Peter Popham: The Sarajevo legacy
[Peter Popham has written articles published in The Independent].
The jubilation of the people of Sarajevo at the capture of Radovan Karadzic, the man they blame for the bloody siege which pinned down their city for 44 months and cost 10,000 lives, has slowly evaporated during an extraordinary week of revelations. What was left yesterday was a coming to terms with the bitter fact that much of what the former Bosnian-Serb leader stood for has already come to pass.
"I didn't feel much jubilation," admitted Senad Slatina, a political analyst in the city. "Some of the young people say it's a good thing but for me it's so overdue that it's almost irrelevant. Karadzic is no longer on the scene, but his ideas and his life work are almost on the verge of becoming reality."
In Belgrade, the lawyer of the man accused of genocide spoke of spinning out his appeal against extradition as long as possible. But in Sarajevo the fact is that the statelet Radovan Karadzic invented, the Republika Srpska – the Serbian entity which was meant to become part of Greater Serbia – is alive and kicking, and writing the nation's future.
It was the political fantasy that produced the siege of Sarajevo, the ethnic cleansing of communities all over Bosnia, and the prison camps for "cleansed" Bosniaks who survived these purges. Srebrenica became the ultimate symbol of this, the ugliest chapter in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The gritty, Muslim-dominated mining town in eastern Bosnia, theoretically protected by United Nations peacekeepers, was bombarded and then invaded by Bosnian Serb forces. Muslim women and children were packed on to buses and sent to safety, but their menfolk, nearly 8,000 of them, were rounded up and shot.
The man whose ideas produced Srebrenica will soon face justice in The Hague, but on the ground in Bosnia, many fear that those ideas have triumphed.
The work of the International Commission for Missing Persons in exhuming the victims of Srebrenica, many broken by mechanical diggers and exhumed and reburied to obscure what happened to them, has given thousands of families something to bury and a name to put on a gravestone. Yet the town itself remains ethnically cleansed. The town's Mayor, Abduraham Malkic, may be a Muslim, but he lives in a Muslim enclave far away and commutes to his office.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is a multi-ethnic state in name, but in fact it is rigidly divided. And the state architecture sanctified by the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war, has sanctified that reality, because the state institutions vie for power with those representing the Republika Srpska on the one hand, the ethnic Serbian entity, and the Muslim-Croat Federation on the other.
The legacy of Karadzic, right across Bosnia, is the division of everything by ethnicity: schools, police forces, district offices, work places, television stations, newspapers, practically everything. So although a few hundred Bosniaks in Sarajevo took to the rainy streets to celebrate Karadzic's arrest on Monday night, the demonstration did not last long...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
The jubilation of the people of Sarajevo at the capture of Radovan Karadzic, the man they blame for the bloody siege which pinned down their city for 44 months and cost 10,000 lives, has slowly evaporated during an extraordinary week of revelations. What was left yesterday was a coming to terms with the bitter fact that much of what the former Bosnian-Serb leader stood for has already come to pass.
"I didn't feel much jubilation," admitted Senad Slatina, a political analyst in the city. "Some of the young people say it's a good thing but for me it's so overdue that it's almost irrelevant. Karadzic is no longer on the scene, but his ideas and his life work are almost on the verge of becoming reality."
In Belgrade, the lawyer of the man accused of genocide spoke of spinning out his appeal against extradition as long as possible. But in Sarajevo the fact is that the statelet Radovan Karadzic invented, the Republika Srpska – the Serbian entity which was meant to become part of Greater Serbia – is alive and kicking, and writing the nation's future.
It was the political fantasy that produced the siege of Sarajevo, the ethnic cleansing of communities all over Bosnia, and the prison camps for "cleansed" Bosniaks who survived these purges. Srebrenica became the ultimate symbol of this, the ugliest chapter in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The gritty, Muslim-dominated mining town in eastern Bosnia, theoretically protected by United Nations peacekeepers, was bombarded and then invaded by Bosnian Serb forces. Muslim women and children were packed on to buses and sent to safety, but their menfolk, nearly 8,000 of them, were rounded up and shot.
The man whose ideas produced Srebrenica will soon face justice in The Hague, but on the ground in Bosnia, many fear that those ideas have triumphed.
The work of the International Commission for Missing Persons in exhuming the victims of Srebrenica, many broken by mechanical diggers and exhumed and reburied to obscure what happened to them, has given thousands of families something to bury and a name to put on a gravestone. Yet the town itself remains ethnically cleansed. The town's Mayor, Abduraham Malkic, may be a Muslim, but he lives in a Muslim enclave far away and commutes to his office.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is a multi-ethnic state in name, but in fact it is rigidly divided. And the state architecture sanctified by the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war, has sanctified that reality, because the state institutions vie for power with those representing the Republika Srpska on the one hand, the ethnic Serbian entity, and the Muslim-Croat Federation on the other.
The legacy of Karadzic, right across Bosnia, is the division of everything by ethnicity: schools, police forces, district offices, work places, television stations, newspapers, practically everything. So although a few hundred Bosniaks in Sarajevo took to the rainy streets to celebrate Karadzic's arrest on Monday night, the demonstration did not last long...