Bosnia: the fighting continues

American lawyers ask me from time to time to testify in immigration cases for people from the Balkans.  If they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in the country of origin, a court will allow them to stay in the US.  I am generally skeptical.  The Bosnian war ended in 1996.  The Kosovo and Macedonia wars in 2001.  Hundreds of thousands of people have returned to their homes.  Discrimination and ethnic quotas are common.  Interethnic violence happens but is rare.  Are there really places that are still unsafe?

The answer is yes, as my mailbox revealed this week.  Here’s a note from a friend:

The editor in chief at Tacno.net [an internet-based news outlet], Ms. Štefica Galić, and her first assistant Amer Bahtijar are in serious jeopardy from both Croat and Muslim militant nationalists in their town, Mostar. Those otherwise mutually hostile extremists have now virtually unified against my friends because of Tacno.net’s anti-nationalist editorial policy that promotes tolerance and cooperation between peoples and countries in the region. Seriousness of the situation is such that Štefica and Amer are in danger even when going to a restaurant for lunch, because literally no part of the town is safe for them.

The problem is that local police are unwilling to protect them even though they are notified about all the threats and everything that’s going on. Last year Štefica was physically attacked by local Croat nationalists in her hometown Ljubuški (also in Herzegovina). Fortunately, she suffered rather minor injuries on that occasion, but when she reported the incident to the local police, the officers almost laughed at her, implicitly supporting the assailants. The authorities reacted, albeit fairly reluctantly, only after the U.S. Ambassador to OSCE intervened.

Now, the threat is even bigger than last year. So, I want to ask if you possibly have any idea what could be wise for them to do in such a situation, or if you know someone…who is influential enough to help them somehow?

The short answer is “yes,” so I am doing what I can to alert people to what is going on, including in this post.  But what is really going on?

My correspondent went on to write:

The main reason is that during the war [Štefica] and her late husband, Neđo Galić, were rescuing local Muslims (Bosniaks) from a Croat concentration camp in their hometown Ljubuški. Last year, Svetlana Broz, a granddaughter of the Former Yugoslavia’s President Tito, filmed a documentary about their heroic deeds, which actually served as a pretext for local Croat extremists to attack Štefica in the street (the attack took place just a couple of days after the movie was premiered at the local cinema in Ljubuški and they were openly menacing Štefica all the time). Ms. Broz’s NGO also granted Štefica an award for civil courage.

This is not about ethnicity per se.  It is about a much more profound divide in the Balkans:  between ethnic nationalists and anti-nationalists.  The ethnic nationalists have managed to keep Mostar, an important city in southern Bosnia, divided since the early 1990s, when clashes there helped initiate a series of wars.  The political economy in Mostar depends on this division, which gives Croat and Bosniak nationalists political monopolies and the opportunity to divide the pie and drain resources from their own communities.

This would be far more difficult if Bosniaks and Croats got along well enough to sit in the same institutions together.  They would watch each other with care.  The failure to reintegrate Mostar’s institutions has left both the Croat and Bosniak populations at the mercy of their, forgive the expression, blood-sucking ethnic nationalists.

That is why the anti-nationalists are such a threat.  They don’t get a lot of votes.  But they are unreliable when it comes to covering up corruption and past ethnic crimes (as well as threatened ones).  The people who threaten them do so for good reason.  The European Union, which spent upwards of $100 million on reintegration in Mostar, should ask for its money back.  The inter-ethnic war may be finished in Mostar, but the fighting continues between the nationalists and anti-nationalists.