Tuzla, June 15: We return to Tuzla by bus and meet up in the afternoon with our friend Peter Lippman, from Seattle, who is at the end of a long visit to the country he knows so well.

Peter Lippman has
reported from Bosnia
for AP since 1999.

Peter left the Advocacy Project last year after writing several of our best series (on Guatemala, Ecuador, Bosnia). He is now researching a book about Bosnia since the war, and knowing Peter’s style it will be full of dry wit and elegiac prose. One of his most memorable diary items was about a couple in besieged Sarajevo who covered their bed with cats to keep warm at night.

Right now Peter is obsessed by salt. If Srebrenica is known for its silver, then Tuzla is known for its salt. Peter tells us that the people of Tuzla have been flooding the land under Tuzla for centuries, drawing up the water and extracting the salt. The result is that parts of the town are subsiding, and some ancient landmarks have disappeared altogether. Salt has even entered the vernacular. Instead of telling a Tuzlan to “get real,” you say “put some salt in your mind.” (Strangely enough, on the other side of the hills, Srebrenica has historically suffered from such a lack of salt that Srebrenicans have been called “goiters.”)

Peter is one of those rare types who can go anywhere, sleep anywhere and put up with any amount of hardship to get the job done. He is also deeply respectful of community-based activists who work hard at bettering the lives of others. His devotion to Bosnians, and the fact that he speaks the language fluently, has earned him legions of friends on both sides of the Muslim-Serb divide. But Peter also harbors no illusions. When Pia and I lament the lack of cooperation between NGOs he observes wryly that “mistrust is the default mode here in Bosnia.”

Behind this is a serious point about civil society. Peter is convinced that each NGO is out for what it can get, as well as totally dependent on donor aid, and that this makes any effective networking by civil society highly improbable. This is in spite of the fact that Peter spent several months of 2003 on behalf of the Advocacy Project, helping the Forum of Srebrenica NGOs (an 18-member network) to design a new website.

Peter went to great pains to persuade the Forum to elect an editorial committee of three persons and produce material for the site. But in the end, he had to write and translate most of the material. This confirmed his suspicions that the Forum lacked drive and commitment.

The Forum has yet to mount any collective action, which is the true test of a vigorous civil society. Notwithstanding this, one of our former AP associates, Aspen Brinton, visited the Forum last summer and concluded that the discipline of working on the website and writing a common mission statement had, in fact, helped to bring cohesion to the Forum. The reason was that its Serb members wanted to emphasize reconciliation, while Muslim members wanted those responsible for the massacre to be held accountable. In the end they reached consensus. Aspen concluded that this in itself was a contribution towards ethnic integration.

Peter agrees that it sounds good, but his own personal default mode tonight is cynicism and he still doubts whether the Forum can be effective. The Forum received some bad news earlier this week, when the local council retracted an earlier offer to give it a battered old building in the town center, provided that the Forum could find the money for refurbishment. Apparently a Sarajevo-based group of war veterans has come up with the money.

Zulfo Halilovic survived the massacre
in 1995 and now works for reconciliation
as head of the NGO DRINA.

Around seven, as Tuzla comes alive and the main street turns into a teenage fashion catwalk, we meet for coffee with Zulfo Halilovic, one of the leaders of the Srebrenica Forum. Zulfo heads DRINA, which is one of the most effective NGOs working in Srebrenica. He is also another survivor of the 1995 massacre. According to Peter, Zulfo was on patrol in the hills outside Srebrenica in early July, 1995 when he saw the defenses of the town crumble in the valley below. It took him thirty days to reach Tuzla.

Now Zulfo is working to rebuild his tormented town. He was one of the very first to return and rebuild the village of Suceska, in 2000. We saw him just yesterday in the Srebrenica park, officiating over a DRINA event for children – most of them Serb.

Zulfo concedes that the Forum of NGOs needs an injection of energy if it is to be useful, but he insists that NGOs have to pool their resources instead of competing. His own organization DRINA has just acquired its own new building, and Zulfo says that part of it could be used by the Forum. First, though, member organizations have to demonstrate some real commitment or leave the Forum. A meeting is planned for later in the month.

We hope it succeeds. As donors hand over the task of rebuilding Srebrenica to the local government, an active civil society will be more important than ever. Meanwhile I have a new nickname for our friend Peter. “Salt Peter” seems to suit his dry sense of humor, and he certainly has salt in his mind.