From Peter’s diary: ELECTION FEVER IN TUZLA

DAYTON DEEP FREEZE — REFLECTIONS ON A STALLED PEACE PROCESS

THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TALKS BACK

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From the editorial desk:

Earlier this month, Peter Lippman left Bosnia for Kosovo, where he has been working with Advocacy Project member Teresa Crawford. As our readers may remember, Peter and Teresa went to Kosovo last spring to work with student activists and were arrested and deported by the Serbian authorities. They are returning to assess how much of Kosovo’s civil society has survived the upheavals of the last year — with particular emphasis on women’s groups. We will bring you their reports in the continuation of Volume 6 (Civil Society in Kosovo) of On the Record.

The prospect of leaving Bosnia has prompted Peter to reflect on the Dayton peace process. In this issue, we contrast his current thoughts with the way he felt last September, when he served as an elections supervisor for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In some respects the September 1998 elections represented the high point of the Dayton peace process. Bosnians were asked to elect a national presidency; assemblies for the two “entities” (the Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation); cantonal governments in the Federation; and even some local governments.

Peter had served as an elections supervisor twice before, and he knew better than to expect a miracle. But as the following diary extract shows, the process of helping Bosnians to organize an important election brought him closer to local Bosnians and demonstrated their yearning for peace. It also produced a measure of optimism about the country’s future.

But this has not been borne out by the political leaders who were elected. Ironically, the September 1998 elections undermined the prospects for unified Bosnia by electing nationalist politicians who had no intention of implementing the Dayton peace package and helping refugees return to their homes. In other words, “democracy” has created more obstacles for the courageous, persistent refugees that Peter has met over the past months. The second article in this issue reflects the trepidation he now feels, and his sense that time is running out for Dayton.

From Peter’s diary:

ELECTION FEVER IN TUZLA

September, 1998. I have now been in Bosnia a year. When I first came here, I worked for Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on the municipal elections in Nevesinje (Herzegovina, eastern Republika Srpska [RS]) as a supervisor. This week, I am working in the same capacity on the general elections. I went to Zagreb from Tuzla to meet the OSCE people and get my assignment. Many supervisors arrived the same day from all over the OSCE-membership area, i.e. the US, Russia, Bulgaria, Portugal, Holland, Ireland, and much more. We have a nice crew as far as I can tell. No people desperate for attention. The Portuguese, Irish, Dutch, and Bulgarians make a good sociable combination. There are a few from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan also.

We trained hard the first couple of days. I feel sorry for the newcomers. It’s really a complicated procedure. Fortunately the OSCE (the “Organization for Spreading Confusion in Europe” or the “Organization for Sitting in Cafes in Europe” as it is sometimes called) has gradually gotten things more organized, and there are fewer foul-ups each time. There are not many changes in the training, from last time. But it’s kind of an “i-before-e-except-after-c” situation. There are four elections in the Federation at once: for the Bosnian presidency, the Bosnian and entity parliaments, and the cantonal assemblies; and 11 new municipal councils have to be created.

We have to know all the rules, and establish a communication network in case someone doesn’t know the rules, or in case the Serbs or Martians (which is more likely) attack and we have to call SFOR (the NATO stabilization force) to get a helicopter to rescue us. The hard part will probably be making sure that a lot of illiterate older villagers can mark their ballots without invalidating them.

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One night I was walking home. I passed an SDP (Social Democrat Party) rally. Gradimir Gojer was on the stage. He is a Sarajevo Croat who runs a cultural center. He was saying, “The Bosniaks [Bosniaks] will vote for Alija [Izetbegovic]. The Croats will vote for Mr. Zubak or Mr. Jelavic. But Bosnia and Herzegovina will vote for ME!!!” He said, “We need to solve the problems of the people rummaging through the dumpsters. We need a Bosnia of Internet-literate people, not the medieval Bosnia that the nationalist parties are promoting!”

These were very nice words, and the crowd of a thousand or so was enthusiastic, chanting “SDP! SDP!” and waving flags. I wasn’t moved. I never thought I could be more cynical about politicians before I lived here. And Gojer is one of the good ones. It is so easy to say nice words.

Yesterday I visited Hanifa and Latifa at the office. We talked about the elections. They are relatively well-educated, but Latifa wasn’t even sure what the four elections were. This is all new. And Hanifa said she couldn’t make up her mind whom to vote for. Latifa said all the old parties had to be thrown out.

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We were given our polling station assignments. I received a relatively small station, in a Muslim village about 20 minutes from Tuzla. I shared a car with Jasur from Almaty, Kazakhstan. His station is up the road in the next village. It will be interesting to see what kinds of people come into the station. Tuzla supports the social democrat Mayor Beslagic, but the surrounding canton supports the Muslim nationalist SDA [Party of Democratic Action], Izetbegovic’s party. However, I was told that this village voted for Beslagic.

I was made “team leader,” with five other supervisors under me. I am responsible for answering their questions on election weekend and making sure everyone gets the “sensitive materials,” i.e. the ballots, to the right place at the end. I was probably put in that position because of my experience. But I noticed most of the team leaders and group leaders (one level higher) are police or (former) military people, in real life.

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The elections are over. The weekend went fairly smoothly. There were no major incidents. I got along fine with my polling station committee members, who were all from the village. There were 791 names on our voter registrar, and 127 of them were Kisic (last name — pronounced “Keesheech”). Three of them were on the committee.

They had all done the work before. They assured me that they knew what to do, and for the most part they did. But the process was too complicated for distracted grownups. So they ended up relying on me for instructions now and then. I think it would be best if they hired college students who are used to taking in large amounts of information and concentrating on complicated tasks.

The main problem during the day was that of husbands voting for their wives. Many of the older women are less educated than their husbands. Some are illiterate. But a lot of them just don’t know what a ballot is, and don’t have a clue whom to vote for. There were too many parties and candidates (83 altogether). It was confusing for everyone. So the women go behind the screen with their husbands, who therefore end up voting twice.

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We had 603 voters, a 76% turnout. They tended to come in clumps. Not too many young people live out in Dobrnja, not far from Tuzla. A moderate commute by Western standards, 20-25 minutes. But no one here would think of living out of town if they worked in town. So Dobrnja is still a village.

Fortunately it was more or less spared by the war, but a lot of its men weren’t. My chairman, Began, showed me where he was shot in the arm. He had to go to Germany for two operations and 10 months of convalescence. He told me that he was sitting in a trench, when a bullet went past his head, ricocheted off of the rifle that he was holding in front of himself, and then went through his left arm, about four inches from his heart. It went through veins, muscle and bone. He bled and fainted. When he came to, someone was bandaging him. Then that man got shot in the head. Began woke up in a field hospital. Now his arm works ok, but he lacks feeling in a couple of his fingers. His arm hurts when the weather is changing. Bosnia is full of people who hurt when the weather changes.

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There was supposed to be a telephone in our polling station, but it didn’t work most of the time. This was a problem because other supervisors needed to get in touch with me if they had questions about the procedures. So they would radio me instead. But my radio was a car radio. So whenever someone would call me, my driver would come in and get me. He had to sit in the car monitoring the radio all day. He didn’t complain.

The weather was nice most of the time. Towards Saturday evening it started storming. We were packing, and then the electricity went out. We grabbed the ballots and left.

Most of the committee members and most of the voters were social-democrats belonging either to the Social Democrat Party (Lagumdzija) or the Social Democrats of Bosnia (Beslagic). These two parties should be one, and maybe will be someday, but are not so far, due to rivalry [Note: the two parties united in the spring of 1999].

Two of the Kisics were brothers. They got into an argument because one of them is SDA (Muslim nationalist party of Alija Izetbegovic) and the other is a member of the Social Democrats of Bosnia. Mainly they got into an argument because they are brothers. Around here, being brothers is one reason to get into an argument; the other is, because you are not brothers.

We closed the doors at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday and began counting. I watched and filled out forms. There must have been a total of 20 forms to fill out. They were fairly logical, but I’m afraid that the local people would have been just snowed under by them. This is really going to have to be simplified. The OSCE spent $30 million on this election. They could probably spend a few million and supply machines to replace the supervisors and committees. But that will have to wait until there is more trust in this country. Which will have to wait until it is a country, if it ever becomes one again. The people of Tuzla are ready to run their own elections, but not the people of Banja Luka, Gacko, Foca, Mostar, nor probably even Sarajevo, where gangsters rule.

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We counted up the votes. The two social democratic parties took 2/3 to 3/4 of the votes, but it won’t be that way throughout the canton, let alone the country. Our ballot count reconciled, meaning that we found as many ballots in the box as we had given out. That meant no one walked out with a ballot. We took about six hours to count the four races and pack everything up.

I got back to the OSCE office around 10:00 p.m. and turned in my materials. I ran into Tom (another supervisor) from Alaska, and he did not get away from his polling station until 7:30 this morning. He had 1,500 votes to deal with. Mona, one of the coordinators (about 3 steps up the OSCE food chain from me) told me that someone came in only having counted one of the four races. She made him hunt down his chairman and tally up the rest. As far as I know, the elections went pretty smoothly around the country. There were no reports from the newspapers about untoward behavior in the polling stations, although in Zvornik a man tried to tear apart the ballot box and the station had to be closed down temporarily. In a couple other stations, representatives of the SDA were giving away free lunches or alcoholic drinks to voters. Another problem was that sometimes the polling station committee chairman would vote on behalf of illiterate people.

In terms of the process, this appears to have been a successful experiment. The real question is, who will emerge at the top of the heap as leaders in the new Bosnia. I have the impression that here in Dobrnja, I’ve had it easy. This is after all the only place in Bosnia that has never had a nationalist government.

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DAYTON DEEP-FREEZE — REFLECTIONS ON A STALLED PEACE PROCESS

While conducting an interview recently with a woman displaced from west Mostar, I asked, “Where are you in terms of returning to your apartment?” She looked at me quizzically and said, “In the phase of waiting.” Her answer summed up much of the experience of over a million Bosnian refugees and displaced persons over the last seven years.

What is going to become of these people? A Bosnian father currently living in Germany with his wife and two children recently told me: “My 12-year-old remembers a dog she had when we lived in Banja Luka, but for my 10-year-old, Bosnia is just a word.”

Three-and-a-half years after Dayton, over 850,000 internally displaced persons still wait throughout Bosnia for a solution to their predicament. Almost 200,000 Bosnian refugees are still living in unstable situations in Europe and other parts of the world. Most of those who have reached the United States and Australia will probably never return.

Meanwhile, the ethnic-based regimes governing most parts of Bosnia are holding to the same separatist positions, either overtly or covertly, that they held before the war when the nationalist parties were first formed. While there has been some increase in refugee return to areas where returnees now constitute a minority ethnicity, that return as of mid-1999 could still be termed symbolic. Can we predict whether the million displaced will ultimately come home, or is Bosnia doomed to a de facto partition that was the original aim of the war?

– Inconclusive Results

The international community proclaimed 1998 the “Year of Return,” but true return barely got under way. This year (1999) is another “Year of Return.” The pace of return has picked up noticeably in such places as the Prijedor municipality, where several thousand Muslims are due to return to Kozarac and Hambarine. But that was not easy — as we reported recently in this series.

In the villages around Drvar and Bosansko Grahovo over 5,000 Serbs have returned from the RS. Croat returns to central Bosnia are tentatively increasing. And there are signs of the ice breaking in some of the most return-resistant areas of the eastern half of the RS.

However, with the “now or never” year half over, the critical mass required to accomplish the restoration of Bosnia as a multi-ethnic state has yet to take place. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs are all still experiencing obstruction. Since Dayton, only around 7,000 Bosnian Muslims, out of hundreds of thousands displaced, have returned to their pre-war homes in the RS. These are mostly older people returning to semi-repaired houses in villages. The return of ethnic minorities to town centers, for reasons described throughout this series, is uniformly negligible.

The situation in mid-1999 could truly be called inconclusive. Headlines in the newspapers daily note the handover of keys to dozens of reconstructed houses on both sides of the entity lines. In spite of the ongoing crisis in Kosovo, the international community continues to support Bosnia’s reconstruction. But the ethnic-based regimes are still promoting their de facto separatist agendas. Deputy High Commissioner Hanns Schumacher, resigning in early July, stated that he could not name a single Bosnian politician who is working towards the reintegration of the country.

– Continuing Obstruction

Local authorities also continue to use a broad repertoire of tactics to prevent return. These tactics are being refined, since politicians increasingly recognize that they must present a “moderate” front to the West in order to continue receiving international funds.

Although violence is employed less often, as recently as late June a bomb was thrown at a group of displaced Muslims returning to the municipality of Modrica who were returning to remove rubble from their houses in preparation for reconstruction. A more common tactic is the simple failure of authorities to deliver decisions on the tens of thousands of property return claims that have been submitted in both entities. And the eastern half of the RS stands out as an entire region where return has barely begun.

Meanwhile, so uniform is the rhetorical support for Dayton that it is difficult for the unpracticed eye to discern who is really opposing return. Even hard-line former President of the RS Nikola Poplasen says, “We must struggle for the implementation of Dayton.” Political parties such as the SDA (the party of Alija Izetbegovic) hold conferences in favor of return, while preventing return in their own direction. And organizations of displaced persons supported (often covertly) by the political parties hold their own conferences on return, where they call for recognition of the right to stay where they are.

Each side declares that the most return has taken place to its respective area: The Croats say that the Serbs and Muslims are returning en masse to Mostar, Stolac, and Capljina. While this return is running into the thousands, it is only taking place in the villages surrounding these towns. Similarly, the highly-touted minority return to the Serb-controlled part of Brcko is only to the rural parts of the Zone of Separation outside the heart of the city. And the official figures for minority return to Sarajevo are vastly inflated. This is because people are counted as having returned who never even left Sarajevo except on vacation, as are those who have merely received their identification cards but not their flats, and those who have merely applied for a transfer of pensions.

Promises and schemes to jump-start the return process are regularly launched and then fall flat. Most notorious of these was RS Prime Minister Dodik’s promise last year that 70,000 minority returns to that entity would take place; in the end, only around 3,700 returns happened. And in February of this year the Bosnian Presidency announced that within 15 days there would be 2,000 returns each to Sarajevo, Mostar, and Banja Luka; after an initial fanfare, nothing was heard of this plan again.

In the RS, hard-line nationalists in the government use the displaced population to cement an agenda of mono-ethnicity in their own realm. One tactic they employ is the regular publishing of survey results that “prove” that 97% of displaced Serbs wish to remain in their new location. My contact with displaced Serbs has consistently contradicted this finding.

Another tactic for solidifying the ethnic homogenization of Bosnia, used to one degree or another in most areas, is the distribution of “socially-owned” land and privatization of businesses, exclusively to the benefit of the majority ethnicity. This practice has taken on a particularly feverish pace in Brcko, as the Serb authorities scramble to cement the ethnic imbalance before the new District can be created.

Security and availability of housing are crucial aspects of sustainable return. A third aspect is employment. With the economy stagnating in both entities, younger people are more prone to move overseas than to try to return home. A recent report showed that the monthly cost of living in the RS is around 370 DM, ($220), while the average income in May of this year was 200-240 DM. Infrastructure is slowly being repaired, but a real startup of industrial activity is awaiting privatization, a process that is mired in corruption.

Meanwhile displaced persons get along by selling cigarettes or newspapers on the street, or living off paltry pensions and occasional government assistance, primarily for demobilized soldiers.

– Sarajevo

Sarajevo is the potential showplace for return — at least, that is the intention of the international community. While several thousand Serbs and Croats have in fact returned to the capital of Bosnia, bureaucratic obstruction still runs strong (as discussed in previous issues of On the Record). Despite proclamations to the contrary, illegal occupants are not being evicted. Property claim applications sit ignored for months in spite of legal deadlines. The incidence of double occupancy is downplayed to the point of absurdity. Apartments freed up when a displaced person returns home are often given to, or taken over by, other displaced persons rather than to the original occupant. And names of non-existent people have turned up on the list of minority “returns.”

Goran Kapor of the Democratic Initiative of Sarajevo Serbs (DISS) recently stated that, while local Serb and Croat authorities are cementing ethnic divisions blatantly, Muslim authorities are doing so covertly. Houses are being built in Sarajevo neighborhoods for displaced Muslims from Srebrenica. Mosques are being constructed in neighborhoods that were once predominantly Serb or Croat (as are churches in formerly Muslim sections of RS cities). Meanwhile, those Serbs who do persist and return find unexplained delays in receiving their pensions.

-Three Important Cities

Three towns that the international community has particularly focused its attention on since the signing of Dayton are Mostar, Brcko, and Srebrenica. Each is a town with a special set of problems, and each has posed an especially symbolic obstacle in the return efforts of Bosnia’s displaced. Mostar received the international community’s attention early, with the appointment of an international supervisor for the two years following Dayton. In the past half year, the return of displaced Serbs and Muslims to surrounding villages has picked up significantly. But return of Croats to Muslim-controlled east Mostar has barely begun, and that of Muslims to Croat-controlled west Mostar is non-existent.

The recent arbitral decision to create a Brcko District is a reasonable one, and points the way towards resolution of problems of displacement throughout Bosnia. However, for every positive attempt on the part of the international community, local obstructionists have a corresponding response. It remains to be seen whether a multi-ethnic Brcko can in fact be recreated. Srebrenica has been one of a handful of “Black Holes” of return in the eastern half of the RS. The stain of Europe’s worst massacre since World War II hovers over the place as it stagnates in a dead-end section of Bosnia. But the formation of a multi-ethnic municipal council, elected in September 1997, has finally become unblocked. The local authorities’ desperation for international funds has moved them to cooperate to the extent of allowing the first municipal assembly session to take place.

If cooperation continues, half-deserted Srebrenica will experience return and reconstruction. But as with the rest of Bosnia, it is still too early to know whether real results are forthcoming. Mostar, Brcko, and Srebrenica are symbolic knots that are in the process of being untied by the joint efforts of the international community and displaced persons. There will be more — particularly the rest of eastern RS, such as Gacko and Foca. Displaced Muslims do not yet dare to walk the streets of Foca, haven to numerous indicted war criminals. And in Gacko, even the police have thrown stones at the buses of SFOR-protected assessment visits.

-Internal Politics

Activities at the various levels of Bosnian politics do not show much evidence of change. In the RS, Poplasen is still, as outgoing High Representative Carlos Westendorp recently noted, “pretending to be President.” Since the international community is unwilling, probably wisely, to use force in his removal, this situation will most likely continue until the next general elections, scheduled for late 2000. And with the process of selection of RS prime minister paralyzed, Milorad Dodik has continued as acting prime minister since September of 1998, with the crucial support of the international community.

Although the functioning of Bosnia’s joint governmental bodies has thawed since the end of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, these institutions never were of much more than symbolic meaning in their effectiveness to coordinate the operations of two very loosely affiliated entities. At the state level, as well as between Croats and Muslims at the Federation level, the ethnic-based political factions cooperate neither with each other nor with the international community. Passage of bills in the Federation Parliament has been for the most part blocked.

In the Federation there has been a very public campaign against corruption for most of this year. Some local and Cantonal officials have been removed from their positions. But the campaign is being led by politicians themselves of very questionable ethics, giving rise to the suspicion that this is yet another political -performance for international consumption. Deputy High Representative Jacques Klein recently lambasted the corruption in government, noting the disappearance of hundreds of millions of deutschmarks from the government’s budget, and pointing out customs fraud, smuggling, and tax evasion as the causes.

Meanwhile, in the RS the once monolithic nationalist structure continues to break down into smaller, mutually hostile fragments, but each one remains as anti-return as the others. The near-chaos in Bosnian politics leaves a vacuum of true leadership for return and reconciliation. The country that is not quite a protectorate is also not a country. With nationalist politicians at the highest levels of government creating a political atmosphere hostile to return, local authorities are free to make crucial decisions in favor of their own majority ethnicities.

The election of honest, non-nationalist politicians would, of course, change this state of affairs. But in spite of gains, the leading non-nationalist Social Democratic Party is, as of yet, not a serious challenge to any of the ruling parties. This would change if the electoral rules were modified to require the highest officials to be elected by votes from all three ethnicities. There has been discussion of this modification, but the “transitional” electoral rules have yet to be replaced. Under the current rules, each successive election strengthens ethnic divisions and legitimizes the crimes committed during the war.

– External Influences

The recent NATO intervention in neighboring Yugoslavia has hurt the progress of return to Bosnia in several ways. It heightened tension in the RS precisely at the beginning of the year’s return season. It also threw an additional 40,000 to 60,000 refugees and returnees from Yugoslavia — Albanians, Sandzak Muslims, and returning Bosnian Serbs — onto the already unbearable load of displaced persons in the country. And to some extent international attention, and certainly donor funds, have been diverted to the crisis in Kosovo.

Economic consequences of the war were particularly severe in the RS, where many companies that depended on exports to Yugoslavia went out of business, and over 50,000 workers lost their jobs. Prime Minister Dodik, already having begun to assert economic independence from the weak Yugoslav dinar, is now working to reorient the entity’s economy towards Croatia, and perhaps towards the Federation.

The political fallout from this crisis has yet to settle. It is conceivable that the most radical extremist elements among the Serb nationalists have lost some of their enthusiasm, as their mentor in Belgrade has suffered a serious setback. This will become even more significant if Milosevic is in fact removed from office. He and his counterpart in Zagreb, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, continue even today to form strong centers of gravity for Greater-Serbian and Greater-Croatian nationalism. As long as these forces exist in Bosnia’s neighboring countries, disinterest in the reintegration of Bosnia, especially among Croats and Serbs, will remain strong. Political leaders will continue to manipulate their own constituencies, and it will be left to the international community and independent local organizations to press for return as best they can.

– The International Community’s Approach

High Representative Carlos Westendorp stepped down from his position this July. He has proven to be a friend to Bosnia, forthrightly defending the concept of reintegration. But without military force to remove separatists, his powers were limited to the realm of economic leverage. And he himself recently stated that “making Bosnia and Herzegovina a unitary country is not an option anymore.”

While parallels have been drawn between Kosovo and Bosnia, the big difference between the two crises is that there was no clear winner in Bosnia, as there was in Kosovo. Without predicting that justice is going to prevail in Kosovo, it is true that the international community now has a protectorate in that province. In Bosnia, it has to press its goals through cooperation with the very people who recently waged the war. The international community at this point has no particular strategy other than to muddle along with the present combination of compromises and economic pressure, in the hopes that a sufficient critical mass of return will soon take place.

After seven years of exile, a refugee is no longer a refugee, but a resident of a new locality. As many displaced persons have told me, if return does not happen this year, it will never take place. What happens during the rest of 1999 in and around Bosnia is crucial. A desperate awareness of this situation, especially in light of the recent return of hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees to Kosovo, has led some to advocate the forced return of displaced Bosnians to their homes. Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic himself proposed this, asking, “Why does it take five years to return one Bosniak to west Mostar?” Westendorp responded by saying that Silajdzic was “having a bad day.”

Aleksandra Stieglmayer, spokesperson for the Office of the High Representative (OHR), said that it will take another ten years for return to be accomplished. If such a thing is even likely, will that lead to the recreation of truly multi-ethnic communities in a democratic Bosnia? It is possible, but that will require enormous changes that are not presently on the horizon. The grassroots return organizations of Bosnia will have to increase their efforts to make their needs known. They will have to become better acquainted with the laws affecting them, and will have to mature quickly into organizations that know how to do outreach more wisely. They will also have to coordinate their efforts to step up the pressure on their own political leaders. Greater self-reliance on the part of non-governmental return organizations will be key to success; otherwise, return will continue along at a merely symbolic level.

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THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TALKS BACK

Bosnian activists working for the return of refugees and displaced persons have many criticisms of the international community; these have been given much attention in this series. These criticisms include the comment that the international community lacks an overall plan for return, that it is ignoring eastern Bosnia, and that it is defeating the purpose of reconciliation and return by effectively patronizing the nationalist parties.

What do representatives of the international community have to say in response to these criticisms? In the course of a discussion with Helena Holme-Pedersen, advisor to the OHR on issues of refugee return, I had the opportunity to gain insight into one version of the international community’s strategy for return.

Holme-Pedersen works for the Reconstruction and Return Task Force (RRTF), a section of the OHR which coordinates the refugee return efforts of international governmental organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), OSCE, International Police Task Force (IPTF), and SFOR, as well as prominent international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). As such, the RRTF is responsible for developing a strategy to make return of refugees and displaced persons possible.

The RRTF has divided Bosnia into regional areas of operation, where local branches of this body concentrate on issues that are particular to their regions. Some of these branches are more active and successful than others. The northwest region is an example of greater progress in return. Northwest Bosnia, including Sanski Most, Prijedor, Bihac, Drvar, and many towns and villages in between, has been an area of relatively high movement in the past year. Other examples of higher focus have been the Tuzla-Bijeljina and Zenica-Doboj “axes of return.”

The RRTF’s approach, according to Holme-Pedersen, has been a pragmatic one of geographical prioritization, which means focusing on areas, as she expressed it, where there is a “less threatening situation.” For example, over 3,000 displaced Serbs have returned from the RS to villages around the Federation city of Drvar. She explained that it is strategically effective to begin with returns to villages where ownership of private houses is not contested, and then to gradually work on return to the towns.

In response to the criticism that east Bosnia has been ignored, Holme-Pedersen pointed out that the eastern half of the RS is still under the hard-line influence of Pale, the former capital of the entity. “It is hard to encourage return to a place like Rogatica, where the mayor bragged to us about how during the war he put Muslims through the wood-chipper — alive,” she told me.

However, Holme-Pedersen continued, even in the east changes are slowly taking place, as the “Dodik phenomenon” spreads gradually eastward. The RRTF has been conducting discussions with the governments of Pale, Sokolac, and Han Pijesak, the former headquarters of the RS army, and hideout of indicted war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic. Three hundred displaced Muslim families have so far registered to return to these areas. Holme-Pedersen also speaks of “cracking” Zvornik and Srebrenica, two other municipalities notoriously resistant to return.

It is obvious that economics plays a large part in Holme-Pedersen’s strategy for return. From a simple cost-analysis point of view, concentrating on areas of lesser resistance results in the most returns accomplished per effort and money spent. In addition, she emphasizes the importance of “bribing rather than penalizing” political leaders in order to open the way for return.

This approach has obviously been the key dynamic in the RS. That entity received a paltry 2% of international aid coming into Bosnia until the “moderate” Dodik was elected prime minister last year. After that event, the millions started flowing, particularly to the more cooperative western half of the entity.

However, domestic return activists harshly criticize this way of solving problems with money. A common observation on their part is that the international community is only strengthening the nationalist parties by directing vast amounts of funds to the local governments, and thereby solidifying ethnic homogenization. Thus, many independent activists are in direct opposition to the strategy for return described by Holme-Pedersen.

It is impossible to completely discredit this criticism, given the slow rate of return. According to the Coalition for Return, at the present rate it will take another 44 years for return to be concluded. Of course, many people have already given up on return or have successfully resettled abroad. To a certain extent this problem is not solvable, but the underlying fact that those who promoted ethnic homogenization in the first place are still in power, throws the cooperative approach into question.

Although activists in the grassroots return movement are aware that they could not operate without the assistance of the international community, a general attitude of impatience has developed in response to the slow pace of return. Holme-Pedersen characterized Srcem do Mira, a prominent group active in return to the RS town of Kozarac, as “very demanding.” She said, “There seems to be an idea of ‘milk the international community.” Where’s the gratitude? People have to be realistic.”

When I suggested that the insistent nature of this group was responsible for the fact that Kozarac presently has the highest reconstruction activity in all of Bosnia, Holme-Pedersen admitted that she would rather see organizations push hard for their rights than to remain passive. However, she commented that there is a “dialogue problem” between NGOs facilitating reconstruction, and recipients of aid, in that the NGOs need to better explain the limitations of reconstruction to these recipients.

Holme-Pedersen illustrated her argument, “There are cases where returnees refuse to accept the key to a repaired house, because there is a toilet seat missing. People need to understand that they had a pile of rubble, and that this reconstruction is free for them. We did not destroy the houses, and we know that they didn’t either. But we can’t make everything perfect. The international community has spent $5.1 billion to date on fixing Bosnia, and there will be more. But people need to be patient.”

I would not want to be in Holme-Pedersen’s place, having to decide whether to bribe or penalize those who are resisting return, and having to deal with the impatience of those who have been waiting for as much as seven years to resume their lives. I only hope that between the activists and the international community, these problems can be solved more quickly in the near future.