The Bosnian police, multi-ethnic democracy, and the race of ‘European civilization’

Abstract

In many social science accounts of the role of law enforcement organizations in relation to race and racism, police are positioned as the agents of racialization projects, directly or indirectly carrying out the state's work of demarcating insiders from outsiders along racial or ethnic lines. This paper will argue that in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina the Bosnian police themselves have been the targets of a massive racialization project – one undertaken by police reformers from the international community. Furthermore, by entering the fray with Anglo-American paradigms of ethnicity and identity, and by imposing reforms governed by such paradigms, they only differently ‘ethnicized’ the Bosnian police rather than helping them to heal extant divisions. In turn, these imposed solutions trapped internationals and Bosnians alike in a situation in which the presence or absence of appropriate ethnic demographics became, for too long, one of the main proxy measures for democratic policing practice.

Keywords:

• Bosnia-Herzegovina
• police reform
• racialization
• ethnic categories
• Yugoslav identity
• transition

Notes

1. The interviews discussed in this paper took place almost entirely in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, (with a few exceptions in Banja Luka) during approximately one year of ethnographic fieldwork in 2002 and a short follow-up visit in 2005.

2. Omi and Winant use the term ‘racialization’ to ‘signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group. … “Racialization” is grounded in historically constructed theories of race and denotes superiority or inferiority’ (Omi and Winant 1986, p. 64). Their related phrase ‘racial formation’ captures how concepts of race in the US are implicated in structural and cultural dimensions of social life (Omi and Winant 1999, p. 15).

3. BCS refers to Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, the hyphenated language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian. After the war, it became important to many former Yugoslavs to refer to their native tongues by a sub-region-specific name (e.g. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian) and to insist that these were indeed separate languages.

4. . Examples of this depiction of the uni-directionality of racialization projects abound. Implicitly, these same depictions often represent police as more-or-less ethnically homogenous – in their interests and in the effects of their actions, if not in their actual demographics. See, for example, Edward Escobar (1999) on the history of Mexican American racial identity in Los Angeles, California, as related to police characterizations of them; and Chan and Mirchandani (2001, p. 117) on the ‘racialization and gendering of street gangs’ in Canada. In both these works, police are the primary agents in the processes by which racialized categories are mobilized.

5. Other excellent accounts include Glenny (1996); Malcolm (1996); Silber and Little (1997); and Pavkovic (2000).

6. Whether sociobiological or historical materialist, both varieties of explanation accept as given that the groups at war with one another in Bosnia-Herzegovina have been so for centuries in ways that have not changed in any meaningful way. They both assume an unchanging essence in the identity categories ‘Serb’, ‘Croat’, and ‘Muslim’, rather than, for instance, emphasizing how present-day political leaders may have manipulated public storytelling about various groups to serve particular – and very current – social and political interests (a theory of ethnicity clearly favoured by Woodward – one that Ronnie Lipschutz calls ‘instrumental’ [Lipschutz 1998, p. 55]).

7. See, for example, Bringa:

Prior to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (April 1992) its population officially consisted of three narodi distinct in terms of religious affiliation but not of geography, language or social life. Affiliation with one of the three religious doctrines, Roman Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, and Sunni Islam, corresponds to membership in a Bosnian nacija or official narod. Thus, Catholics are Croats, Serbs are Orthodox, and Muslims are members of the ‘Muslim’ narod (Bringa 1995, p. 10).

Following Bringa (1995, p. 21–2), I privilege the term nacija over narod because it was the one used most frequently in daily conversation during the year I lived in Sarajevo.

8. Though it is worth noting that under Tito's communist rule, which lasted nearly a decade after his death in 1980, all religion was banned, so the fact that neither Croats nor Serbs have living memories of their Muslim neighbours worshipping in mosques cannot necessarily be equated with an absence of religious identity or feeling.

9. Major cities tend to be somewhat more ‘ethnically’ mixed. Sarajevo remains a richly diverse city, though Muslims are now estimated to make up its largest nacija group by far.

10. I retain the term ‘international community’ or ‘IC’ because it was so pervasively used in BiH. It refers to actors from the UN and/or other international governmental and non-governmental organizations [IGOs and INGOs respectively] who arrive in the wake of conflicts or other humanitarian crises.

11. I carried out interviews either in English (many Bosnians who live in Sarajevo or Banja Luka are fluent or near-fluent in English) or a mixture of BCS and English. Quotations from interviews included in this paper retain certain grammatical errors in English because correcting such errors risks the possibility of altering the speakers' intended meanings more than translation already does.

12. I also interviewed approximately four dozen employees of UN, US government, and OCSE/ODIHR affiliated agencies involved in Bosnian police reform.

13. The Bosnian officers expressed a fairly balanced combination of appreciation for the assistance they had received from the UN, the US and other countries; thoughtful reflections on ‘democratic policing’ in comparison with policing and training before the war under Communist rule; and incisive criticisms of aspects of international assistance and reform. This paper disproportionately reflects their criticisms due to the collection's thematic focus.

14. Reference to civilian claims comes from participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork in BiH. I lived in Sarajevo (renting from and partially co-habiting with an elderly Bosnian woman), travelled throughout BiH, and taught classes at the University of Sarajevo for ten months in 2002.

15. This mention of European Union police referred to the fact that the UNMIBH IPTF, terminating in December 2002, was to be taken over in 2003 by a European Union Police Mission.

16. From the internationals' perspective, it didn't help Bosnian officers appear more ‘civilized’ to refer to their Pakistani, Indian or African colleagues as stick-wielding thugs. However, projecting barbarism onto others in order to make oneself appear more civilized by comparison is inextricable from much of Western civilization – see, for example, Said (1994); Goldberg (1993); Balibar (1990); Bhabha (1990); Delacampagne (1990). It is tricky at best for anyone framed as ‘racist’ or ‘barbaric’ to escape that frame – see Rosga (2001).

17. Some indication of what a newly self-governing Bosnian state's interests might be for its police forces, and within them the relative positioning of interests one might define as ethnocratic, can be found in an ‘unofficial declaration’ signed by the reigning political leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina in late 2007. This document asserts ‘full and unconditional agreement’ to reform the country's police forces according to three European Commission principles:

1. All legislative and budgetary competencies for all police matters must be vested at the State level;

2. No political interference with operational policing;

3. Functional local police areas must be determined by technical policing criteria, where operational command is exercised at the local level (OHR 2007).

All of these precede ‘agreement and acceptance’ that ‘the overall reform aims at establishing a functional, multiethnic and professional police’ force. At the time the declaration was signed, it seemed a hopeful indicator of progress toward structural integration of the country's law enforcement agencies. However, more recent events suggest otherwise. These include accusations by the Serb signatory of the Declaration, Milorad Dodik, that efforts to integrate the police are part of a conspiracy to annihilate the RS as a semi-autonomous entity (Bilefsky 2008; 2009) – accusations the OHR has long denied (OHR 2005).