Bosnia's Success Story? Brčko District and the ‘View from Below’

Abstract

Situated in the far northeastern corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brčko District is widely heralded as a successful multi-ethnic society. Such portrayals are typically ‘top down’ and centred on institutions, yet it cannot be assumed that multi-ethnicity at the institutional level necessarily translates into everyday relations between Brčko's ethnic groups. Based on qualitative interview data, this article explores Brčko from the ‘bottom up’, through a focus on inter-ethnic relations in everyday life. Its central argument is that viewing Brčko through this additional lens not only raises important questions about the District's image as a success story but also, and more broadly, has significant implications in highlighting the limitations of liberal peacebuilding and the importance of ‘peacebuilding from below’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding an Early Career Fellowship (2007–9). This research was a follow-on from the author's Leverhulme-funded research into establishing whether, and to what extent, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is contributing to inter-ethnic reconciliation in BiH.

Notes

During the negotiations that preceded the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, Brčko proved to be a stumbling bloc. Both the Serbs, on one hand, and the Croats and Bosniaks, on the other, claimed Brčko. The Serb side wanted control of Brčko as a vital strategic link – the Posavina corridor – between the two halves of RS. The BiH Federation, however, counter-argued that Brčko had historically been a Bosniak- and Croat-majority area; that it constituted a vital northern access route from the Federation to Croatia and Central Europe; and that to give exclusive possession of Brčko to RS would be commensurate with rewarding Serb ethnic cleansing of the area in 1992. Unable to resolve this impasse, the parties agreed to submit the issue to binding arbitration. Annex 2, Article V of the DPA placed Brčko under the authority of the international Arbitral Tribunal for Dispute over Inter-Entity Boundary in Brčko Area. On 5 March 1999, in its Final Award, the Tribunal established Brčko as an autonomous, demilitarized district held in condominium by both entities and under the sovereignty of BiH. Brčko District was formally inaugurated on 8 March 2000.

According to the 1991 census – the last time that a census was conducted in BiH – the Brčko municipality had a population of 87,627: 44.1 per cent Bosniaks, 25.4 per cent Croats and 20.7 per cent Serbs. A further 6.5 per cent declared themselves to be ‘Yugoslavs’ and 3.3 per cent belonged to other ethnic groups.

Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms and Ger Duijzings, ‘Introduction’, in Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms and Ger Duijzings (eds), The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, p.14.

See, e.g., Elizabeth M Cousens and Chetan Kumar (eds), Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001; Béatrice Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below: UN Missions and Local People, London: Hurst, 2006; Bougarel et al. (see n.3 above); Paula M. Pickering, Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007; Béatrice Pouligny, Simon Chesterman and Albrecht Schnabel (eds), After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities, Tokyo: UN University Press, 2007.

Carl Bildt, Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, p.6.

Raffi Gregorian, ‘Supervisor Raffi Gregorian's Speech at the Central Ceremony at the Brčko District Anniversary Celebration’, 8 March 2009 (at: www.ohr.int/print/?content_id=43174).

International Crisis Group, ‘Bosnia's Brčko: Getting In, Getting On and Getting Out’, 2 June 2003 (at: www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1475&1=1).

Florian Bieber, ‘Local Institutional Engineering: A Tale of Two Cities, Mostar and Brčko’, International Peacekeeping, Vol.12, No.3, 2005, p.431.

Ibid., pp.430–1; Michael W Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Making Peace: United Nations Peace Operations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, p.238.

BiH Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees, Comparative Analysis on Access to Rights of Refugees and Displaced Persons, Sarajevo, 2005, p.21.

Arbitral Tribunal, ‘Arbitral Tribunal for Dispute over Inter-Entity Boundary in Brčko Area, Final Award’, 5 March 1999, p.8.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Representation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ‘Statistics Package’, 30 June 2008 (at: www.unhcr.ba/return/pdf%202009/SP_06_2009.pdf).

Doyle and Sambanis (see n.9 above), p.239.

Michael G. Karnavas, ‘Creating the Legal Framework of the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Model for the Region and Other Postconflict Societies’, American Journal of International Law, Vol.97, 2003, p.131.

According to UN assessments conducted at the end of 2002, only the court police, the State Border Service and the police in Brčko District were genuinely multi-ethnic. Gemma Collantes Celador, ‘Police Reform: Peacebuilding through “Democratic Policing”?’ International Peacekeeping, Vol.12, No.3, 2005, p.367.

Author interview with Deputy Commander, police force in Srebrenica, Srebrenica, 25 June 2008.

Howard L. Clarke, ‘Brčko District: An Example of Progress in the Basic Reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, 4 February 2004 (at: www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/MR293Clarke.doc).

Due to opposition to this Law, the Supervisor decided to impose it.

The poll was conducted by the Sarajevo-based independent firm Prism Research. Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina, ‘Lessons from Education Reform in Brčko: A Report Prepared by the OSCE Mission to BiH Education Department’, October 2007, p.10. Copy on file with the author.

Ibid., p.11.

Ibid.

Ibid., p.13.

Carl Dahlman and and Gearóid Ó'Tuathail, ‘Bosnia's Third Space? Nationalist Separatism and International Supervision in Bosnia's Brčko District’, Geopolitics, Vol.11, No.4, 2006, pp.670–1.

Hugh Griffiths, ‘The Dynamics of Multi-National Intervention: Brčko under International Supervision’, MPhil thesis, University of Amsterdam, 1998, p.13 (supplied by the OHR in Brčko District; on file with the author).

Alex Jeffrey, ‘Building State Capacity in Post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Case of Brčko District’, Political Geography, Vol.25, 2006, p.216.

Gregorian (see n.6 above).

Bieber (see n. 8 above), p.421.

Dahlman and Ó'Tuathail (see n.23 above), p.670.

Pickering (see n.4 above), p.111.

Peter C. Farrand, ‘Lessons from Brčko: Necessary Components for Future Internationally Supervised Territories’, Emory International Law Review, Vol.15, 2001, p.579.

See Janine Natalya Clark, ‘From Negative to Positive Peace: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Journal of Human Rights, Vol.8, No.4, 2009, pp.360–84; idem, ‘The Limits of Retributive Justice: Findings of an Empirical Study in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Vol.7, No.3, 2009, pp. 463–87; idem, ‘Transitional Justice in BiH: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in Lilian Barria and Steven Roper (eds), The Development of Institutions on Human Rights: A Comparative Study, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.

As an example of opportunistic sampling, while waiting outside Brčko's Hotel Posavina to interview a Croatian man who ultimately never arrived, the author met a young journalist who offered to set up an alternative interview with a Croatian woman working in a nearby café.

Author interview, Brčko, 2 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 5 July 2009.

UNDP, Justice and Truth in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Public Perceptions – Early Warning System Special Edition, Sarajevo, 2005, p.30.

Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘We Are Pretending Peace: Local Memory and the Absence of Social Transformation and Reconciliation in Rwanda’, in Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman (eds), After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond, London: Hurst, 2008, pp.129, 137 (original emphasis).

Author interview, Brčko, 3 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 6 July 2009. While conducting research in June 2009 in Prozor, a small town in central BiH, the author met two men (a Bosniak and a Croat) in a local café who began to argue about the war until the Croat stood up and left. In addition to highlighting the problem of competing truths, this example helps to explain why some people prefer simply not to talk about the war with members of other ethnic groups.

George Santayana, cited in Marie Smyth, ‘Putting the Past in Its Place: Issues of Victimhood and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland's Peace Process’, in Nigel Biggar (ed.), Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict, Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2003, p.150.

Peter B. Miller, ‘Contested Memories: The Bosnian Genocide in Serb and Muslim Minds’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol.8, No.3, 2006, p.323.

See, e.g., Joel Halpern and Harvey M. Weinstein, ‘Empathy and Rehumanization after Mass Violence’, in Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein (eds), My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.305; Mark R. Amstutz, The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, p.97; Hanna Hjort and Ann Frisen, ‘Ethnic Identity and Reconciliation: Two Main Tasks for the Young in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Adolescence, Vol.41, No.161, 2006, p.142.

Ronald J. Fisher, ‘Social-Psychological Processes in Interactive Conflict Analysis and Reconciliation’, in Ho-Won Jeong (ed.), Conflict Resolution: Dynamics, Process and Structure, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999, p.85.

Louis Kriesberg, ‘Paths to Varieties of Intercommunal Reconciliation’, in Ho-Won Jeong (ed.), Conflict Resolution: Dynamics, Process and Structure, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999, p.107.

Author interview, Brčko, 6 July 2009. According to the UNDP opinion poll of June 2005, only 28.67 per cent of respondents in Brčko agreed with the statement ‘what happened must never be forgotten’, in contrast to 47.62 per cent and 37.25 per cent of respondents in the Federation and RS, respectively. UNDP (see n.35 above), p.30.

Author interview, Brčko, 7 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 4 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 5 July 2009.

Such ‘thin’ definitions of reconciliation are not confined to Brčko and can be found throughout the country. Clark, ‘From Negative to Positive Peace’ (see n.31 above), p.363. That people claim that reconciliation exists, however, while at the same time expressing ethnic distance (see n.60 below), arguably attests to a minimalist understanding of reconciliation that encompasses little more than the absence of violence; in short, negative peace.

John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 1997, p.24.

Roy J. Lewicki, Roy J. and Carolyn Wiethoff, ‘Trust, Trust Development and Trust Despair’, in Morton Deutsch and Peter T. Coleman (eds), The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, San Francisco: Jussey Bass, 2000, p.86.

UNDP, The Silent Majority Speaks: Snapshots of Today and Visions of the Future of Bosnia and Herzegovina – Executive Summary, Sarajevo, 2007, p.13.

Author interview, Brčko, 3 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 4 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 7 July 2009.

J. David Lewis and Andrew Weigert, ‘Trust as a Social Reality’, Social Forces, Vol.63, No.4, 1985, p.972.

Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.265.

Author interview, Brčko, 6 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 5 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 4 July 2009.

Research on ethnic distance in BiH would seem to support this. According to a UNDP survey in November 2008, for example, 31.3 per cent of respondents in Serb majority areas found it entirely acceptable to have a Bosniak boss, but only 15.9 per cent found it entirely acceptable for a family member to marry a Bosniak. Similarly, 83.7 per cent of respondents in Bosniak majority areas said they considered it completely acceptable to have a Serb boss, but by contrast just 20.5 per cent found it acceptable for a family member to marry a Serb. UNDP, ‘Annual Report – 2008, Web Edition’, 2008, accessed at www.undp.ba/index.aspx?PID=36&RID=87

Author interview, Brčko, 2 July 2009.

Author interview, Brčko, 5 July 2009.

Roger Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p.187.

Michael Pugh and Margaret Cobble, ‘Non-nationalist Voting in Bosnian Municipal Elections: Implications for Democracy and Peacebuilding’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol.38, No.1, 2001, p.44.

Roberto Belloni, State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia, London: Routledge, 2007, p.178.

Timothy Donais, ‘A Tale of Two Towns: Human Security and the Limits of Post-War Normalization in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, Vol.7, No. 1, 2005, p.20.

Halpern and Weinstein (see n.41 above), pp.303–4.

Robert Belloni, ‘Peacebuilding at the Local Level: Refugee Return to Prijedor’, in David Chandler (ed.), Peace without Politics? Ten Years of International State-Building in Bosnia, London: Routledge, 2006, p.128.

Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse and Hugh Miall, Contemporary Conflict Resolution: The Prevention, Management and Transformation of Deadly Conflicts, 2nd edn, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007, p.222.

Bieber (see n.8 above), p.431.

UNDP, The Silent Majority Speaks: Snapshots of Today and Visions of the Future of Bosnia and Herzegovina – Selection of Graphs, Sarajevo, 2007, pp.29–30.

Ibid., p.32. In the RS, however, there are leaders who threaten a referendum on secession from BiH.

Pouligny (see n.4 above), p.267.