“We are hungry in three languages”: massive citizens protest in Bosnia
Demonstrations have spread rapidly across Bosnia, with citizens organizing popular assemblies to voice their frustration with the country’s institutional paralysis. Through the adamantly non-ethnic nature of the demonstrations, the protesters are taking aim at the entire political elite.
On Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after a Sarajevo canton’s premier declared that the people of Sarajevo would not riot because there was “no hunger” in Bosnia’s capital, his administrative building was in flames. So was the presidency and 16 other government buildings across the country, in what has been the worst episode of violence since Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war.
The politician, Suad Zeljkovic, had been responding to protests that began on Wednesday in the northern city of Tuzla after those laid off from several formerly successful factories took to the streets. His remark was reviled by citizens in a country with an official unemployment rate of 27.5 percent (estimated to climb into the 40s with the grey economy included.)
“They should have leveled [the building],” said an old man at the protests, in a video now circulating on youtube. “These are the people who are burying us…Twenty years they’ve been suffocating us, holding us down.”
The Dayton Peace Agreement, brokered by American Diplomat Richard Holbrooke, ended the war that killed 100,000 people, but also made Bosnia one of the most governed countries in the world. The accords were an opus on power-sharing that created a bureaucratic quagmire with three presidents, one for each of the predominant ethno-national groups —Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, now called Bosnjaks— and substantial veto power. It also created two political entities, Republic of Srpska and the ‘Federation,’ which is sub-divided into a further ten cantons.
Zeljkovic was the head of the cantonal government of Sarajevo until he tendered his resignation on Saturday morning as the flames of his administration building were still being put out. Three other cantonal leaders have resigned, including in Tuzla, where the original unrest began, the outgrowth of months of peaceful protests there by laid off or unpaid workers.
The fate of the Konjuh furniture factory in Tuzla is in many ways a metonymy for Bosnia: founded in the 1880s by the ruling Austro-Hungarians, the business employed more than 5,000 workers during the 40 year reign of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. After a failed post-war privatization, there were only 400 employees by the end of 2013, and it went bankrupt in January.
Bosnians are angry about unemployment and hunger, but is is this unwieldy, redundant, blockage-prone ethnic-based power system that is the real target of the protesters’ ire. A protest sign reads “we are hungry in three languages,” referring to the country’s three official languages: Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, which are more akin to dialects.
Though it is true that protests are drawing more people in the Federation, the protests are adamantly non-ethnic. The protest gatherings, now peaceful, have continued daily in more than 30 cities across the country without violence, but with mounting anger at politicians who have been earning salaries without improving the quality of ordinary citizens’ lives. ..
Despite RS president Milorad Dodik’s statements that the protests are an attempt to destroy the entity he leads, people have taken to the streets in the de facto entity capital Banja Luka, where one man was fined 550 BAM, or 280 Euro, and in Prijedor. Average pensions and salaries in the RS are lower than in the Federation, and there is widespread discontentment there too.
The comprehensive sets of checks and balances afforded to each of the warring parties have made much-needed constitutional reform impossible. Discord has even stymied a census that would tell the government just how many constituents it has after two decades of war and displacement.
“[One politician’s] salary is 28 times my pension,” said the same old Sarajevan, affectionately referred to as “Dedo,” or “old man.” “I worked for 40 years, 7 months and 18 days. My pension is 304 Bosnian Marks (150 Euro).”Where are the tax dollars going? After the most recent general elections, in 2010, it took 16 months to form a government. That coalition fell apart after two months. The bureaucracy may be dysfunctional, but it is bloated: in a country whose population is 3.8 million, an estimated 1 million jobs are paid for out of government coffers.
“We keep taking loans from the IMF and other granting institutions, but these funds are not used for social programs or give people dignified pensions, they are used to sustain the high salaries of politicians and administrations,” said Sumeja Tulic, a 29 year old human rights lawyer who has been at the protests every day. ..
read more:
