The sun gave me a lot of bright ideas today. Like walking up skinny streets on steep hills with no cloud cover to take a picture from a 15th century fort that overlooks Sarajevo. Here are a couple videos of the views. In the first one, you might be able to hear the nearby mosque announcing the 5 p.m. prayer (my apologies for not knowing the correct name for this).
Before making the trek up the hill, we stroll along the river Miljacka. Here's a picture of the bridge by where Franz Ferdinand was shot:
This morning and early afternoon, before embarking on our local excursion, we meet with some people from the American University of Bosnia-Herzegovina (AUBiH). Two of them are third year law students, who will be joining us for a few days this week and who are from different parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The third person from AUBIH, Dr. Esmir Ganic, gave us some background about the university and the current governance of BiH. Apparently, the constitution has not been updated since the Dayton Accords were signed. The constitution as it stands now allows for a Presidency, with three presidents representing each of the three major ethnicities- Bosnian, Croat, and Serb (I believe that the terms are four years long and that you can run for reelection, but if you have served for eight years straight, you must take a break from the presidency for a term). The different presidents rotate as the Chairman of the Presidency every 8 months. The state is broken down into the Federation of BiH and the Republic of Srpska. The Federation is then broken into 10 Cantons, which were designed to maintain a balance between Croats and Bosniaks. Here's a map that seems to be pretty accurate, as far as I can tell (from http://www.ezilon.com/maps/images/europe/Bosnia-and-Herzegovina-poli.gif):
From what Dr. Esmir told us today, the three political parties are still strongly based on ethnicity. It appears that the current constitution and geographical demographics support having ethnically based political parties, even though the conflict here in the 90s focused on ethnicity as well. One thing that I thought was interesting was that Dr. Esmir said that the aspects of policy that the USA has done a better job than the European Union. For instance, he said that the USA guided military reform succeeded much more than EU guided police reform. It seemed that one difference that may have influenced the different approaches from the EU and USA is that the EU's member states focused more on ethnicity. The concept of the "nation-state", where the citizens of a state are almost entirely of one ethnic background, seems to be much stronger in Europe, whereas the USA (although the USA is not perfect) cares less about having continuous ethnic geographical boundaries. Essentially, America's "ethnic melting pot" attitude (where the American identity comes before Irish, etc. identity) has affected our approach to guiding BiH policy. Obviously, this morning's conversation wasn't an in-depth analysis and the USA certainly wasn't flawless when it came to Balkans policy, but the ideas were headed in this direction.
After our meeting, we went to the office for the International Commission on Missing Persons. There we heard a couple presentations about what the ICMP does and why they do it. According to their statistics, there were about 40,000 missing persons after the Dayton Accords were signed in 1995. To date, about 28,000 of those have been found and identified. Also, they have exhumed about 3,000 mass graves in BiH, which held on average 200 bodies. While this is devastating and impressive at the same time, it was also frustrating to hear that there are still barriers for them to try to finish the job. The ICMP never exhumes bodies from graves without permission from the local authorities, which is more reluctant or bureaucratic than in others. That being said, the ICMP has had a huge impact in resolving questions and doubts that families have about loved ones that went missing between 1992 and 1995.
One of the themes that both presenters talked about was their belief or hope that by identifying victims of the 1992-1995 conflict, future perpetrators of ethnically motivated violence will be deterred. I think that this is an interesting view, but I am skeptical that their efforts will have much of a deterrent effect. I think that identifying missing persons is vital in the healing and recovery process for the region, but I also think that they could be used as a powerful political tool, should tensions rise again.
The presenters also mentioned wanting "justice" and "rule of law" to prevail. The first presenter even alluded to convictions among many of the victims that all of the perpetrators of ethnically motivated killing should be prosecuted in a court and punished if proven guilty. However, I think that without compelling witness testimony (there is scant witness protection in BiH) and/or confessions, the only war criminals that will be prosecuted will be the big names, like General Mladic.
Professor Sullivan asked us today after our meeting with Dr. Esmir to consider the question, "Who rules or governs Bosnia-Herzegovina?" I don't have a good answer yet, but I do have a small response. If I learned anything from the character V in "V for Vendetta", 'who' is a function of the form 'what'. My early impressions are that the victims and survivors of the 1990s conflict in the Balkans still yearn for a sense of justice for the crimes that have been committed and for the security that a rule of law brings. One of the many steps towards achieving this is likely resolving centuries-old distrust and hatred between ethnicities and religions.
Tomorrow, we will be meeting with important members of the Presidency and Parliament here in Sarajevo. As for last night, I caught the first half of the game with a couple classmates at an outdoor cafe in the Old Town district. For the second half, we saved a few KM by returning to our hotel and splitting a large bottle of the local brew, Sarajevsko, in their room.
Lucas out.
No comments:
Post a Comment