Laws notwithstanding, many Bosnians shouldn’t expect to rise too far if they don’t stay among ‘their own kind.’
by Tihomir Loza 11 February 2010
Fahrudin Radoncic, the owner of the biggest Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) daily, Dnevni Avaz, and a number of other media outlets, made news late last month with a suggestion that an ethnic Serb journalist, who until recently edited news for the country’s biggest broadcaster, should never have been allowed to do so because of her ethnicity.
Federal Television, where Duska Jurisic is one of the most recognizable faces, is part of the country’s public broadcasting service. FTV is largely watched in the Bosniak-majority regions.
Apart from being one of Bosnia’s wealthiest men, Radoncic, who has been both mocked and admired as “Bosnia’s Berlusconi,” has since September led a new political party, the Union for a Better Future for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Radoncic objected in particular to FTV’s coverage of Bosnia’s Islamic Community, whose head, Mustafa Ceric, is an ally. “We cannot allow that [Jurisic], who is not Muslim, edits [coverage] of our Islamic Community,” he said. In subsequent interviews, Radoncic repeated this and, for good measure, added a few personal insults, describing Jurisic as a frustrated journalist and ignoramus. At the same time, an article in one of his publications portraying Jurisic and three other female journalists is best described as an exercise in misogyny and hate speech.
Everything else aside, Radoncic’s statement almost certainly breaches Bosnia’s laws, which prohibit public expressions of ethnic or religious prejudice; discrimination on ethnic, religious, or gender grounds; and hate speech. This being Bosnia, though, prosecutors will almost certainly mind their own business.
As Ivan Lovrenovic, probably Bosnia’s most lucid thinker on political and social affairs, noted in an article for Dani magazine, there were few reactions to Radoncic’s statement. But those who reacted, did so in strong terms. The BH Journalists Association described Radoncic’s statements as nationalist and racist and qualified them as “hate speech,” calling on prosecutors to charge Radoncic and the Electoral Commission to sanction his party. The president of Bosnia’s Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, Srdjan Dizdarevic, said Radoncic’s was “an unacceptable, neo-Nazi statement, extremely dangerous for a multiethnic society as well as any free society.” A few public figures also protested. But most other actors of public life, including those whose job is to defend freedom of speech, remained silent. Why?
There may be obvious and rather prosaic reasons in some cases. The chairman of Bosnia’s PEN Center, who refused to comment on Radoncic’s attack on Jurisic, writes a column for one of Radoncic’s publications, which have for 15 years been among the most vulgar in the region in addition to being nationalist. Others may be shying away from a conflict with a reputedly ruthless man who controls a major share of Bosnia’s public space and may acquire formal political power in the October general elections. Other independent figures could have simply been weary of public engagement in general, viewing Radoncic’s latest nationalist outburst as just another sorry but minor episode in what, after all, is a warmup for an election campaign that promises to be dirtier than ever.
Indeed, we have heard similar calls for ethnic and religious exclusivity many times before in Bosnia. Last year, when an imam was found guilty of sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl, Ceric condemned the girl’s family’s decision to hire a lawyer, who happened to be a Serb, to represent them in court. According to Ceric, as a non-Muslim, the lawyer was incapable of comprehending the case and Bosnian Muslims in general. When in 2008, state-level prosecutors ordered an investigation into financial dealings of his government, Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Bosnia’s semi-autonomous Republika Srpska entity, said it was unacceptable for ethnic Serbs to be prosecuted by “Muslim judges.” Very few civil society actors in Republika Srpska and no Serb political party condemned Dodik’s statement. But the fact that we have been here before does not necessarily render the issue any less important.
Save a number of political positions reserved for representatives of the three “constituent peoples,” such as the country's tripartite presidency or the upper house of parliament, your ethnic background is no impediment to gaining any public office in Bosnia, irrespective of your place of residence, according to Bosnia’s various constitutions.
In reality, your limits are a fair bit lower than the sky and very much determined by your name and place of residence. You shouldn’t train your sights too high if you are a Bosniak in Republika Srpska or the Croat parts of what is officially a Bosniak-Croat Federation, nor should you hope for much if you are an ethnic Serb or Croat in the Bosniak-majority parts of the Federation. This has been a tacitly accepted norm since the 1992-1995 war left the country in effect divided into three largely mono-ethnic, if not always discrete, territories as homes to three separate societies.
But Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, where Radoncic seeks to make rules, has been one of the few exceptions. Before the war, Sarajevo very much reflected the country’s ethnic diversity. Today, like in nearly all other Bosnian settlements, one ethnic group makes up the vast majority of population. Bosnia hasn’t had a countrywide census since 1991, but frequent estimates that Bosniaks make up around 90 percent of Sarajevo’s population go undisputed. The city certainly feels Bosniak. As it should, one might add, given that the Bosniaks have always been the most numerous group.
But even today, Sarajevo rarely feels exclusively Bosniak. To no small measure, this is thanks to a relatively high number of non-Bosniaks, such as Jurisic, in public life. They are largely people who made, or began to make, their names before the war.
The high proportion of non-Bosniaks in what now is a largely Bosniak public sphere has a lot to do with the nature of Bosniak nationalism, which is, at least historically, significantly less exclusivist and paranoid than that of the rival Bosnian Serbs and Croats. (Non-Bosniaks also play significant roles in public lives in Tuzla, another city with an overwhelming Bosniak majority.)
Of course, you won’t find any non-Bosniaks among the really powerful and rich in today’s Sarajevo. And this is not because the public wouldn’t tolerate non-Bosniaks as true movers and shakers. Rather it reflects the fact that really big slices of cake are cut inside or under the eye of a few Bosniak organizations, the two biggest Bosniak parties and the Islamic Community. While he is obviously endowed with talents that come in handy in the chaos of post-conflict and post-communist transition, Radoncic would have never gotten anywhere without support from Ceric and Alija Izetbegovic, the late founder of the dominant Bosniak Party of Democratic Action. Nor would he as a Bosniak be able to get far in Dodik’s Banja Luka, where the rules for the game played in the top league of business and politics are decided exclusively by Serb parties.
While very rarely top dogs themselves, Sarajevo’s non-Bosniaks nevertheless occupy fairly visible positions in the media, culture, academic institutions, politics, and even the judiciary.
Their ethnicity only underlines their prominence. They have often been highly respected by the majority for refusing to join the nationalist endeavours of their Serb and Croat ethnic brethren that ended up as criminal campaigns, featuring the crime of genocide, against Bosnia’s Muslims. As people who more often than not subscribe to a political narrative that to a great extent overlaps, but rarely coincides, with the mainstream Bosniak interpretation of the past, they are also highly valued by more liberal parts of the Bosniak society as living proof that a civic-minded and multiethnic Bosnia is possible.
But is their relative prominence in Sarajevo’s public life anything more than a footnote in what after all is a story of a country quite hopelessly divided into three societies along ethnic lines? It is and here’s why.
The old, pre-war Bosnia, with its fabled “tiger skin” ethnic territorial pattern, won’t be re-created. Most people will remain where they are now. For the foreseeable future, Bosnia will continue as a single country divided along ethnic lines into three societies. Yet, how Bosnia’s three societies treat what in effect are minorities in their midst will influence the level and quality of interaction among them, and that interaction will in turn determine whether Bosnians will continue to live in an internationally sponsored limbo or a proper country they can fully share as their own.
More importantly, the position of minority groups within these three societies will determine, and be the most important measure of, the level of their own democratization. For Sarajevo to become truly tolerant and altogether more agreeable a place for everyone, people like Jurisic must be judged without their ethnicity ever entering the equation. It goes without saying that, like any journalist, she should be able to look at any issue of public interest anywhere she chooses. Likewise, for Dodik to harbor any hopes of turning Republika Srpska into an altogether more decent society he must first start decontaminating its public life of ethnic exclusivity exactly to make way for judges, who may happen to be Muslim, to regularly pass verdicts on defendants who may happen to be Serb.
The role of civil society in effecting changes related to human rights is indispensable. Reflecting what is often seen as civic apathy in the country, Bosnia’s civil society actors, however, now regularly fail to cry foul loudly enough when people like Radoncic, Dodik, or Ceric openly call for ethnic discrimination.
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