SURVIVING THE PEACE The Struggle for Postwar Recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina

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July 31, 2021
Updates: Inzko's anti-denial decree; Srebrenica and Prijedor commemorations; Stanišić & Simatović verdict...

There's big news from Bosnia: the outgoing High Representative has decreed a new law punishing genocide denial and related crimes.

Before going to that news, I have to mention a couple of new items related to my book. One is the July 9 book review by Valery Perry of the Democratization Policy Council: "Tilting at Windmills? Bottom-Up Individuals Trying to Undo the Damage of Top-Down Politics." You can read that here.

The other item is a CounterVortex podcast by the irascible blogger, self-described ranter, and steadfast opponent of historical revisionism Bill Weinberg. In his July 11 episode Weinberg provides a sketch of the history of the breakdown of Yugoslavia, then goes on to read at length from Chapter 18 of my book, the chapter addressing war crimes denial and thus very relevant to current news. You can listen to that here.

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In the month between my last blog and Inzko's decree there were a number of events and incidents that I'll try to recount briefly first, since I consider them all background and context to the decree.

Srebrenica anniversary

July 11 was the 26th anniversary of the fall of the Srebrenica enclave and the subsequent series of massacres that were deemed genocide by the ICTY and the International Court of Justice. On this anniversary, the exhumed and identified remains of 19 victims were reburied at the Memorial Cemetery at Potočari near Srebrenica. The youngest victim was 16 and the oldest 63 at the time of their deaths. One of the victims was a woman, age 24.

The new burials bring the number of those resting at Potočari to 6,671. The remains of the victims were found at about 570 different single and mass graves around the region. More than another hundred remains have been identified but not yet reburied, and over 200 have been buried in other cemeteries. Over 1,000 are still missing.

Regional recognition of the Srebrenica genocide has seen an uptick, as both the Montenegro and Kosovo parliaments acknowledged it and declared a day of mourning for July 11. Serb members of the Kosovo parliament walked out during the vote, and in Montenegro the decision revealed fissures in the pro-Serbia coalition that has ruled the country since last year.

There were repercussions in Serbia in response to the Montenegro decision (which made a point of condemning genocide denial), as leading figures roundly condemned the resolution. President Vučić announced that Montenegrin politicians who supported it would not be welcome in Serbia. Montenegrin parliamentary representative Draginja Vuksanović-Stanković, traveling through Belgrade, was harassed at the airport in spite of possessing a diplomatic passport. She was searched, as were all her belongings.

An initiative to declare July 11 a day of mourning in Bosnia was rejected by the chairman of the Council of Ministers because, he said, it had been proposed too late. This leaves Bosnia as the only former republic of Yugoslavia not to have recognized the date in some form. President Dodik went so far as to forbid Serb ambassadors from lowering the Bosnian flag to half-staff, and the Bosnian ambassador to the US obeyed his instructions.

Just before the anniversary, Dodik outdid himself by asserting that "there is information that the coffins are empty, that there are no remains in them," and that the idea of the genocide was "thought up by a member of the US Congress who is a Muslim professor." And Mladen Grujicić, mayor of Srebrenica, repeated himself, saying, "I'll never say that genocide happened here. There are soldiers buried in Potočari."

This refers back to the July 2 report by the Republika Srpska's "Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Sufferings of All Peoples in the Srebrenica Region between 1992 and 1995," which I mentioned briefly in my June blog entry. The 1,000-odd page report, which analyst Eric Gordy calls "The Revisionism Report," claims that the preponderance of those killed at Srebrenica were soldiers and thus legitimate targets; that the actual number killed was closer to 3,000 than the official figure of 8,000; and that while a war crime was committed, it can't be qualified as genocide because the (dishonestly minimized) number killed was "not a substantial part" of the Muslim population.

Although the report has been widely characterized as grossly amateurish and composed by a menagerie of pseudo-experts, it serves as a new benchmark for the deniers. You can see an extensive discussion of the report here.

After the Srebrenica anniversary, the graves of 92 victims were re-exhumed in order to add newly identified bones. This has become a routine event, since when the bodies were moved to "secondary mass graves" after the war in order to conceal the crime, it was common for them to be broken up and the parts scattered to different sites. So far, remains have been added to over 800 graves.

On Kurban Bajram (Eid al Adha), about a week after the Srebrenica anniversary, observant Muslims in Srebrenica mounted banners in the town, wishing each other a pleasant holiday. Mayor Grujičić ordered the banners to be taken down, for reasons that were not explained. The banners were removed, but then citizens placed new ones on private property where they could not be removed.-

On that same day of Bajram (July 20), the annual reburial of identified victims' remains took place at Kamičani cemetery near Kozarac in the Prijedor municipality. On this date twelve victims were reburied, the youngest 21, and the oldest, his father, 47. Over 3,000 non-Serbs were killed in the municipality, and about 500 are still missing. Some 800 people were killed in one or two days in the villages in the Brdo region near Prijedor.

Stanišić and Simatović verdict

On June 30 the long-awaited verdict—guilty—was issued in the re-trial of Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović. This trial was significant because Stanišić and Simatović were Serbian state security officials who have now been convicted of war crimes in Bosnia, thus giving legal backing to what everyone knew: that Serbia was heavily involved in the assault on Bosnia-Herzegovina's sovereignty and physical integrity during the war in the 1990s. As one commentator said, "A guilty verdict punches a gaping hole in Serbia’s long-standing denial that it was a direct participant in the wars in its fellow former Yugoslav republics."

The pair had been tried earlier, receiving acquittal in 2013 after a five-year-long trial. The verdict was overturned two years later, leading to a retrial. The present guilty verdict is thus a first-instance decision, so it can and probably will be appealed.

Stanišić was head of the Serbian Ministry of the Interior’s State Security Service, and Simatović was commander of the service’s Special Operations Unit. During the war, the two were known in the Serb-controlled parts of Croatia and Bosnia as "Milošević’s men on the ground."

Stanišić and Simatović were convicted of violation of the laws or customs of war and crime against humanity by aiding and abetting murder, deportation, forcible transfer, and persecution. They trained and deployed members of a special unit of the Serbian State Security Service and local Serbs from Bosanski Šamac to participate in the takeover of the municipality. In the process, they "directed, organised, equipped, trained, armed, and financed their own units and other Serb forces, which were involved in the [above-mentioned crimes] and forcible transfer of non-Serb civilians from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1991 and 1995."
 
For legal tactical reasons, the verdict was restricted to Stanišić's and Simatović's actions around the town of Bosanski Šamac, but their area of operations was vastly broader than that one municipality. You can read about their conviction here.

Serbian expansionism

As if entirely ignoring the lesson of the Stanišić and Simatović verdict, just a few days after the Srebrenica anniversary Serbian Minister of the Interior Aleksandar Vulin gave a speech that resurrected the "Greater Serbian" language of the 1990s.

In the speech honoring the socialist movement in Serbia, Vulin said, "The task for this generation of politicians is to form a Serbian world, that is, to unite Serbs wherever they live...For the ‘Serbian world’ to form, Serbia needs to be economically successful, well-led and have an army that is able to protect Serbia and Serbs, wherever they live."

The phrase "Serbian world" has been interpreted as a euphemism for Greater Serbia and, keeping the bloody history of the 1990s in mind, it is difficult to avoid hearing Vulin's language as a call for more bloodshed. Furthermore, Vulin flagrantly ignores the principle of sovereignty, wherein the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina is alone responsible for protecting its citizens, Serb or other.

Vulin's statement naturally angered and unnerved leaders around the region, some of whom called on President Vučić to repudiate Vulin's words. Vučić responded, "It is not for me to silence Vulin."

Russia and China's pushback

In mid-July, Russia and China submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council attempting to address their objections to the continued existence of the Office of the High Representative and the upcoming arrival of Christian Schmidt. The resolution supported Schmidt's appointment, but would remove the Office's "Bonn Powers" immediately and terminate the OHR in a year's time.

The Russian ambassador to the UN said that the High Representative was "becoming like a czar with almost post-colonial type powers." He asserted that the selection of Schmidt is not legitimate without Security Council approval. But the Peace Implementation Council (Dayton's international administrative body) rejected this assertion, saying that its approval was all that was needed to legitimize the OHR's director.

The Security Council vote on the resolution took place July 22, with only Russia and China voting in favor of it. The other 13 members did not vote against it, but underscored their dismissal of the initiative by abstaining.

The resolution was a manifestation of a long series of actions, especially by Russia, to enter into a power void left by the inaction, disinterest, and sometimes incompetency (especially during the Trump period) by the West in Bosnia-Herzegovina and vicinity. Over the years as Russia has gradually revived its superpower status, its influence in the country has gone from casual dalliance to active support for Serb—and to a significant extent Croat—separatism. Russia has worked to exert an ever stronger influence, especially by catering to the egos of Dodik other separatists. Opposing the OHR has been just one of Russia's tactics.  

Inzko's decree

You'll remember from my last blog entry (June, 2021) that High Representative Valentin Inzko is resigning (today, August 1) from the post that he's held since 2009. I have discussed his conflict with the Republika Srpska Parliament (NSRS), which honored several convicted war criminals who were instrumental in the founding of the entity. Inzko demanded that the NSRS revoke the awards, but the Parliament pushed back and Inzko was rebuffed.

In the bigger picture, war crimes denial and glorification of war criminals, which I have described many times in many of their manifestations, have been ongoing since the first crimes were committed at the beginning of the war. The denial has, naturally, upset and often retraumatized the victims of the war crimes and the survivors of genocide.

By extension, the denialism has pained Inzko, who has not had much power to do anything about it. Or at least, that is the way he has behaved. Inzko announced in 2019 that he would use his Bonn Powers (see last month's entry) to establish a law punishing genocide denial by July of 2020. This did not happen and, as I noted, Inzko seemed to play down the importance of the law as compared to an actual change in the thinking of the deniers.

Then on July 23, with one week left before his departure, Inzko finally imposed a ban on genocide denial. Installing amendments to Bosnia-Herzegovina's criminal code, the new law went into effect five days after the decree. These amendments outlaw the "public denial, condoning, trivialisation or justification of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes." One qualification of this ban is that it applies to such actions when they are done in way “likely to incite to violence or hatred.”

The amendments also outlaw public incitement to violence on the grounds of religion or ethnicity, and they prohibit public distribution of material denying genocide. Relevant to the above-mentioned conflict with the NSRS, the amendments not only prohibit awards to convicted war criminals, but also punish anyone who names a park, a street, bridge, school, municipality, or other institution after a convicted war criminal. The prohibited actions are to be punishable by up to five years' imprisonment.

Inzko explained his move by saying, "The lack of acknowledgment, accountability and redress for victims of mass atrocities and systematic abuses has devastating effects...Hate speech, the glorification of war criminals, and revisionism or outright denial of genocide and war crimes prevent societies from dealing with their collective past and constitute renewed humiliation of the victims and their loved ones, while also perpetuating injustice and undermining interethnic relationships.”

You can see the OHR's press release and description of the amendments here.

As I described in my June entry, Inzko has voiced strong criticism of the international community's weak and ineffective approach to Bosnia's problems. He has been in a frustrating position of witnessing and criticizing the misbehavior of domestic politicians, while lacking the support to do anything of substance about it. Now, discussing the arrival of the new High Representative, he says, "A new approach should be more prescriptive; it should be more robust, and there must be a sense of urgency."

Immediately after Inzko's decree there was a torrent of public comment about the ban from all sides. As could be expected, officials representing the Bosniak population spoke with approval of the decree, and Bosnian Serb officials, as well as those in Serbia, condemned it. Munira Subašić, a prominent leader of women survivors from Srebrenica, lamented that "many mothers did not live to see this decision, and they had the wish to be protected from the provokers and from insults. Many mothers did not live to see the court judgments [against the war criminals] nor to see their missing loved ones buried." Another survivor said, rather politely, "I don't know that he [Inzko] really had to wait until the last moment, but there it is, and for our families this is good news."

Banja Luka's boy wonder mayor Draško Stanivuković disappointed those who still thought he could represent a new generation of more reasonable politicians by saying that Inzko's decree was the "biggest possible catastrophe," and that it was "in no way good for the Republika Srpska and our people."

The US Embassy issued a statement saying, "We must underscore that the genocide at Srebrenica is not a matter of debate, but of historical fact. It is likewise important to emphasize that these terrible crimes are not a reflection or condemnation of an entire people." But Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik stated that this was "the nail in Bosnia's coffin," calling, as he had done many times before, for the dissolution of the country.

Dodik said, "This will sow much evil in Bosnia-Herzegovina...what he [Inzko] has done was not part of his authority. He showed that he is a typical Serb-hater, a man who is the son of the Gestapo, and you could not have expected anything different. This is a legally unfounded decision; the RS rejects this. Genocide did not happen in Srebrenica; this is what many relevant analysts in the world say...from here on, this state will not be able to function." Dodik wound up his comments by saying, "I repeat, genocide did not happen, call me in ten days to see that I will say the same thing."

Over the years Dodik has taken many opportunities to repeat his denials, all in the interest of popularizing himself, forcing the RS opposition to fall in line, and to garner votes to stay in power. In that sense, this day is like any other day. He has also, for over 15 years, skillfully managed to disrupt political proceedings at the highest levels of Bosnian politics. So his statement that Bosnia will not be able to function portends an escalation, but not something unfamiliar, as Dodik has generated dysfunction at the state level throughout his long tenure in one mandate after another.

In recent years Dodik has engineered an alliance with extreme Croat nationalists, led by Dragan Čović of the HDZ party. So it is not a surprise that rather than approving Inzko's ban, HDZ parliamentary representative Borjana Krišto expressed a lukewarm objection, saying, "That kind of decision is not good for Bosnia-Herzegovina, especially in these times, regardless of the contents. It is not good for Bosnia, for its way forward, for its security and political stability."

In the days following the issuance of Inzko's decree the rhetoric escalated, especially from leaders in the RS. Dodik declared that, since Inzko's measures were "illegal," they could be removed through negotiation and "dialogue" between the two entities. But, he asserted, if that were not possible, then it would be time to move toward the secession of the Republika Srpska and the dissolution of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also stated that Inzko's laws herald the end of the functionality of the state that he has long declared non-functioning.

Working to fulfill this prediction, RS leaders (including opposition figures) announced that Serb politicians would boycott official proceedings at the state level including the joint presidency, the Council of Ministers, and the Parliament. A state-level parliamentary session in which the state budget was to be discussed was immediately postponed due to the absence of the Serb representatives.

One pro-Bosnia representative declared, "The representatives did not come to work because they were prohibited from denying the existence of dismembered human bodies, disinterred graves, and bones strewn about, all of which has been proven in court proceedings and characterized as genocide. They do not want to come to work because they have been prohibited from continuing to disturb the families of survivors..."

In the next days the boycott led to heated discussion about whether officials who have absented themselves should be paid for simply occupying their positions, as current law dictates. There is thus an initiative underway to cancel salaries to boycotting politicians. And as concerns the three-part state-level presidency, the law says that if one member (say, Dodik) is absent, the other two (currently pro-Bosnia Komšić and Džaferović) still constitute a quorum. This in itself will probably force Dodik to violate the boycott and attend meetings of the presidency in order to prevent any pro-Bosnia, or anti-denial, decisions by the other two members. He must be present and vote, because a member who is present and does not vote can be overruled by the other two.

Dodik has also revived several other goals amounting to near-complete divorce of the RS from political functions of the Bosnian state at any level, saying, "Our goal would be to withdraw from the agreement about the (unified Bosnian) army...the agreement about indirect taxation, and to withdraw from the High Court and Judicial Council."

Not all was harmony within politics in the Serb-controlled entity, however. Opposition parties including the SDS, DNS, and PDP, which have been coalescing in an implicit, rising revolt against Dodik and his SNSD party, naturally oppose Inzko's laws, as they do not wish to admit that genocide took place any more than do Dodik's party comrades. But they are now asserting that Dodik's reactions to the new laws are a kind of manipulation to gain votes for the SNSD. Some opposition figures are blaming Dodik's reign for creating conditions that led to the imposition of Inzko's laws, and calling for calm measures rather than a harsh reaction.

Dodik has called together opposition leaders to meet with the SNSD and, he suggests, to form a unified government that he calls a "Concentration Government." But leading opposition figures have suggested forming such a government—without the SNSD. We will see who prevails, but the SNSD has the power, and the numbers in the RS Parliament, to react strongly. There is already a move underway in the RS to outlaw characterizing the entity as a "genocidal creation" or calling the Serbs a "genocidal people."

President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić also called for a calm response, saying that he was "not a supporter of imposed decisions, but we must build fraternal relations with Bosniaks...We want peace, we do not want heightened tensions and conflicts."

It's not unusual for Vučić to take a seemingly moderate stance, while other high officials in his regime sound fiercer. Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabić called Inzko's decree "ill-thought out and irresponsible," and Minister of the Interior Vulin said that Inzko has decided to "silence the Serbs and forbid them from speaking the truth."

The spokesperson for Russia's foreign ministry spoke up as well, saying, "We profoundly resent the flagrant and absolutely unacceptable interference of outgoing High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Valentin Inzko into the domestic affairs of this sovereign and independent European state."

Meanwhile, Dodik announced the creation of a petition calling for the revocation of Inzko's new laws. At the same time a citizen of Sarajevo launched an on-line petition calling for Dodik's arrest—all this in the couple of days after Inzko's decree. The anti-Dodik petition has so far garnered over 48,000 signatures, while Dodik's petition apparently only received several hundred.

And in another quick and provocative response to Inzko's decree, new graphic expressions of glorification of war criminals appeared in numerous venues. Posters of  Ratko Mladić were mounted on the walls in Srebrenica and nearby Bratunac; a mural depicting Mladić appeared on a wall in the central part of Belgrade.

One early consequence of the new laws was the postponement of some war crimes trials wherein Serb police officers were being tried for persecution of Bosniaks in the town of Vlasenica. Lawyers for the accused requested time to study the laws in order to understand how far they could go in denying charges of crimes against humanity without subjecting themselves to prosecution for denial.

This brings up the question of whether the anti-denial laws will actually be enforced. The state prosecutorial office has already shown interest by announcing that it is receiving complaints from citizens about genocide denial, and that it is drawing up indictments. In response, Dodik has declared that if SIPA (the State Investigation and Protection Agency, the Bosnian state-level police equivalent to our FBI) comes to arrest anyone in the Republika Srpska, the RS police will prevent the arrest. The RS police do not actually have the legal right to oppose SIPA, but if such a thing happens, it will most probably take place violently and be the occasion of armed conflict.

Along with other observers of Bosnia, I have long noted three centers of power that can affect the course of the country toward recovery or dissolution: the grassroots activists; the domestic political leadership; and the international community. HR Inzko's recent promulgation of laws against historical revisionism is a rare example of the kind of behavior the international community needs to practice in order to support local human rights campaigns throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Corona

As of the very beginning of August, approximately 620,000 citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina have received at least one vaccine, with about 230,000 fully vaccinated. The proportion of the population vaccinated is between 7% and 10%, depending on what you think the population is. The 2013 census reported a 3.7 million population, but the number was inflated from the outset, and thousands—probably tens of thousands—of people have left the country since then.
Since the May surge (the third) subsided, rates of infection and death have been relatively low. The delta variant is present in Bosnia, but it has not been reported as being dominant yet. There are warnings of a fourth wave impending, but this has not started. Meanwhile, donated and purchased vaccines are coming into the country more often, in tranches of 100,000 or more, from the east and the west.

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