb nationalist utopia. It represents the strategic goal on the part of the RS political leadership and powerful right-wing faction in Serbia proper that still believe in Milosevic’s project. Instead of relying on military power, as it was the case in the early 1990s, the new wave of Greater Serbian proponents – many of whom were labeled as “reformist” and “moderate” by the Western media and diplomats - are using pseudo-democratic methods of blocking every meaningful reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina that would serve all of its citizens. Between negotiations, they masterfully use acquired time to raise tensions with inflammatory rhetoric and turn every legislative issue into an inter-ethnic dispute and a serious crisis.
Their ultimate goal is to portray Bosnia and Herzegovina to international community as a failed state – a state whose “constituent” peoples cannot agree over a single, however mundane, issue. A number of foreign newspapers and magazines have already made such proclamations, undoubtedly reflecting certain diplomats’ private views. If Bosnia and Herzegovina indeed becomes a failed state, it will only be prudent to let it partition along ethnic lines, conventional wisdom would have it.
In essence, the RS leadership and their mentors in Belgrade are using the same strategy as Kosovo Albanians – solidifying control over the near-ethnically pure RS and making unworkable any semblance of multiethnic life and civil society. The last remaining obstacle for RS secession is to gain international legitimacy. However, if Bosnia and Herzegovina is eventually deemed a failed state, the RS would automatically gain legitimacy since it would be seen as an administrative territorial unit with a centralized and stable government with efficient police, economy, education, etc. Same could not be said for Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state or the other entity – Federation BiH.
The first thing that Mr. Lajcak must do is to see through the apparent political quagmire and recognize the strategic goals of various political factions in the country. Only by doing so will he realize what is really at stake: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s very statehood. By default, US and EU reputation in producing and keeping peace in this country is also at stake.
Once this understanding is reached, the incoming HR must be able to break free from his predecessor’s legacy and set in motion aggressive series of polices that would ensure Bosnia and Herzegovina’s survival, gradual stabilization and prospering. These policies must rely on the principle that ethnic groups’ rights must be preserved but not at the expense of the state. In order words, entities or future administrative units must not enjoy state-like powers as they enjoy now. As long as that is the case, secessionist forces will continue to bide for time and obfuscate any attempts by domestic and international powers to move country toward Euro-Atlantic integration. That is why the new HR will have to reclaim the right to use Bonn powers, but only in furtherance of strategic goals rather than to solve tactical problems.
Mr. Lajcak must be aware that the burden for these bold initiatives lies directly on the international community and HR as the tip of its spear. There are simply no coherent domestic political forces or political tools that could counter the secessionist ambitions. Dayton peace agreement is the product of the international efforts to end the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and within its framework lies the inability to amend it from within Bosnia and Herzegovina. Right now, its perseverance works only in favor of those who wish to go down in history as fathers of Greater Serbia. We must not be afraid to name them: Milorad Dodik and Vojislav Kostunica.
posted by tijana on nEUrosis, June 22nd
A recent TV news programme on B92 (an informative, non-scandalous and hence often denounced TV station in Serbia) showed a so called “shelter” in Belgrade for the internally-displaced people from Kosovo. This dilapidated building contains about fifty people, who all happen to share one bathroom. A three or four-member family often occupies a single room, which also has a stove inside and serves as a kitchen.
These people have been living in such conditions ever since the bombing of Serbia in 1999, when they were forced to leave Kosovo. The Serbian authorities are paying for their utilities in this building. And that’s about it. Some of the refugees have also managed to get some money to start building their own houses in Belgrade. However, allegedly, they could not get the legal building permits from the authorities, which is why they cannot introduce electricity in their new homes. Naturally, they are complaining that they are not getting enough help from the Serbian government. The officials say they’re doing all in their power to help them.
In the meantime, the government keeps repeating that Serbia will never renounce Kosovo. None of these refugees is thinking of ever coming back to the disputed province. Yet for our politicians it’s the land that matters, we’ll deal with the people later.
In the light of the World Refugee Day on Wednesday, Serbian news agencies announced that the country has the largest number of refugees in Europe (currently 105,000) and occupies the sixth place in the world. Bear in mind that this number does not include more than 200,000 internally-displaced people from Kosovo. The majority of these have been unemployed for more than a year. Recent research showed that when they eventually do find a job, it’s way below their professional qualifications.
So what does the international community do? So many refugees indeed depend on the help of the UNHCR. However, I recently ran into a refugee who was protesting in front of the UNHCR office in Belgrade. He says that the UNHCR wanted to put him in a psychiatric institution (although there was nothing wrong with his mental health) because they didn’t know what else to do with him. He actually looked quite sane.
After he had escaped from the war in Croatia, he was helped by the UNHCR, only to flee to the UK. However, he had to be repatriated recently. According to him, the UNCHR obviously thinks that the best way to assist him is to place him in an asylum. Yet, I won’t dare to draw any broader conclusions; this is an isolated case after all. Or, perhaps there are there others, less brazen to speak up?
posted by tijana on nEUrosis on June 16th.
Shadowed by the excitement over Bush’s watch, Milan Martic bugStroudgered off to jail. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sealed the faith of the former leader of Serbs in Croatia with a 35-year-long sentence. He was convicted of crimes against non-Serbs in Krajina (part of Croatia with Serb population) as well as for ordering an attack on Zagreb. This decision yet again spurred a vehement discussion on double standards: they only convict the Serbs and no one blames the Croats.
Disappointed, if not surprised, I discovered that Kurir, a tabloid with significant circulation in Serbia, yet again spearheaded this “debate.” The article merely starts with Martic and then goes on to describe the atrocities that Croats committed over Serbs in an action called “Bljesak,” which acted as a trigger for Martic’s crimes. According to Kurir, Croats killed about 300 Serbs and expelled more than 15,000 during two-day long “Bljesak.” The newspaper argues that Martic bombed Zagreb in retaliation to “Bljesak.” The essential idea being that one crime justifies another.
Those who believe in the influence of media over public opinion, sense the danger of such mainstream discourse. The article claims that war criminals behind “Bljesak” will never receive their due punishments since ICTY has stopped pressing further charges.
The main obstacle on the road towards reconciliation in Serbia is a deeply ingrained belief that only Serbs are being prosecuted. Why is this case?
Luis Moreno Ocampo, the leading prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), might offer an answer. At a recent conference on war crimes in Dubrovnik he explained the two possible ways of going about prosecutions. One is sequential, where the charges are first pressed against the crimes with the largest number of victims, regardless of which side had committed them. The second, representative, seeks to prosecute the gravest crimes committed by each side during the war.
Since the sequential method is the one currently employed, the Serbs happened to be the first on the list, judging by the scale of the committed crimes. Xabier Agirre, who worked for the ICTY, also pointed out that some of the “big fish” on the Croat side of the war crimes pond had already died.
While I thoroughly understand the logic of lining crimes by the number of victims, I’m wondering if this approach is the best fit for the former Yugoslavia. It unavoidably fuels the feeling of injustice towards one side and plays into the hands of those prone to abusing nationalism. I also find it hard to understand how one explains to the families of victims that 1,000 people dying together are more important than the one who died alone? Another relevant question is whether ICTY should be regarded only as a tool for bringing about justice, and can we deny its implicit role in (re)writing history?
Not to neglect my homage to Martic, I’m coming back to a quote I found by the former US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith. He characterized Martic as a man of “limited abilities and intelligence” (I have heard others say the same) whose actions gave a perfect excuse to Franjo Tudjman to start his retribution in the Operation “Oluja” (Storm), where the Croats crushed Serbian insurgency in Croatia and cleansed most of the Serbs from the area. I won’t dare to play with the exact figures. So who’s destiny are we weeping about here?
Summer 1941: We leave our home in Kupojno.
After the German plane destroyed our house, we began our altered life. We cleared rubble and salvaged some furniture, our mattresses and blankets, pots etcetera. We righted the woodstove where it had landed in the yard, and held together its broken panels with wire. Thereafter we cooked in the open. We lived in a corner of the cellar with the splintered kitchen floor as our roof.
A few months later the same plane or another wasted more bombs on us, leaving our ruin complete. Cowering behind the Bogomil stones in the upper meadow, we survived. When night fell we began walking, carrying some bundles of salvaged possessions and two live chickens — Uncle, Aunt, four children, one dog.
We trudged through wrecked villages toward Bojnik, which we entered before dawn and found also in ruins. Some people were living in their smashed houses. There was little reason to stop except for rest. An old woman watched us from the empty frame of a window in her roofless house. Bloating animals — dogs, goats — lay here and there. Uncle asked the woman for water and she swore at us with forceless anger. We sat on a broken wall. Birds sang and the sun rose, throwing heat at us, promising a cruel day. There were explosions somewhere very far off, the sound ovoid, almost benign. Uncle had words with Aunt, and pronounced that the daylight was less dangerous than the night for travel.
We resumed walking, stopping near midday by a stream where we gulped water and built a fire, cooked and ate our first chicken. We drowsed, half-dead, then the sound of a tank and Garo barking jerked me awake. The machine throbbed and clanked past us on the road, spewing black fumes. Uncle said it was Italian. We gathered our things and moved on, walking through the dust churned up into the still air. The road climbed into rough karst hills, leading us closer to the Drina River town of Vi?egrad. My Aunt’s people lived there, if they still lived. We hoped they would take us in.
Rain brought relief from the heat, but cast a new curse. Other cruelties remained unchanged, keeping pace with our progress through ruined villages and towns held by Italians who ignored us, or by Ustashas who could ignore or as easily murder us if they were bored or drunk enough. Our destination of Vi?egrad was yet another several days’ hike.
Trudging through steady drizzle along a mud-clogged road, Uncle exclaimed yet again how near we were to Vi?egrad, even as a hacking cough drowned his words. Aunt called him a fool. He flashed his yellow teeth, windmilled his arms to rally us forward — a ludicrous jollity. Aunt stopped walking. She stood staring down into the mud. She looked up and glared at Uncle still shuffling ahead, now pumping his scarecrow arms like pistons on a locomotive.
“Vaso!”
He halted.
“Vaso, the rain is not going to stop! So we must stop!” She scanned the roadside: sodden vegetation, scrubby trees, burned houses, and ahead on the right a house well abused but unscorched, with a roof. She marched past Uncle, veered off the road, picked her way through litter and smashed furniture to its gaping front door, peered inside. She shouted a greeting into the shadows. We waited on the road. When she entered the house my sister looked at us, then followed her. They appeared at a broken window.
“Come and look. It’s not so bad. It’s dry at least.”
Uncle pondered the horizon. He coughed and spat green mucus into the mud. He approached the house and entered. So we were sheltered, suddenly and absurdly cheered by our fortune.
Uncle made his patriarch’s inspection, Aunt already looking for a broom, my sister stepping over broken glass to open cupboards. I and my cousins followed Uncle from room to room, everything a musty chaos, not one object where it belonged. Strewn clothing, bedding, furniture, papers and photographs, a leatherbound Koran torn apart, floorboards ripped up, holes punched through plaster, pillows slashed open, walls splattered with bullet holes, a mattress crusted with dried blood, blood on the wall above it, and sprayed across the ceiling. Uncle closed a door on the blood. We went into the kitchen, Aunt now sweeping debris, my sister going out the back door with a bucket.
“There’s a rain barrel, Uncle.”
He said we would leave first thing next morning. Aunt gazed levelly at him and put her broom aside.
“Help me move this table.”
There was scrapwood under the back steps. Uncle kindled a fire in the kitchen stove. We dried our clothes. We still had some smoked salt fish from home, a quarter-round of hard cheese, one tin of meat. In the cellar we found some withered potatoes, two jars of onions in brine, some mouldy sausage that we trimmed and fed to Garo.
The rain stopped. Uncle went down to a pond behind the house with hook and line and came back without fish, but in his hat some raspberries, which he divided into four little piles on the enameled tabletop that my Aunt had wiped clean. I remember Uncle’s calloused fingers stained red, and the red blotches on the white enamel, the sweet tang of the fruit. We boys gobbled ours, but my sister said they tasted like dog piss. She spat into the sink and Uncle ate her berries in an indignant gulp. Closing our minds to the pitiful things all around us, we ate in the cramped kitchen, filled our stomachs with boiled potatoes, Uncle’s smoked fish, briny slices of onion. Garo, as usual, ate our fish heads. The cheese and meat we saved.
A truck drove past at dusk. At a distance it slowed and turned, came back and stopped in the road, disgorged three men: an Ustasha officer in high polished boots like Mussolini’s, and two soldiers in clean uniforms. In the yard we were inspected and deemed mildy amusing, and more certainly repellant (disgust being, for a trampled enemy, the only possible variant of pity). I watched a soldier slap Uncle repeatedly about the ears until Aunt blurted that there was indeed a weapon in the house. She offered to get it, but the shiny boots posed and demurred and chose me instead. The two soldiers followed me inside and I pointed to the bag containing Uncle?s rusty pistol, a relic from the Great War. (Triggered, of course, by a Serb nationalist. Nothing can ever quite redeem us.) The soldiers searched the rest of our baggage, peered into a few cupboards. Everything they looked upon seemed to confirm in them the correctness of their contempt.
So they took our gun and left Uncle with aching ears, Aunt and my sister weeping, my cousin of nine saying, as if planning a tea party, that he would kill all the Croats some day, and roast them on spits and feed them to their mothers in a soup, and Aunt barked at him between sobs for this last part. But it was just a schoolyard story (though not quite apocryphal), something mothers have heard and still hear.
We rested as best we could on a patch of floor, and began walking before dawn under stars in a clear sky. The sun climbed over a ridge and dappled us through tree boughs, and I felt that this day might be better. In ?e?njavica, Italian soldiers and Croats were camped in the abandoned houses. The main street was scattered with rubble, some civilians gathering it into piles while bored soldiers stood about smoking. A crazy woman in a dress caked with filth performed a bizarre dance, jerking like a puppet in front of the soldiers. They smoked and stared at her with dumb contempt as she lifted her dress to flash her pubis at them. Aunt saw the display too late, then hustled us past. Uncle later bartered his aluminum pocket comb to a soldier for some cigarettes.
As we left the town a hellish stench made us gasp and wretch. We passed a horse with legs stiff in the air, its exploded belly swarming with vermin. My sister vomitted on the road, then so did my two cousins, and Aunt fussed, wiping their faces, because they?d lost their breakfast of cold potato.
We passed into the German zone. The cruelty of the Ushashas and the indifference of the Italians gave way to a measured suspicion. We were questioned at certain crossings, though never impeded for long. The day advanced. The sun stayed with us and grew too hot. There were others on the road, some with horse and wagon, some with wagon only, pushing and pulling, some lugging bags and suitcases. Some were clearly Muslim by their dress. Others, like us, attempted a non-identity. No one spoke; eyes glanced away. We were all closed inside our fear and exhaustion. Approaching a village at dusk we found an empty house, but it was so strewn with filth and debris that we slept under trees in the yard. The night was mild and dry and we were undisturbed.
posted by jibs at Steady State, on June 12th
The debates surrounding Kosovo’s independence top the news again. As the decision on Kosovo’s independence looms closer, the voices from elsewhere become louder and the disagreements sharper. Can’t help writing about it.
The Serbs are ‘disgusted’ by George Bush’s speech on Kosovo given during his visits to Albania and Bulgaria. While touring the Balkans, Bush tried to charm his Eastern European supporters by taking a firm stand on the Kosovo saga. “America believes that Kosovo ought to be independent.” he says, and that “endless dialogue” over Kosovo’s future status is pointless.
He has a point… in a way. There is a very little ground between “independence” of an enclave (Kosovo in this case) and “territorial integrity” of the parent country (Serbia). Something tells me that the minute NATO bombs were generously sprinkled over Serbia in 1999, Kosovo gained its independence. So the dialogue was finished back then.
So, in a way, there was nothing the dialogue could change, as Kosovo outcome was predetermined. The time between then (1999) and now, was used for implementing democracy, civil society, and all those nice things you need to have (or appear to have) to gain independence. Like a prerequisite before taking an advanced course in college. This is what the breakaway regions in the former Soviet countries also hope to achieve, before fate will smile in their direction (improbably, I should add).
Everyone knows that law has little to do with the outcome surrounding Kosovo, but still there is a wrangle about the precedents, applicability, legality and double standards. True, the law should apply uniformly to everyone, but in the matters of international relations, one simply can’t expect the same outcomes say, in Burundi and Japan.
The whole “Kosovo precedent” saga is thus a matter of interpretation. And the reaction depends on where it came from: the Kosovo Albanians are happy, the Serbs disgusted, the Georgians anxious to point out differences, Russians nostalgic about the good old days of power and the former Soviet breakaway regions are saddened. One blanket won’t fit everyone equally, so get used to it.
But what is to be done? There is no way out which would not upset some party, and please another. Think of it, give independence to all potential candidates, and you can have 200 more countries, anything between more visa restrictions and tiny football teams.
So, forget about a just solution.
Amidst all this I liked the position of Sergey Baburin, Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma. Although openly advocating the recognition of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno Karabakh and by this, standing up for the bitterest and most nostalgic Russian sentiments, he says “I’m always trying to assure Russian President that it’s necessary to form diplomatic relationship among Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. This question is not connected with Kosovo because there is another situation.”
posted by le ideoblogue, at nEUrosis on June 12th
The American President George W. Bush deigned two small Balkan countries with the joy of his presence in the past three days. Both Bulgaria and Albania were Dnevnik Bulgaria in havoc sufficient for a visit of such importance. While the local media followed in trance the high-level visit and reported widely on the President’s menu, suit, and the gifts he received, they ignored the rather juiciest details. Given the propensity of Mr Bush to produce verbal gems and social blunders, such details were not wanting. Talking about Bulgaria’s membership to NATO, he assured his audience that “These are big achievements for this country and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved.” With partners this eloquent they sure are.
Also, at the start of the press conference with Bulgaria’s president Georgi Parvanov, Mr Bush tried to pronounce his name several times, without much success. “Dear President Parna… Parnano… ” he said before giving up, and switching to first names. “I call him George and he calls me George”. Mr Parvanov was ecstatic. So were the Bulgarian media, many of whom also reported that “the master of the world set foot in Sofia”. I will not dignify this absurdity with a comment.
But the fun did not end here. Bulgaria’s neighbour, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (here I will also switch to first names and call it Macedonia) also tried to take credit. On the day of Mr Bush’s visit to Bulgaria, the Macedonian government declared that his visit in the region indicates that Macedonia will soon join NATO and the EU. How about that?
Still, the greatest joke is yet to come. The media in Bulgaria, Greece and Albania speculated widely on the question whether Mr Bush had his watch stolen by fans in Tirana. Apparently, he started the rally with a watch on his wrist, but after shaking hands and being kissed and otherwise molested by ardent supporters in the Albanian capital, he was left watch-less. YouTube has a video of the whole thing, which can be seen here. Apparently having nothing better to do, the White House vehemently denied these speculations, and issued a statement saying that the President’s watch fell, was picked up by a bodyguard, and was put in his left pocket. The American embassy in Tirana had its own version - that the watch was relayed to the first lady, Laura Bush, who accompanied her husband during his European tour. As a proof, both sources pointed at pictures showing Mr Bush upon his arrival in Sofia later the same day, with a watch on his wrist. Phew (sigh of relief).
This blog is the story of my war experience. I am Bosnian man, writer and poet. (Names here are changed to protect privacy.) I was nine years old when Germany invaded Yugoslavia. I was 60 years when war came again to my village in Bosnia. My parents were Serb and Muslim. This was not usual kind of marriage in 1930, but they were Communists and held strong belief in the communal dream. Tito?s dream, for peace and unity.
The text beginning below here is translation of my writings during many years. I wish to thank my translator, Toni.
May 1941
We lived in a house hard by a bubbling stream, my uncle Vaso?s. So lucky we were! The war raged and we heard it only on the wind. A hillside in the mountains of Kupojno, with rushing water a sound to soften the buzz of war planes. A solitary house in a cradle of craggy rock, with birch and tall black pine a natural blind, a shingled roof obscured with moss. With a few sheep and goats, some chickens, one old dog, a fat pig awaiting her slit throat. Hardly a target even if spotted!
A house with a bony scarecrow of an uncle who ate like a starved dog and coughed and rattled like death. He hit me in the face when I was bad. Then he would be as indifferent as if I were a broom in the corner. Then he would tickle my nose with his moustache that stank of tobacco. He would make pebbles disappear and find them in my pocket. My Aunt Marija was younger, plumper, ever in motion until she dropped each night into bed. She complained of her burden, collapsed and wept, then picked it up and resumed. She kept me and my sister and her two boys busy and fed. She shouted at me to be careful before I went out to the stream, to lower my homemade net into the chill water and scoop up the little fish that Uncle smoked on a woodfire behind the house, but on cloudy days only, when there were no planes.
The planes came over, disappeared beyond the hills. Sometimes from far away the faint sound of explosions. The planes came back, ignoring or not seeing us. My uncle exclaimed yet again, his flat joke, “Flying Frankfurters!” He would sometimes add, heavy with contempt, “A race of dogs.”
A truck came. Uncle saw it at a distance on the road below. Trucks or tanks would go past on the valley road, on their way to the chaos that had spared our area. Would they turn up our track? This was always the question. This truck turned as if planned. Uncle met the men a short distance from the house. An Ustasha officer got out of the truck with a pistol. The driver stayed in the cab with a rifle aimed at Uncle. Five or six soldiers jumped casually from the rear and trained their weapons on the house. Uncle was searched, then they marched him up to the house and came inside. They wanted birth and marriage records. Uncle then told them with nervous dignity what he could not hide, what they knew already from our fear, and from the small divergences of speech and household gods that render we South Slavs alien to one another even as we share our boiled Turkish coffee and raise toasts with glasses of identical plum brandy. He told them we were Serbs. (Not precisely true for Vedrana and me: our absent Partisan father, Uncle?s brother, was Serb, our mother Muslim).
We sat in the kitchen with the officer and another as the rest searched the house, knocking over furniture, breaking glass and china, shooting at the chickens from the windows. They found a wad of paper money in a jar in the cistern. They found Uncle?s pistol in the meat locker, took him outside and shot him with it. I remember the spray of blood on the kitchen window. My sister began screaming and Aunt collapsed to the floor whimpering and praying. The men were drinking Uncle?s brandy. Some of them took my sister into the bushes behind the house, where she eventually stopped screaming. She was fourteen. It was only my uncle that they killed. They took food, some chickens in a coop, they shot our pig and quickly bled and gutted it, threw it in the back of the truck, and they left.
As it happens, these events did not occur at my Uncle?s house, although Ustashas were in those mountains later that year, dragging Serbs from their houses and killing them in many imaginative ways. What happened was this: A truck full of Serb Royalists, of Chetniks, arrived. Chetniks did not kill fellow Serbs unless those Serbs were traitors allied with Tito?s Partisans, or with Italians, or with… but it was and is impossible to keep up with alliances and betrayals. These Chetniks did not kill us, although they smelled like horses and behaved very badly, and their pathetic truck was half-crumpled and pocked with bullet holes. They wanted food, and began loading their truck with it. They shot our pig and bled it.
Then we heard planes. The Chetniks became agitated. They moved their truck quickly under some trees, then changed their minds. They threw the pig into the truck and left in a hurry. The planes went over and then one of them turned, returning in a lazy circle. Uncle stared at the sky, then forced us from the house running, we had never moved so fast, running to the sheep meadow, all of us and the dog too, flat on the ground behind the largest of the old Bogomil stones. The plane dropped a bomb in the valley, perhaps impeding or killing the fleeing Chetniks. Then it went over the house once, circled back, dropped one bomb, which destroyed the henhouse and part of the kitchen. It came back again. The German bombardier, his own house destroyed later in Berlin or Dresden, hit our house very precisely this time. Uncle ran screaming across the meadow after the departing plane, stood bellowing curses. Then he dropped to his knees, coughing and cursing.
Aunt led us toward the house, told us to stay clear. She was dry-eyed, staring as if at a strange foreign landscape. Dust and feathers were settling, revealing in the yard, in the vegetable patch: broken furniture, roof tiles, our smashed beds, split timbers, sections of wall. A splintered chair was wedged in the branches of the beech tree. Two outer walls stood tall but broken, and as we watched, one slumped with a crumble of mortar, tottered, then crashed with a cloud of white dust into the cellar, burying Aunt?s shelves of preserves. Our old Alsatian, bewildered but uninjured, sniffed at the hens? blood soaking into the earth. Uncle was still on his knees in the sheepmeadow as Aunt came to her senses, and began to wail.
Posted on nEUrosis on June 8th by tijana
I’ve been planning a summer trip to Italy for a while now, visiting a friend in Venice. If this casual enterprise appealed to the imagination of any 23 year-old EU citizen, he/she would only need to grab his/her passport (or, not even), find a low-cost airline, bus or InterRail ticket and hit the road. For a student from Serbia, however, the journey turns into a strenuous endeavor.
If you happen to visit the web site of the Italian embassy in Belgrade, you’ll find an in-depth and altogether useful elaboration on how to obtain the Italian visa. Yet, the web-site fails to mention a “slight” detail that might preclude your visa-application process in the first place. In order to get an interview for the visa, you need to schedule it via a special phone service. The missing piece of info here is that you need to do it two months in advance.
So I called a few days ago and discovered I can get an interview only in August for a trip that was planned for the beginning of July. After an initial bout of anger, I tried to figure out how come there was such an increase in demand for trips to Italy all of a sudden. For, to my knowledge, confirmed by various travel agencies, a year ago it was enough to call several weeks in advance to get an interview.
I heard all sorts of rumors about possible scams and hidden profiteers in this process. The most entertaining one being that some people are calling the service too many times and scheduling fictitious interview slots which they later sell to those in need. I also heard that if you badly need an interview, you should only loiter around the embassy til one of those characters whispers the corrupt offer into your ear.
So I decided to conduct some investigation of my own by hanging out in front of the embassy. Alas, all I found was a queue of weary faces waiting for their scheduled interviews, travel agents, and of course policemen. Fearing that I might be accused of corruption (I’m not a working journalist with a press card) even though I wasn’t really intending to buy a slot, I decided not to ask the policemen after all.
My next move was to knock on the door of a tourist agency next to the embassy, which regularly assists people with their visa applications. The seasoned travel agent assured me she knew nothing about the scam and dissuaded me from attempting to get a slot this way even if I stumbled upon such an offer - for it was way too risky.
This is how I discovered that the considerable change in the application process took place when the embassy decided to outsource (if I could call it this way) its visa scheduling process to Telekom Serbia company. Instead of calling the embassy directly, now one needs to dial a special phone service that charges substantially more than the cost of a regular phone call.
And suddenly the demand for visas seemed to soar. Or is it just that the waiting process prolonged? For what reason, the travel agent couldn’t tell. One thing’s for sure, if you don’t have an interview scheduled in time, you can still try calling every day (or even several times a day) and check if someone else had dropped their slot. Someone drops their June interview and I get to see Venice in July. The only side-effect being that I might just get nauseous at the sight of my next telephone bill. So is it the soaring demand or the soaring bill? I really can’t tell.
I wondered what happened to the people who had to go for an unplanned trip to Italy cause their relatives might have died, for instance. “What happens in such cases is that they start sobbing on the phone and ask for an emergency interview right away,” the travel agent said. I was taken aback. Could it really be that there’s no written procedure in such cases? As I said, I’m not working for any media outlet, so I couldn’t verify this piece of info by ringing up the embassy and demanding a detailed explanation of an emergency procedure, if any.
In any case, this post wasn’t meant to sound like a “Put me on the White Schengen List” sort of dirge. We’re hearing a lot of that, yet not much gets done. After finally conceding to accept repatriation of more than 100, 000 Serbian citizens who reside in the EU illegally, Serbia signed the visa alleviation agreement last month. This is just the first step in the visa waiver process, which should come only “once” (or “if,” if you prefer) we officially become an EU candidate country. Governments in the countries of Western Balkans argue that the EU conditions for border control and other technical standards are too demanding and costly.
In the meantime, I’ll just have to run a more thorough inquiry of the application process. I guess I should’ve called the embassy well in advance and asked about the exact visa- waiting time months before the planned date of my trip. My fault. I’m just wondering, it’s hard enough as it is, do we really have to make it even harder?
Posted by tijana, May 31st, on nEUrosis
Walking down the streets of Belgrade near the central station (a slightly doggy part of the city where one can run into all sorts of funny characters), I stumbled upon Ratko Mladic - the run-away Serbian war-crimes suspect long wanted by the International War Crimes Tribunal (ICTY) in the Hague for his participation in the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.
He was staring at me from a T-shirt displayed on a sales stall along with some insignia of Serbian nationalism. I wasn’t quite sure if I was supposed to be shocked and appalled by the fact that there might be a demand for this type of goods, on our Serbian, not yet (if ever) EU market. So as a responsible soon-to-be journalist my first instinct was to grasp for my camera and document what I was hoping to be a rare phenomenon in the capital of Serbia. Or perhaps this was just wishful thinking of someone who spent too much time outside of the country?
Just as I started this little photo session, I was approached by a sulky seller who demanded to know why I was taking the photo. “Are you an ardent supporter of the General?” he asked, raising an eye-brow. I couldn’t lie. “Actually…no.” I muttered. “I just find this stall…interesting.” He then said he was hoping I wasn’t one of those tedious human rights NGO activists who take photos of his stall all the time. Feeling guilty that I never asked for his permission to take the photo, I apologized and stepped away from the site as fast as possible, failing to ask about the volume of the demand for what he was selling. Perhaps I should’ve asked anyway.
I did some research online afterwards and failed to find a comprehensive, in- depth research of public opinion in Serbia, or at least in Belgrade, which would indicate the level of support for the war crimes suspects. But clearly a considerable number of people list Mladic and Karadzic among epic heroes in Serbian history. Yet, is this group of staunch supporters limited to Serbian refugees from Croatia and Kosovo, or does it span a much wider public? How many closets of those 28 percent of voters who supported Radicals in the last parliamentary elections hide Mladic’s T-shirts?
Perhaps the following event could be telling of the answers to my questions. On May 22, only a day before the long-expected verdicts for the suspects in the murder of the former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic were pronounced, Belgrade was taken by surprise. The city was planning to rename the street “Boulevard AVNOJ-a” (an anti-fascist Yugoslav organization in WWII) into “Zoran Djindjic Boulevard.” The murdered Prime Minister was a fast-track reformer, determined to set the country on the road to EU integration. However, only four days after this action was announced, the dwellers of former “Boulevard AVNOJ-a” found the boulevard covered in posters that resembled street-name plates with “Boulevard Ratko Mladic.”
The organization that arranged for this “fitting” event is the “Serbian National Movement 1389,” named after the year of the famous battle in Serbian history that took place in Kosovo. According to their web-site, they claim to support traditional Serbian values and fight against organized crime, corruption, foreign usurpers and homosexual movements. Talking about anti-fascism in Belgrade…
The organizers claim to have the freedom to express their opinion and that it was the Serbian minister of interior who bypassed the law by taking the initiative to rename the street upon the suggestion from Djindjic’s Party (Democratic Party-DS).
Finally, those who perpetrated the assassination of Djindjic have just been convicted to highest sentences and are likely to stay behind the bars for the next 30-40 years. Yet, what are the adequate bars to public opinion? I guess we should find the right barometer to gauge it first. Isn’t it useless to fine those who put up the posters, if their action indeed reflects the sentiment of a considerable percentage of the Serbian public, or at least the citizens of its capital?
Technorati tags: public opinion, Serbia, Belgrade, Mladic, Djindjic, war crimes, nationalism, anti-fascism
