21 Jun 13 | Europe and Central Asia
Crowds hold up signs as they demonstrate in front of the Bosnian parliament building in Sarajevo demanding laws for personal identification numbers for newborns. (Photo: Sulejman Omerbasic / Demotix)
In the shadow of events in Turkey and Brazil, Bosnians have been taking to the streets. For over a week, citizens of the small Balkan country have been protesting their leaders’ failure to pass a new law on citizen identification numbers, leaving babies unable to travel for medical care. Milana Knezevic writes
As is often the case in Bosnia, this seemingly straightforward task soon took on an ethnic element. Serbian parliamentarians wanted the number to recognize the internal geographic split between the Serb majority entity Republika Srpska and the the Croat Bosniak majority Bosnian Federation. Their Croat and Bosniak counterparts disagree.
The political stalemate means that since February newborns in Bosnia have not been able to get passports.
Last Wednesday, activists organised a car blockade of parliament in Sarajevo. The impromptu show of support for Belmina Ibrisevic, a seriously ill infant who could not travel abroad to get treatment, quickly grew until several thousand people surrounded the building, trapping parliamentarians inside.
“It [the protest] is about those few brave citizens who decided to take a risk and react. Others came, following basic instinct and their conscience”, says Sarajevo-based activist and political commentator Nedim Jahic.
On Monday, the leaderless “babylution” took the shape of a tribute to baby Berina Hamidovic, who died at a hospital in Belgrade. After weeks of pleading with authorities, her parents decided to take her across the border without a passport.
“My Berina has died, because to Bosnian authorities she wasn’t alive”, father Emir told local press.
On Tuesday, some of Bosnia’s biggest music acts stepped onto a makeshift stage outside parliament. Behind them, projected onto the parliament building, loomed the image of a giant pacifier in the shape of defiant fist. It is estimated some 10,000 people gathered to see the show. Meanwhile, citizens of Tuzla, Mostar, and other cities have also organised demonstrations under the banner of “JMBG”, the name of the ID law. The official facebook page has 22,000 likes and counting, where photos, videos and articles are widely shared. People from across the world have tweeted and facebooked messages of support, as have some of the biggest stars of the region. Combined, this makes for a remarkable, country-wide wave of political expression not seen for years.
This is not the only time Bosnia’s leaders have been unwilling and unable to make important decisions. The complex system of ethnicity-based quotas and vetoes implemented with the 1995 Dayton peace agreement to accommodate Bosniak, Croat and Serb leaders, has led to political paralysis on a number of occasions.
“The timing was important was an important reason for people reacting the way they have in this particular case”, explains Florian Bieber, Professor in South East European Studies at the University of Graz, and a leading expert on post-war Bosnia. “Frustration had been accumulating over time, especially with the deteriorating economic situation. This is an issue that affects everyone, not only one group, which helped galvanised support across the population. It also has a human face. It’s not about losing money; it’s about lack of ID numbers risking children’s lives”.
The size and scope of the protests is not to be underestimated. The feeling of unity invites comparisons to the anti-war protests of 1992. Much has particularly been made of seemingly cross-ethnic nature of the demonstrations. But while it is certainly the case that Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks alike have been taking part and expressing solidarity, the movement has largely been confined to the Bosnian Federation. Recent student protests in Banja Luka, while likely inspired by the nationwide atmosphere of protest, have distanced themselves from the message of JMBG.
“Today’s protests are also important, however, without significant number of citizens from Republika Srpska, it is hard to expect real change. In todays’ conditions and political structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina, you cannot expect to have change and efficient pressure without relevant support coming from both entities, which is rarely the case”, Jahic concedes.
Politicians have also been unwilling to cooperate thus far. Some parliamentarians have refused to come back to work citing security fears, while Bakir Izetbegovic, the Bosnian representative to the three-member presidency, has urged people not to take to the streets.
Despite this, the movement rumbles on. The protesters have given the politicians a deadline of 30th June to resolve the ID number debacle, and Jahic says the first priority is to “see results on the directly addressed issue.” However, protesters have also demanded that politicians, who earn approximately six times the national average, take a 30% wage cut and place the money in a fund for Bosnians who need medical treatment abroad. This appears to invoke the frustration and anger about the general state of the country helping drive the scale of the protests.
While Bieber is uncertain whether the demands will be met and the elites will change their ways, he does believe this could be a turning point for the country.
“Even if they fail, the protests have made citizens feel they can achieve something”.
22 Dec 17 | Bosnia, Croatia, Mapping Media Freedom, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features
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Journalists who referred to Slobodan Praljak, seen here in 2013, and his co-defendants as war criminals after their conviction have been targeted by parties who think the men are heroes. (Photo: UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia)
Several journalists and news outlets from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina faced death threats and intimidation following their coverage a war crimes trial at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands.
In the ruling ending the case, six Bosnian Croat leaders were sentenced on several charges for an ethnic cleansing campaign against Muslim Bosniaks during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
One of the six defendants was Slobodan Praljak, who committed suicide during the delivery of the court’s verdict by potassium cyanide. Just a seconds before taking the poison, the defendant addressed the court: “Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal! I reject your judgment with contempt!”
What was supposed to be an easy task, writing a news report from a trial, turned out to be a quite delicate situation. The problem stems from how reporters should refer to the convicted men. War criminals or heroes?
For the conservative and right-wing politicians, currently in power in Croatia, the case is clear. The defendants are heroes, regardless of what court has said. Therefore, Praljak and the other five defendants, in line with the nationalistic narrative, should be praised as heroes, while his suicide is seen as a highly moral act. In line with this, the majority of politicians in the Croatian Parliament held a minute’s silence honouring Praljak. Even the Croatian prime minister, Andrej Plenković, said that the UN court’s verdict was a “deep moral injustice” becoming, as the Guardian reported, the first head of an EU government in support of a convicted war criminal. Later, following the national and international critics, Plenković back-pedalled in his narrative, even though keeping “but” in his argumentation.
In this kind of fraught environment the professional media were supposed to objectively inform the public. For those media workers that used “war criminal” to describe Praljak and other five defendants, what followed was a nightmare. A series of death threats, intimidations, insults and bullying, mainly via social media, were issued against all those outlets and journalists who described Praljak as a sentenced war criminal, or were critically analysing Croatia’s involvement in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
In just a few days, Croatian news website Index.hr and its journalists received tens of serious death threats, including bomb and napalm threats. As reported by the site, the threats included: “I will fuck your treacherous mother. You are a dead man”; and “there will be time when your 18-year-old daughter will be walking alone around the town.”
Nataša Božić Šarić, editor and host of a political talk show Točka na tjedan (Point for the Week), which is aired on regional private broadcaster N1, received death threats and insults on Facebook after the show. Her question to the guests “should the sentenced be stripped of awarded medals?” was considered as provocation by conservative and right-wing viewers.
The most recent report from the Croatian Journalists’ Association (HND) says that the latest in the long line of intimidated journalists is daily Jutarnji list op-ed Jurica Pavičić. He was threaten for his critical column on the Croatian Parliament’s decision to hold a minute’s silence for the defendants.
The Praljak case resulted in similar rhetoric and threats in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the war crimes were committed. Sanel Kajan, a journalist and correspondent for the regional private broadcaster Al Jazeera Balkans (AJB), received threats from his fellow citizens, Bosnian Croats, for using his voice for the announcement of a special show on the ICTY trial on AJB and for sharing colleagues’ pieces on Facebook.
“I received a ton of threatening messages via Facebook,” Kajan told Index on Censorship. “At the beginning I was just deleting them, but once I realized the gravity, as threats were multiplying every minute, I decided to report the case to the police,” he said. Among the numerous Facebook messages there were death threats like “You won’t be alive for a long time. I promise you this”; and a religious-based ones like “Shame on you, you unbaptised Satan”.
This is not the first time these kind of threats have been “provoked” by objective reporting while nationalistic reports have been praised as true, patriotic journalism. Similar incidents have happened in all post-conflict Balkan states. In recent years, Mapping Media Freedom has documented similar cases in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and the Republic of Macedonia. In all those cases media workers were threatened, intimidated and bullied for questioning nationalistic dogmas.
Zdenko Duka, a well-respected Croatian journalist and former president of HND pointed out that there is plurality in the society which is backed by professional and critical media. “But unfortunately the ruling elite is pushing towards nationalistic rhetoric as a compensation for their incompetence and cowardness,” Duka said. Elaborating on the power dynamics he said that “the Catholic Church and the war veterans” are influencing Croatian politics through the ruling conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). “Veterans are a privileged group with 2-3 times higher average pensions than the rest of the citizens,” Duka explained.
Croatia’s public and politicians have applied doubles standards to the ICTY verdicts: The court is praised when others are found guilty, but denounced as corrupt when it convicts “heroes”. For years this line of argument has been validated in the public discourse. Srdjan Puhalo, a political analyst from Bosnia and Herzegovina, calls this phenomenon the “moral incompleteness” of the Balkan societies.
“Nowadays is hard to critically analyse the 90s wars. If you write critically you will be called a traitor, and everybody knows what one should do with traitors. Bottom line is that it is you against the system which is backing up the 90s ‘heroes’,” Puhalo said. The only exit out of this vicious circle, according to him, is time. “At the end, only the verdicts will stay throughout history and everything else will be forgotten,” Puhalo concludes.
It is even more important that these kinds of threats against press freedom are not minimised and left unpunished.
“If there will be no concrete action/investigation/outcome out of this then the message will be loud and clear: You are free to intimidate them, and journalists should shut up,” Kajan said.
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Since 24 May 2014, Mapping Media Freedom’s team of correspondents and partners have recorded and verified more than 3,700 violations against journalists and media outlets.
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