In 1996, a youngster plays amid the remains of conflict in the Sarajevo district of Grbavica. AFP/OOdd Andersen via Getty Images )
On October 2, a German diplomat by the name of Christian Schmidt modified Bosnia and Herzegovina’s election legislation just moments after the polls closed. As he had the authority to do so in his capacity as the high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, he did so without consulting anyone. The election had been going off without a hitch; international observers said it had been calm and legal. Then Schmidt’s choice abruptly plunged the nation into chaos.
In order to “advance the operation” of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the two constituencies that together make up the nation, along with the Republika Srpska, Schmidt had been expressing interest in changing the election rules for more than a year. But during the summertime protests in Sarajevo, which drew over 7,000 people, he reneged on those commitments. His unexpected enactment of these regulations has dented the nation’s already shaky faith in democracy.
Since the end of the Bosnian War in 1995, this form of intervention has been common in Bosnia and Herzegovina (referred to as Bosnia in this article for simplicity). An exceptional case study of the results of interventionist foreign policy and neoliberal economics has been produced as a result of decades of international management involvement and billions of dollars in aid. As a result, the nation’s politics are as gridlocked as ever, and the peace is still precarious.
Bosnia’s political system has been dubbed “the most decentralized and complex constitutional regime in the world” by political scientist Jasmin Mujanovi, who also described it as having a “Byzantine government machinery staffed according to a rigorous ethno-sectarian core.” This is a result of the Dayton Accords, which declared Bosnia to be “one country of three nations” and put an end to the war by awarding territory that had been ethnically cleansed to those who had carried it out. Nearly every element of Bosnian life is impacted by the segregation codified in the accords, including politics, public services, and educational institutions. The peace accord was quite successful in some ways. There has been little interethnic violence since it put an end to a three-year battle that caused an estimated 100,000 deaths and 2 million displaced people. However, it didn’t protect the nation from postwar political unrest and economic stagnation.
The government structure built in Dayton is overwhelming. In a nation of just over 3 million people, there are two federal entities, the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 14 levels of government, more than 100 political parties, 13 prime ministers, more than 180 ministers, and more than 700 members of parliament, along with 10 cantons and one autonomous district. There are also three co-ruling presidents, each of whom represents one of the three constituent ethnicities, the Serb, Croat, or Bosniak. The president is closed off to all other ethnicities, including Jews, Roma, and anybody else who does not cleanly fit into one of the three ethnic categories. Politics become more and more firmly rooted along ethno-nationalist lines with each election cycle. A number of international organizations, including the Office of the High Representative, which is run by Schmidt, a former German agriculture minister, are in charge of overseeing all of this. His broad authority allows him to rewrite the Constitution, dismiss elected officials, and, as Bosnians have just found, change election regulations before the ballots are even counted. His UN-appointed function is to enforce the Dayton accords.
In eight different situations, the Dayton Accords have been found to be discriminatory by Bosnia’s Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, whose decisions, in accordance with Dayton’s preamble, supersede the agreement itself. Defenders of Dayton frequently claim that, despite its flaws, the accord is the only thing preventing a return of ethnic conflict in the nation. Dayton, however, was only supposed to be a stopgap measure; it only served to temporarily halt the conflict.
The 21 amendments Schmidt made to the Constitution and electoral laws may seem minor and exceedingly technical when seen individually. However, detractors claim that the combined impact threatens Bosnia’s democracy. The changes were made in response to a contentious Constitutional Court decision. A former leader of the Croat ultranationalist HD 1990 party named Boo Ljubi filed a lawsuit against the Bosnian government in 2016, alleging that Croats were not fairly represented in the tripartite administration. Croats make up roughly 15% of the population, while Bosniaks make up 50% and Serbs make up 30%. Ljubi claimed that the equality established in Dayton required that Croats receive an equal share of the executive branch of government.
Critics assert that Schmidt strengthened the current dysfunctional system by altering the election regulations to favor Ljubi’s party rather than working toward a government governed by ethnically neutral democratic principles. (Schmidt dismissed the remaining seven human rights cases as “beyond the High Representative’s jurisdiction.”)
When the Dayton Accord was signed, the humanitarian community was tasked with establishing a durable peace while privatization and “shock therapy” were meant to transform Bosnia’s economy in the image of American capitalism and usher in a period of prosperity. Instead, the accord put Bosnia in a political limbo and pushed it into poverty. This gave politicians a chance to take advantage of the country’s desperation by causing fear and ethnic conflict.
The international strategy for resolving Bosnia’s problems turned out to be a poisonous slow-release drug.
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In Tuzla, a city of 110,000 people in the nation’s northeast, you could see the faces of hundreds of political candidates on every billboard and wall in the days leading up to the general election. The night before the election, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) filled my expensive but run-down hotel from the Yugoslav era. The receptionist informed me that there were between 30 and 40 election observers staying there while he smoked outside. I questioned him about the impact of this kind of global involvement. He shrugged. Every election, the same political parties go to the same villages, give the people there 50 marks (about $27), and tell them to vote for them. (In Bosnia, the average hourly pay is about six marks, although many individuals make much less.) “People will do anything for 50 marks.”
Such tales of corruption are frequent, as is resignation to the ineffectiveness of global actors. Since 2016, I’ve been covering the area and going there, but I haven’t met many people who are optimistic about the future of the country during that time. Numerous young individuals are emigrating from Bosnia. Half of those between the ages of 18 and 29 have already expressed a desire to leave their nation, and remittances account for 10% of the GDP on an annual basis. As a response to the high unemployment rate, politicians like Milorad Dodik, the leader of Serbia, and members of HD have used harsh language and territorial threats to stir up racial tensions.
Despite being the third-largest city in Bosnia, Tuzla’s downtown can be explored on foot in under 15 minutes. The city center contains a memorial to a massacre, and many buildings and walkways are littered with bullet holes from the conflict, as is the case in most Bosnian cities and towns. Before the ethnic cleansing, Tuzla was diversified like the majority of Bosnian cities. It served as the industrial economy’s hub and attracted workers from all walks of life.
Tuzla was chosen by President Josip Broz Tito as the nation’s manufacturing hub after World War II because of its salt deposits, which were mined for industrial use (the name of the city comes from the Turkish word for “salt mine”). At the time, Yugoslavia was transitioning from a largely agrarian economy.
A document put out by the World Bank and the European Commission in 1997 said that the war had only hurt “a small part of the overall industrial capacity.” However, a report from the EastWest Institute that same year said that foreign experts recommended privatization as part of a “full makeover” of the economy.
Bosnia’s economic issues were attributed to a “slow pace of privatization, impediments to the free flow of money, a bloated public sector, [and] a lack of direct foreign investment” by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2004. Any remaining state-owned companies in Bosnia were put up for auction as part of the economic shock treatment the US imposed on much of the post-Soviet bloc. According to a 2014 AP study, “more than 80% of privatizations have failed” as a result of tycoons purchasing the businesses, selling them off for components, and then declaring bankruptcy afterward. Even worse estimates include: only 10 of the 1,200 enterprises that were privatized in the Republika Srpska survived, according to a 2015 Quartz analysis.
Business owners often filed for bankruptcy instead of making investments in their company or factory to bring in more money. Bosnia’s legal system is slow, and it could take years or even decades to finish a case. While these proceedings were going on, several manufacturers continued to operate while their employees were underpaid.
A tiny building with the alternating red and yellow stripes common during the Austro-Hungarian era and a sign with the hammer-and-sickle symbol over the door can be found in Tuzla’s center. The leaders of the labor organization Syndikat Solidarnosti (Solidarity Syndicate) meet in this location on Wednesdays and Fridays to catch up, plan events, and partake in rakija, the regional fruit brandy.
The vice president of the union, Enes Tanovi, told me that he couldn’t get help from NGOs and charities that gave direct aid because he was technically working at one of the businesses that went out of business. Tanovi worked odd jobs and hard labor for as little as five euros a day to make ends meet.
He met people who used high-interest microloans to develop subsistence crops and feed their families. While some people were able to repay their loans, others lost everything.
Employees from a number of large corporations peacefully protested in Tuzla in February 2014, accusing the government of disregarding worker exploitation after state-owned businesses were privatized and calling for reimbursement for unpaid wages and pensions that had been stolen. During a fight with the police, 600 protesters set fire to the city government offices, which used to be the Sodaso headquarters and Tuzla’s largest employer. More than 80% of the table salt used in Yugoslavia was provided by Sodaso. (About 2,500 individuals worked for the company in 1998; by 2013, only 422 remained.) The structure is still standing in Tuzla’s city center, its burned-out windows open and blackened.
Although many workers have already received part of their back pay from the postwar era, the Solidarity Syndicate employees claim that Tuzla alone still has at least 2,000 cases of unpaid salaries. They are aware of at least 20 suicides, which they attribute to a lack of employment.
Nevertheless, the US has kept praising the Bosnian interventions as successful. From 1996 to 2017, according to USAID, more than $1.7 billion was allocated to Bosnia’s recovery efforts. In asserting that “no other single program had such a profound impact on economic recovery after the war,” it brags about creating more than 18,000 jobs.
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In February 1996, Mustafa, a Bosnian policeman, gave Lubo, a long-lost Serb friend, a kiss to celebrate their reunion. (Photo by Dimitri Messinis for AFP via Getty Images) )
Bojan Oi, a 42-year-old psychologist and participant in the think tank Krug 99 (Circle 99), arrived at our meeting dressed in a suit and spoke slowly and deliberately. The Hotel Mellain, the tallest structure in Tuzla, has a café where we first met. He contributed to a letter that criticizes Schmidt’s revisions to the election legislation. We have a proverb that is better accurately described as a curse: “May you have and then have not,” which means that you should encounter the opposites of living in abundance and poverty.
He told me that, before the conflict, Bosnia served as both the country’s industrial center and its cultural epicenter. It was the epicenter of Yugoslav counterculture and music, and its capital, Sarajevo, was a multicultural home to people from a wide range of different backgrounds in addition to Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. As the head of the Non-Aligned Movement and a nation that saw itself as a middleman between the East and the West, Yugoslavia was a relatively powerful and affluent country on the international stage. Bosnia “used to manufacture parts for Rolls-Royce helicopters and plane engines,” according to oi. We had an electrical engineering system for the Third World that was like General Electric, Siemens, or Philips.
However, politicians-turned-genocidaires started to spread the myth that the territory should be governed by a single ethno-state once war broke out in 1992. Because of the Dayton Accords, these aspirations eventually become constitutional law. The West came to view Bosnia’s Yugoslavian era, during which the country was multicultural and economically successful, as a historical anomaly. Instead of imagining a modern, multiethnic Bosnia, the international community chose to see Bosnia as a primitive, agricultural country torn apart by tribal wars.
Bosnian leaders aspired to imitate the post-World War II reconstruction effort in northern Italy, which targeted specific industries for investment, most notably steel manufacture, in the early wake of the war in 1996. Numerous of Italy’s most recognizable brands, including Vespa, Lamborghini, and Alfa Romeo, were created as a result of the “economic miracle.” With the help of a network of motorways, Italy went from being mostly a farming country to a thriving industrial nation in just 20 years.
Bosnian economists requested this kind of scheme from Western authorities. But the organizations and charities from the West that worked in Bosnia fell in love with the pastoral idea of sustainability. oi said that the West was interested in the word “sustainability,” and that this was done through “small and medium enterprises,” or SMEs. The international community proposed that SMEs would help the economy. They were, by definition, not the industries that had driven Bosnia’s success before the conflict; instead, they were primarily self-sustaining farms, garment distributors, and small companies.
Oi used a narrative about post-war international investment in SMEs to illustrate his thesis. The World Bank imported 600 Holstein cows from Germany on the justification that farmers would want livestock supplies. The traditional black-and-white dairy cow was bred in the Netherlands to yield almost twice as much milk as the typical cow. Although their small legs and large tummies made them physiologically ideal for the Netherlands’ flat fields, in Bosnia’s rocky mountains, they started to hunger due to a shortage of grass. They would continue to climb until they fell, shattering their legs or snapping their necks. According to oi, by the end of the year, these sustainable dairy cows had been transformed into sausage in farmers’ smokehouses.
These initiatives persisted despite prior failures. The European Union Force arranged a supply of 33 Holstein cows for the village of Kalinovik just three years ago.
Milford Bateman, a British banking consultant and former economics professor at Juraj Dobrila University of Pula in Croatia, says that the focus on small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and “microenterprises,” or businesses with one or two people, like street vendors or seamstresses, is part of a larger neoliberal aid strategy. Following the war, microfinance institutions served as the primary financial sources for small companies. They flourished alongside NGOs as part of the World Bank’s Local Initiative Project. They started out as nonprofit organizations, but later many of them turned into for-profit businesses. According to Bateman, commercialized microfinance was regarded as the most politically acceptable—that is, market-driven—method of assisting the poor in financing their own remedy for poverty and underdevelopment.
After Bangladesh, where the idea originated, Bosnia was the second-largest user of microfinance in the world by 2008. Typically, Western investments gave Bosnian microcredit institutions money at interest rates of 7 or 8 percent, and those institutions then gave loans to the country’s destitute at rates of 30 or 40 percent. It increased debt in underdeveloped communities while generating profits for the firms. In that regard, Bateman added, “It’s quite similar to the subprime situation on Wall Street.” It is unstoppable. The moment the music starts, you start dancing.
In Bosnia, there were about 400,000 active microloans in 2008, worth a combined $770 million. However, hundreds more Bosnians lost everything that year due to the worldwide financial meltdown after they were unable to make loan payments. The default rate for certain microlenders reached as high as 80%. A law meant to stop fraudulent lending required that people who didn’t pay their debts had to say in court that they were broke, which was embarrassing for many.
Despite this background, microfinance organizations remain a significant source of credit in Bosnia, which illustrates the limited options many Bosnians have.
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You won’t often hear the word ubleha outside of Bosnia, despite the fact that many of the former Yugoslavia’s countries speak the same language. It can relate to promises and plans that are never meant to be fulfilled, as well as “charming lies” or “selling snake oil,” in its most basic definition. Western interference and democratic pledges are now viewed negatively. The privatisation programme and the Dayton accords, as well as the political and economic issues they brought about, were born out of the belief that Bosnia needed to be saved by the West but that the promises the West made would never be kept.
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The agent: Bill Clinton, a former president, acknowledged that Dayton “clearly set up the risk of stalemate” in Bosnia in 2019. (AFP / Pam Price via Getty Images )
The agreement was “brokered by an anxious American administration determined more to terminate the war…than to construct the basis for a stable and durable state,” according to Dayton’s own architect, the late Richard Holbrooke. In 2019, when thinking back on the accords, former president Bill Clinton acknowledged that they “clearly set up the risk of stalemate.”
Bosnians’ already waning faith in the West has only been exacerbated by Schmidt’s hasty change of the election laws. The US Embassy in Sarajevo immediately issued a statement in response to the news praising the high representative’s choice “to strengthen the stability and functionality of Bosnia and Herzegovina through amendments to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitution and the BiH Election Law.”
The Office of the High Representative was intended to be a temporary solution, much like Dayton itself. The Peace Implementation Council, a group of 55 nations and organisations that supervises and carries out the agreements, extended the office’s authority indefinitely in 2008 until a long list of “key priorities for transition” were satisfied. When India and Britain were both under colonial control, Gerald Knaus of the think tank European Stability Initiative compared Bosnia’s connection with Europe to that of India with Britain. He also compared the role of the high representative to that of an imperial viceroy.
Prior to the election, Darko Brkan, the leader of Zato Ne? (Why Not? ), an NGO devoted to fostering public engagement and governmental openness, said me that he thought it was unlikely that Schmidt’s proposals would be adopted. He informed me, “If the election law amendments were to take place, I would think about permanently leaving Bosnia.” Brkan stated that he was extremely troubled by the high representative’s behaviour in a follow-up email sent after the election. “I never thought anyone could ever do what the high representative did, especially someone from a democratic nation. I still can’t comprehend how that could have happened since the possibility was so incomprehensible to me,” he wrote. “As far as I am aware, no democracy in history has ever allowed the election rules to be modified after the votes have been cast. I believe that my entire confidence in democracy has been completely destroyed as a result of seeing this precedent occur in my nation.
He said that the abrupt changes to the election regulations “create a precedent for anyone in this nation and the area that no one really believes in democracy other than as a tool when they need it for their own interests, and that it is OK to punch a large hole in it if it suits a cause.” Brkan asserted that he would carry on his decades-long campaign for democracy and human rights, although he and his family have already departed Bosnia as he promised. His son has just started kindergarten in Montenegro, where they are at the moment.
The prospective revisions to the election legislation have drawn criticism from Azra Zorni, a plaintiff in one of the five cases where the European Court of Human Rights found against the Bosnian government. The Dayton Accord was found to be discriminatory by the European Court of Human Rights in 2014. However, the decisions in her case and similar cases have not yet been put into practise. Zorni, a member of Krug 99, detailed her encounters with prejudice after the war in an open letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. She is Bosnian and has a Muslim last name; but, as a young woman in socialist Yugoslavia, she did not observe any religion. She was born and reared in Sarajevo. On the streets of Sarajevo, she encountered her Serb spouse, with whom she fell in love. Interethnic marriage was not unusual at the time, if not common.
She also relied on charity, just like everyone else who was stranded in Sarajevo during the war. She was residing in Dobrinja, a heavily shelled neighbourhood close to the airport. Merhamet, a Muslim organisation with worldwide funding, supplied coffee. The NGO refused her when it was her turn to receive some since she was married to a Serb. With locations in Sarajevo and Stockholm, Merhamet is still in business and continues to serve only one ethnic group within the Bosnian people.
According to Zorni, this discrimination is related to the political system that the international community imposed on Bosnia, supported by diplomats, and put into place by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). “Dayton strapped a prisoner to us. We are still looking for a method to escape it. Ethno-nationalism serves as the foundation for our governance, she declared. “At the time, stopping the conflict by signing this peace treaty was useful, but nearly 30 years later, it is totally dysfunctional.”
“You address segregation via desegregation, right? “, oi said to me. In the United States, that is how it was done.
He stated, albeit stoically, that he questions whether it is even right to continue battling what appears to be Bosnian society’s impending collapse, and whether attempting to create a viable civil society is in and of itself ubleha.
Is maintaining the false hope that a decent life is achievable here morally right? Would it be preferable to let things fall apart quickly on their own and leave them alone? I was asked, “Oi.” Are we simply squandering our time?
Analysis by: Advocacy Unified Network
