Hopeful news from Bosnia is refreshing
WASHINGTON — In Sarajevo 10 years ago, I sat with the youthful Bosnian prime minister, the respected philosopher Haris Silajdzic, in the ministry residence on the Bosna River. He was depressingly pessimistic about the future and fate of his small country so torn apart by the Balkan wars of the ‘90s.
We talked as dusk settled over the half-ruined but still gorgeous old city that the Serbs had tried so hard to destroy in the longest military siege in recent history. “Bosnia is a symbol,” he said. “That’s why it is so important.
“What we had here were not Serb nationalists, but fascists, and so Bosnia broke the World War II barrier of ‘Never again!’ On top of that, ‘neutralism’ was the mantra here. That is really the modern world’s original sin, and it originated in the United Nations. But the problem here is that you cannot be neutral between good and evil.”
He paused, then asked, “Is Bosnia the last dark page of the 20th century, or the first page of the next century?”
We Americans never really fully understood the importance of the Balkans in the ’90s — how those wars became the prototypical conflict of the post-Cold War era; how the West for three long years between 1992 and ’95 let the Serbians maraud over the Balkans; and how this abject failure of the West, in the wake of the great victory against the Soviet Union, inspired the Bush administration’s neocons to regard the West as so weakened and cowardly that they would encourage the new American president to launch military adventures unilaterally.
Marshal Tito
The Balkan wars started when Yugoslavia began to fall apart after the death of Marshal Tito, who had by force of will and personality held the country’s various ethnic groups together. After that, Serb politicians deliberately manipulated the old, latent ethnic hatreds to gain power, attacking Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo and threatening all of Europe.
The Europeans, by then deeply committed to form a pacific European Union, ended up, along with the United Nations, sending “peacekeeping” troops with such an ambivalent neutralist mandate that they were not even allowed to defend themselves. Finally, it all ended with several hundred thousand dead, when in 1995 the American-backed Dayton Accords brought a curious, only partially effective semi-peace. There was good reason for Silajdzic’s sorrow.
Fast-forward to today: Last week, Haris Silajdzic, now the president of Bosnia and in a strikingly different mood, came to Washington. He had an imperfect, but refreshingly different, story to tell.
“For the first time, I say that I have come with good news from Bosnia,” he told a small group of us at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There are still unresolved, open questions, but I say generally that this is the first time I have come here that I really feel we are on our way.”
In a moment of melancholy, he said: “One achievement of a war is that you start anew. During a war, you begin to know who you are dealing with. The masks fall. You have a chance for a fresh start.”
Then: “Today in Sarajevo there are new companies, a new atmosphere. The city is practically rebuilt. You hardly see any destruction. And it suffered the longest siege in history.” He added, with a touch of the old sadness, “You can change buildings and economics, but the state of hearts and minds is very hard to change.”
History’s ironies
History plays with the ironies it encounters, and how ironic it is that today the European Union, or E.U., is the hope of the “new” Bosnia. Along with most of the formerly Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries, Croatia and Albania have begun partnerships with the E.U. Macedonia and Kosovo are waiting. Bosnia hopes that it will be next.
Bosnia still has many problems. Its Bosnian population, largely Muslim and centered in Sarajevo, remains almost totally separated from its largely Christian Serb population, whose capital is really Banja Luka. There is no constitution yet, and so the question of “civic identification” vs. “ethnic identification,” always a major problem in the Balkans, has still not been hammered out.
Universal Press Syndicate