Post-War Identification. Torsten Kolind

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СКАЧАТЬ compared the situation to a kind of apartheid.

      The public sphere in Stolac

      Institutionally

      According to several employees in the OHR, IPTF (International Police Task Force) and OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) I talked to, it was very difficult to make progress in Stolac municipality, as every attempt at establishing or facilitating inter-ethnic cooperation was obstructed by hardliners in the HDZ. Furthermore, according to the same sources, there was reason to believe that heavy and well-organised criminal activity emanated from institutions, companies and groups of persons around Stolac with connections to the HDZ. Upholding the nationalist policy of ethnic separation could therefore be a way for such corrupt Croats to profit financially. I will not evaluate these presumptions; but it does make sense that a rather influential and inflexible group of Croats was trying as hard as possible to uphold ethnic division in Stolac in as many areas as possible. When I did fieldwork, Stolac was ethnically divided on all institutional levels, and intense symbolic demonstrations constantly reinforced nationalist thinking and promoted ethnic stereotypes. In short, antagonistic Croats dominated the public sphere, where they clearly communicated the message: “Croats and Muslims cannot live together.” I shall give some examples of how thorough the ethnic division and discrimination was on the institutional level at the time of my fieldwork.

      All local public enterprises in Stolac had Croat directors, and they only employed Croat workers (only three Muslim men had been re-employed in their former jobs due to their much specialised skills). Croats ran the post office, the banks, the telephone company, the power supply, and the water company. As a result, Muslims used banks and post-offices in Mostar, and only a few Muslims had telephones in their homes. Furthermore, the post office only used Croatian stamps and Croatian currency (as well as DM: Deutschmarks). The municipal assembly elected in April 2000 was dominated by the HDZ and, despite the sharing of power principles laid down by the OSCE, Muslim town council members had been completely excluded from the local administration. Since the reunification of the cantonal police in the Herzegovina-Neretva canton in June 2000, the local police station had officially been multiethnic. Interethnic cooperation had in reality been very rare. Furthermore, according to the local representative of the IPTF Croats still dictated the majority of police activities and protected criminals from prosecution. He himself had to conceal his written documents on a floppy disc, as they would not be safe on his computer in his office at the police station. Since May 2000, Muslim school children had been permitted to make use of a small part of the local primary school, but classes for Muslims and Croat children were still held separately, and the secondary school as well as the school gym was for Croats only. Muslims were excluded from local public health care; the hospital built and financed with public funds before the war only treated Croats. The nearest TV antenna was turned so that it was only possible for the residents of Stolac to watch Croatian television unless they bought a satellite dish. A small town had been built on a field on the western side of Stolac, which was inhabited only by Croats. Croats occupied many Muslim houses, though the situation has improved since I left Stolac. In short, the self-proclaimed state of Herceg-Bosna was a de facto reality. In fact, in November 2000, the HDZ took the initiative to hold a referendum among Croats, in order to establish an independent state Herceg-Bosna. This referendum, which was invalid under the terms set by the OHR, was regarded by the Muslims in town as pure provocation.

      Symbolically

The public sphere in Stolac was dominated by nationalist-minded Croats symbolically as well as institutionally. The public sphere was filled with nationalist symbols of all sorts. Again, let me offer some examples. Today the central mosque in town (Čaršija mosque) has been rebuilt; but when I did fieldwork, the whole area – where the mosque and all the old buildings connected to the marketplace area surrounding the mosque had been before – was laid out as a parking lot, and on one side there were three flags: the flag of Herceg-Bosna, and two flags with the Herzegovinian Croats’ newly designed version of the coat of arms of Stolac. A big wooden cross had been erected outside the municipal office. Crosses were used by the Croats as territorial markers in various places in Herzegovina. On the outskirts of villages or areas ruled by Croats, one often saw two/three-meter-tall concrete crosses painted white. Inside the medical centre, there was a huge poster with a picture of the former Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, who supported the struggle of the Herzegovinian Croats. Inside all the public buildings I entered, I saw the Šahovnica (a framed checkerboard emblem composed of white and red squares, the Croatian coat of arms with strongly nationalist and at times fascist undertones) the size of a normal sheet, and several places also a poster of Franjo Tuđman. On the top of Stari Grad (Pasha Rizvanbegovic fortress, an old fortress and a cultural monument), there was a big Croatian flag that could be seen from almost any part of town. Nationalist Croat graffiti was abundant, though a lot of it originated from the time of the war. For instance, on entering Stolac one sees the sentence Dobro došli U Stolac (Welcome to Stolac) painted on a house, with the ‘U’ painted in a way that symbolises Ustashe.⁹ However, the graffiti is rather faded. Streets and town sites have been given new names, which are all part of a Croatian nationalist discourse. Many Bosnian Croat cars had a BiH (Bosnia Herzegovina) sticker on the back of the car, but the letters were printed on a red and white checked background, the Croatian national symbol. Leading up to the general election in November 2000, many of the election posters of the Herzegovinian Croats featured fierce nationalist rhetoric. In short, Stolac was ruled by nationalist-minded Herzegovinian Croats. On the institutional level and on the public symbolic level, the Muslims have no influence. In all these arenas ethnic discrimination and nationalist symbolism prevails.

      I have found it necessary to begin with this short prologue summarising the war in Herzegovina and Stolac in particular, outlining the return of the Muslims to Stolac, and describing the incessant dominance of nationalist ideology in the public sphere. These matters are rather complicated, and I refer to episodes and periods throughout the book. The other main function of the prologue is to describe a town where nationalist thinking had come to be totally dominant because of both war aims and post-war policy. My informants’ counterdiscourse, which is the focus of the book, has to be understood on the background of this dominance.

1 By March 1991 Tuđman and Milošović had already met to discuss the partition of Bosnia Herzegovina between them, and on May 1992 Tuđman sponsored talks between Mate Boban, the leader of the Bosnian Croats’ strongly nationalistic and heavily influential political party HDZ, and Radovan Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, at which time they considered a potential division of Bosnian territory (Bennet 1995: 200, Glenny 1996: 193-4).

2 The figure 200,000 is from UN sources, the figure 100,000 is from a recent research project at the Reserach and Documentation Center Sarajevo.

3 See OHR’s HumanRights report 28, May 1998.

4 I do not know the reason for the sabotage, but see Bax (1997) for similar actions elsewhere in Herzegovina, where Partisan memorials were interpreted by local Croats as symbols of Serbian oppression.

5 Serbian forces in Bosnia Herzegovina consisted of Bosnian Serbs as well as part of the former JNA.

6 Several Muslims I spoke to saw the Croatian conquest of Stolac as part of a deal between the Serbian and Croatian forces about sharing the territory of Bosnia Herzegovina between them. As an example of such a deal people recall how in this period of Croatian/Muslim control of Stolac, Croatian СКАЧАТЬ