Women's Work and the Growth of Civil Society in Post-War Bosnia*

*I am grateful to IREX for a Short-Term Travel grant to Bosnia in 2005, which enabled me to interview women heads of NGOs and other women leaders about their work and the challenges they face.

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Notes

*I am grateful to IREX for a Short-Term Travel grant to Bosnia in 2005, which enabled me to interview women heads of NGOs and other women leaders about their work and the challenges they face.

01. “Bosnia” in this study designates primarily Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) activities and organizations. NGOs in BiH operate in the Serb Republic and among predominantly ethnic Croatians as well. However, most international support for NGOs (with the possible result of growth in civil society) has gone overwhelmingly to those who suffered most during the war, namely the Bosniaks.

02. Civil society is measured in Bosnia primarily in terms of the number or efficacy of NGOs. This assumes, at the most, an absence of civil society in communist Yugoslavia or, at the least, the total destruction of the infrastructure during the war. There is a danger in this approach, however, as other indicators, such as relative freedom of the press and the development of a legal system that supports the growth of civil society, become more relevant. See Brinton, “Constructing Civil Society,” 10 (cited with the author's permission).

03. Slapšak, “Žene i rat u bivšoj Jugoslaviji,” 1–31.

04. Ramet, “In Tito's Time,” 93.

05. Ibid., 94–97.

06. Albanese, “Nationalism, War, and Archaization of Gender Relations in the Balkans,” 1007.

07. Slapšak, “Žene i rat,” 3.

08. Jalušić, “Women in Post-Socialist Slovenia,” 120–21.

09. Licht and Drakulić, “When the Word for Peacemaker was Women,” 5.

10. Ibid., 8.

11. The feminist and classicist Svetlana Slapšak considers the international Women in Black movement a fitting employment of the traditional Balkan and Mediterranean woman's power and competence in the culture of the grave (washing, preparing, and mourning the dead—the anthropological concept of miasma) to convey the message that deaths of all victims are tragic and to provoke ideas of peace. See Slapšak, “Identities under Threat on the Eastern Borders,” 155.

12. This position buttresses her philanthropic activities through the Hunt Alternatives Plan, her position as Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, and her 2005 book This Was Not Our War.

13. Slapšak, “Žene i rat,” 6. Slapšak finds another proof of this observation in the linguistic facility of Muslim women of the harem, who were known to be conversant in as many as 10 African, Asian, and European languages.

14. Spahić, “Female War Victims,” 2.

15. Hunt, “Women's Vital Voices,” 5.

16. Bagić, International Assistance for Women's Organizing in South Eastern Europe, 7. For example, in a 2002 proposal for the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy in Tuzla canton, NGOs are numbered at 50. Of those, 33 are headed by women. See http://www.policy.hu/∼bagic/FinalDraftMay.htm; INTERNET (accessed 1 December 2005); permission to cite received from author on this date.

17. Milojević, “Šta hoće žene?,” 1.

18. Hunt and Posa, “Women Waging Peace,” 39.

19. Helms, “Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation?,” 25.

20. In Good Intentions, 35–65; and Hertić et al., “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 315–66. See also Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism, 95–96.

21. Sejfija, “From the ‘Civil Sector’ towards a Civil Society?,” 11–13.

22. Ibid., 1.

23. Grupa autora, “Lokalna samouprava je vaše pravo,” 5.

24. See, for example, Ghodsee, “Feminism-by-Design,” 737–42; and Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism, 105–08.

25. Sejfija, “From the Civil Sector,” 4.

26. Ibid., 15.

27. Ibid., 15–16.

28. Grupa autora, “Strateške opcije i prioriteti razvoja Programa gradjanskog društva u BiH,” 4.

29. Bagić, “Women's Organizing in Post-Yugoslav Countries,” 12–13.

30. Bagić, International Assistance for Women's Organizing, 11.

31. Helms, “Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation?,” 25.

32. Bagić, International Assistance for Women's Organizing, 16.

33. Ibid., 18.

34. These are just a few of the projects, given as example, of the German-supported NGO in Tuzla, IPAK.

35. Žene Ženama, Annual Report 2004, published with the support of Kvinna till Kvinna, Sweden.

36. As a result of a 10-fold drop after the war in the percentage of women holding political office in BiH, the OSCE ruled in 1998 that women must represent 30% of the candidates from the first 10 (major) political parties. The percentage of women in the parliament rebounded in turn to 26%. One might still dispute whether women participate to the same degree in the actual political process (Dani, no. 171, 8 September 2000) available from www.bhdani.com.

37. Muslims in Yugoslavia, particularly in the cities, were often nonobservant. It is an irony, then, that previously or still-secular Bosniaks now demand respect for (and knowledge of) their religious and ethnic difference, for example that they be offered dishes without pork at restaurants or non-alcoholic drinks (even if they do eat pork and drink alcohol). It is an understandable legacy of the war. Furthermore, focusing concern on the issue of Islamization in Bosnia, rather than on, for instance, the arrest of war criminals and the punishing of war crimes, many Bosniaks consider “blaming the victim.”

38. Bakšić-Muftić et al., Socio-ekonomski status žena u BiH, 3.

39. Women activists took special pride in the passing of the Law on Gender Equality in BiH in May 2003 (PS BiH broj 56/03).

40. Bakšić-Muftić et al., Socio-ekonomski status žena u BiH, 9.

41. Selimbegović reminds the reader that religious conservatives were already active on the eve of war, when Refik Numić, the then Deputy Minister of Agriculture, suggested, as a remedy for high unemployment, that men be granted the exclusive right of employment and financial maintenance of the family. Selimbegović, “Budućnost pod nikabom,” 2.

42. Selimbegović, “Budućnost pod nikabom,” 3.

43. Much has been written on the practice of Islam in modern Bosnia. The emblematic text is Tone Bringa's Being Muslim the Bosnian Way.

44. Interview with Vildana Selimbegović, 12 July 2005.

45. Ibid.

46. One such researcher, Dr. Selma Leydesdorff (University of Amsterdam), made this point to me during the conference in Sarajevo, 10–15 July 2005: “Genocide Against Bosniaks of the Safe Area Srebrenica in July 1995: Lessons for the Future.”

47. Bakšić-Muftić et al., Socio-ekonomski status žena u BiH, 38–41.

48. Ibid., 41.