Southeast European Integration Perspectives

Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina

Damir Arsenijevi [Ed.]

Unbribable Bosnia
and Herzegovina
The Fight for the Commons

Nomos

| 10

BUT_Arsenijevic_1634-0.indd 1

11.11.14 09:07

Southeast European Integration Perspectives

Edited by
Wolfgang Petritsch,
former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina
and Special Envoy of the EU for Kosovo

Christophe Solioz,
Secretary-General of the Center for
European Integration Strategies

Damir Arsenijevi [Ed.]

Unbribable Bosnia
and Herzegovina
The Fight for the Commons

Nomos

This publication benefited from a special sponsorship by Vanessa Redgrave &

Carlo Nero of the Dissent Project www.dissentprojectsltd.com

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the

Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data
is available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de
ISBN

978-3-8487-1634-0 (Print)
978-3-8452-5674-0 (ePDF)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN

978-3-8487-1634-0 (Print)
978-3-8452-5674-0 (ePDF)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Arsenijevi, Damir [Ed.]
Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina
The Fight for the Commons
Damir Arsenijevi
182 p.
Includes bibliographic references.
ISBN

978-3-8487-1634-0 (Print)
978-3-8452-5674-0 (ePDF)

1. Edition 2014
Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden, Germany 2014. Printed and bound in Germany.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without
prior permission in writing from the publishers. Under 54 of the German Copyright
Law where copies are made for other than private use a fee is payable to Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort, Munich.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining
from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Nomos or
the author.

Contents
Damir Arsenijevi
Introduction

Emina Busuladi
Why?

11

Miralem Ibriimovi
My Union Fight

27

Zlatan Begi
War, Peace and the Protests

35

Damir Arsenijevi
Protests and Plenum: The Struggle for the Commons

45

Emir Hodi
Jer me se tie Because it Concerns Me

51

Aleksandar Hemon
Beyond the Hopelessness of Survival

59

Haris Husari
February Awakening: Breaking with the Political
Legacy of the last 20 years

65

Adis Sadikovi
February Stirrings

71

Emin Eminagi
On the University of the People: Protests and Plenums as
Sites of Education

79

Igor tiks and Sreko Horvat

The New Balkan Revolts: From Protests to Plenums, and Beyond

83

Stef Jansen
Rebooting politics? Or, towards a <Ctrl-Alt-Del> for the
Dayton Meantime

89

Larisa Kurtovi
The Strange Life and Death of Democracy Promotion
in Bosnia and Herzegovina

97

Edin Hajdarpai
Democracy in the Conditional Tense: On Protests in
Bosnia and Herzegovina

103

Eric Gordy
From Antipolitics to Alterpolitics: Subverting
Ethnokleptocracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina

111

Asim Mujki
The Evolution of Bosnia and Herzegovinas Protests in Five Theses

119

Jasmin Mujanovi
The Baja Class and the Politics of Participation

135

Jasmina Husanovi
Traumatic Knowledge in Action:
Scrapbooking Plenum Events, Fermenting Revolt

145

Selma Tobudi
Protests and PlenumsA Remembering

155

Vanessa Vasi Janekovi

Remembering Work as Political Sovereignty

165

Nigel Osborne
The Plenum Brain

173

Contributors

181

Introduction

The February 2014 protest and plenums are the only genuinely novel development in Bosnia and Herzegovina since end of the war in 1995. As a popular revolt and a form of political organisation, they put an end to the predominant fascination with the one of powerwith an image of the unity and
homogeneity of powerand they proved in practice that it is possible to
disperse and dispose of the symbolic guarantee behind the existing ruling
structures. They went further. Anticipated by various site-specific protests
that had been manifest in previous years throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina,
the February 2014 protests changed from merely voicing dissatisfaction to
inventing methods of making decisions that concern the future of all citizens.
Up until February 2014, the predominant mode of protest in Bosnia and Herzegovina was one of pseudo-activity, which followed the logic of making
records of injusticesof representing the obvious. The political consequences of breaking away from representation alone mean that new forms of
actively organising politics needed to be invented and tested. All this led to
an accentuation of social conflict and the introduction of a sharp divide in the
social: breaking from pseudo-activity, to which most of the so-called civil
society scene has acquiesced, the protests and plenums disrupted the passive
fascination with the management of identitarian differences and created an
active, practical site for new social ties and new solidarities to be forged,
tested, and lived in the street and in the plenum venues. In this reclamation of
space, body, and voice, a boundary was crossed: from the exhibition of
dissent to dissent in action. From now on, the stakes for any future protests
in Bosnia and Herzegovina can never be the same.
In the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the February 2014 protests
and plenums rescued politics itself. Politics, predominantly considered as
synonymous with corruption, nepotism, and clientelism, returned into the
public domain as a common concern. Popular revolt escalated in response to
unprecedented police brutality and the arrogance of complacent ethnic oligarchs, in whose view, citizens are mere disposable bodies. The fight back
against the physical violence, which had been directed at protesters, showed
that these disposable bodies still matter and cannot be as easily discarded as
they were in the carnage of the 19921995 war and through their subsequent
post-war exhaustion, as the processes of the privatisation of the commons
ground on and poverty stared them in the face.
7

More importantly, in this fight back there lies a shift: from being a helpless victim, to assuming responsibility for ones life with no external guarantees. In this, a crucial change took place: the position of victimhood was
discarded. This is why many who were and are invested in maintaining the
status quo, both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally, were quick to
condemn this fight backthe violence of protestersin the course of
which several government buildings were burnt. Condemnations ranged from
claims of alleged re-traumatisation of citizens because of their exposure to
images of burning buildings, to the continuation of bureaucratic terror by
attempting to criminalise the protests and protesters, and brand this fightback as an act of terrorism. All these are ideological positions at their purest:
the former, through its insistence on war-time victimhood and the creation of
trauma, as supposedly some kind of comfort, turns a blind eye to the systemic
violence of ethnic oligarchs; the latter through projecting the terror enacted
by the state apparatus onto the citizens-in-revolt. However, the violence of
protests must be defended to the very end. This is a violence that politically
opposes and strikes against the disposability of life itself. It is, thus, a strategy
for survival and our pledge for the times to come, as its act of creation has
brought about a new modality for contemplating and enacting politics.
In the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the February 2014 protests and plenums are primarily a site of renewed enthusiasm and energy,
caused by the rupture of a different possibility for life and a move away from
mere passive resignation to the only choices previously being posited. The
enthusiasm and energy have to be affirmed, as their context is almost 20
years of a predominant ideology that threw all of its persuasive and practical
efforts into making impossibility seem convincing. It is worthwhile recalling
that, amidst the uncertainty and risk that any true political gesture entails, the
renewed enthusiasm and energy gave us allin the streets protesting and in
taking part in the plenumsa sense of being alive and a chance to meet one
another anew. Moreover, people who had never met before, and who had
hitherto lived in their separate social circles, came together, jointly, to make
demands, and in so doing, transformed public space into social space. Solidarity, as a concept and as a practice, was rescued from being held hostage by
those who were all too ready to relegate it to history. It became an everyday
word and a lived experience that we had to prove through words and actions.
Such rekindled enthusiasm is probably best expressed by a newly-met friend
who, on our way to a plenum meeting, said: It feels like a holiday! In the
protests and plenums, people have re-invented ways of declaring and enacting their presence in public spaces. Hence, many strategies and forms were
tried and tested: from street marches and protests where it was critically important to keep bodies moving in space; through the plenums, as forums,
wherein public demands for justice were made; to manifestos, as a means of
making demands visible and being able to address them, transparently, to the
public and to the authorities. The language in which these strategies were

articulated left no room for ambiguity; the banners reading We are hungry in
all three languages, Reverse corrupt privatisation and End nationalism
spoke clearly about newly re-identified and new political priorities: that it is
still possible to demand freedom, justice, and better life. The protests and
plenums were themselves heterogeneous, not only between different cities
Tuzla, Biha, Mostar, Sarajevobut also within these cities. However, as a
particular political sequenceand the protests and plenums are nothing less
than thisthey shared the same principle: the principle of the insistence on
the commons, as that in, which we all partake, on an equal basis. This point
of equality is the minimum, lower than which benchmark any future revolt
cannot go.
Unbribable Bosnia and HerzegovinaThe Fight for the Commons affirms
this benchmark and links the insistence on equality with the concept of unbribablityas an individual and collective refusal to be bribed and coerced
into submission and servility. All the contributions in this book uphold such a
stance. In the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where privatisation partitioned and sold off social space, causing the collective and individual escape
into private helplessness, the insistence on unbribability means not settling
for the crumbs of freedom but reclaiming and returning to common use that
which has been stolen through privatisation and maintained in privatised
units of all kinds. This is how we recuperate and make, as our commons, not
just material assets and natural goods, but all life that has survived, with
complicated affect, from which we must learn and draw our strength and
inspiration. In such recuperation, nobody is left behind. The legacy of previous workers rebellions and all anti-fascist struggle, evident in the decisions
and symbols of these protests and plenums, is a powerful reminder that we
have a tradition that actualises the idea of and the fight for emancipation.
This is why the book opens with contributions by two workers who led the
strike actions and first protests that started in their factoriesEmina
Busuladi from Dita and Miralem Ibriimovi from Polihem. Their accounts
stand as powerful reminders how the many have been sacrificed by the selfaggrandising few in the chase after capital and how we are fighting for a
dialectically qualitative change, not some tinkering with minor quantitative
adjustments. A short note on who we are. At the start of the protests in
February 2014, some politicians, voicing their contempt for the protesters,
called us bagra (scum, nothing), a significant appellation that symptomatically said more than they intended. It is precisely in bagra that we should notice
not just the fantasy of purity that preoccupies the ethnic oligarchs, but, more
importantly for us, as the etymology of the word suggests, is the implication
that the political scum are daring to claim public space, to speak, and to act
heretically.1 We are now beyond daring. We have already commenced.
1

Most telling in the etymology of the word, dating from the eleventh century, is the evocation of debauchery and the reference to the Bogumils.

This book would have been impossible without the enthusiasm and camaraderie of all the contributors who answered the call to take part in this endeavour. The contributions range from those written in the early days of protests
to those taking into account how protests and plenums subsequently developed and the effects of the big floods that happened in May 2014. I am particularly grateful to Tag McEntegart, Neboja Jovanovi and ejla ehabovi, my trusted collocutors, for their insights and suggestions. Christophe
Solioz nurtured the book to its existence. Alma Fidahi and Besmir Fidahi
selflessly translated the majority of the contributions. My special thanks go to
Vanessa Redgrave and Carlo Nero of Dissent Projects, who made it possible for this book to see the light of day.
Damir Arsenijevi, 9 November 2014

10

Emina Busuladi

Why?

Why the strikes, the protests, the demonstrations? Why the uprising, the frustration, the chanting on the streets? One thousand questions come before one
thousand answers. Because Im not one to bow my head. Because I do not
like injustice. Because I genuinely love my country. Because I am brazenly
persistent and because, when I start something, I have to see it through to the
end. Because I grow stronger from the blows that are inflicted. Blackmails
and threats cant stop me. I have no chips on my shoulder, and they cannot
bribe me.
Why do I love Dita, and why am I struggling for its survival?
I came to Dita straight from school. As I was young and green, I grew and
matured alongside Dita. Dita provided for my food, for the education of my
children and was there for me in difficult times. During the war, Dita was
busy helping the troops, citizens and refugees. However, instead of praise,
celebration and compliments, someone took it into their heads to set about
destroying and killing Dita. To obliterate it. But, to what end? Dita, and the
chemical products it manufactures, still have potentialit can continue educating some other children, feeding some other families, bringing in revenue
for the country, providing for pensions, healthcare and education, giving jobs
to young people, getting them off the streets and bringing them back from
Afghanistan. Dita can and must continue to work in order to build and rebuild
this afflicted country.
Inevitably, I see the connection between all these recent events surrounding Dita and the end of the war. At that time, Dita was still a successful
operating company, exporting and developing new products. We received
regular and decent wages. Dita was headed by a great woman, Merdana
Fia. But, she got in the way of somebodys political interests and was physically removed and insulted by the then self-styled benefactors of Dita,
who devised the worst possible scenario for their colleagues of many years.
What this meant was that people who had worked in Dita for over 30 years
started destroying and killing Dita, upholding the vested interests of others,
including party chief. All of us who worked there were of a similar age; we
all had similar problems and were working on them together, maturing within
and alongside Dita. Together for years, we had shared laughter and tears. In
whose interests was it, to destroy Dita and to crush underfoot so many years
11

of friendship, destroying that which is held most sacred: the families of colleagues, driving many into ill-health, invalidity and premature death? For
those, indeed, are the consequences of Ditas destruction.
Many workers, like myself, did not know their way around politics,
economics and privatization and were easy targets to fool. After all, we were
growing up in Titos country, where everybody was doing their job, where
people feared God and the law. And where are we now? People no longer
fear God, because they imagined themselves to be gods. They do not fear the
law because they tailor their own grotesque laws with impunity, to serve their
own interests. And then they proceed to violate those same laws, too. In the
late 90s, Ditas Director received the Manager of the Year Award. Looking
back, that seems to have been part of the plan and the beginning of slide into
destruction. Production was becoming increasingly stagnant; wages were
declining and being paid later and later. No investment was made in new
products. A few years ago, I heard the then-Director publicly express his
remorse: We did not need this. But, it was too late. Slowly and gradually,
everything started going downhill.
The newly elected Director, Management and Supervisory Board lied
pushing us, their workers, into the arms of the growing disaster, urging us to
take loans and buy out the state-owned capital, i.e. to purchase shares. What
did we know about shares, dividends or capital? We only knew about matters
to which we were accustomed: making high-quality detergents and earning
honest wages. We thought the factory hadnt been ours in the previous system, but believed it to be ours now. This was the third time that we were
buying back our factory. In the 70s, when Dita began working, we were
busy paying back the loans required to start the factory, in the 80s we bought
Markovis shares, which we then re-purchased from the state, which, in
1994, turned everything social into state-owned. Once we start producing,
things will get better, we thought. But, no. It was just another scam. We
harbored no hopes on our walk from buses through the gates of the factory,
looking at the chimneys in vain. In vain, we called from home asking Are
they smoking yet. It was our way of inquiring whether the factorys machinery was operational. Will we get paid, get our hot meal allowance and other
reimbursements? But, everything remained the same.
We only produced a little. Production and the sales were curbed. They
lied when they said that nobody wanted our products. Our friends, relatives,
neighbors and acquaintances were stopping us on the streets asking how
come were no longer operating? How come our high quality and distinctive
products are no longer on the market? History repeated itself: Dita needed
new investments and in just one year, between 2004 and 2005, the Management took out an 8 million Convertible Marks loan, with no balance sheets or
income statements kept, and no monitoring of resources expended. The absurdity only grew bigger: Marijanko Divkovi, Director of Hypo Alpe Adria
Bank, which issued a largest part of the loan to Dita, was a member of the

12

Dita Supervisory Board. Where those millions ended up and in whose pockets, only God and the gangs know. Their final destination was not in Dita,
thats for sure. Thus begins the second battle against the already distraught
workers. We had to sell our shares to keep our jobs and livelihoods.
The Trade Union took the leading role. Or more accurately, it was Kata
Ivelji, the President of the Independent Trade Union of Chemistry and NonMetals, as an individual. But more about the trade union later.
The payment of salaries was delayed and the workers were taking loans
to buy shares. Parts of the wages were paid through the bank and the other
part in cash. The wages would arrive whenever, in whatever amount and we
had to be happy or had to pretend to be happy. Repayment of the Managements loan was questionable. Members of Ditas management got themselves individually indebted for the sum of 100,000 Convertible Marks.
Something didnt feel right there. The question was whether their thensalaries could even have covered the full amount of loan repayment instalments?
My sense of dissatisfaction grew, and I began raising my voice. Director, my children are going hungry because of you, I used to tell him. He
used to respond by saying: I am pleased if it is because of me. Does such a
cynical answer merit passivity, lack of reaction or combativity? My children
were attending university at that time. My son was finishing medical studies,
and my daughter was beginning to study architecture. Mum, lets stop our
studies for the time being. Well continue later, they used to say, aware of
the situation. But my parental duty and obligation was to attend to their education. That is what I said to the then-Director during one of our discussions.
His comment went against the grain: Not all young people should get a
university education, only the elite. My response to him was full of rage
because I felt humiliated as a parent and as a person and I continued fighting
for my own and for other children. Today, Im the mother of a highly esteemed and respected doctor and the mother of a civil engineer who is full of
knowledge and confidence.
Those were very hard times for my family. My family consists of my
husband, who was on stand-by employment without pay from the Soda
factory, and our two children, honourable people, good, honest and industrious students and favourites among their friends. To make things even worse,
we lost the apartment that my husband had been allocated during the war as a
soldier of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We were left on the street.
At that time, Dita was giving away apartments that were becoming vacant
when workers could no longer afford the rent, to former employees who no
longer resided in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was possible because the
criterion for receiving such apartments was suitability of adopting the same
outlook as the management. Dita was also giving away non-refundable funds
of 10,000 Convertible Marks. Some received even more. I was one of the few
who did not receive 10,000 Convertible Marks in cash, but was offered its

13

counter-value in construction material. I did not succumb even then. I held

my head high and soldiered bravely on. They were trying to force me to sell
my shares persuading me to follow example of majority of my colleagues.
But I did not want to. My friends looked at me in amazement: Minka, you
have no doors or windows in your house. My response was No each time.
Out of necessity, I learned then what the shares were.
Today, I have doors and windows in my house, but I also have my
shares and my integrity.
Sometime in May or June 2005, the Sarajevo company Lora emerged as
Ditas saviour. A low level of production started up. As for wages, they depended on who was at the receiving end, but they were mostly minimal. Initially, the meal allowance was doled out in cash or bonds. Later, it was disbursed only in bonds. The value of the meal voucher was 5.5 Convertible
Marks. The calculations made to arrive at this figure were unsound. There
were two menus in the restaurant: one for the management, the other for the
workers. We were paying our meals with the same vouchers, but we were not
eating the same food. The second and the third shifts meal consisted of a
quarter of loaf of bread, fish, meat spread or cold cuts and yogurt, which cost
5.5 Convertible Marks. The meal vouchers could be used to buy groceries:
one voucher bought one litre of oil or two cans of fish; one kilo of cheese,
however, cost six vouchers which meant that one kilogram of cheese cost 33
Convertible Marks. I took issue with those calculations, because it seemed to
me they were a way to belittle and undervalue workers by stealing what was
legally theirs. I simply could not stand idly by watching all that happening.
Something about it stank. Something was wrong. I could see that the life of
the factory was increasingly stagnant, that a small number of workers were
satisfied, but that the majority, mostly production workers, was not satisfied.
People were leaving: some were retiring, others transferred to other companies, and some went to Afghanistan. But no one who left without work to go
to was finding other employment. Some came back to Dita on short-term
contracts or so-called internships. We employed a few orphans, who did
not receive salaries, even though the humanitarian organization Koraci Nade
regularly paid the money for their salaries to the management on contract.
We had our trade union, but everyone seemed to have forgotten the real function of trade unions. They thought that the unions of today were like the former ones, which, in that time of plenty, were busy selling workers tons of
meat at discounted prices and sending them on jaunts to the coast. When I
asked the trade union representative in our operating unit what they were
doing, why they would toy with peoples lives in this way, she simply replied: Well, go ahead, you be our representative. So, in 2009, I was elected
onto the Executive Committee of the Dita Trade Union. Other operating units
also elected new representatives and thus began our fight for the workers, for
Dita, and for the state.

14

All those years the Chairman of the Executive Committee of Trade Unions,
Ramo Rami, stood against us. Ramo imagined himself to be like Tito: the
president for life. Although he was a highly skilled worker, it was through
pushing through the ranks of the union and after most of the other engineers
were driven out of Dita that he became Chief Maintenance Engineer. All
these years the Branch Union, Dita management, the line ministry, the cantonal government and other institutions of the state, such as the Tax Administration, Inspectorate and judicial institutions, were against us.
We have constantly threatened strike action since 2009. Ditas owner
and director promised better times and asked for patience. The trade union
tried launching a warning strike, but we did not gather enough interested
people. We just wanted to earn our salaries, but without any projects to work
on, they were constantly delayed. They would give us a penny or two to keep
us quiet. In late 2010, the owner told us that the banks would no longer give
him loans and that we would have to wait until the beginning of following
year. We later learned that, during this period, he had taken loans galore.
We scheduled the first strike for August 24, 2011. Ever since 2009, we
had been struggling with the management, giving a little, getting a little, but
on August 24, 2011, we began our strike, in accordance with the Law on
taking strike action. By then, they owed us seven months of salaries and 22
months of pension and health insurance. Outside, temperatures were reaching
42 degrees. We set up our strike camp in the perimeter of the factory, in the
open, between the reservoirs, every day between 7 am and 3 pm. We were on
strike until winter. It is only then that they allowed us to enter the premises of
the trade union. We negotiated with management every day, but there was no
progress. Management gave us a copy of an agreement that would give Lora
possession of Dita. The document consists of few pages I found on my desk
one day. When I read the agreement and showed it to labour lawyers, they all
said it provided prima facie evidence of a crime, that we, the workers, had
been tricked and robbed, because not a single item of that agreement was
fulfilled. When the new cantonal government was formed, we expected they
would help us and fulfil what they promised before they came to power. But,
with them, the strike took us one step forward and three steps back. They also
tried to break us in every possible way: Get them laid on stretchers and
remove them from the factory that way, was how Sead auevi, former
Prime Minister of Tuzla Canton, would vividly describe his position. Whereas most dissatisfied workers were on strike with commitment and integrity,
the maintenance service workers, on the instruction of their manager, Ramo
Rami, behaved like immature teenagers, and the administration staff was
with the director and the management. Although the strike was legal, a number of workers were under a working obligation to pack detergent that had
been brought in from Beohemija, a company from Serbia. So, from being a
production company, we turned into a packing plant.

15

I brought the first criminal charges in the midst of this first strike.
Wherever you turned at that time, you would see posters that read REPORT
CRIME. I thought the posters encouragement was genuine, so I reported
the crime, providing all the appropriate documentation. But, there are many
drawers in the states administrative offices, and all they do is use them neatly to tuck away the documents. At least Tuzla Cantons Ministry of Internal
Affairs received the documentationI went to the State Investigation and
Protection Agency three times, but the duty officer told me that the economic
crime investigators were busy working in the field and that they would call
me when they become available. I am still waiting for that call to this day.
They are clearly so busy in their work that we should all be bathing in milk
and honey, instead of existing in this economic misery.
The strike lasted until March 19, 2012, at which point, eljko Kneiek,
the Minister of Industry in the Cantonal Government, provided the guarantee
to re-launch production. The Trade Union Executive Committee and the
Strike Committee had two options at their disposal: they could either freeze
or stop the strike. I and another member of the Strike Committee, who supported option to freeze the strike, were outvoted. The strike, after a lot of
pressure, lobbying and threats stopped. Television stations recorded the glorious day when Dita restarted production, but the production stopped again as
soon as the media left. We went back to our working stations and started
pretending to be working. I was moved to a new position in administration.
Although it was supposedly a promotion, I felt I was being punished. I was
moved from a large laboratory to an office ten meters square. They gave me a
job as an economist, although I was a chemical technician. They gave me a
computer, although I had no idea how to turn it on. I was surrounded by folders and numbed by boredom. And what could I have do, other than open
those folders, one by one, and stare in disbelief at all the information I found
in them. A dozen workers in the administration continued to work regularly,
whereas production workers were regularly dispatched home, where they
spent their unspent vacation days for who knows what year, or on paid standby. We realized the situation was not going to get any better, so we asked for
a meeting with the Management. At the meeting, we were again promised
that better times will come.
Thus began the period of silent rebellion. One Friday, Ramo Rami
came to my office and said: Haris (Haris Abdurahmanovi, the owner of
Lora) has called us to request a meeting somewhere in the city after 3 PM.
He was probably not expecting me to reply, I can only talk to Haris on the
factory premises and before 3 PM. Our daily strain continued until early
October 2012, when the workers came to the factory, as they did regularly at
the beginning of every month, to find increased security at the gates. We
were now banned from entering the factory. A couple of workers, including
me, wanted to enter the factory by force. One of the security guards stood in

16

front of me, grabbed his gun and told me that Adnan idi, then-Director,
had banned everyone from entering.
How come I cant come in, I own stocks in this factory, and Ive been
working here for 35 years, I told him. Then I realized that the value of my
stocks is not pertinent to the struggle. Ever since then, I used the shares only
as a means to further the struggle.
So begin the protests. We remained at the gate and decided to fight 24
hours a day. They did not allow us onto the perimeter of the factory, and we
did not allow them to go outside the factory. There was no electricity, water,
heating or phones in Dita. The greater part of Ditas 17 tenants left the factory because of that. All the rents they were paying ended up in Lora, as if it
was the sole Owner of the factory and as if there were no other shareholders.
We stayed on duty 24 hours a day. The rain and the wind hampered our protests; we were forced to build a tent settlement and divide ourselves into two
shifts: women took charge of the tent settlement by day and men manned it
by night. Hunger! Dita workers had nothing to eat in their homes, let alone
bringing some food with them to the factory. The food started arriving when
we approached workers of other factories and citizens of Tuzla for help.
Citizens supported us by bringing food. From the very beginning, we received regular visits from members of the organizations the Neformalna
Grupa Mladih Tuzle, Lijevi and Revolt. They were with us when the mercury
on the thermometer fell below -15 degrees, bringing us tea, coffee and hot
meals. For many workers, that was their only meal. Many companies started
sending food and money, but not those whose workers who were in the Trade
Union of Chemistry and Non-Metals. We sent a formal request for assistance
to the members of the branch unions. We received only one response to our
request for assistance and that was from the Solana factory.
Indeed, when we asked the representatives of the trade unions for help,
the attacks and insults merely increased! They accused us of erecting the tent
settlement illegally, of pursuing our own interests or the interests of some of
Tuzlas tycoons. The thought that we were living without wages, without
health insurance, without being able to go into the retirement we had earned
never crossed their mind. At a meeting of the General Board of the Independent Trade Union of Chemistry and Non-Metals, which was attended by Ismet
Bajramovi, the President of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions
of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and members of the Social and Economic Council, poisoned by accusations of Kata Ivelji, everyone, not a single voice
spoke up with me or for me. I did not have the right to defend myself at that
meeting.
Thanks to the good people and the solidarity of workers from other
companies, we had enough food. We shared it in such a way that workers
could carry it home to their wives and children. It was easier for them to be
on duty when they knew their families at home were not going hungry.
Among us were workers who would come on foot to serve their turn on the

17

picket line, in some cases, walking more than 20 kilometers. They would stay
for a few days and then go back home. At that time, municipal elections were
held. Representatives of political parties came to visit, promising to resolve
our situation and bring food! Only one party did not send a single representative: The Social Democratic Party.
Good God, Jasmin (Jasmin Imamovi, Mayor of Tuzla and member of
the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party), you keep talking
about people from Tuzla, I used to say. We were there for you when you
needed us. Visit us now, when we need you. Show how much you love the
people of your Tuzla. We are here to preserve a part of Tuzla for which our
brothers, husbands, sons gave their lives and limbs. Look around Dita. Jasmin. It was once an industrial zone, the pride of Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina. And whats become of it? Its been turned into a barren twilight zone.
A disgraceful reflection of your own and many others shame, you, who
quietly watched it being degraded and destroyed. We cannot do anything;
you say, without even trying. Yes you can; surely you can. You could, if you
wanted.
Later, the tactical games started; there was some talk about the company, Beohemija, being interested in Dita. Yet it was an open secret that it had
been interested since 2005. They called the Dita workers to visit their factory
in Zrenjanin for a tour of their facilities and to talk about the future. I refused
to go and talk without a majority shareholder who did not go. A bus full of
workers, mainly those who were at home and were not protesting, went and
came back even quicker. People from the government went as well. A few
months previously, when I was visiting the cantonal government with a delegation from Libya who, at that time, was interested in buying stocks and
starting production at Dita and several other factories in Tuzla, Igor Rajner,
Advisor to the Prime Minister, told me that the factory did not belong to us,
the workers, and that, therefore, it was not ours to sell. He advised the Libyan delegation to contact the owners of Lora. It was clear that he already
meant to sell the factory to someone else.
People started talking more openly about bankruptcy. Since there had
been no results from the earlier claims we had lodged, we concluded that we
needed to find a new lawyer. The Courts werent functioning, and nor were
the lawyers who were representing us. Haris Abdurahmanovi had bribed
everything living thing that had a pulse. Once we had a new, functional, lawyer in place, claims for unpaid wages and unlawfully paid salaries were added to a claim against Lora for failure to fulfil that part of the agreement that
related to the transfer of shares. There was also an additional complaint
against Dita for malpractice and a lawsuit against the Agency for Privatization for failure to fulfil its obligations. Those suits still stand in the Court to
this day. There has been no movement at all since the time they were lodged.
The judges, they say, have a lot of work. So, why abolish the Court of Asso-

18

ciated Laboura functioning court, which existed before the war and which
did not need years to deliver a single verdict?
Throughout the whole time of our struggle, we were under pressure to
comply with the legislation, to not run foul of the law, even accidentally,
because we knew that many would like see that happening and would seize
on it. I took on reading the legislation really closely and consulting with our
lawyers so as not to make a mistake. When we started our struggle, I spoke
with workers and said: As God is my witness, I will do an honourable and
honest work. Should I make a mistake from ignorance, may God, and you
forgive me. Should I deliberately do something against you good people, may
God punish me!
It was late December. Our protest was already entering its third month.
The workers were exhausted by the snow and the cold. Then we received
word from the cantonal government that Beohemija was interested in taking
over Dita. Times were difficult. The pressure was overwhelming, and some,
unwillingly, gave up. When Beohemijas delegation arrived, the negotiating
team was numerically expanded by workers who were not taking part in the
protests. This was at behest of the government. A group of 40 workers who
were taking part in the protests, and those who had given up in the meantime,
met under the leadership of Kata Ivelji and made unanimous decision to
accept the Protocol on Cooperation between Beohemija and Dita. Clearly this
meant sellouts! The group of 40 even accepted the Protocol that was only
committed to writing several days later. Naturally, I was against the it. Every
media outlet released my statement where I said that something like such a
protocol can only be signed by a crazy, bribed or blackmailed person, because this Protocol, save for the promise to pay three months worth of salaries that were owed anyway, will not bring Dita any good. However, due to
pressure from the majority of workers, we stopped the protests on 29 December 2012.
By early 2013, the workers were in their factory units again: we had
electrical power, money, but no heating because, over the winter, the radiators had broken down. While we were on all those paid and unpaid leaves,
the factory had been abandoned. Unmaintained, dirty, there were many burst
pipes leaking and it smelled. Much of it has been dismantled, looted, destroyed. It was a pitiful sight that caused great grief to those of us to whom it
mattered. But, diligent hands, honest workers will and the desire to work
very quickly brought order. Once the workers received three salaries their
spirits immediately went up. They were ready for new working victories.
They could hardly wait to start producing and earning their salaries. But,
nothing came out of it. We went back to the same old story. We produced
very little; we were mostly engaged in packing for Beohemija and even that,
only for a very short time. Enormous pressure was brought to bear on the
workers: harassment, vulgarity, humiliation and, again, being dispatched
back home. We received only the three months salaries. Discontent and fear

19

ensued. Worried about the future, the administrative workers openly approached the production workers. We wondered whether they did it sincerely
or whether they were pushed to do so. We did not trust them much, but we
got together in agreement. We realized how grave the situation was and that
all the mighty promises were futile. Even the workers who had been supporting the Protocol were committed to looking at what we can do. Well strike,
of course, I said. Did the Management really think we would give up so
easily? In one of the earlier meetings, the Director had stood up and asked
me: Woman, how come you have so much strength and will to continue
fighting?
Little did he know that the more you beat me, the more you punch me,
the more you spit on me, blackmail me and belittle me, I grow stronger, more
audacious and more persistent. I often told my children that they will face
many obstacles, pitfalls and problems in life, but that these obstacles are not
there to halt them, but theirs to overcome and conquer, because they will
make them stronger. We have to be persistent, brave, honest and enduring,
because that is the only way we can hope to succeed in life. We will fall over
again and again throughout life, but we have to stand up and fight and become stronger because that is the only way we can expect to succeed in life.
In mid-2013, we went on strike again. Because each strike must be
carried out according to the Law on strikes, we had been waiting to strike for
a long time whilst we collected the necessary documents.. The Management
left the factory. This time the situation was reversed: they could not come in.
There was no electricity, no water and no heating. The sewage system was
clogged. Across all those years someone had been working to turn Dita into
another HAK 1, HAK 2 and Gumaraall factories that were once successful
that were similarly destroyed and razed to the ground. Again, we guarded the
factory 24 hours a day, in our struggle to save it from destruction. Again, we
divided the day into 12-hour shifts. That was not what the owner expected.
One of the companies that remainedleasing Ditas reservoirspaid rent
which allowed us to get the electricity back on to light up the perimeter and
security sheds. On several occasions, they also provided food packages to the
striking workers.
We started gathering in front of the cantonal government every Monday
and Wednesday at 9 am. Sometimes they would call us to talk, but they usually they did not. In one of the talks, Sead auevi told us: I would resolve
the situation, but Sarajevo is not going to allow that to happen.
Well? I replied, We voted for you, we picked you. You promised us
a better tomorrow. You promised us a state in which people could live productive lives. Why are you crawling to Sarajevo to ask them how Tuzla can
become economically healthy and how were supposed to live well enough
lives here? Address the suffering citizens here in Tuzla. Let them tell you
how they want to live. Let go of the policies of the proverbial men in black.
Turn to your constituency. You see they all are unhappy. Dont preside over

20

conditions where our children and up going to Afghanistan. They are not
warriors or assassins; they are economists, lawyers, engineers... Where will
they work if the economy collapses? Who will earn our pensions if they all
disperse to all corners of the globe? Enough of them have already left. How
are we supposed to receive medical treatment when health funding is shrinking, when schools and universities are going into reverse, instead of improving and progressing? Under such conditions, for what and for whom is the
education of children being undertaken? How are they to be taught when
teachers are unhappy?
And that is when he began to avoid us. He did not know what other lie
he could tell that might make us continue to believe him. We complained to
Mr. Valentin Inzko, too. Because his role is to help citizens, to make the state
institutions work, as few people who are supposed to protect public interest
do anything, but are mostly busy chasing their own interests. The economic
crime investigators of the Tuzla Canton Ministry of the Interior were on Ditas premises collecting evidence for months in 2012. They would take years
to discover what everyone knew all along: that there were crimes of theft,
fraud and other economic crimes taking place in Dita. Dita was piling up
debt, postponing the payment of taxes and contributions owed to the state,
whilst its Lora owner was buying villas, yachts and planes. The workers
received no salaries, could not afford medical treatment, could not retire, and
everybody kept quiet about it. The unions criminal charges were languishing, stashed in the depths of some drawer or other of the Office of the Prosecutor and the Court. The High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council were constantly busy. Of course, supposedly, they will consider the events that had
happened and were happening in and around Dita when they have time available, but its been two years since we received their courtesy response.
And they say that the judiciary is independent, that it is not politicized!
Indeed, Ive asked myself all these years: is it likely that Haris Abdurahmanovi would not dare do what he was doing if he hadnt had such strong
backing.
In one of the meetings with the Office of the Prosecutor, the prosecutor,
looking straight into my eyes, inquired as to what my vested interests in the
matter were that I had seen fit to launch criminal charges against these
thieves. I could not believe what I was hearing. My sole satisfaction will be
to see the end of the looting and the thieves brought to justice. He should
know that better than me. He did not know about my interests, but he did
have information that Dita could not survive in the marketplace any longer
because Ditas products were no longer of a high enough quality. He did not
find elements of crime in my first criminal complaint, although we workers
knew that the then-Technical Director deliberately degraded the quality of
recipes, making trashy products and chasing the customers away. The same
prosecutor apparently believes that there is no criminal offence committed
when a factory director takes loan instalments, union dues and allocations for

21

the fund for special purposes from workers salaries and does not pay this
money into the accounts where it was intended that they should have been
placed, instead taking it for himself. Id like to know what law allows such a
director to do so and remain unpunished. Id like to meet someone
anyonewho is remotely concerned and who will take responsibility for
bringing these people to justice.
Every Wednesday, we gathered in front of the government building.
Sometimes we would gather at the Office of the Prosecutor or the Tax Administration. The workers were growing more exhausted, both mentally and
physically. The employees of the cantonal government and other institutions,
who receive salaries, have their health insurance and retirement funds, would
look at us and often condescendingly commenting, in tones laden with disgust and irony: Here they go again. At a certain point, a group of workers
who were gathered in front of the government building made a unilateral
decision to start a hunger strike. It was already autumn. It was cold. The
temperature descended below zero, and the workers did not have anything to
protect themselves from the rain. The police would not let them have anything. They gave up in only a few days. One of them got sick. I no longer
remember the exact day and date, but it was after 3 am when he got sick.
Should someone die? Become a chronically sick invalid? The passersby
seemed unaffected. The whole country was hungry; we were all on the edge
of poverty, but to them we are just statistics. Just numbers. The workers
stopped the hunger strike. They saved their lives and preserved their dignity.
If you should die, do it with dignity. We can look anyone in the eye, because
we do not have anything to hide. The government employees enter the government building with their heads down. Months fly by without any progress.
Our first demand, the launch of production, was crossed off from the list of
demands by Sead auevi personally. In all the talks, that has always been
the first point of discussion of demands.
Dear God, you put us to the test too often. What have we done that is
so wrong that we must be punished in this way? How long until they exhaust
us and break us? Dear God, give us strength not to succumb and let us find
the strength to endure, help us in our just struggle. We do not ask much, we
ask to work, we seek to earn our bread.
It was yet another Wednesday, and we headed for the front of the government building again. A new Minister of Industry had recently assumed
office; we wondered whether he would talk to us. That December morning
was cold and windy. Few people were on the streets. I walked slowly towards
the government building. I was thinking what to say, how to react if yet again
we are turned away. And then what? About halfway, I felt fatigue and cold
sweats. My eyes got blurry, and I suddenly felt a severe chest pain. The next
thing I remember were the doctors with masks, and an oxygen bottle. Running and shouting Quick, were losing her. Do not fall asleep! Open your
eyes... They were talking to me. I was returned to my pain. God, will this

22

ever stop?, I thought. Where am I? What are they doing to me? I did not
understand what was happening. You suffered a strong myocardial infarction; youve arrived just in time, but now you must undertake a strict regime
of rest. A large blood clot is travelling around your bloods circulatory system, and we must monitor its course, one of the doctors explained.
I educated my child to become a doctor and to be there for me. And he
was. He came rushing with medication. He stayed with me in the beginning,
but had to go back to his home abroad and treat other people. He left Bosnia
to go to a foreign land where the majority have jobs and those jobs are carried out legally and properly, where people are treated with respect, where
there are no strikes, where there is law, where the law is respected, where the
thieves, criminals and thugs are where they belong.
After all was said and done, doctors advised me to go for walks, read
books, watch good movies... start with something new from scratch. But, I
quickly found myself slipping into a state of inertia. It hurt me that I was not
with my workers. I called them in secret, inquiring about what was happening. On Wednesday, January 29, I told my family I was going for a checkup,
but I went and joined those who were gathered in front of the government
building instead. I stayed only very briefly because I did not feel all that
good. There was something weighing on me, I felt some discomfort. Halfway
home I met my husband. He looked sad and dismal. He was on his way to
pick me up. Minka, dont go to grandmas house - (he was referring to my
92 year-old mother). You know... she just fell asleep and died in her sleep,
she did not suffer... she was having her usual coffeethe cups were still
hot, he said. That was the first time I had ever walked silently past my
mothers door. I did not even have the strength to cry; everything in me died;
I turned numb... or the medications started working. She was a very lively old
lady, who had been a widow with four children for 55 years. She was not
educated, but she was courageous. She provided for all her children and
raised fair and honourable people. No one ever knocked on her door to make
any complaints.
The following Wednesday I had to perform the appropriate religious
practices for the soul of my mother. However, neighbours, relatives and
friends were talking about the chaos that was taking place in front of the
government building. The police were beating up young protesters. They said
there were many people there and that the demonstration was due to continue
until Thursday. I decided I would attend, too. My family looked at me in
disbelief. But, together with my workers, I had been through thick and thin
all these years; I had to be with them in these crucial and difficult moments.
When Thursday came, my husband stuck to me like a shadow. Go to
the back, he told me. But I was in the front line. My soul wanted to be there,
but my real heart was making it hard, though the medications helped.
Thieves, thieves, get out!!! it echoed. Drop your shields! people were
saying to the police. But instead, they dropped tear gas, beating our young

23

people with truncheons, hitting the hungry, hitting the just, hitting people
who merely wanted a job so they could earn their bread. We asked for the
resignation of the government, but none of the mighty dared come out before
the people and speak to them. Riot police were busy dispersing people all day
long.
On Friday, at noon, we were there again, surrounded by young protesters wearing masks. Columns of people came from all sides... 1,000, 2,000,
5,000, 10,000 people, no one could count them anymore. The traffic was
completely blocked and there were a huge number of television reporters. I
received a message from Sead auevi. He had decided to call us to talk.
But, this was no longer only about Ditas workers. There were a lot of youth,
students and the unemployed. Come out and make your offer, I replied. He
did not come out because he had nothing to offer. That day, for the first time,
the people of Tuzla took their destiny into their hands. They knew no one
would do anything except they themselves. At this moment in history, the
citizens exploded with the pressure of the pent-up yearning that had been
building up in them for years, crouching somewhere in the depths of their
souls. All their despair and anger came to surface. They expressed their discontent by throwing rocks. And what happened, happened! When Dita and
workers of other factories were joined by so many other forces: school pupils, college and university students, the unemployed, pensioners, war veterans and the marginalized, the government resigned.
Later that day, people I had known for some time, those who had been
with us during our struggle, called me to come to Kua Plamena Mira. There
were about 20 people there. I was the oldest. The rest were all the next generation of our young and educated people. That is how the Plenum was created.
Why Plenum? Because it consisted of honest, decent, educated youth,
young people that I knew, those who were following us through the struggle
to save Dita, to save jobs; youth I trusted, smart, stubborn, persistent, fearless
young people. While riot police hurled their truncheons and tear gas at us,
they responded to the violence by throwing carnations at them, and creating
candle-lit vigils around which people could gather. All carried out with human dignity, as we, the workers, are wont to do. Since we have no leader, no
privileged few, everyone has the right to vote in the Plenum, everyone has
the right to express their problem.
The February protests gave birth to the Union of Solidarity. Why the Union
of Solidarity?
The unions were one of the main culprits for the degraded state of the
economy, because they did not take the side of the workers nor, at any point,
did they support their struggle. They even distanced themselves from the
February 2014 events. It would take me many more pages to write about the
crimes of the trade unions who were defending the interests of the government and employers. However, one situation that will always stick in my

24

mind is a meeting in 2010, where Kata Ivelji was also in attendance. We

discussed the question of the wages they owed. The Management had promised to pay up three months worth of unpaid wages if we accepted a new
Decisions on Work agreement and acquiesced to a minimum wage rate that
was altogether pitiful. Kata Ivelji, as President of the Branch Union gave her
consent for that plan. I warned my colleagues against signing it. I proved to
have been being correct to do so, because hidden in the small print of the new
Decisions on Work, was the information that this contract was valid only
for a fixed period of six months work. That means that if we had signed, after
six months we would probably have lost our jobs.
All it takes is a reading of the draft of the new Labour Law to understand whose side the union was taking. After all, they had actively participated in the drafting of that very same Law. The state was becoming mired in
chaos. The economy was collapsing, unemployment had reached 65%, bankruptcies are taking up to 15 years to resolve; i.e. until all the assets are sold,
and the bankruptcy trustees, banks and the state pay-outs are settled. Bankruptcy usually means liquidation. The workers are always the only losers.
And the trade unions remained silent on the issue. People did not trust them,
because they did not know how the so-called officers of the unions spent
the Union dues that they, the workers, have been paying into the unions
accounts all those years. In the last five years of our struggle for Dita and for
our workers, the Branch Unions issued assistance worth 10,000 Convertible
Marks, which amounts to half of our annual dues. Where are the funds from
the dues we paid for all those other years? When the destruction and decline
of the industry and the economy were planned, first the workers were divided
- set against each other and then the Unions themselves fragmented, rather
than uniting and strengthening the workers, supporting them to break away
from the influence of the state.
Why the Union of Solidarity? Because workers founded it. Because the
members of the new trade union were with the workers all the time, supporting both Dita workers and workers of other ruined companies. All have access to membership, regardless of whether they can afford to pay the membership dues, and regardless of whether they are students, dissatisfied workers or pensioners.
In the end, I found myself on the electoral list of the Communist Party.
Why the Communist Party, you may ask?
This year is election year and it is pretty questionable as to whether
there are any candidates who offer the kind of integrity and trustworthiness
that would encourage you, wholeheartedly, to vote for them. For 20 years we
have experienced the same people and the same policies, but we only spiral
deeper into the pit of economic and social decline. In late 2012, I sent a letter
to the Cantonal Assembly, the legislative body whose duty it is to monitor the
work of the government. I waited for their response for a year. It took them a
year to put Dita and the economy of Tuzla Canton on the agenda. During that

25

session, all agreed that the economy is in a disastrous condition. Since then,
Ive been to a few more sessions. Ive even stood at the lectern on the Assembly platform, to beg, demand and warn. I was looking the Assembly
representatives in the eyebut saw only a handful of interested people. Most
of them were completely uninterested and passive. Yet, thousands of lives,
jobs and the survival of this country depend on them.
That is the reason I agreed to be put on the list for the Cantonal Assembly as a representative of the Communist Party. I did not want to represent a
democratic party, because democracy has never been more absent. Why the
Communist Party? They say that the Communist Party means singlemindedness. But, have we not been witnesses to the folly of other parties?
Earlier, we would never have seen collecting boxes, asking for charitable
assistance for medical treatment for our countrys citizens, in the markets or
at the entrances to stores. We all had the right to medical treatment, but now
the sick give half of their earnings to pay for their medications. Earlier, we all
had a right to education, but now they want to make it accessible only to a
privileged few.
Human beings should leave something good behind them when they
die, something to be remembered by. I often ask people: Tomorrow, your
child or your grandchild will ask what you did for Tuzla, for the country, in
those hard times? And what will you say? Will you tell the truth, that you did
nothing, or will you lie and remain what you are now a living creature,
maybe, but with no valid claim to being part of humanity?

26

Miralem Ibriimovi

My Union Fight

It is hard to write about the events of February 2014, and not remember what
Tuzla once wasa significant industrial centre with a huge number of employed workers. At that time, there was an enviable fraternal organization of
unions, and the workers were significantly better protected from various
forms of exploitation. At successive union congresses, we requested and
fought for our rights: better working conditions, a five-day work week, proper pay for undertaking night work, for working during holidays, for working
on Sundays, for working overtime, regular health and pension insurance,
adequate permitted time for vacations. In the factories where the workers
were working in three shifts, the shifts lasted up to a maximum of eight hours
a day, so that left the employees time to rest and time for social improvement.
By the end of the 1990s, what used to be Yugoslavia was now becoming
various new states, and the nationalists, in order to asset-strip the former state
much more easily, set about turning the peoples who lived in the former Yugoslavia against one another. In all this, Bosnia and Herzegovina got the
shortest end of the stick, and, even after the war and after the declaration of
independence, suffered major human casualties and on-going material destruction.
People championing the nationalist parties, even after the war, continued, and continue to do so even now, to support the policy of destroying once
strong state-owned firms, by devaluing them and burdening them with huge
loans. The firms that were thus led to bankruptcy were then bought, as private companies, by those same people, or those close to them. It was fatal for
the thousands of workers who had been promised everything, and who, in the
end, lost the factories, whose productivity and profitability they had built and
their jobs, putting their very existence in question. In the privatized companies, which were established, a small number of workers were employed, and
those workers, not protected by the law, or by the unions, rapidly found
themselves subject to exploitation. The 40-hour working week was a distant
memory, as workers were working ten-plus hours a day. Health and pension
insurance was irregular, and paid holiday became just a fantasy. Business
owners did not permit the workers to organize or to form unions. A oncestrong and unique Alliance of the all the unions of Bosnia and Herzegovina
was now fragmented to entity level, and, then, into independent-sector
unions. This fragmentation meant more suffering for the workers, but often
27

the leaders of those unions benefited, as they were often eased into their positions by the political parties. The new owners also benefited, as the disunity
of the unions also played into their hands. The existing unions did nothing
then, and did nothing later, to stop the wholesale destruction of Tuzlas industry, keeping their heads down when notable parts of Tuzlas industrial
group company, such as Sodaso, were devalued and sold off at bargainbasement prices, and when a large number of workers lost their jobs. In such
a situation, the workers who had lost their jobs were sent to the employment
office, aware that, most likely, they would never be employed again, because,
they had reached an age when they should be thinking about retirement and
not about finding another job. In addition, many of the workers, due to the
owners of the companies failure to comply with the collective labour contract were forced to seek their rights in court. In most of the cases, the verdicts of the court were in favour of the workers, but the verdicts were almost
never enacted. And, so, the courts, which were trusted by the workers, failed
them too. One example of such scandalous behaviour on the part of the courts
is the case of the Polihem factory. While it was still a part of the Sodaso
group company, after the war, the Polihem factory found itself in a difficult
situation because of failure to ensure the necessary delivery of raw materials.
The railway was the only way to deliver raw materials, which are hazardous
to human health (chloride, propylene, ethylene...) because the road traffic
rules did not allow it. For several years, the Polihem factory did not manage
to receive approval for the delivery of raw materials. So, the production of
polyol, our most important product, ceased. Although another part of the
factory continued production, the volume and value of this production did not
cover the costs of electricity, water, salaries or the cost of the health and
pension insurance of the workers. Nor did it cover the loans to keep even
reduced production going. Despite the drastic reduction in their terms and
conditions, and without any other alternative, as they waited for production to
start up once again, the people from the factory returned to their jobs. However, soon after, they were, yet again, put on so-called stand-by, during
which they received some sort of minimal financial compensation.
It seemed that the leadership of the Polihem factory was not able to
solve the situation. The question is why? Was it because of their incompetence or was it due to political reasons? Either way, in practice, they did not
find a way for the production to continue.
In 2000, the dissatisfaction of the workers reached breaking point and a strike
was announced, in which I was unanimously elected as the leader of the
strike committee. All of my colleagues knew that, since my arrival at the
factory in 1975, I had fought for the workers rights and for better working
conditions, and that I had never succumbed to pressure exerted by the management. In preparation for my responsibilities, I studied the relevant Labour

28

Law and the Law on strikes, and I tried to run the strike by complying strictly
with the legal framework.
During those years, while speaking with my colleagues, I realised that
the majority of them did not want to, or were scared to, engage in union organisation. However, after five years dominated by such a powerful fear of
losing their jobs, that they had acquiesced to the stand-by arrangement and
its puny financial compensation, over 500 workers joined the strike, and gave
their consent to the strike boards authority. Nationally, the Polihem union
was very well-organised and gave its support to the Polihem workers strike
board which began talks with Tuzlas cantonal government, which was, incidentally, the majority owner of the factory.
Workers were aware of the fact that, due to a lack of political will; the
issues surrounding Polihem would not easily be resolved. One of the basic
requests of the strike committee was that the then-director and management
of Polihem must be replaced. Although opinions varied among the workers
some were only dissatisfied with the director, and requested that the management should remain. Nonetheless, the majority decided that the director
and the management must go. Initially, everything seemed to be going well
for usthe Government fulfilled our request, and, after a while, a new director made a plan and program for the re-launch of production, which was met
with full support from the union. However, the Tuzla Canton Government
the majority owner of Polihemrefused to give the program the go-ahead,
saying that there were no financial resources to implement it. This was yet
another in what, with hindsight, can be identified as a series of dirty moves
on the part of the government. And this was one in which, I personally suffered a huge blow. During that period, the Polihem factory was the only
company in the city of Tuzla which was systematically searching for economic salvation through looking to re-launch production. During the strike,
however, it was dishonest people within the government who let us down by
outwardly accepting our requests, and then searching, behind the scenes, for
reasons and excuses not to fulfil them, and finally dismissing them. Because
of these machinations, the strike board decided that the strike action should
be moved from the factory to the street, in front of the Sodaso building,
which was now used by the cantonal government as a government building.
We thought that that would make them take concrete steps towards resolving
the issue, but their response was to send in a special police unit.
When the workers, already desperate, blocked the road to the city, and
went to the Sodaso building to ask, as we had done in countless other occasions, for a meeting with the relevant minister for the time, and when no
onenot even after keeping us waiting for two hoursno one responded, we
spontaneously headed toward the intersection (located on the main route into
the city of Tuzla), thinking this would force them respond to our request.
However, an hour or two after we arrived at the intersection, and afterby
sheer presence of numberswe blocked the traffic, a sizeable police force

29

and the police special unit started to remove us by force. One of my friends,
who works in the police force, told me a few minutes before the police action
started, that they had received an order to get the intersection moving again,
using force, if necessary. I thanked him for the information, and said that
neither I, nor any of the 500 workers, would give up our request, even if the
price to be paid would mean conflict with the police.
Among the people at the intersection, there were a large number of disabled persons and women, but that did not stop the police from arresting 32
workers and by force, getting the traffic moving again. I was also detained on
that occasion, and the police officer, who was leading me up to the vehicle
wanted to handcuff me. I told him that I am not a criminal and that I will
never allow him to handcuff me. After more of my colleagues had been detained, we were transported to the special police unit HQ in several police
vehicles. We all found ourselves in one room, and were shocked by the police procedures, and, even more, by the orders issued by the so-called responsible people from the government.
We were taken to court to be charged with minor offenses that same
day, where, after giving our statements, we were issued with fines for violations of public order and peace. Then I asked the judge to explain why those
who are really guilty for the creation of the situation were not the ones who
are being punished, because there would have been no disturbance of public
order and peace if someone from the government had spoken with the workers that day. Of course, the judge chose to ignore my question.
I knew that this situation was being influenced by several individuals,
whose aim was to devalue and destroy Polihem, so that it could be purchased
for the purpose of a final asset-stripping in the near future. That, in the end, is
what happened. A Polish factory called Organika bought Polihem, and then
set up a new factory, which they called Poliolchem. After several years, all
of the workers from Poliolchem were fired and sent to the employment
office. Having found that there was sufficient evidence indicating that Poliolchem failed to comply with the contracts, we sued them, and the court had to
rule in our favour. Although the verdicts were binding and had to be executed, the court never issued the order to enact the courts judgement, but, instead allowed Organika to sell one part of Poliolchem to a factory called
Organika Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose headquarters is in Sarajevo, and to
initiate bankruptcy procedures in relation to the second part of Poliolchem.
The aim of all of that connivance was to ensure that those who were the immediate creditors of the organisation the workerscould not collect what
was owed to us. After all of these events, the workers (and I among them)
have also lost all trust in the union alliance because, in this case, the union
alliance did not provide support for our fight for the preservation of the factory and the jobs. The management of the union alliance, to this day, has never
declared its position on the issue, let alone tried to help us in our fight to

30

bring the factory back to life. They just kept their union alliance offices secure.
The most difficult days for workers were after the sale of Polihem. A
large majority of workers did not have any means of support. Job opportunities were minimal. One of our colleagues opted for suicide, jumping from the
10th floor of the building in which he lived. Not even cases such as these
influenced the opinions of the so-called responsible parties in the governmental structures. They remained deaf to the cries of thousands of dismissed
and desperate workers and mute as to what they were going to do about the
situation. We were and are only of interest to them when pre-election campaign time comes around. I have, personally, lost any will or motivation for
any sort of engagement in union organizations or political parties because I
have not seen a single indication that any of them are working for any improvement in our situation. As a result of everything that has happened in our
country since the end of the war, I have lost any optimism and faith that I
previously had in our prospects for a better tomorrow.
The prevailing conditions, which only suited those who could be lured
into taking a criminal path, and, who in their get-rich-quick pursuit, have
no pity for anyone else, thrived in those intervening years, up until 5 February 2014. That was the day when the arrogant and the uninterested conduct of
the government, and the growth of dissatisfaction, not only amongst the
workers of the destroyed factories, but in other citizens as well, sparked an
explosion of public opposition. Numerous smaller strikes and gatherings of
workers had usually gone unnoticed in previous years. On that day, however,
several thousands of the citizens of Tuzla and Tuzla Canton publicly sided
with the workerspupils, students, the disabled, pensionersall of whom
were unhappy with a situation which had prevailed and become more desperate over a twenty year period, facing an uncertain future, experiencing a 40
per cent unemployment rate, an increasing gulf between the salaries of those
employed in the private sector and those in the state sector, low pensions, an
ever growing crime rate, together with corruption, nepotism, and lack of any
interest on the part of the politicians to resolve this. On that day, regular
gatherings of the workers of destroyed industry grew into a mass protest of a
large number of citizens, who are refusing to accept the overall situation in
the country.
I was in front of the Sodaso building on that day, and, together with a
several thousand of my fellow countrymen, I was asking myself why the
police were responding to our legitimate requests with force. I found it especially painful to witness members of the special police unit chasing and beating the younger protesters. While I was watching the behaviour of a large
number of police officers and the special police unit as the situation developed, I remembered the events at the intersection from 2000, afraid that it
would happen again.

31

I wondered why, at that moment, the police were guarding the Sodaso
building from its rightful ownersfrom the factory workers. How absurd!
And even more absurd that, despite the fact that the Tuzla Canton Government has been using the building for a number of years to house government
departments and the civil servants who work in them, no civil servant was in
the building on that day. Although there was no intimations of violence at the
very beginning, after the way that the protesters were being treated, both
before and on the day, by individuals from the government, their procedures,
and once the police, by using force, sparked the wrath of the people, the situation got out of control and the Sodaso building was set on fire. In my opinion, only the government and the police, can be deemed to be the instigators,
and should be held responsible for the events of that day.
The uprising of Tuzla citizens has sparked a reaction in the whole of the
Federation precisely because the situation is no better in other parts of the
country. I had expected that a greater number of citizens would create pressure for drastic changes be achieved, but, overall, I am very disappointed
with the outcome.
Yet, one of the positive things that have occurred after the riots are the plenums. In such an uncontrollable situation, and in order to try to prevent the
riots from escalating, the Plenum of Citizens of the Tuzla Canton was
formed. Thanks to a group of young intellectuals from the University of Tuzla, (not the academic community as a whole) the Plenum has shown that in
this city there are still young, educated and brave people who may, in the
future, be holders of new, more advanced ideas. In its attempt to stop the
escalation of violence and to channel productively the dissatisfaction of the
interested citizens, it would be a nucleus from which ideas about how to exit
from this crisis would develop. In the beginning, the gathering went well, but,
every day brought fewer and fewer activities and the positive developments
tailed off. I had expected that the plenum would become stronger, but the
opposite happened. I had expected a larger number of interested citizens to
join us who would pressure the government, but it all died down.
I dont yet know why there was a decline in interest for the plenum. It
seemed to me that the way in which the plenum functioned (one man-one
vote) did offer a light at the end of the tunnel for all interested citizens: in
that forum, they could express openly their dissatisfaction, find like-minded
people and ideas to solve things they were unhappy with. This was a huge
step toward real democracy, the kind striven for by all citizens in this country
who are now accustomed only to the dominant transitional democracy.
Another positive outcome from the February 2014 explosion of discontent is the formation of the Union of Solidarity. In a speech at one of the
plenums, I pointed out that I could not and did not support any existing union
organisations, and that a new union should be established, one which will not
be a puppet front for the vested interests of political parties. This idea took

32

root and later the employees, who were still organising themselves through
the remnants of the former unions of the destroyed factories, founded the
Union of Solidarity. Of necessity this was done swiftly and without true and
fair election of the management. Union organisation, as a form of the fight
for the rights of workers, must continue to exist, but such organisation must
be established and led according to the will of the majority of their members
brought together in the struggle for their rights and led by the principles of
securing offices within the union.
Ground down by 20 years of disempowered, citizens must surely recognise that the creation of new jobs, new factories, and schools has will not
happen as a result of any promises by current incumbents. Will it have to
take another 20 years for us all to realize who wrought such a havoc? That is
why all the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina should make a decision in
principle that they will not go on like thisat the very least, for the sake of
their children and grandchildren.

33

Zlatan Begi

War, Peace and the Protests

War
The year is 1994 War is raging throughout the territory of Bosnia and
Herzegovina with. In Sarajevo, the capital, the front lines intersected. The
battles are being fought within the city itself. There are several enclaves in
Eastern Bosnia which are besieged, one of which is Srebrenica, where, in less
than a year from now, there will be genocide. In Western Bosnia, the Biha
enclave is also besieged. There is difficulty with water, food, medical supplies and other life necessities reaching the citizens.
Everyone was waiting for the response of the International Community
to these medieval-type sieges of cities, to the daily shelling of civilian targets,
the starvation, the massacres, the mass executions, the rapes All of this was
happening at the heart of democratic Europe And what was the response of
the International Community at the brutal aggression on Bosnia and Herzegovinas young democracy? Convoys of humanitarian aid. In fact, convoys of
humanitarian aid that only arrived after the international recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina; after its admission to the UN, after the start of aggression and after the embargo on the import of arms that could have equipped
the legal institutions of the government of this young country.
That was also the response of the democratic international community
to the crisis in Yugoslaviaas the civilized Europe and the World called
the slaughter they were witnessing. The embargo, of course, applied to all of
the warring parties in Bosnia and Herzegovinaa decision which did not
worry the generals in Belgrade, which, over the past fifty years, had amassed
a military capability worthy of a third military force in Europe. As is well
known, it was the embargo on arming the defenders, in combination with the
protected zones of the United Nations, which, in the end, de facto, enabled
the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is the first
deception that was perpetrated upon the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The response of the Bosnia and Herzegovinas legal institutions in Sarajevo to the aggression, the siege, the starvation of its citizens, the mass executions and the organisation of systematic rape, was at times also surprising.
For example, back in 1994, in the midst of war, the Parliamentary Assembly
of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the proposal of the Government, passed a Law on Ownership Transformation. This was, of course, at
35

the time when the conflict was at its fiercest, when the remaining patches of
territory under the control of legal institutions of the young Bosnia and Herzegovina could barely be defended; at the time when areas under the protection of the UN were suffering daily attacks; where, only a few months later,
there would be genocide in Srebrenica. Under such circumstances, the passing of this law went completely unnoticed.
Why is this law, which was passed during a period of all-out war, so
important? Because this law represented the preparation for what was to
follow after the war ended, and what is now considered as the biggest robbery ever witnessed in this territory, since there was first mention of Bosnia
and Herzegovina in the history books. This assertion of course, refers to the
privatisation, which was conducted after the war, but the preparation for its
implementation was carried out during the fiercest warfare, when the public
focus was directed simply towards survival. By passing this law, the legal
institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina in its capital city, Sarajevo, conducted
the transfer and legal transformation of all public-owned property into stateowned property. Simply put, they granted themselves the legal right to dispose of an enormous amount of property, composed of all the means of production, which was transferred out of the workers/citizens hands and placed
into the hands of the state, i.e., the means of production were then owned by
the state in the shape of its institutionsinstitutions that were structured
along the logic of political parties. After that, the state would issue shares
the mechanism used to privatise the companies, after which the majority of
these companies were ruined.
Therefore, the legalisation of privatisation represented the final act of a
highly planned process, which was carried out according to the following
model: public-owned property (simply put, the property of the workers/citizens) was turned into state property (as the property of the state, it was
then at the disposal of its institutions, that is, the party elites, which dictated
the structure of state institutions), ultimately to be followed by the further
privatisation of state-owned property into private property. And, so, while the
workers of numerous companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina had defended
their country on the front lines, defended their state, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
they were astonished when, after the war ended, they had to face the fact that
the socially-owned property they worked for decades to create, now belonged
to someone else.
Straight from the factory gates, some sooner, some later, they were all
sent off, by the new private owners, to the bureaus for the unemployed, and,
then, cast off by society. That is how the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina
were deceived for the second timeonly this time by the institutions of the
state, which they had defended with their own lives for a full four years.

36

Peace
If peace is defined as the absence of war, then, the period from 1995 until
today can be referred to as a period of peace. However, apart from the absence of war, little else can be considered as providing conditions worthy of
the description peace. Powerful party elites control absolutely everything.
We are witnesses to the abhorrent erosion of industrial, natural resources, and
all other resources of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Intra-party structures, in the
organizational sense, are adapting themselves to fit themselves into this newly established constitutional structure of the country. So, each canton in the
Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina finds itself led by a few local powerful
individuals, who rule over the lives and deaths of the disempowered citizens
from the shadows, by using the devious party machineries that have developed. The situation is the same at the Entity level.
The process begins thus: very subtly, a network of obsequious subjects
is developed in public institutions, all organised through the party-family
axis. That is how a party-family infrastructure was slowly built, which then,
over years, goes on to remodel all public institutions in its own image. Individuals own abilities and their critical thinking gradually becomes an antireference for anything, as well as a cause to marginalise those who dare to
think for themselves. Often, the public media, which are under complete
control of various party elites, begin to enforce the punitive isolation of citizens who refuse to toe the party-family line. At that same time, using the
power of the aforementioned Law, the breath-taking asset-stripping of the
industrial wealth of the country is being carried out, leading to the destruction
of thousands of prospective enterprises and the creation of mass unemployment and dispossession.
In the early stages, this process progressed subtly and slowly, concealed
behind various piecemeal legal changes and seemingly unimportant governmental decisions, wrapped up in the justification that it is all perfectly legal! The adjustments to the Law were no longer undertaken to fit the needs
of certain parties or policies, but to fit the needs and desires of individuals
within the parties, all facilitated through a developed network of party sympathisers within the institutions of government.
I say that the process was subtle and slow in the beginning. That was
back in the day when the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, represented by the Office of the High Representative, still preformed
its obligations as set by the General Framework Agreement for Peace. But, in
such a context, the Office of the High Representative chose not involve itself
in the privatisation thievery which was being conducted by these infiltrated
domestic institutions. However, various other interventions by the Office of
the High Representative enabled the functioning of legal state. Fearing the
possible sanctions, or replacements and bans on engaging in public affairs,
the domestic masters of life and death, carefully and yet again, under the

37

claim that it is all perfectly legal, developed extensive party-family networks within public institutions and companies, patiently awaiting the moment of absolute freedom.
And then, a crucial moment happens: the Peace Implementation Council
in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Office of the High Representative make a
decision that they will no longer execute their obligations as laid down in the
General Framework Agreement for Peace. In this way, the International
Community was the first, formally and unequivocally, to violate the terms of
the Agreement. In doing so, the International Community rode roughshod
over the fact that the General Framework Agreement for Peace, by its legally
binding nature, was and is an international contract that is bound by the regulations and provisions of the Vienna Convention regarding the Law on International Contracting.
More specifically, Annex 10 of the General Framework Agreement for
Peace defines the rights, the obligations, and the responsibilities of the Office
of the High Representative for Peace. The parties to this agreement are Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia and the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (i.e. the Republic of Serbia). In accordance with the provisions of
the Vienna Convention and international law, only the contracting parties are
authorized subsequently to change an agreement they made. In this particular
case, only Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia, in the legal sense,
can repeal one or more Annexes of the Agreementnot the Peace Implementation Council, since the Council is not a contracting party to this agreement.
Contrary to this, the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by
deciding, in essence to repeal one of its Annexes (in this case Annex 10),
violated the international law assuming the role of a party to this agreement,
instead of acting as the guarantor of the agreements implementation.
What is particularly hypocritical is the justification given for such an
unlawful decision: where it was stated that the Bonn Powers, which define
how the High Representative and his office in Bosnia and Herzegovina is to
perform its obligations, are not part of the General Framework Agreement for
Peace. However, the provisions, which define the position of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) are not a part of the Agreement either. Thus, if
we were to abide by this logic, then the PIC should not exist either, let alone
be responsible for making any decisions. However, all the while there is a
deliberate ignoring of the fact that, the High Representative is the sole and
final authority regarding the interpretation and implementation of the General
Framework Agreement for Peace. The document on the so-called Bonn Powers, in fact, represents the necessary definition of the form through which the
High Representative is to carry out the obligations defined by the General
Framework Agreement for Peace, which is the essence of his position.
After such positioning of the International Community in 2006, the local powerful political figures began to impudently and publicly do the things
they had once done subtly and gradually. Finally they had arrived at their

38

moment of absolute freedom, and, without fear of sanctions or dismissals,

they have embarked on finishing the project of creating a state in their image
and driven by their ideological stance. Apart from the fact that a significant
amount of property has been carved up between them, the corruption and
criminalization of system institutions is deepening, and a complete system of
party-family structure is fully embedded. Every day we see prime ministers,
assembly presidents, envoys and other senior public officials appointing their
closest relatives as directors of public companies. We see the government
giving grants from public funds to private firms run by the spouses of ministers who work in that same government, or employing immediate family
members in public institutions and companies.
Employment vacancies in public bodies are being advertised without
any objective criteria so that it is clear predetermined candidates are being
lined up for the posts, according to their family or party affiliations. There are
numerous cases when e.g. the preconditions, as set forth by the public employment vacancy documentation, outlines that the applicant for the position
of, for example, a sports officer in the Cultural Correctional Institution
should be a mining and geology engineer! The arrogance finally goes as far
as not advertising the employment vacancies publicly at all, but cutting
straight to making appointments without any public, transparent competition,
simply according to party merit or family affiliation. With all this, arrogance
becomes the basic principle in communication with citizens.
This is all being indolently observed by the International Community,
which contributes to the ruin of Bosnia and Herzegovinas institutional system. So, along with their failure to execute the obligations from the General
Framework Agreement for Peace, they also promote a model of strong and
powerful leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This model includes the disempowering public institutions, in such a way that the key issues are not debated
and decided on within those institutions. On the contrary, the representatives
of the international community imposed a model, which implies that the key
decisions are to be negotiated with the leaders of the strongest political parties. Far from the public eye, most often in pubsfive, six or seven people
discuss and decide on issues that relate to all citizens, in the presence of and
under the supervision of the grandees of European and world democrats.
Thus, the main role of the official institutional system of Bosnia and Herzegovina is that of an automaton, where the elected officials should only formally raise their hands for what their leaders agreed on during private parties.
Such actions by the International Community have had several significant consequences for Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the first place, the policy
of not meddling has actually meant a policy of violating the General
Framework Agreement for Peace and international law. It created the conditions for the negotiation of everything by an inner circle of leaders. Their
decisions have included both if and then if so, how to implement the decisions of the constitutional court in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This has led to

39

80 outstanding verdicts, which, having been taken by the constitutional courts

in Bosnia and Herzegovina, have never been implemented. This is about
failure to implement verdicts and judgments, which found that there had been
numerous violations of the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the
Entities Constitutions, and thus violations of the General Framework
Agreement for Peace as well. If the implementation of just one of the most
significant of these verdicts had been enacted when it was madei.e. several
years agoe.g. the one concerning Bosnia and Herzegovinas state property,
then Bosnia and Herzegovina, today, would be a member of NATO. This
situation illustrates the importance of implementing these verdicts. Although
failure to implement court verdicts, especially those of the constitutional
courts, is deemed a criminal offense under the law in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its domestic judicial institutions have not once initiated a single prosecution against the persons responsible for this failure.
However, in addition to the responsibility of the domestic holders of
public functions, there is also clear legal responsibility for the current state of
affairs in this country that lies at the door of the Office of the High Representative. Within the deadline stipulated by the Constitutional Court for the
implementation of verdicts, which note violations of Bosnia and Herzegovinas Constitution, and the General Framework Agreement for Peace, the
duty of the High Representative is also proscribedwhich is political in
nature. Such duty can be exercised through official discussions, negotiations,
warnings and other appropriate measures. However, upon the expiration of
the deadline, the duty upon the Office of the High Representative increases,
transforming from a political into a legal duty. Simply put, after any
deadline which is set forth by the Constitutional Court, the High Representative is legally obliged to ensure the implementation of the Constitutional
Courts decisions through his own decisions, otherwise this means that the
General Framework Agreement for Peace is being violated. This is meant to
eliminate the emergence of an unconstitutional state. This right and this duty
stem from Annex 10 of the General Framework Agreement for Peace, since,
as stipulated therein, the High Representative is the final authority who
should ensure its implementation.
By pushing this idea and practice of strong leaders, the international
community has placed individuals above the citizenry of the country, and by
disregarding its obligations; the Office of the High Representative has placed
the very same individuals above the law and the Constitution. In such a context, one can hear statements made by one of the political leaders, who
concluded that the Constitutional Court makes unconstitutional verdicts. All
of this has led to a rapid disruption of the principles of the rule of law and of
the mores and norms of a legal and constitutional state, without which a
democratic state cannot function. The strong-leaders approach has caused
citizens no longer to trust the systems institutions and has led to great electoral apathy which suits very well some of the existing party elites.

40

After the protests that took place in February 2014, a series of meetings
between the protest and plenum participants with representatives of the International Community were held, including almost all ambassadors or representatives from embassies. At these meetings, I personally warned about the
violation of the General Framework Agreement for Peace by the International
Community, and explained in detail, from a legal standpoint, the implications
of such violation. What took me aback was that the senior officials of these
foreign embassies seemed to be completely surprised to experience Bosnia
and Herzegovinas lawyers taking a legal approach concerning the General
Framework Agreement for Peace and the obligations on the International
Community through the Office of the High Representative, according to the
very terms of that agreement. This was a new approach for the overwhelming
majority of those present.
In connection with what I have outlined above, I remember the reaction
of a Slovak Embassy official in particular. There was an all-day meeting with
ambassadors and representatives from 16 Embassies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was held at the residence of the Belgian Ambassador to Bosnia
and Herzegovina. The officials gathered to deprecate the lack of responsibility being taken by domestic political leaders and stressed their inability to
sanction them. After I elaborated on the rights, obligations and responsibilities of the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina enshrined in
the General Framework Agreement for Peace and understood from the standpoint of international legislation, one younger diplomat, a Slovak embassy
representative, with a smug smile, said something like this to me: When I
studied Law, the first thing that I learned was that, where international law is
concerned, there are no sanctions that are effective against those who do not
comply with their international legal obligations. I then asked him: Then
what is the difference between the local political leaders, about whose irresponsibility we have been talking for the entire day, and you, as leaders within the international community? Clearly, there are no effective sanctions
against either of you for your failure to complete each of your obligations.
Thats when I realized that the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been
deceived for a third time.

The Protests
The development and the consequences of the demonstrations are, more or
less, well known. However, what we do need to shed light upon is the phenomenon and the tactics of this corrupted political structure as it has impacted on the criminalization of the protests and protesters. On the very first day
of the demonstrations, the regimes puppet-media published information that
accused the demonstrators of mounting campaigns of robbery, as well as
reports that 12 kilograms of drugs had been found among the protesters in

41

Sarajevo. The public and private regime puppet-media were filled with
frightened political leaders who upheld the truth of this misinformation and
assisted in its spread. In doing so, these public officials, running around like
headless chickens, often contradicted one another. For example, while a
member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bakir Izetbegovi,
was stating one piece of misinformation through one media outlet, e.g. that
12 kilograms of drugs had been found among the protestors, a second media
outlet covered a report from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Sarajevo
Canton, which stated that, as a result of police action against drug traffickers,
the 12 kilograms of drugs had actually been found in a completely different
part of town, and that it had nothing to do with the demonstrations.
It was absolutely surreal to stand in front of an undamaged Omega
shopping centre in Tuzla, and, at the same time, read statements on the internet, issued by politicians and reports made by the regimes puppet-media
claiming that that very same shopping centre had been robbed by crazed
hordes of protesters. During the past couple of days a report made by North
Korean state television has been in circulation, which states that this countrys football team is a step away from the World Cup finals, although the
North Korean team has not actually made it into the competition! Watching
this report took me back a couple months, and made me feel as perplexed as
that morning in February 2014 when I stood outside the Omega shopping
centre and read the statements about it having being stripped and trashed by
the protestors.
There is the case of the director of the Federal police administration,
whom one journalist referred to, on air, as the General of police. That
General had spent days visiting the media and claiming that the protesters
were in fact terrorists; that a coup dtat was in progress and similar such
nonsense. The General seemed to have forgotten that he is the head of
police under whose auspices a privatization process that has looted all public
assets has been carried out, and that that this same police force, along with
the judiciary, has failed entirely to react in an adequate way. The General
seemed to have forgotten that that police, including the judiciary, has spent
years neglecting the majority of cases of apparent corruption and serious
crime. Yet, ultimately, the General was not ashamed to appear in front of
cameras wearing the uniform of such a police force.
Also, it is interesting to note that after the downfall of the Government
in Tuzla on 7 February, there was no functional government whatsoever for
nearly two weeks. State services, including the police, did not function at all.
What is even more interesting is that, during this period, not one criminal
offence took place. This speaks volumes about the discipline of protests and
even more about the protesters, which the regime puppet-media so badly
wanted to depict as hooligans.
While I write this, the independent judiciary of Bosnia and Herzegovina is working hard to imprison demonstrators, with the aim of intimidat-

42

ing the population and discouraging them and others from participating in
future protests. That judiciary is part of the same system, and is no different
from other political structures in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That judiciary
functions as a stick in the hands of the political elites. There is a significant
responsibility on the part of the International Community in this aspect as
well, but, hypocritically, they defend themselves on this issue by asserting the
so-called independence of Bosnia and Herzegovinas judiciary. The judiciary in Bosnia and Herzegovina is indeed independentindependent of
any connection to legality and completely untouchable in its idleness, corruption and servicing of the interest of the criminalized political elites and the
structures they have built. It is not independent in anything else. This claim
is supported by the miserable results of the work of judicial institutions, but
also the fact that no one has been prosecuted for the looting that has accompanied privatization, for corruption or serious crime, and numerous other
egregious failures.
However, we must rejoice in the fact that the citizens have not yet been
cheated for a fourth time. The tendency for voluntary consent to multiple
frauds is so characteristic of Bosnians and Herzegovinians that there is an old
saying in our country which goes like this: Fool me onceshame on you;
Fool me twicegood for you; Fool me three timesshame on me.

After the protests

It remains to be seen.

43

Damir Arsenijevi

Protests and Plenum: The Struggle for the Commons

You dont have to wonder and ask, why did it happen in Tuzla? Tuzla was
probably one of the strongest industrial places in former Yugoslavia and
now everything is destroyed. Imagine how many of us are in the streets
now. I havent worked since the end of the war. How do I live? I live with
my eighty-five-year old mother, who has three heart stents and I have to
give her insulin every day. We survive on her pension, which is 150 Euros a
month. And you think this is all? The employer hasnt paid my national insurance contributions and I worked for twenty-seven years. The prosecutors office should hear us. The cases of theft through corrupt privatization
have been deliberately sidelined for fifteen years. After fifteen years they
now think of forming a committee that will allegedly speed up the review of
illegal privatizations. Why now? Because people took to the streets. People
are the strongest, nobody can beat people. That is why we fear no one.
Mensud Grebovi, former worker in Polihem company, Tuzla

The protests
The protests that started in Bosnia and Herzegovina in February 2014 continue. Their message is clearthe time of the unquestioned hegemony of the
ethno-nationalist elites, who stole the countrys resources, common goods
and capital in the blood of war and genocide, is over. Local and international
politicians, who in concert have maintained and allowed the parasitisation of
the unwieldy and nepotistic ethnic bureaucratic structures, have exhausted the
citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina for almost twenty-two years. Out of rage
and despair, the citizens, many left with no choice but to rummage through
dustbins to survive, forced to give bribes for basic services, have finally stood
up and are demanding an end to the everyday terror of ethnic privatized slavery.
The image of the protest is heterogeneous: the disenfranchised workers,
the unemployed, war veterans, youth, pensioners, students and academics, all
came together to oppose this privatized slavery, underpinned, as it is, by the
internationally imposed multiculturalist apartheid that brings peace and
democracy to Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the threshold of hunger and despair, people refused to occupy the identitarian category to which they have
been neatly assigned for over two decades. They proved in practice that solidarity is still operative as a way of materializing and thinking equality. Pro45

tests at the same time brought together these various groups and brought
down these identitarian walls. Against the fetish of difference and reification
of ethnicityenforced by the alliance of ethnic oligarchs and the members of
the so-called International Communitythe people in the protests insisted
on commonality and joint demands for justice for all. The displacement of
the hitherto imposed social classifications by these joint demands took place
in the street and this is why the street functions as the metonym of the protests. Why the street? The street enables the emergence of the previously
censored speech of commonality and proves as a lie that we live parallel lives
that never intersect. It tears apart the spatial hierarchies; the street shows that
you may be destitute, but you are not alone; the street brings us all together as
bodies in movement, the street reminds us that the ultimate barricade is the
human body and that this body stops the flow of everyday terror. And the
metonym of the terror is the continuation of corrupt privatization.
It was the recognition of the workers demands as a universal demand
that brought the street together. This unity makes tangible in everyday life in
Bosnia and Herzegovina that this is the way to stand up against privatization.
International and local bureaucracies administer post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina through the ideology of reconciliation, which imposes an ethnic
logic on the loss resulting from the war and genocide. In the ideology of
reconciliation, commemorations of loss in public spaces are cast along ethnic
lines and they are predicated on the creation of ethnic victims. The effects
of the ideology of reconciliation are the following: loss resulting from the
war and genocide is further mythologised in favour of the ethnic oligarchies;
grief is manipulated in such a way that it is used to promote the view that
there is no alternative other than the ethnic reality.
The street stands for the recuperation of public space in the interests of
the living, as opposed to the privatization of death from which the ethnic
oligarchies still extract capital. In the 19921995 war, the newly-elected
ethnic elites mobilised the working class to carry out the final stage of the
counter-revolution, which had started immediately following WWII through
the bureaucratisation of Yugoslavia. This final 1990s stage was the war
against Yugoslavia and the attempt to eradicate all anti-fascist struggle. These
ethnic elites distributed the weapons among the workers to kill one another in
the war, and then, at the extreme point of genocide, it was workers who buried the bodies in mass graves. In the war, the ethnic elites amassed huge
wealth and became oligarchies, which now continue to profit from the mass
gravesboth the discovered and the clandestine ones. These graves are the
foundations for the ethnic manipulation of fear and grief. And the results of
this war? Hundreds of thousands of dead, over a million refugees and displaced persons, and thousands of missing persons, whose remains are scattered around the country and buried in as yet unknown locations. All this
violence seems to have served one double-stranded purpose: for ethnic oli-

46

garchies force capitalism on Yugoslavia and, hand in hand with that, personally, to become millionaires. The terrorising post-war reconstruction forced
people to accept helplessness and escape into their private spaces, which
spaces have got smaller and smaller. The reduction of public space and the
silencing of public language that can speak of equality have been further
deepened by the NGO compradors, through their programmes and projects
obsessed, as they are, with identity politics. Corrupt privatisation, in all its
manifestations, continues the logic of the politics of ethnic death and the law
of the mass grave; it continues the dismemberment of solidarity and seeks to
destroy even the last lingering traces of commonality that resisted and survived the war.
Fighting corrupt privatisation, including when it means burning its sites,
such as the cantonal governmental buildings in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is
also a wartime reminder not to acquiesce to helplessness but to fire back
when fired upon. What the protests fired back againstwhat they literally
set on fireare the sites from which the ethnic politics enacted its brutalising
corruption: through everyday bribes, threats, and intimidations. These were
the sites from which the police were ordered to attack the protesters, using
brute force. Setting these sites on fire symbolically and creatively made space
for a new type of politics to emerge: rescuing the idea and the practice of
politics itself from the corruption of the authoritarian accumulation of capital.
The street recovers and brings together what I call unbribable life, as
life that refuses to be corrupted and bought off in the face of a politics that
aims to desensitise such life in relation to the workings and effects of the
terror of the corrupt privatization.1 It is a life that is not individuated, life that,
in its demand for and its insistence on the politics of equality for all, enacts
its refusal to be bribed. In the protests, unbribable life tears down the division
that is produced by the imperative of corrupt privatization: what is animal
becomes human and what is human becomes animal.2

The plenum
Plenums are public gatherings, open to any citizen, through which collective
decisions and demands can be made and action taken, beyond guarantees of
1

I discussed this previously when analysing the corrupt privatisation of ethnic remains
from genocide through the strategic collaboration of: forensic science; multiculturalist
post-conflict management, with its politics of reconciliation; and religious ritualan uncouth alliance between the Scientist, the Bureaucrat, and the Priest. See Damir Arsenijevi, Gendering the Bone: The Politics of Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Journal
for Cultural Research, 15 (2011) 2, pp. 193205. Unbribable life can also be talked about
through Lacans notion of lamella, as organe irrel, that comes together through the protests against the corrupt privatization. The etymology of corrupt is most telling here: not
just as to bribe, but as cor- altogether + rumpere to break.
See Marxs discussion of estranged labour in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844.

47

leadership. They are open, direct, and transparent democracy in practice. The
Plenum, as the form of self-organisation and the method of work, in which
citizens come together to articulate demands, is underpinned by the action of
the protests. The threat of protests legitimises the plenum. People now recognize that the open and transparent model of plenum work, in which decisions
about the commons are made without prohibitions on speech and without
leadership, is a way out of corruption, hopelessness, and poverty. First and
foremost, the plenum is a setting for speech beyond prohibition and censorship. This type of setting is crucial to fight corrupt privatization and the fear
it instils when it comes to making decisions about the commons. The plenum
model of work creates a different public language by enabling people, who,
as a result of war, have withdrawn from public life and the so-called, transition to democracy, to have a say about the matters that concern them in
everyday life. The plenum is a public space where, through calls for a different kind of justice, demands for equality are spoken. This is the ethics of the
plenum.
The Plenum is now under attack. The attack comes from all quarters:
from the corrupt and complacent ethnic oligarchies and their media, who
vilify the Plenums demands for openness, transparency and non-corruption;
to the incredulous and hedging local NGO compradors and various international actors, who have been stunned by the outstanding class solidarity expressed in the plenums. The first have everything to lose: in over twenty-two
years of killing and stealing, the eighty-five wealthiest oligarchs in Bosnia
and Herzegovina are collectively worth $9 billion. International and local
actors, despite their calls and concrete activities to locate, arrest, and prosecute war criminals, failed to end impunity by disregarding financial crimes.
To end impunity means that nobody can be immune from prosecution. To
end impunity means to interrupt the international and local flows of capital
that were amassed in the war and genocide, to locate and arrest war criminals.
The latter also have everything to lose: international organisations have given
credibility to ethnic oligarchs by negotiating a range of deals with them for
over two decadesfrom imposing censorship on talk about war-time atrocities to maintaining ethnic segregation in schools. Throughout the same time,
they have encouraged the creation of over 10,000 local NGOs, whose activities predominantly insist on resignation to the status quo and the upholding of
the ideological stance that there is no alternative. These local NGO compradors further promote the neoliberal framework of the rule of law by assuming the proscribed idiotic position: as mere rapporteurs and monitors of
violence, working to strengthen the capacities of the weak ethnic bureaucracies.
The plenum puts an end to this idiotic position, in which activism in
Bosnia and Herzegovina was confined to a range of so-called development
projects. In doing so, the plenum enacts an emancipatory politics that confronts authorities with demands for a cessation of all forms of violence, insur-

48

ing our seriousness with the threat of mass protests. Emancipatory politics is
not mere reporting on violence against freedom. It does not settle for the
crumbs swept from the table of the international donors and ethnic oligarchs.
Emancipatory politics harnesses all the courage we have to materialize hope
against the predominant insistence on making impossibility convincing.3
For over twenty-two years, citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina who
survived the war were told that they are a charity case, that they live in a
black hole, that they face a shapeless future and the best they can hope for
is to get by, put up with it, and be grateful if their children are offered a
chance to work on American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, servicing those wars. For over twenty-two years, ethnic oligarchs have raped and
killed, mentally and physically abused women, men and children alike in the
carnage that was heralded as transition into democracy. Since the end of
the war in 1995, instead of mourning the horrific losses, citizens of Bosnia
and Herzegovina have been forced, by local and international actors alike, to
acquiesce to an imposed censorship, in which speaking and acting is only
permissible if they embrace the status of victims, from off the backs and
bodies of whom the ethnic elites can steal the commons and thus, amass their
obscene fortunes.
The protests and plenums created, for the first time, a chance for Bosnia
and Herzegovina to move from melancholia to mourning: that is, to face the
losses and start counting the gains from the war. Ours is life that has survived
war and genocide; has survived the feeling of deep mistrust whilst expecting
some salvation. Ours is life that has been brutalized by the corrupt privatization of public companies, life that only dreams of fleeing this country, life
that knows that its only certainty is that it can die in solitude and hunger. This
is the life from which we have now to recuperateto create anew more humane and social ties that offer all of us hopeful, and not a resigned future.
And it is this lifeunbribable lifethat in agony and pain gives up on mistrust and works hard to produce and practice a different possibility now. How
do I know this? I am part of this life and every day, I remind myself that the
protests and the plenum are one and the same thing, they are the ways in
which to keep the body-politic functioning, in public space, moving and
practicing that possibilitybecause this is our only chance of staying alive.

Raymond Williams wrote extensively on this subject.

49

Emir Hodi

Jer me se tieBecause it Concerns Me

Many observers have written about the February protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the subsequent emergence of peoples plenums. Opinions
ranged from delirious revelations that the revolution is upon us, to cynical
dismissals coming from socialites and other elites. But regardless of ideological standpoint, everyone paid attention and everyone had expectations.
Under the enormous weight of expectation though, popular public opinion
has been largely critical of plenums and their inability to maintain pressure
and mobilize. The expectation was that plenums were to become a significant, catalysing political factor in a corrupt system run by oligarchssimply,
to force a twenty year old ethnocracy to change, thats all.
While the people involved in organizing plenums across Bosnia and
Herzegovina have made many mistakes, it is important to note the difficulties
activists are facing throughout the Balkans. Any analysis of social movements and activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina must be addressed from a
post-conflict, or cold-peace perspective.
We are talking about a country that has never truly recovered from the
bloody war of the nineties. We are talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing,
crimes against humanity, colossal destruction and a General Framework
Agreement for Peace that nobody is happy with. War criminals are presented
as heroes, and war profiteering thugs have put on suits and drive Audis, that
is, they are materially successful. It is now clear to everyone that the political
elites are using nationalism for their own personal gain, creating an artificial crisis that allows both them and their cronies to plunder with impunity,
continuing the conflict through other, more covert means. However, when the
downtrodden respond against institutionalized violence with violence, then
local and international elites scream about the rule of law, and from a refined
perspective, deplore all forms of violence.
The worker protests that started in Tuzla, and spread to other cities in
February, were seen as that opportunity, a time for corrupt politicians to finally reap what they have sown. However, the surprising speed of events
the scale of the protests, of police brutality, the scare tactics, the weight of
expectation and the inability to defend against a powerful media onslaught,
has left many activists burned out and losing the propaganda war. Having
said that, I am of the opinion that for the past few years we have been wit-

51

nessing a social movement in its inception and the February protests were
just the spark needed for maturity.

When workers of five of Tuzlas factories took to the streets on the 4 February 2014, hardly anyone paid any attention. Bosnia has seen its fair share of
localised worker protests in recent years, many of them disregarded or ending
up in the margins of leading newspapers. Needless to say, most people didnt
have high expectations. After the watering down of the JMBG1 protests last
year, a certain melancholy infected most activists; there was a general feeling
of acceptance that protests simply dont work in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
However, when protestors clashed with police and broke into the government building in Tuzla on the 5 February, the media took notice. People in
Tuzla decided that they were no longer going to recognize, nor tolerate, the
authority that has caused them such hardship over the years, and they took
personal risks in expressing their desperation. As the online headlines said,
Demonstrators clashed with police.
Upon hearing about the events taking place in Tuzla, several friends and
I agreed to organize a solidarity protest in front of the Cantonal government
building in Sarajevo. We had only two hours to organize a call to action via
social media, and inform people of the importance of standing in solidarity
with our brothers and sister in Tuzla. Late in the afternoon on 5 February
there were approximately thirty of us protesting outside the Cantonal building. Mostly familiar faces, some were even unhappy to see each other at the
protest again. That evening, a local Sarajevo news portal published the sarcastic headline, Mass protests in Sarajevo.
When we returned the following day, 6 February, we didnt really know
what to expect and we were prepared for a low turnout. But we were pleased
to be proven wrong, there were already a few hundred people standing in
front of the government building. Describing the general mood of the gathered citizens as angry would be an understatement. As in Tuzla the previous day, people screamed out thieves, thieves!
By the 7 February protests had begun to spread throughout much of the
country, mainly in the Federation. In Sarajevo there were around 3000 people
in front of the Cantonal government building. Riot police made a cordon in
front of the building while enraged people shouted at them, who are you
protecting?! It reminded me of an identical scene during Occupy Wall St in
New York, when demonstrators asked the police the exact same thing and the
NYPD answered with batons. Sarajevo police answered in the same way.
1

52

JMBGPersonal ID number. Protests started over the inability of politicians to agree on

personal ID number amendments.

All of a sudden riot police charged the demonstrators, beating everyone

in their way. I foolishly believed that I wouldnt be hit while taking photos
with my DSLR.
Then I noticed that the police were now running in the opposite direction. It seemed I was in the middle of a counter attack. Hundreds of demonstrators charged back at the police lines. The police were overwhelmed by the
sheer number of people ready for a fightpeople who threw stones and
charged at these symbols of authority. During the game of cat and mouse,
there was a point at which the police lines were in disarray and they had
retreated back to the park between the Presidency and cantonal government
buildings. Behind them a number of demonstrators rushed at the cantonal
building and smashing their way in through the main door. Mostly young
demonstrators, incensed by their fight with the police, projected their anger
onto the government building, a building that represented the power structure. As the building started to burn, I saw a young girl near the flaming entrance write with spray paint, Who sows hunger, reaps fury.

What started in Tuzla engulfed not only Sarajevo, but Mostar, Biha, Zenica,
and many other towns. On 8 February in Sarajevo, we had thousands of determined, angry and confused people on the streets. We received reports that
several people were arrested the previous night. Misinformation and fears of
further arrests spread quickly. Reports were coming in that the police were
beating up and intimidating people indiscriminately in the evening hours.
Most of the mainstream media was quick to report on hooliganism, violence and paid gangs. As a result of such conflicting, confusing and inaccurate broadcasts, many citizens were reluctant publicly to join the protests.
While many citizens did indeed support the protests and are well aware of the
corruption and criminal elements of the government, there are those who are
easily frightened by such reports of hooliganism, violence, terrorism and
other inaccurate portrayals of socially and economically disadvantaged demonstrators.
Many media outlets published unchecked police reports of large
amounts of illegal drugs being confiscated from those arrested. However not
all journalists were as easily intimidated. On the eve of the 8th of February,
while we were protesting in front of the burned out Presidency building, one
of the journalists who had been invited by the police to see the evidence
came over to me. He was visibly shaken and watchful. He told me how he
was invited into the police station to photograph the items that had been confiscated from the homes of arrested protestors. When he arrived there, he had
been taken through a number of rooms and was told to wait in one of them.
Eventually, one of the senior officers came into the room and threw the pho-

53

tos of evidence on the table and said, Publish these. He had been invited
to photograph the evidence, but instead of seeing and photographing the
actual confiscated materials, he had printed photos thrown at him. When he
showed me the photos, I understood why he had been so nervous and had
decided not to publish them as requested. The photos showed AK47s, handguns, knives, and twelve kg of the drug speed.
The following day the police issued a disclaimer, claiming that the
drugs allegedly seized from arrested demonstrators were in fact from a drugbust that was carried out nearby at about the same time as the protests were
going on.

The events that took place in Sarajevo on the 6, 7 and 8 February were a
mixture of chaos, panic, anger, suspicion and disorganized synergy. In the
wake of the violent outburst of protestors, as well as the police brutality and
the media attacks, a number of activists and academics met to figure out a
way forward. Following Tuzlas example, it had been agreed to organize the
first plenum in Sarajevo. Plenums were seen as the only viable way forward
in articulating demands and fending off attacks.
The ruling oligarchs know that nationalism is their best defence. These
protests and the emergence of citizens plenums were attacked precisely on
that basis.
In the Federation, Bosniak nationalist Bakir Izetbegovic said, it is not a
coincidence that the government buildings were attacked on territories defended by ARBiH.2 While the leader of Republika Srpska entity, Milorad
Dodik, told Serbian citizens not to protest, warning them that these protests
were Bosniak and aspiring to destabilize Republika Srpska.Such was the
paranoia of RS politicians that the protests would cross the border into the
tranquil Serbian entity, that there were posters printed warning citizens not to
join the Bosniak protests. Even the convicted war criminal, Biljana Plavsic,
went to the public and warned, If you protest, youre jeopardizing RS.
Nonetheless, people did protest in the RS, and during one of the war veterans protests in Banja Luka, a man, in his address to Dodik, described the
situation in one sentenceWhile we were shooting at each other, you were
getting rich.
So with politicians fostering ethnic tensions and most of the mainstream
media reporting on hooliganism, attacks on democracy, coup dtat and other
types of insidious nonsense, volunteers proceeded to find a location for the
first citizens plenum. Somehow, amongst the madness, people started working together, introducing new volunteers that had never worked together
before, all with the objective of making such a plenum possible. Basically,
2

54

ARBiHArmy of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

people self-organized due to the vast amount of mistrust held against politicians and political parties within the ethnocracy we live in.
Numerous volunteers worked under very stressful conditions for the
plenums to be productive. Despite external and internal pressures, most of the
people I know worked very long hours without rest and truly believed in
what they were doing. They believed in the importance of providing a space
for people to voice their concerns and offer suggestions. The calls for social
justice, rights, democracy, have energized everyone involved in attempting to
provide an alternative model to the institutional ethno-nationalist one.
Volunteers and all the plenum organizers throughout the country have
made many mistakes. There was no long-term strategy as such, the constant
attacks have forced volunteers and organizers into a position of perpetual
damage control. Plenary sessions were run on a direct democracy principle,
but it turned out to be much more difficult than predicted to have productive
sessions, for instance, trying to prevent plenums from becoming psychotherapy sessions for traumatized citizens, some of whom spoke publicly for the
first time about their situation and concerns. The animosity that was directed
at the political elite soon turned inwards, due to distrust, paranoia, infiltration
and other similar disruptions.
Some analysts have also criticized the work of plenums for being apolitical, for not openly backing non-nationalist parties, or making strategic alliances with NGOs. However, in an atmosphere of distrust of NGOs, and the
accusations of political infiltrations, such alliances would have lost the support of large number of protesters. Plenums, however, gave everyone a
chance to participate equally. Traumatized, downtrodden and distrustful people were competing for dominance of ideas. In that energetic, creative, volatile setting, a lot has been invested in articulating and legally formulating
hundreds of demands. At some point, so much energy was focused on running the plenums, articulating demands and fighting off external and internal
struggles, that the legitimizing forcethe number of people on the street was eventually lost. Piven and Cloward,3 wrote about the sudden rise of disruptive forces and how Organizers not only failed to seize the opportunity
presented by the rise of unrest, they typically acted in ways that blunted or
curbed the disruptive forces which lower-class people were sometimes able
to mobilize. Excluding the why, how, should, and so on, the general observation is that during most protests and movements, organizers opt out of
escalating mass protests in favour of organizing a structure, hoping that it
will grow in importance or power. Protest energy, which for a brief time truly
frightened some political leaders, gradually vanished off the streets due to a
lack of direction, leadership and any noticeable wins. Without the disruptive energy on the street, without real, applicable pressure, the plenums
quickly lost their relevance; therefore, their position to make demands.
3

See Francis Fox Piven and Richard Colward, Poor Peoples Movements: Why They
Succeed and how They Fail (New York: Random House Inc., 1979).

55

Plenums have ignited a way forward for future social movements in

Bosnia and Herzegovina. I understand that a lot of people, especially those
over the border, had great hopes and expectations for the n spring. Everyone had his or her own opinion on how and what should have happened,
from a violent overthrow of the government, to forming a new political party
ready for the October elections, or simply burning down the political elites
homes. None of which occurred. What did occur, however, was a change in
the political discourse.
Last years baby revolution is another example of a loud call from below. The humane mobilizing force resulted in rejection of nationalism, backdoor politics, corruption and the criticism of inattentiveness to the value of a
human life by our political elite. For twenty years citizens have been living
under leadership that had no interest in making peace with the past. Under
such repression, in a country that adopted dehumanization as a necessary
process in mobilization for atrocities, recently we have seen attempts at rehumanization. Organizing campaigns directly to challenge the status quo, and
applying pressure in order to force a response from the opponentin most
cases that response will be something that can be exploitedis the way of
rehumanizing our society. With elites defending their war criminals, denying
war crimes, or in some instances glorifying them, the proper political solidarity shown by the activists of Jer Me Se Tie (Because it concerns me)4 paves
the way for different approaches in addressing the recent past. They have
shown the importance of emphasizing the dangers on society if these issues
are not tackled, as well as challenging the dominant irreconcilable nationalist
narratives. The disruptive power of such different approachesthrough artistic interventions, occupations of public spaces, formations of free territories,
guerrilla actions, forms of civil disobedienceis a legitimate struggle for
rehumanization.
Building a movement that attacks hostile divisions, that builds on solidarity, and at the same time explores alternative political models, isnt an
easy task. But it is a task we must take if we are honest about our dedication
to a fairer society. Alternative grassroots movements will be an important
aspect of the struggles that we need to continue in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
as is also the case across the globe. Grassroots initiatives and social movements that arent motivated by financial gain, or institutional employment,
together with action to reform the corrupt unions, are some of the ongoing
engagements we need.
Nationalists have succeeded in imposing a model that they promote as
irreplaceablethat is fed by the divisive forces of capitalism and ethnicity.
Rather than focus only on fighting a small, but powerful elite, we must also
pay attention to the importance of work on the groundunderstanding peo4

56

JMST (Jer Me Se Tie, Because it concerns me)Activist initiative fighting segregation

and discrimination, with a special focus on civil victims of war crimes.

ples desires and fears and the way these, too, affect the situation politically.
While we should not dismiss the significance of institutional forces applying
pressure, neither should we dismiss citizen plenums as alternative models of
organising and acting. Sometimes events take place quickly, as we saw this
February. Guerrilla actions, street protests, occupations of free territory, are
fuel for changefor adjusting political discourse and the demands for reform. However, we also need to work on infrastructure and long-term commitment.
To those asking whats in it for me? I say, everything.

57

Aleksandar Hemon

Beyond the Hopelessness of Survival

Nothing says more about the state of affairs in Bosnia and Herzegovina than
the fact that after the cataclysmic flooding that hit the country in the past few
months no one seriously expected much help and support from their government. People were routinely assuming inaptitude, structural inability and
casual indifference when it came to helping the citizenry the said government
is supposed to be serving. Answering a question about what he was going to
do now that his life and property have been destroyed by the flood, one survivor said: Well figure something out! (Snai emo se!)
It is one thing when the government gives up on its citizens and their
welfare; it is quite another when the citizens forgo asking for basic things
from their government. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the social contract seems
to have been exposed as non-existent. The Bosnians have once again found
themselves alone in their own country with a familiar-looking gang, whose
members continue to claim spurious ethnic kinship.
It certainly didnt help that neither during the spring flooding nor thereafter, was there a centralized emergency-management plan, or a crisis group,
or trained units quickly mobilisable to help the people, or any sign of coordinated effort to relieve the suffering. Neither was there money in the state
budget for any kind of emergency reliefit had either been pilfered or the
government had wagered on nothing ever going wrong, likely both. Everything, of course, went and then continued to go wrong. Additionally, the socalled leadersand particularly Milorad Dodik, the bully at the helm of Republika Srpskawere far more invested in maintaining control over their
sorry domain than helping the people who lived inside it, let alone beyond.
Floods, they assumed, will come and go, but the entities and the power monopoly they allow must last forever.
It is not only often assumed but repeatedly asserted by those in charge
that nothing or, at best, not much can be done about the situation in Bosnia
and Herzegovina. The on-going catastrophe of the so-called transition provides plenty of permanent excuses and finger-pointing for the mismanagement and destruction of national infrastructure, for the endemic graft and
corruption, for the absence of the very notion of a common civic future and a
shared responsibility for it. Because there is nothing that can be done, nothing
presumably needs to be done, apart from maintaining entity jurisdictions and
related power and wealth distribution. Reproducing despair has thus become
59

a policy, the only consistent political program the parties in power share or
ever manage to offer.
The notion of helplessness has been reproduced in a two-fold manner:
on the one hand, the people (defined as/divided into three constitutive ethnic units) are frightened into thinking they would be helpless without the
experienced leadership of the elites; on the other hand, everyone is helpless
before the consequences of the catastrophesthe original one the war, the
most recent one the floodswhich exceed our abilities so much that all we
could truly hope for is mere survival. We, they say, must be realistic: the
disruption of the system would endanger our very survival, disrupting our
already well-practiced figuring out. Programmatic despair is further reinforced by a presumption of the democratic rulers ruthless selfishness and certainty that what little wealth in Bosnia and Herzegovina is left will be redistributed along the well-known pyramidal lines of political loyalties, which
are, as we know, conveniently ethnically drawn. In that light, the insistence
on maintaining entity competences (entiteske kompetencije), a demand for
strict application to the Dayton-agreed division of domains, makes more
sense than ever. Now that some relief money has arrived from abroad, it is
brazenly used as a means to buy votes for the fall electionsaid is distributed according to the needs of the ruling parties and entity competences, and
not the people.
The greatest damage inflicted upon Bosnia and Herzegovina by the gang that
governs it is therefore the systematic elimination of a common vision for a
better future. Fully dedicated to the extinction of any ideas as to how such a
future might be achieved, the political elites dont bother to submit even
unrealistic promises of a better future. Their election platforms offer, at best,
improved chances of individual and collective survival and, at worst, a kind
of hospice care for the moribund infrastructure and those who depend on it
because they have no place to go. Forever in a kind of holding pattern, the
citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are expected not to interfere with the
actual way the system works while figuring out how to attempt living a dignified life.
Hopelessness is hence the true underpinning all party platforms. As long
as no one can imagine a better country, the only options are imagining a worse one, for which ethnic tensions and hostilities are ever useful, or accepting the status quo, which appears manageable simply because weve managed to survive so far. Brimming with confidence in their inability to change
anything substantially, the Bosnian political elites have managed to convince
the foreigners (EU, NGOs, US, in order of indifference) that there is no one
else who could manage the survival and/or hospice, guaranteeing that the sick
would not escape to contaminate Europes bright and/or complicated future.
After all this time, the Bosnian and Herzegovinan population is so thoroughly discouraged by the constitutional paralysis, so exhausted by the ab-

60

sence of action and change that elections are routinely reduced to choosing
from the lists headed by the same cast of characters, over and over again.
Elections relegetimise actual disenfranchisement, restore hopelessness by
ensuring identical outcomes. Hence hopelessness in Bosnia and Herzegovina
is not merely a consequence of the war and difficult transition. It is a political
agenda unto itself, since any possibility of change undermines those in power, exposing along the way the fact that they didnt do what they should have
done, that theyre still not doing it and that there is no reason whatsoever to
believe they would ever actually get around to doing it. For the same reason,
limited competence and absence of imagination are cherished political assets,
commonly coupled with obedience to the so-called leaders, while graft and
corruption are tools of social control. A consensus seems to have been established all across the political smorgasbord: if the country is eventually going
to tank than it is not unreasonable to grab what can be grabbed before the
boat is to be jumped. If anyone is entitled to the spoils of the catastrophe, it is
those who worked so hard to maintain it.
Yet one must not make the mistake of thinking that the state of Bosnia and
Herzegovina is a natural consequence of political and/or managerial incompetence and mishandling. If that were the case, then more money or training
or pressure from the foreigners would effect some kind of change. If that
were the case, the persistent pursuit of a civic, civil society by the few NGO
idealists who believe in the local version of democracy would bear some
visible fruit. If that were the case, citizens could hope that out of the slime
pond of Bosnian politics a new, evolved organism might emerge, equipped
with new eyes and an ability to transcend the divisions and constitutional
paralysis and unite the populace in pursuit of the common civic project called
Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The sinking-ship platform and the related incompetence are systemic
and deliberate, the results of a combination of instinctive and malignant political intelligence on the part of Bosnian politicians. The redistribution of scarce wealth under the guise of slapdash transitional privatisation made criminal, political and business elites more than mutually indistinguishablethey
merged into one happy realm, where neither ethnic differences nor law matter
one bit. The common vision they share is of a state that is constantly and
constitutionally blocking its own functioning. The only common future they
can imagine is the one in which the state is about to die, the upside of the
situation being that its assets are to be shared by the elected few who have
long taken up the seats at its deathbed. And theyre certainly willing to keep
it comatose so as to be able to watch it die in perpetuity.
What the political elites perpetuate could be well called the Great Dayton
Ruse. While the Americans and EU believedand, incredibly, still believe
that the General Framework Agreement for Peace and the Constitution were

61

just the beginning and that some kind of carrot-and-stick-stimulated advancement of the people and their government was inevitable, the political
forces (the nationalist parties) in charge of Bosnia and Herzegovina realised
that they could well afford to wait out the initial burst of Daytonesque enthusiasm and let the things settle into something they could comfortably mismanage. They saw from the beginning how it would play out in the end. They
knew that the US and EU would sooner or later lose interest (which they did
in 2006, if not earlier) and felt confident that they were in fact the ones holding the carrot and the stick over the innocent foreigners who would always be
happy to settle for not having another troubling war on their hands. Bosnian
politicians are repeatedly committed to keeping Bosnians inside Bosnia and
Herzegovina, as well as making sure the country moves in predictable directions, even if slowly and toward the top of the list of the poorest ones in Europe, while EU/US are concerned about is the possibility that a deluge of
refugees could be unleashed by new hostilities, particularly now that theyre
busy with making all the wrong decisions regarding the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. No boat rocking means no boat people; in return the Bosnian political elites have a free reign to mismanage the country as they see fit. In their
alleged pragmatism, the Europeans and Americans would never listen to, let
alone endorse or nurture anything outside the predictably and comfortably
malfunctioning Bosnian system.
The token of that false stability, the diamond in the Dayton crown, is the
behemoth of Bosnian bureaucracy. The dysfunctional government has established itself as the largest and the only reliable employer in the country, as an
Edenic zone of endemic patronage and graft, with a plethora of ministries and
local, cantonal, federal and national institutions. It is a truly Kafkaesque situation in that the whole purpose of the system is never to get anything done.
The main and only threat to it are the peoplesome would call them citizens-who insist that something be done. The system hence works hard to disabuse
citizens of the notion that anything can be done, while effectively (or actually) depriving them of citizenship. The distant utopian goal, though no politician would dare or be coherent enough to formulate it, is a country without
citizens. This is why the educational system in Bosnia and Herzegovina had
to be calibrated to produce national subjects rather than citizens. While citizens might be able not only to imagine but to demand a better future, national
subjects are presumably content if the nation, comatose as it might be, simply
continues not to die.
The crucial operation of the Dayton-enabled mafia is a full and thorough elimination of any imaginable alternative to the existing system. The
bureaucratic behemoth absorbs much of political intelligence, including the
so-called opposition, implicitly or explicitly promising relative comfort as
long as nothing changes. It is thus important to commend Zlatko Lagumdija
and his SDP for their seminal and permanent elimination of a viable partisan
counterforce to the nationalists, all in return for a fair share of the spoils. The

62

voting-for-the-list electoral system further ensures that no one outside the

stranglehold of the established parties could dream of rippling the scum pond.
But the functioning of the political system that is willing to offer mere
survival depends, in the end, on the actual physical survival. The needs of the
population cannot be ignored indefinitely; some actual food and basic service
are irreducibly necessary; the utopian project of a state devoid of citizens is
not ultimately achievable. While the system believes in itself as stable
politically, constitutionallyit is, in reality, more than precarious. Recent
flooding destroyed so much infrastructure that the functioning of an already
dysfunctional state has been irreparably impeded at the very basic level. The
water has inflicted so much damage on the livestock and spring crops that the
increase in food pricing is inevitable, which might well lead to further social
unrest, regardless of the outcome of the fall elections. As any external pressure (global politics, financial markets, rain) exposes its rickety structure,
Bosnia and Herzegovina is but a catastrophe away from complete collapse.
Rampant climate change will inflict more damage, further exposing the
weakness at the sordid heart of the political system. The claim of the parties
in power that theyre necessary can no longer be sustained. The false alternative between survival and whatever else is the opposite has been reduced to a
pile of mud.
But what happens if we disregard the knee-jerk hopelessness and imagine
and pursue alternatives? What if the self-perpetuating trap of things-as-theyare can be transcended by looking for a different and/or better way to, first,
activate citizenrythose who would see and fight for their future beyond the
fog of national interestsand, then, organize them in a way that allows
them to speak as such.
The speed with which the plenums in Bosnia were undermined and
dismissed on the left and on the right and all across the political range was
symptomatic of the politics of despair, as was the glee when the movement,
spontaneous as it was, did not spread like a wild fire (outside Tuzla, at least).
Many couldnt wait to see the comforting confirmation that nothing could
ever change, many rejoiced when the value of inaction and passivity seemed
to have been re-establishedall of which expressed fear of understanding
that the plenum movement was a crucial precedent. This winters (2014)
protest was the first time that people assumed agency outside the political
system, the first time they outright rejected the politics of despair, the first
time they refused to believe the powers-to-be that nothing can be done, the
first time they stood up to the violent incompetence of their list-elected leaders. Even if the movement fails to accomplish quickly a major transformation
of the Bosnian society, it has shaken to the core the creaking despairmongering structures.
The peoples reaction to the catastrophic flooding showed why the plenums were so important: abandoned and ignored by much of the government,

63

people had to work together, help one another and seek solutions across the
ethnic divides. The flooding brought up the inescapable question: if the government cannot ensure its voters survival, let alone have a decent life, what
is its justification? What is its purpose and legitimacy?
The entire Bosnian body politic needs rebuilding from ground up. The
starting point has to be the civic solidarity discovered by way of plenums, the
only political space where people could actually practice their citizenship.
The trap of Bosnian democracy has to be transcended. The fall elections are a
turning point one way or another: if everything continues as it has been, then
the country is soon to be coming apart at its seams, which are actually far less
ethnic than infrastructural. If the voters have learned that their government is
constantly and systemically depriving them of citizenship and the basic services and minimum welfare that comes with it, then a change can be made in
the voting booth. Either way, the stakes are raised, and the struggle will intensify. Either way, the change is coming.

64

Haris Husari

February Awakening: Breaking with the Political

Legacy of the last 20 years

Eight months after the February 2014 riots in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
political elites and the judiciary are still turning a blind eye to the collapse of
the formerly state-owned factories, while workers continue to gather every
Wednesday in front of the local court, asking for justice to be meted out
against those who have obliterated the industrial complexes of Tuzla. Looking at these workers, standing at the junction of Maral Tito Street and Alija
Izetbegovi Alley, week after week, I have become aware, when contrasting
these peoples expectations with the actual legacy of the past twenty years, of
how poetically ironic life can be.
It was not by chance that the series of social and political riots in Bosnia
and Herzegovina first began in Tuzla, and then spread to many other cities
large and smallthat same day. Why Tuzla? Once the heartland of the countrys labour force, built and expanded after the Second World War, in the
post-socialist transition, Tuzla had been left on the brink of collapse when the
state-owned factories were sold to the private owners, who were then obliged
to invest in them and make them work. Instead, these new owners sold the
assets or raised loans, and in most cases, after some time, simply filed for
bankruptcy, leaving the indebted factories in the hands of banks. Applying
the same model, the industrial sector was also destroyed in similar fashion
and workers came to grief all over Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Tuzla, the
major industrial centre of the region, these changes forced the majority of
citizens to struggle to survive. The stagnation of social life has emerged as a
deadly legacy of the previous twenty years, a legacy that takes Bosnia and
Herzegovina through the post-socialist and post-war transition, encompassing
the forced take-over the industrial complexes and national resources, the
creation of extreme stratification within the society, the de facto enslavement
of its citizens and the creation of a seething conflict that finally exploded in
the acts of violence witnessed in February.
What began peacefully turned into the most violent scenes since the end of
the war in the 1990s. On 5 February, the workers gathered in front of the
cantonal authorities building to express their discontent, just like they had
done every Wednesday before thatand which the authorities ignored on
that day, as they had on all the others. However, this time, after the local

65

authorities yet again rejected the workers request for dialogue, a mass of
500-600 citizens, mostly workers with family members, put garbage containers in the middle of the street, blocking the movement of traffic in the city
centre. The police, who cordoned off the cantonal authorities building,
forced them off the streets using excessive force.
The brutality with which the police responded to this non-violent action
caused a public outrage, resulting in even more people taking to the streets
the following day. On 6 February, the gathering for the demonstration had
increased hugelyto around 5000-6000 people this time students and jobless
citizens joined workers, and united in mutual anger and social discontent, the
demonstration again blocked the city centre. Social life in Tuzla came to a
standstillthe citys main routes, at entrance and exit points, were controlled
by the police, whilst the traffic in the city was brought to a standstill by the
crowd. Schools were closed and classes were cancelled.
Yet once again, the local authorities rejected the request for dialogue
and the city experienced repeated scenes such as had been seen the day beforeat first, people started to throw things at government building, which
again catalysed the conflict with the police. Believing that they could stop
further escalation of this expression of social discontent, the police, fully
armed, acted in a well-known, and easy-to-anticipate wayusing tear gas
and excessive force, even on peaceful observers, and putting the neighbourhood under siege. By forcing the demonstration into the University campus
area, and entering university buildings, the police also invaded academic
space, which is against the law. The police brutality continued into the night,
and while they scared people off the streets, against the grain, residents of
surrounding buildings, blockaded in their flats, started to chant against the
police, and to throw things out of windows at them. Late that night, only the
police were on the streets, controlling the situation.
On 7 February, around 10,000 people gathered again in the same place,
shouting, and throwing things at the building, their anger fuelled by the brutality. The police, confronted with the scale of the crowd and too few in
number to do anything, retreated and left the building. They were acting out
of fear, terrified that further escalation of social discontent would catch fire in
many other cities, all over Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their retreat abandoned
the fate of the building to approximately 100-200 disaffected youths, who
stormed into it, destroying the things inside, and setting fire to some of them,
all of which ultimately set light to the building itself. Then, most of the
10,000 people spontaneously started to walk toward the City Hall, fighting
off the police, before they smashed their way into the City Hall and set it on
fire.
In the recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the three-days events
in February 2014, when thousands of citizens took the streets, clashing with
the police, and burning authorities buildings, will be marked as a major act
66

of citizen rebellion against terrible social conditions. In the eyes of the most
of the protestors, the so-called post-socialist transition to liberal democracy
has been experienced as a never-ending story of looting that, after the collapse of the welfare state, led them to the streets. For them, burning the authorities buildings was an act of anger that burst. Suddenly after years of the
build-up of pressureof continuously seething conflict with the political and
capitalistic elites.
What occurred in Tuzla on 7 February was an escalation of the social discontent of workers, who established themselves as the political subject of the
post-socialist transition, and, also, at the very least, as ordinary people who
expected social justice. Hence, the destruction and burning of the buildings
associated with the government was one answer to twenty years of political
violence that has most evidently existed in the form of transitional looting.
This political violence is inherent in the system as a subtle form of the politics of neglect: neglect of the interests of the majority, legalized looting and
the systematic theft of the industrial complexes and national resources of the
country and citizenry. This was accompanied by the possessive expansion of
the capital of the few, which legitimized social stratification and granted
permission to private capital to exert its absolute rule.
Nevertheless, recent events may also be considered as acts of liberation;
acts that finally made labourers into political subjects, also liberating them
from the legacy of the past twenty years.
The majority of the citizens of Tuzla consider Bosnia and Herzegovina
to be a failed statea bureaucratic structure established almost twenty years
ago to stop the war, which, since then, has actually continued the legacy of
the war, through a constant political conflict between the ethno-national political elites. To make matters even more complicated, Bosnia and Herzegovina is, by its Constitution, a state comprising three ethnicities. All of these
ethnicities have the constitutional right to issue a veto on any matter; up to
and including whenever they so much as feel that their so-called ethnic interest is being threatened. Considering the political situation over the last four
years, we can safely assert that the war never actually finished. Rather, it has
continued, but simply uses more subtle methods: creating and consolidating
ethnic tensions between people; insisting on conflicting agendas; strengthening the institutions of the entities, whilst at the same time obstructing the
entities by the use of the power to veto. This has led, in the last four years, to
a complete institutional deadlock throughout the country. For almost twenty
years, living in a failed, bureaucratic, and non-functional state that has been
steadily exhausting its society. Facing a featureless future, led by nationalistic
political elites, ordinary people finally gave way, under the burden of social
and political discontent, which exploded on 7 February 2014.
While some consider the act of setting fire to authorities buildings as
calculated, for me, it is both a real and a symbolic act of liberation. Twenty

67

years ago, the Sodaso building was actually stolen from the same workers
who gathered to ask for health care for themselves and their families. The
hooligans, as the media categorized the citizens who destroyed the building, are actually the children and friends of the workers, or are themselves the
workers who built those factories, including the very building that caught fire
and burnt down. In many ways, the overall situation reminds me of one of the
scenes of Michael Hanekes film Hidden, in which Majid, one of the lead
characters, kills himself in a most brutal way in front of the friend with whom
he had tacitly shared some terrible memories, suffused with guilt and betrayal. Majids way to face the past was to slit his throat in front of the friends
eyes. This act of self-flagellation, although it is such a violent and disturbing
one, is at the same time a liberating act liberating him from the memories of
guilt and betrayal, in the very act of punishing his friend. In the same way,
setting fire to a building that the workers literally built with their own hands,
could be nothing other than a liberating actit liberated those in the demonstration crowd from memories of a politics that betrays things in which they
believe, and it sent a clear sign that they do not want to be silent observers
any more. It was an act of anger directed towards institutional buildings
there was no looting, nor was there excessive violence from the demonstrators, even though, after they set the cantonal authorities building on fire,
10,000 deeply outraged people walked through the city. Rather, they expressed their rage against those who they held responsible for their situation:
the cantonal, city, local, and judicial authorities.
The night after, while the smoke from the buildings still hung in the air,
around ten workers, youth activists, and members of the academic community spontaneously gathered to look for next steps. Faced with solitude and the
strong likelihood of more of the same politics, such as had exhausted everyone for far too long, and encouraged by new solidarity, they organized a
forum open to everyone. The next night, around hundred people gathered,
wanting to share that search for answers as to what the next steps needed to
be. Night by night, the number of people attending these plenums increased.
They drew in workers who had not been paid for almost four years but were
forced to work every day without health insurance; workers who had stood in
front of their factories for several years, saving them from organized looting;
mothers whose sons had been severely beaten by the police on 7 February,
members of the academic community, students, youths and pensioners, all of
whom had felt injustice... everyone together, joined in creating a place of
direct democracy, where everyones voice could be heard and where everyones actions counted. During February, as the gatherings grew, we were
taking control of public places and organizing this forum, at first in the House
of Peace Flame Foundation building, then in the National Theatre, and at its
high point, when the gathering passed the 1000 people mark, in the Bosnian
Cultural Centre, all the while strengthening belief that an alternative politics
was possible.

68

However, the political elites were too strongthey were in control of the
media and they kept obstructing the self-organized forums, which imposed
themselves as an observing and correcting subject of the electoral democracy
working in the public interest. At the same time, many of the people attending expected to find alternative solutions to social and political crisis over
night, criticising the violence in the streets, naively believing that the potential for political change was in political anticipation. Hence, confronted with
the political and media obstructions to the expression of social discontent, as
well as with a set of extraordinary challenges, and needing rapidly to organize the existing solidarity more sustainably, in such as way as was not possible within a direct-democracy forum framework at that time, the political
activists efforts shifted to establishing the Sindikat Solidarnosti (Union of
Solidarity).
If a significant measure of successful rebellion is in the change in thinking both in and about a society that occurs, then the series events of February
2014 were successful. In the existing social context at the time, believing that
they would change a political system was nave. Although such change is
certainly necessary, the politics of the last twenty years has created a society
in which social life is categorized within ethnic identities, and in which politics exists only within ethnic categories. Hence, February events were an
explosion of social and political discontent that made a change possible.
While this is, most of the time, explained as a rebellion against terrible
social conditions and the collapse of the welfare state, I believe the February
events were also a social awakeningan authentic act of liberation from the
existing legacy. In February, people took to the streets confronted with the
impact of the post-socialist transition, and, at the same time, the three days of
the February events gave birth to a new kind of political activism, of the kind
that brought together jobless citizens with workers, students with academia,
youths with eldersall those who felt insignificantinto a political subject,
creating more possibilities for the power of action than any activism before.
Up until that time, in the twenty-year long history of post-socialist Bosnia
and Herzegovina, such a thing was inconceivable.
Years of post-socialist transition, had its peak when the state-owned industry was sold off, leaving an entire generation on the street. Looking at
aggrieved workers standing, week after week, at the junction of two streets;
streets named after leaders with contrasting political legacies (one of socialism, industrial growth and a thriving life, and the other, the legacy of that
post-socialist transition), I see the February events as acts of liberation from
the political legacy of the last 20 years, which is reflected not only in transitional looting and collapse of the welfare state, but also in the break with
existing historical narratives.
While Alija Izetbegovi has his alley, that runs through a central street
in Tuzla, symbolically mapping his historical significance, most of the characters and events from the socialist era are tacitly erased from the collective

69

memory. The best example is the Husino rebellion, one of the most significant events in the history of Tuzla and of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was
a strike, in the turbulent period after World War I, against the injustice of
industrial slavery in the coalfields. It took place in 1920, sparked by the colliers demands for a better life and improved work conditions and it is one of
the most significant events of class struggle in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Indeed, confronted with the refusal of the authorities to meet their demands and
eviction from the colliers colony, colliers of all nationalities started the General Strike, that grew into armed rebellion against authorities, who wanted to
arrest them, and compel them back to work.
In the last twenty years, the Husino rebellion, in line with most of the events
from the socialist history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been treated as of
less significance or completely erased from the collective memory. Instead of
stressing the solidarity between people, the politics of the last 20 years has
emphasised ethnic identities, always attempting to set them against one another. I believe that the February events were an awakening that is the break
with this political legacy.
It was not a coincidence that this explosion of social and political discontent began in Tuzla, which has the Husino collier as its symbol. Just as it
was no coincidence that one of the February 2014 awakening symbols in
Mostar, the city divided into two by the war, was a sign that read: Freedom
is my nation.

70

Adis Sadikovi

February Stirrings

The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidentssmall fractures

and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they denounced
the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid
matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.
Noisily and confusedly they proclaimed the emancipation of the Proletarian,
i.e. the secret of the ninety century, and of the revolution of that century.
Karl Marx1

For the first time since the war of 19921995, the February protests brought
Bosnia and Herzegovina back into the spotlight of the worlds media. Of
course, the sensationalist nature of that media coverage provided this country
with just enough attention to ensure that, after all, in the here and now, there
would not be mass slaughter again. As soon as this was certain, the eyes of
the world, focused by the media, continued to follow the current developments in Ukraine, validating once again that death, along with sex, is the
best-selling media fodder in todays global neoliberal cannibalism. All that
followed, and which was politically, sociologically, anthropologically, economically and historically far more important and innovative than the stoning
and burning of buildings, was mostly ignored by the world media.
Let us start from the beginning. A protest began in Tuzla on 5 February
2014, which, for the first time, saw people take to the streets to join those
who began it, showing their solidarity to and with the workers of the 5 factories looted by privatization (Dita, Poliolchem, Polihem, Guming and
Konjuh), who had held several joint protests previously. Right from the start,
at 9 a.m., the protest gathered more people than any of the protests before it.
Still, there were only a few hundred people there, and no one could imagine
that only a couple of hours after it started, things would change radically. As
the day went on, the protest was growing, not dwindling, and by the afternoon the number of people rose to almost a thousand, which enabled the
blocking of one of the two main roads. This news broke on social media and
the number of protestors slowly started to increase. Soon, the other, parallel
main road was blocked, which caused complete traffic gridlock, since the
1

A speech given by Karl Marx on 14 April 1856. Printed in Peoples Paper from 19 April
1856. Available at: www.marxists.org

71

town was now divided in two. These tactics, used to draw the publics attention to the problems of the workers, had been popularized by the workers of
Tuzlas shoe factory Aida, who had done the same thing in 2009, at the other
side of the town. However, this time, a significantly larger number of people
were involved in the blockade. During the blockade that day, there were
banners which had the workers demands written on them: to revise privatization, payment of unpaid national insurance contributions, the payment of
wages etc. Gradually, the atmosphere in front of the Government of Tuzla
Canton started to heat up, just as that day itself started out quite chilly, only
for the sun to be shining brightly by noon. Tyres were brought and burnt at
the blocked intersection. Riot police, although only few in number, were
already in full gear and waiting at the entrance into the building. After an
occasional stone hit a window or walls of the Government building itself, a
group of protestors went to the car park behind the building to stone official
vehicles. This ultimately triggered the police to react and to form a cordon
and start to disperse people. In the ensuing chaos, never previously before
seen in Tuzla, one group of people was arrested while another group was
injured. Thus began the spiral of violence. News about police brutality echoed not only around Tuzla, but also around the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The situation eased during the late afternoon.
The next day, 6 February, twice as many people appeared on the streets,
mostly in response to the overreaction of the police during the previous day.
Although the banners with the pro-workers slogans had been brought, they
were not exposed for long, because the stoning started at the very beginning
of the protests, and the police had reacted immediately this time around. The
spiral of violence continued to escalate. Twice the number of citizens were
met with triple the number of police, massed in ranks and equipped with
teargas. The conflict became much more violent than on the previous day.
While chasing the protestors, the police entered a nearby school and faculty
buildings. A real war was being led on the streets. During this time, smaller
groups of citizens in Sarajevo and Banja Luka organized support protests for
the workers of Tuzla. News about the Tuzla protest echoed throughout the
region.
There was hardly any talk of the workers demands on 7 February. The
people that gathered in an even greater number than the day before, came to
confront the police. The protestors main demand was for the Government of
the Tuzla Canton to resign. The Cantonal Government headquarters was
burnt and the police seemed to be behaving in a substantially different manner than on the first two days. The large number of people was due to a large
number of pupils and students that joined, since the schools and faculties
were closed that day. At the same time, in Sarajevo, Zenica, Mostar and some
of the other cities, a significant number of people started to gather. In Sarajevo, the protestors very soon clashed with the police, which, as in Tuzla, only
led to an even larger number of people to take to the streets. Soon, in Tuzla,

72

Sarajevo, Zenica and Mostar, other institutions were burntinstitutions

which represented symbols of state terrorand the Governments of those
cantons started resigning, one after the other.
One thing, which definitely marked February, and even March, is the
media spin. The word spin, which has barely been used in Bosnia and Herzegovina up until 2014, suddenly became as common a word as thank you.
Truly, the sheer volume of unverified and false information being poured out
of media outlets was such that one could only believe ones eyes. For example, there were stories of kilograms of drugs being circulated amongst the
protestors, of buses of protestors coming all the way from Sandak to give
their support, of buses of special police units coming from other cities to
disperse the protestors, of a hidden political interest behind the protests.
This last story is particularly interesting. There did not exist a political
interestthere were many of them; and they were not hidden. Any protest
in itself represents a political act. The demands of the workers that were expressed on 5 February are very political demands. None of them were hidden.
And those were not the only demands that emerged during those early days
of the protests. There were other political demands coming from the protestors, such as the abolishing the Cantons, abolishing the entities, reinstating
the Constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, replacing the
states tripartite presidency with only one president, and even one demand to
name a King. In Sarajevo, a neo-Nazi group called the Bosnian Movement of
National Pride (BPNP) read out their proclamation in public. In Tuzla, there
was a demand to bring back the factories under workers control, which also
has its political implications. The opposition parties had their activists on the
streets of every city, looking for ways to turn things to their parties advantage. Therefore, to say that there are political interests behind the protest,
and to characterize them as hidden, is beyond comedy.
Over time, only the demands that a majority of protestors could identify
with survived. Since the protests started out as protests being undertaken by
the workers, the demands which were articulated as joint demands had to
have come from the left. The plenum form was chosen to be the means of
articulating the demands of the workers. A plenum is a direct-democratic
decision-making mechanism. This means that everyone is welcome to participate, everyone has the right to join in the discussion and has the right to
vote, and the rule is: one man equals one vote. Although the plenum was an
entirely new forum and practice and for most of the citizens of Tuzla and
Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was something that had already been experienced
for a handful of those involved.
In 2009, there were several consecutive student protests in Tuzla, one of
them resulting in a one day long blockade of the Faculty of Philosophy which
resulted in a student plenum. This event was closely connected to similar
events that occurred, at that same time, in Zagreb, and other places in Croatia.
However, it was the first time the word plenum was used in public dis-

73

course in the post-war period in this region. During the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ), this term denoted large sessions of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. However, the
2009 student protests marked not only the revitalization of this term, but a
conceptual turning point as well. Not only the students, but all citizens were
invited to the Zagreb student plenum, which broke the club tradition of the
plenum and made it an open type of gathering. In 2014, the Plenum of the
citizens of Tuzla, was based on similar principles, although, it proved necessary to make certain changes, i.e. in the new circumstances, to adapt the plenum into a fighting method and tool.
Why plenum? Bearing in mind the numerous demands that emerged at
the protests, amongst which were some that were mutually exclusive, it was
necessary to filter out the demands that would not benefit the workers. Although abolishing the Cantons and transferring their jurisdiction to higher and
lower levels, all the while respecting the principle of subspidiarity, would
make significant savings in financial and operational terms, and even, to a
certain degree, decrease the democratic deficit 2014 was simply not the right
year to discuss this. Demands such as this one could only have put the workers at a disadvantage and, thus, were counterproductive. To explain more
clearly: in a situation where, despite the fact that Croatians, de facto, only
make up one tenth of population of The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in four out of ten Cantons, there is a constitutional majority of Croatians. So because of those four Cantons, their political leaders see the sole
guarantee of their so-called ethnic survival as lying in the Cantonal structure. Thus, any kind of talk about abolishing the entities would lead to a denial of support to workers from the Croatian ethnic group, and to a division of
the working class along ethnic lines, under circumstances where to radicalize
such talks would lead to war. Such a scenario was already experienced by
and in this region in the late 1980s and the beginning of 1990s.2 The same
goes for the talk about the entities, although this would then lead to antagonising the Serbian and Bosniak ethnic groups.
The Plenum was a place where such counterproductive and indeed,
counterrevolutionary demands could be critically questioned. Every such idea
is subject to the scrutiny of the public, and herein lays the importance of the
plenums. However, the plenums greatest advantage is also its main disadvantage. Since the plenum is always open for all to participate, there is no
place in which to manoeuvre a different form of organisation, which would
enable a particular tactical advantage. This is precisely why its enemies (governments and those with vested capitalist interests), have at their disposal a
wide range of weapons with which to fight against it: infiltration, media spin,
dilution, tiredness, planted disruptions from within the plenum, bribery, in2

74

More on this in: Jake Lowinger, Economic reform and the Double movement in Yugoslavia: An Analysis of Labor Unrest and Ethno-Nationalism in the 1980s (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University, 2009).

timidation etc. All of these methods have been used extensively so far. However, one of these methods, owing to its sophistication, seriousness and
range, is set apart from the rest.
After the Government of the Tuzla Canton resigned on 7 February, the
Tuzla Canton Assembly, at the request of the Plenum, transferred the jurisdictions of the ministers to their deputies or secretaries, in order to ensure that
there would be no hiatus or paralysis in the public sector. At the same time,
the Plenum requested that the new ministers to be elected, should not be
members of political parties; should not be politically or professionally compromised and that they must be capable, professionally and competencywise, of steering Tuzla Canton in a progressive direction in the following few
months, until the regular elections in October 2014. Since there was no consensus within the Plenum as to whether the Plenum itself should propose new
ministers and prime ministers, or whether it should only approve the proposal
of the Tuzla Canton Assembly, the second option was wisely chosen. Encouraged by a lack of consensus within the Plenum, and by a declining number of people at the protests and attending the Plenums, the Tuzla Canton
Assembly called upon all the groups and individuals to make their nominations for the prime minister and the ministers. At this point, the Association
of Employers of Tuzla Canton emerges into the spotlight, as the most influential lobby group amongst the people who are in intense negotiations with
the Tuzla Canton Assembly: moreover, a lobby group which is the enemy
of the people who started the protests.
Although the situation in Tuzla Canton is still chaotic, the position the
government intends to take/keep can already be seen. The Employers suggest
one of their own to be the prime minister, and he, very wisely, resorts to
something that could be compared to the Aikido philosophy: he uses his
enemys energy against him. Since the very beginning of the protests, the
mantra, which was repeated, was Solidarity. The new prime minister,
claiming to be listening carefully to the voice of the people, hit upon a perfect
counterrevolutionary idea: a solidarity fund. A solidarity fund is a fund which
would be filled by voluntary contributions of working citizensan amount
that would equal five per cent of their personal earningsand which would
fund the taxes and the contributions for the newly employed, which, allegedly, would encourage the capitalists to employ new workers. Of course, that is
not going to happen. Since the state inspection apparatus remains unchanged,
i.e. corrupt, then employing workers illegally will remain the most profitable
employment practice. However, even if, by some miracle, capitalist business
people did decide to employ new workers on a regular basis, there is still the
question of how the coffers of the Fund would be filled. Namely, if people
were willing, voluntarily, to give up a part of their earnings, all taxes, in every country, would be voluntary. It is precisely because it is not so, that the
taxation has always been mandatory. And that is precisely why the economic
programme, which is largely based on the Solidarity Fund, will fail, and the

75

government will proceed to label any future peoples rebellions, the plenums,
solidarity, as utopian.
As it did in 1848, the working class missed out on an opportunity to
have the final word, which instead was seized avidly and used by the counterrevolutionary forces to secure their own aims. However, matters are not
yet concluded. To paraphrase Marx: the February cracks have revealed the
abyss beneath the Bosnia and Herzegovina society. People used the possibility of speaking publicly at the Plenum to speak about their personal problems. Plenum after Plenum, the hundreds of problems that have emerged are
clearly stating peoples understanding that cosmetic changes will essentially
change nothing: things have to change fundamentally. And they will, to quote
Marx form his 1856 speech, once the oceans of liquid matter3 start to
move. The enemies of working class people have won a battle, but not the
war.
Herein lays the enormous potential of the February protests and plenums. They have shown that people can join forces against their oppressors.
They have shown that neither the government, nor the police are untouchable
and invincible. They have shown that the Plenum is actually a form of upfront clear speech. The experience gained in February is immensely important for any future action. As the experienced gained in the previous years
connected and educated the people who had already started to think more
profoundly about social change, so the February experiences mobilized, connected and educated an even larger number of people. Before 5 February, few
people believed that any sort of change was possible in this country. Today,
there are very few people who believe that change is NOT possible. There
has been an increase in the frequency of mass protests in the last couple of
years. 2009 is especially important. This was the year when, for the first time
after the war, Tuzla radicalized the tactics used at various protests: for example, the students occupying the faculty and forming a plenum, and the workers of the Aida shoe factory blocking the main road.
Also, in April of 2010, there were violent protests of demobilized soldiers in Sarajevo. The demobilized soldiers were in the spotlight once more,
when the former members of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Army helped their
enemies during the war, i.e. former members of the Republic of Srpska Army, finally breaking down, in the most radical manner possible, the ethnonationalist barrier between them. After several years of silence, the revolution
emerges in 2013, in a protest catalysed by the States failure to issue identification numbers. This also proved to be an issue that connected protestors
from various cities, ensuring a mass presence at the protests. All of these
methods: the occupations, the plenums, the violence, the solidarity, the connectingwere used in February of 2014. However, this February also
brought new problems.
3

76

The phrase refers to Karl Marxs speech from 1856.

Available at: www.marxists.org

The pressure from the ruling structures has been stronger than ever,
probably because, for the first time, the rulers are truly afraid. The police
repression, the media spin, the openness/vulnerability of the Plenum, etc., are
all problems that have yet to be resolved. There is no doubt that there is room
for improvement. If we look at the events in February as merely a step forward, then that sort of perspective enables the observation that this trendof
connecting and educatingis pushing ahead with greater vigour and momentum than previously. February of 2014 can and should be a solid springboard
for a meaningful and sustainable social transformation.

77

Emin Eminagi

On the University of the People: Protests and Plenums

as Sites of Education

The protests by the workers of Tuzlas privatised industrial base that began
on 5 February were the start of something no one expected to see happening
in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They were a reaction to the privatisation of a
number of Tuzlas large companies, such as Konjuh, Dita, Resod-Guming
and Polihem, which in the former Yugoslavia, and in the first post-war years
(19962000), were promoted and perceived as providing some of the main
sources of income for the city and its region. However, as a result of the
privitisations, many people lost their jobs. This was the first protest of its
kind in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the birth of a grassroots democratic
movement, which is finding expression through citizens assemblies called
plenums. The participants do not belong to the political elite, but are instead
workers, students, the unemployed and retirees, anyone who feels discontented with the state of affairs in the country.
According to news sources, on the first day of the protests 3,000 people
took to the streets and occupied the two main roads in the city, halting traffic
for several hours. As rocks were thrown at the Canton Government building,
riot police were mobilised to disperse the protests. The situation kept escalating over the following two days, which was marked by several episodes of
state violence, directed at citizens; for example there is a video circulating on
the Internet, where a police officer enters a university campus and peppersprays a student. On 7 February over 10,000 people gathered in front of the
building which housed the Canton Government headquarters, which was then
set on fire, after which the protests moved towards the Cantonal Court, which
was hit by stones for several hours. Afterwards people moved to the Municipalitys headquarters, which was also set on fire. The situation calmed down
later in the evening, when the police decided to join the protestors. What
ensued in the following days and months after 7 February would prove to be
the beginning of a true democratic movement. The movement established a
platform in which people engage in a learning process by rediscovering their
own political voices, something, which the ethno-nationalist elites in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina denied to its citizens through constant threats of
new wars and violence, thus alienating people from each other, in an attempt
to make them believe that the only possible sort of community was an ethnically exclusive one.

79

The Plenums as a University

The plenums became sites of freedom for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. After almost two decades years, for the first time, people started
talking about new possibilities, i.e., what can be done, instead of being dominated by all the predicaments people are facing on a day-to-day basis, congealed by the terror of everyday life. I use this term terror of everyday life
here deliberately, e.g. if you are a worker in Bosnia and Herzegovina today,
working in a privatised company, on the production floor in summer, where
the temperatures go beyond 50 or 60 degrees Celsius and you try to complain
about this, you will automatically be silenced by threats of being laid off and
replaced. The plenums, however, are attempting, and so far managing to
break through such fear, by giving the people a chance to speak, while creating a learning opportunity for people, in that, in real time and space, they can
share their thoughts with grievances and fears with one another, face to face.
It is at this point that I would like to relate the plenums-as-sites-oflearning to the notion of a peoples university. The French philosopher
Jacques Derrida, in his essay titled University Without Condition1 states
that the principle of unconditional resistance lays at the core of the university,
and that the same should always be reflected, invented and posed. It thus has
an obligation to question everything. Derrida continues in saying:
the university might be in advance not just cosmopolitan, but universal, extending beyond () economic powers (to corporations and to national and international capital), to the powers of the media, ideological, religious and cultural powers2

Following this line of argument, in light of what is happening during a plenum in Bosnia and Herzegovina today, we see that both the protests and the
plenums can indeed be viewed as a university of the people. Protests and
plenums create spaces for all citizens where nothing is beyond questioning,
not even the current manifestations of democracy, or even the authority of the
question form itself. Looking at the plenums and protests, while bearing this
in mind, we can see a strong emancipatory potential here, as, whilst engaging
in a struggle against the political hegemony present in Bosnia and Herzegovina today, the plenums and protests themselves are sites of profound learning.
The plenums certainly represent a step forward for the people in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, as they are finally waking up from the dream of the transition from socialism to democracy, and I choose the word dream here, in
reference to the late comedian George Carlin, who says something similar
about the American Dream: that, and I cite You have to be asleep to be1
2

80

See Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Derrida, Without Alibi, p. 204.

lieve it. Prior to and after the wars in former Yugoslavia, the elites promised
the people a prosperous life in a democratic society, free to exercise their
right to national self-determination, and for over two decades this has deceived people. In fact, the people have been given something that was the
complete opposite of a democratic society, we were constantly being told,
by our respective ethnically interested leaders, that we are always under
threat and that we were always alone in whatever we did. But since the
protests started, people are starting to rediscover the long lost solidarity between them. And not only this, through the plenums, people are finally reclaiming the language that was taken away from them, with which they now
can articulate their anger and their discontent, and give voice to their concerns, having been robbed for over two decades. The plenums are a place
without restriction, where people care less and less about nationality, ethnicity or religion, but start caring for each other, and start working towards a
better tomorrow for all of us.

Why are the Plenums successful?

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new
cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Antonio Gramsci3

This quote, by Antonio Gramsci, precisely pinpoints the political and emancipatory stalemate that people in Bosnia and Herzegovina were forced into by
the signing of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in 1995, an accord that denounced them as the working class and categorised them as exclusively ethnic subjects. Thus it was thought that protests and resistance
would only be organised along ethnic lines. But as we have seen in the last
months, the plenums and protests proved that, if they ever did, people no
longer believe the stories of ethnic exclusiveness.
In the past we have witnessed several protests and acts of social decentralisationfor example: the JMBG protests for ID numbers and workers
protests; actions that, at an earlier point, were completely disconnected from
each other. During these events, there was no attempt to show that precariousness does not know boundaries, it just seemed to each group that their
interests were exclusively their own, and did not share their logic with other
protester groups.
This problem points to something more traumatic in Bosnian and Herzegovina today. This phenomenon was not only an immediate consequence
3

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). pp.
3233.

81

of the war, which ended in 1995, but still continues today. That is, the political elites, in the last twenty years, have consistently used and are continuing
to use ethno-nationalist manipulation and threats of potential new conflicts,
arising on grounds of ethnicity, and in this way obscuring other problems that
face the country. Before the plenums, a certain degree of cynicism was omnipresent, regarding any forms of resistance; phrases such as: Yet another
doomed strike! were the mostly frequently heard type of comment.
But what happened through the plenums? How can we read the struggles, which began when there was no connection between social groups and
disbelief in making a change? As Walter Benjamin says, every failed revolution brings more fascismbut here, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on the one
side we have workers strikes, which catalysed the method of plenums, the
workers accepted nothing less than that which they are owed. The workers
now univocally express their No thanks! to the bits and pieces the owners
and the system are presenting to them as a choice. On other side of the enforced division, we were confronted with the muteness of the community,
divided in their concerns and their sympathy or lack of it. What is happening
now, in the fight against the hegemonic imaginary that the political elites and
the international community imposed on them, brings people together again
in new solidarities and reviving a long lost commonality between each other.
It is has become a historical moment of fighting back and resisting, through
education and knowledge production, which is being legitimised through and
by the protests.
The plenums are now under attack by the same hegemonic forces they
are fighting against. The weapons the elites use against the people and plenums are the usual politicking lies, threats of conflict and ethnic difference.
But as the plenums indeed are sites of learning, people soon realise that these
are empty threats, and their concentration is focusing solely on their demands, which represent the real needs of the people. I believe that, after two
decades, we deserve to claim the right to be optimistic about the outcome of
the plenums and protests. People are realising the importance of this, but also
that we all are facing the same problems and the same struggles, thus we
identify with each other, and are starting to share a common vision of the
future together, based on equality, social justice, solidarity and commonality,
as, fundamentally, we are, and have always been together in this.

82

Igor tiks and Sreko Horvat

The New Balkan Revolts: From Protests to Plenums,

and Beyond

Over the last couple of years we have regularly witnessed popular protests
and uprisings in the post-socialist Balkans. The well-known mobilisations,
struggles and street violence in the southern part of the peninsula, in Greece
and Turkey, have a constant and yet under-reported echo in other Balkan
states. These have had a different historical trajectory: after the disappearance
of the state socialist regimes, in all of these states, and most dramatically
across the former Yugoslavia, a period of violence, conflict or general instability and economic hardship has been followed by a seemingly endless transition to liberal democracy and a neoliberal economy.
Transition was meant to be a process ending in accession to the European Union. But now the EU itself seems to be a project without a clear direction and whose prospects are uncertain: continuing austerity measures, multiple crises, from economic to institutional ones, rising unemployment rates,
especially among the youth, and a growing right-wing extremism from Greece, France to Hungary. In accordance with Thatcherite ideals, the European
welfare state is now almost completely dismantled, labour laws are regressing to the early years of the twenty-century, and public services have been
gradually privatised. The political regimes in the Balkans have been following this general European trend with similar disastrous results. However,
today in many of these states they are for the first time facing a serious resistance coming directly from the streets.
These new social movements reflect a need for a deep transformation of
Balkan societies. Given the multi-faceted situation described above, it is unsurprising that the movements differ in their methods of struggle, their ideological orientations and their strategies. They are mostly a reaction to the
deteriorating social and economic situation and numerous abuses of power by
corrupt political elites. Nonetheless, they often serve as hubs for new ideas
and more proactive projects offering a progressive vision of their societies. In
this article we will sketch a typology of these movements and actions by
dividing them into five main blocs: anti-regime protests, mobilisations for the
commons, student movements, workers struggles and, last but not least,
hegemonic cultural and intellectual efforts.

83

From Anti-Regime Protests to the Struggle for the Commons

Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, anti-regime protests have
been erupting regularly across the Balkans. In Croatia in Spring 2011, for a
whole month, up to 10,000 people were marching across Zagreb every evening denouncing the political system and all political parties. In Slovenia in
2012 and 2013 general uprisings mobilised the whole country, contributing
to the fall of the right-wing government and a number of corrupt officials. In
Bulgaria in spring 2013 huge protests triggered by drastically increased electricity bills brought thousands to the streets only to be followed after the
general elections by even larger protests in summer 2013. For weeks masses
protested against political elites and their ties to powerful mafia and media
moguls. In Romania protests have been sporadically erupting since 2010, in
response to unbearable social conditions and continuing austerity measures.
Similar types of protests, with different intensity, have been seen also in
Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania.
Probably the most important social upheaval in the post-socialist Balkans erupted in Bosnia and Herzegovina in February 2014. Only eight
months after the 2013 protests that for the first time significantly transcended
imposed ethnic divisions, on 5 February 2014 workers from several privatised and destroyed factories united on the streets of Tuzla to demand their
unpaid salaries and pensions. Soon, they were joined by students and other
citizens from all walks of life. Clashes with police resulted in burning of
government buildings in Tuzla, which was replicated in other cities such as
Mostar, Zenica and Sarajevo. And while the media and political class were
denouncing hooliganism and vandalism, the protesters were busy establishing plenums, self-governed citizens assemblies that spread throughout
the country, from Tuzla itself where the first plenum was formed, to the capital Sarajevo, regional centres such as Mostar and Zenica, and to smaller cities
such as Bugojno, Biha, Brko, Travnik and others. Most canton governments resigned and cantons assemblies mostly acceptedthe implementation remains another issuethe main demands by the plenums. After long
deliberations open to all citizens, almost uniformly, with some regional variety, they demanded the revision of privatisations, the end of excessive politicians benefits, and the formation of new state-level and local governments
filled with people with proven expertise and no record of corruption.
In our view, the plenums of Bosnia and Herzegovina represent the most
radical experiment in non-institutional politics that can be found across the
Balkans since the collapse of Yugoslavia. The form is clearly radical, although the participants themselves are of various political stripes and cannot
be easily identified as left-leaning or belonging to the left. Enraged citizens
simply rebelled against the degrading conditions of social and political life
and spontaneously adopted citizens assemblies and horizontal forms of democracy as a way to articulate their demands and organise themselves auton-

84

omously. The plenum movement shook the foundation of post-war Bosnia

and the wider post-Yugoslav region, surprised both ethnonationalist political
elites and the international community and opened new spaces for social and
political action. The plenums were operational, with various successes depending on the local situation, for almost three months. In various forms, via
working groups, many plenums are still active. Engaged citizens understand
now that plenums represent a precious instrument that can be easily reactivated. To sum up, a growing social movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina came
out of the protests and the plenums and re-defined the public sphere and
imposed a new political agenda, this time centred on the question of social
justice and equality coupled with a profound critique of the disastrous capitalist economy implemented in this post-conflict country.
All these examplesand the Bosnian one especiallyshow that for the
first time we have more than an anti-government rhetoric per seinstead
there is a true anti-Regime sentiment. Not only the state but the whole apparatus on which the current oligarchy is based is called into question by sometimes chaotically self-organised citizens. The emergence and nature of these
protests invites us to rethink the categories used to explain the social, political and economic situation in the Balkans, and elsewhere in post-socialist
Eastern Europe. It also compels us to understand the nature not only of state
institutions, their weakness or failure, but the nature of the post-socialist
Regime that has been (almost) cemented over the last two decades but susceptible to crack under the weight of its own contradictions and products
such as, for instance, rampant poverty. Rebelling against these Regimes is all
that much harder because they often do not have a single face, no dictator, no
governing families and are not characterised by open repression and censorship. These occasional expressions of anger are indeed the seeds of a new
political and social dynamics that might result in wider movements. However, they are also characterised by volatility and by random triggers, and are
usually followed by confusing and often contradictory political messages.
One of the most developed areas of struggle concerns the commons, the
defence of public and common goods such as public spaces (often parks),
nature (water, forests, hills, landscape), urban spaces and public utility infrastructure (electricity, railways etc.) Examples are abundant: The Right to the
City movement in 20092010 in Zagreb mobilised thousands in defence of a
square in downtown Zagreb; in Dubrovnik citizens organised to defend a
nearby hill from being turned into a golf resort; in Bosnias second largest
city, Banja Luka, citizens tried to defend one of the few public parks; in Belgrade smaller mobilisations were triggered by cutting old trees in one of the
main streets, so to obtain more parking space, or by destruction of a neighbourhood park; in Bulgaria in 2012 people demonstrated against privatisation
of forests; in Romania in 2012 against privatisation of emergency services,
and again against an ecologically disastrous gold mine project in Rosia Montana etc. These single-issue movements proved to be channels of general

85

public dissatisfaction and enjoyed support from the vast majority of citizens
who see privatisations of the commons or neglect of public interest as intolerable practices. The commercialisation of public education, what many see
as the ultimate common and social good, triggered massive student mobilisations as well.

Back to the old Alliance: Students, Workers, and Intellectuals?

Since 2009 strong student movements have developed in Slovenia, Croatia,
Serbia, and to a certain extent in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and,
recently, Kosovo. While students mostly protest in classic ways in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo (by marches, protests and petitions), in Slovenia, Serbia and, especially, in Croatia the student movement
extensively experiments with occupations and direct democracy. It is precisely the emergence of plenums within these movements to which we can trace
the current Bosnian practices of direct and horizontal democracy.
In this context, it is worth paying special attention to the Croatian case,
where an independent student movement articulated a strong resistance to the
privatisation and commercialisation of higher education. Their protest against
neoliberal reforms in the field of education turned into probably the first
strong political opposition not only to the government, but indeed to the general political and social regime. During thirty-five days in spring and two
weeks in autumn in 2009, more than twenty universities all over Croatia were
occupied with students practically running them.1 In itself nothing new one
could say, but the way they occupied and ran the universities deserves our
attention for its originality in a much larger context than that of the Balkans
or Eastern Europe. They invited to their plenums not only students but all
citizens to debate issues of public importance such as education and, in addition to that, to decide upon the course of the protest movement. The most
active plenum at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb
each evening gathered up to 1000 individuals deliberating on the course of
action.2 This event gave rise to the movement for direct democracy, which
was seen as a necessary corrective of electoral democracy and partitocracy
and, possibly, a true alternative to it.
The new Croatian Left, whose ideas quickly spread around the postYugoslav space, do not see direct democracy limited to the referendum practice but rather as a means of political organisation for citizens from local
1

86

We have written extensively about the student and civic rebellions that involved occupation of universities but also of public spaces in Zagreb in our book Pravo na pobunu
Uvod u anatomiju graanskog otpora [The Right to RebellionAn Introduction to the
Anatomy of Civic Resistance] (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2010).
For a detailed overview of the student actions in Croatia see The Occupation Cookbook,
or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in
Zagreb (New York: Minorcompositions, 2011).

communes to the national level. This horizontal model has been used since
then by many collective actions across post-Yugoslav space, from Occupy
movements to street marches, workers strikes, and farmers protests, and,
finally, on a larger scale, by protestors in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The recent period is also marked by reinvigorated workers struggles.
They are not uniform and range from classic strikes, workers influence in
running companies in majority state ownership and defending them from
further privatisations (Petrokemija factory in Croatia), to examples of workers successful and unsuccessful takeovers (e.g. Jadrankamen and TDZin
Croatia) and the models of workers share-holdership (Jugoremedija in Serbia and ITAS in Croatia). We are also witnessing a new cooperation between
different social movements (such as students) and workers in building a
common anti-capitalist strategy.
Finally, there is another type of struggle deserving of attention: namely,
hegemonic cultural and intellectual efforts whose aim is to change the general
public climate, the dominant media discourses, and re-introduce progressive
ideas into wider society. Its primary goal is to undermine the (neo)liberal
hegemony that since 1989 has successfully delegitimised left traditions and
promoted electoral democracyalthough often ending up in autocracies
and the free market as the only game in town. In the post-Yugoslav context,
this general post-socialist orientation was coupled, not always harmoniously,
with nationalist-conservative, right-wing extremist and anti-communist dominance. It clashed though with liberal attempts at democratising these societies; the efforts focused mostly on institutional reforms and EU integration
process that problematised only criminal privatisations and practicesbut
not the general neoliberal orientation.
Introducing a progressive agenda and radical thinking into the dominant
discourse was an almost impossible task until recently. However, the 2008
economic and financial shock, followed by the crisis of the EU, opened a
space for until then marginal movements to articulate their critique of the
current political and economic regime. These attempts range from public
gatherings, forums and festivals (such as the Mayday school in Ljubljana, the
Subversive Festival in Zagreb or Open University in Sarajevo), summer
schools, series of activist and academic workshops and conferences to newspapers, reviews and online magazines (from Zarez, Bilten, and Le Monde
Diplomatique in Croatia to CriticAtac and LeftEast in Romania, or Mladina
in Ljubljana).

Movements, Plenums, Parties

The political strategies of the movements described above remain for now
confined to occasional protests and occupationsoften marked by questioning of representative democracy in the name of horizontalitypetitions and

87

even referendum initiatives. Although, the model offered by Greek left party
Syriza, a coalition of movements engaged in parliamentary politics, is widely
appreciated, we cannot detect so far serious attempts at taking these struggles
towards institutional politics.3
Nonetheless, what the current protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina clearly show is that protest energy can soon vanish and turn into an even bigger
despair, usual fragmentation, or what Walter Benjamin called the melancholy of the Left. But, if protests turn into some sort of institutionalised
politicsbe it the self-created parallel institutions such as citizens-led assemblies and/or new political parties that are ready to face electoral strugglesthe progressive movements potential for a wider social and political
impact can remain strong. Without the protests, the plenums would lose their
potential to apply pressure, and without the plenums, the protests would lose
their legitimacy and articulation. In turn, any future attempt at party and representative politics will have to be based on, inspired and guided by social
movements. In other words, what the Left, in order to get out of its current
impotence, must rethink is the complex dialectics between the 3 Ps: protests,
plenums, and parties. Instead of being overwhelmed by new spring(s),
what we need more than ever is a long-term political and social work that
will combine all organisational forms and be open to changing local and
global circumstances.

88

Maybe the only noteworthy exception, among a number of small left-leaning parties, so
far is a political party in Slovenia (Initiative for Democratic Socialism) that grew from
street protests. It formed, together with other progressive left parties, a United Left list
of candidates for the European elections in May 2014 but failed to elect a MEP. Only two
months later at the national elections in Slovenia, the United Left won six seats in the Parliament.

Stef Jansen

Rebooting politics? Or, towards a <Ctrl-Alt-Del> for

the Dayton Meantime

An IT engineer friend once told me a joke that circulates in his industry.

When a car breaks down, the three persons in it compete to provide solutions
in line with their expertise. The first one, a mechanic, fiddles with a few
screws in the engine, but fails to restart the car. The second one, a chemist,
takes a sample of the contents of the tank and adds some high quality petrol,
but this does not do the trick either. The third person, an IT engineer, orders
everyone to get back into the car. Confused, they obey. He instructs them to
open all four doors. They do. Now close all the doors, he says. They turn the
key and the car restarts.
This joke plays on tendency of IT persons to recommend a reboot in
dealing with any computer problems. I, for one, tend to follow their advice.
When my computer gets stuck in a so-called endless loopa series of
operations that continue infinitely in a self-perpetuating circleI press the
<Ctrl-Alt-Del> combination. This, as far as I understand, does not really
intervene in the computing process. Instead it circumvents the problem, disengaging the process that is caught in a loop, and forcing the computer to
reboot. I have no idea why or how.
In what follows I propose an interpretation of the 2014 revolt in a series
of towns in Bosnia and Herzegovina through this metaphor of an attempted
forced reboot. But first I must point out that this essay is itself a political
exercise from a particular perspective. I am a social anthropologist who has
worked in the post-Yugoslav states for eighteen years. Much of my work
seeks to develop an analytical register to discuss Bosnian lives outside of the
dominant identitarian paradigm of ethnonational conflict and the normative
categories of the liberal transitional justice industry. This is a reflection of
my commitment both to an ethnographic prism on concerns as they emerge
from peoples everyday pursuits of livelihoods and to a political focus, in
Nancy Frasers terms, on matters of redistribution over those of recognition
or representation. Since 2008 I have lived in Sarajevo most of the time. It is
here that I learned about the revolt. After following the events through the
media for a couple of days, I put other duties on hold and became a participant in the Sarajevo protests and plenum. Wary of the damage my presence
as a presumed foreign mercenary might do, I mostly remained in the background.

89

While I participated in several Sarajevo protests before, I soon felt that

this revolt was a political event with more emancipatory promise for Bosnia
and Herzegovina than any other since the war. My essay, then, is not a detached attempt to detect, generically speaking, its emancipatory potential, but
it doubles as a reflection on the question which emancipatory spark drove me
to become part of it.

[one]
A paradox marked my own initial reactions to the revolt. On the one hand, I
vaguely felt that something like this was bound to happen some day. Yet this
wasnt any kind of prediction and, with regard to the political content of any
such outburst, it contained as much fear as hope. On the other hand, if you
would have told me at the start of the year that masses of people would take
to the streets, that four governments would fall, that thousands would attend
plenums, my reaction would have been one of disbelief. If you would have
told me that this revolt would crystallise around demands for redistribution, I
would have checked if it was the First of April.
This does not mean we were unaware of the existence of socioeconomic
concerns. Anyone who wants to know knows that most inhabitants of Bosnia
and Herzegovina are worried about unemployment, poverty and a criminal
ruling caste. My 20082010 ethnographic research in a Sarajevo settlement
found that people diagnosed Bosnian political predicament most prominently
in terms of two interrelated symptoms. Firstly, the absence of what they referred to as a system or a normal state, they argued, left them to their
own devices in the pursuit of their livelihoods. They felt abandoned. Secondly, they bemoaned their existential immobility on the household and societal
scales: since the end of the war, as the saying goes, nothing in Bosnia and
Herzegovina seemed to be moving from the dead point. These shared concerns amounted to a sense of living in continuous suspension between a war
that has not quite ended and a futurewidely held to be related to EU accessionthat has not quite been embarked upon. I refer to this temporalpolitical affliction with the term Meantime.
A key axis of reproduction of this Meantime revolves around an endless loop of depoliticisation. For two decades different sections of the ruling
caste have largely successfully demobilised any stirrings of political unrest
amongst their respective constitutive peoples with calls for closing ranks
in the face of outside threats to their vital interests. Within their own fiefdoms, they also offer a degree of shelter in terms of livelihoods through
partocratic clientelism, and particularly the allocation of public sector jobs
and war-related allowances. This national-clientelistic machine feeds on the
constitutional set-up of the country, where everything is organised in three.
This is sanctioned by foreign supervision that contributes to the legitimisation

90

of the ruling caste and further entrenches the loop of depoliticisation with
ritual evocations of ever-postponed Euro-Atlantic integration as an overall
remedy. In neoliberal fashion, this is presented as a necessary, non-political
process that knows no alternative. In the absence of any ideological debate
and with a national-clientelistic machine looming over them, it is unsurprising then that most people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are disgusted with
politika, which to them means party political machinations. Few seem to
believe that politics can be anything else. And this, of course, again reinforces depoliticisation and a Meantime that is a mean time indeed.

[two]
Antonio Gramscis notion of hegemony, I suggest, is useful to conceptualise
this endless loop of the Dayton Meantime. Often misunderstood as just another word for domination or for ideological brainwashing, hegemony, in
Gramscis work, concerns a material and symbolic framework through
which political struggles are waged. This framework shapes the way in which
we experience, understand and act upon unequal social configurations. It is
never complete, never fully stable. One can speak of a successful hegemonic
project to the extent that particular forms of struggle, procedures and types
of arguments are established as legitimate at a given time. Gramsci makes
clear that this is not simply about consciousness and consentthat is, about
the degree to which people submit to ideological persuasion. Instead, hegemony concerns the way in which one can both support and contest forms of
domination. In other words, successful hegemony is less about who is winning in any particular game, but about the rules of the game themselves.
Who gets to set them? In whose favour do they work? Hegemonic projects
thus include attempts to establish the central terms of the debate, at the expense of alternatives.
In this sense, the foreign-sanctioned national-clientelistic machine in
Bosnia and Herzegovina provides material channels to reproduce ruling caste
domination and establishes the rules of the game. To a large degree it sets the
register through which politics can be waged. In the endless loop of the
Meantime, non-identitarian inequalities (socioeconomic, gender or other
ones) are not considered legitimate parameters for political action. Only demands made in certain terms can be publicly articulated as political demands. To be recognised at all, support for and contention of the ruling caste
must be channelled in identitarian terms or, within the respective fiefdoms, in
terms of claims for clientelistic allocation. The same endless loop also runs
through some interventions that are in principle directed against ethnonationalism, such as those framed in liberal multiculturalism and human rights
discourse as part of the transitional justice paradigm. In the Dayton Mean-

91

time, disagreement on the answers is overshadowed by agreement on what

the relevant questions are.
A key implication of the dominance of this register for knowing Bosnia
and Herzegovina and acting in it is that any contention is forced into the
terms of the (identitarian) legitimacy of the states very existence and its setup as stipulated in the General Framework Agreement for Peace. All roads, in
this universe, lead to Dayton. If concerns with redistribution appear, they are
processed by the machine. Mostly, they are ignored in favour of vital identitarian priorities. Often they are deflected through putting the blame on ethnonational others. At best, they are postponed until the time of a Grand Solution in terms of statehood and Euro-Atlantic integration. In the Meantime,
patience is promoted as the greatest virtue.

[three]
And, suddenly, we have a revolt: widespread discontent with social injustice,
hitherto quarantined in kitchens, factory canteens and agencies for the unemployed, spills onto the streets. Most of it is non-violent, but the initial days
also see damage to some government and party buildings. Four cantonal
governments resign. Plenums, a novel political form, try to channel and articulate this outburst of political energy. For months on end now a good chunk
of media content deals with unemployment, poverty and the privatisation
process. There was some such coverage before, but less frequently and usually as part of smear campaigns between sections of the ruling caste through
the different media they control. Even if the revolt and its reverberations
would end here, it had this impact: it forced socio-economic issues on the
agenda in a more prominent and more universalist manner than was even
thinkable before. Does this in itself solve anything? No, but small victories
must be celebrated if we are taking to the long road.
And a long road it will be. The reactions of the different sections of the
ruling caste are predictable. Each in their own way, along with some handwringing support for the justified demands of the citizens, they seek to
incorporate the events into the loop. Some try to co-opt the events but most
simply intensify their identitarian/statehood rhetoric with regard to what they
consider their constitutive people. The rotating foreign members of Dayton
Bosnia and Herzegovinas ruling caste stick to their own mantra. To summarise: blah blah, support for freedom of expression, blah blah, violence unacceptable, blah blah, private and public property inviolable, blah blah, politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina must listen to ordinary citizens, blah blah,
find compromise, blah blah, help on the road to Euro-Atlantic integration,
blah blah. I dont think I missed anything important.
Even some of the many sympathetic reactions from abroad fall inadvertently prey to the hegemonic logic, hopefully interpreting the revolt as a

92

sign of trans-ethnonational co-operation. I believe that the question whether

this revolt reproduces, transcends or breaks ethnonationalism is a counterproductive reflex, which remains within the Dayton Meantime loop. When, for
once, Bosnia and Herzegovina is rocked by a political event that escapes the
identitarian register, when, for once we see the contours of a road may not
lead to Dayton, lets not reinterpret it in the very terms of the loop itself.
Where then does the key emancipatory potential of the events lay for
me? In my selective reading of a multi-layered set of processes (which I have
no reason to believe is shared by all or even most participants), I identify an
emancipatory spark that can aid a reboot of politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not just any reboot, but one that centres on social justice. This spark,
I contend, is immanent in the combination of three dimensions: (a) a public
No!, (b) a prioritisation of questions of redistribution and (c) mobilisation
on the basis of indignation. Note that it is in the coming together of all three
dimensions that I detect political promise. I now briefly address them in turn.
(a) The revolt could not have occurred without a public display of refusal: a loud and clear No! to the rules of the game in the Dayton Meantime, where the national-clientelist machine serves to ignore, deflect, or, at
best, postpone concerns with redistribution. What existed only as submerged,
inchoate rage against the section of the ruling caste in ones own fiefdom is
now made public in protests and plenums. This time, feverishly pressing
<Ctrl-Alt-Del>, we try to avoid being caught in the endless loop. We reject
patience as the core virtue of the Meantime. We thus refuse to be drawn into
identitarian projections of a Grand Solution on statehood. None of us would
deny that the obscenely ineffective Dayton set-up of the country is a serious
obstacle for any overall improvement in Bosnia and Hrezegovina. But <CtrlAlt-Del> circumvents this question, staying clear from the terrain of the ruling caste. We thereby dismiss their invocation of identitarian/statehood questions as a justification for keeping everything else in Bosnia and Herzegovina
on stand-by. We show we are seriously sick of waiting. No constitutional
complexity, no amount of obstruction by ethno-national others, we scream,
exonerates you from your arrogance, criminality, non-work, incompetence
and negligence. In my reading, a key challenge here is to retain the insight
that this public No! is not a goal in itself. In the Dayton Meantime, it is a
necessary means to take on the main goal: prioritisation of questions of redistribution.
(b) The revolt energetically seeks to force a reconfiguration of the ranking of priorities in favour of redistribution. The revolt does not simply break
up the existing rules to replace it with heterogeneous indeterminacy and the
becoming of a new political subjecta multitude, perhaps. In neo-Gramscian
terms, it does not merely create a discursive opening but also seeks to construct alternative discursive closures. Much work is invested in working
groups to explicitly and tirelessly insist on a better register of contention.
Here I detect the grains of an alternative hegemonic project: in a field that is

93

colonised by identitarian/statehood terms, we loudly claim a place for the

register of redistribution. We seek to redefine what can be counted as the
terms of political struggle in the first place.
Yet while <Ctrl-Alt-Del> is a public No! to the rules of the game of
the Dayton Meantime, this does not automatically constitute an attempt to
reboot politics. As to be expected, the revolt is permeated with a deep aversion to politika. Chants accuse the entire ruling political caste of being
thieves. Central symbols for mobilisation are limousines, unlimited mobile
phone accounts and allowances that facilitate lives of luxury for politicians
while many others struggle to make ends meet. Another key theme is the role
of politicians in privatisation and corruption. The revolt is a culmination of
exasperation with a ruling caste that controls a vast government apparatus
and uses public resources for private pleasure. All this, then, could usher in
further depoliticisation. Indeed, unsurprisingly, some of the demands formulated on the plenums call for transparency, efficiency, technocratic expertise
and individual responsibility in ways that resonate with neoliberal recipes.
Here it should be noted that foreign representatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina have long deployed the rhetoric of economy, not politics. These
calls for (ideologically unspecified) reforms generally fall within neoliberal
priorities encompassed by Euro-Atlantic integration.
Interestingly, and unusually in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, the revolt includes very few pleas to the so-called International Community. The
privatisations conducted on their insistence and under their auspices are now
denounced on the streets and in the plenums. More broadly, even if antipolitics is rife in the revolt, compatibilities with neoliberalism are overshadowed by a focus on redistribution. This mainly emerges in the vocabulary of
social justice, solidarity and equality and contains a marked insistence on the
responsibility of the state for redistribution. While rarely serving as an
explicit ideological resource, the lived experience of Yugoslav socialist selfmanagement is tangibly present.
While this could be dismissed as unproductive nostalgia for paternalist
statecraft, and, perhaps a politics of envy, I detect an emancipatory spark
here too. What we witness here is not the constitution of an unprecedented
subject for a new politics of becoming. Overall, while it is certainly not without contradictions, the call for state provision is central to this revolts <CtrlAlt-Del>. In these post-war and post-socialist circumstances, rejecting yearnings for a welfare state would be cruel to those who are paying the greatest
price of its dismantling. Moreover, when politics has such a bad name, they
play a central role in a potential reboot of politics focused on social justice,
saving it from the claws of politika but also from the mantras of neoliberalism.
Here, in my view, some key challenges include the extension of the
reach of this emancipatory potential to inequalities across the boardrather
than just the privileges of public officialsand the development of a no-

94

tion of commons that is not identical to the state. Some ideals of selfmanagement might provide some inspiration here too and, indeed, they appear in copious references to peoples entitlement to the use of public resources they built and they paid for. Moreover, the revolt invites us to
finally prise open a great taboo, particularly amongst liberal critics of ethnonationalism. What are the politics of Euro-Atlantic integration, uncritically held up as a promise for all? To what extent can social justice be considered a priority of the EU or of NATO, in whose member-states inequalities have increased dramatically over the last few decades? What are the
specific socioeconomic dynamics of Bosnia and Herzegovinas incorporation
into a global neoliberalising order?
(c) Much work is being invested in plenums as platforms for direct, participatory democracy. Im learning a lot from these innovative and risky
forms of political engagement. Despite all the difficulties, there is something
profoundly hopeful in joining a thousand people who have pressed <Ctrl-AltDel> and gathered to set a political agenda, particularly in a context where
politics is such a dirty word. And I believe there is real promise in the ad-hoc
multiplication of the plenum form in a range of contexts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and elsewhere). Perhaps I will have the opportunity to take part in
this.
Yet while the language of citizenship and of associated rights is present,
to me personally the political promise of this revolt is not best identified as
civic activism or engagement. Even the plenums, in my view, are first and
foremost vehicles to carry an emancipatory spark that goes beyond them. The
core mobilising factor of the revolt, I believe, lies in indignation. To me,
this is extremely valuable. As a common placard reads: Man, get angry!
[ovjee naljuti se, a play on a well-known board game called Man, dont
get angry!]. In this public No! and in the prioritisation of questions of
redistribution, indignation is more important than civic duty and it carries a
particular emancipatory edge. When we press <Ctrl-Alt-Del>, we do not
gently open and close the doors of the rickety Bosnian car; we fling them
open wide and slam them shut with a bang. For those who are most vulnerable to the cruelty of the Dayton Meantime, of course, this indignation primarily concerns the extreme contrasts between their own miserable circumstances and the privileges of the ruling caste. Yet even for them, I believe, and
certainly for others, including me, it includes indignation at a society (and a
world) that allows and reproduces such inequality, for it is unjust, unnecessary and even offensive to our political being. It doesnt just piss us off. Its
also an attack on our dignity and that of all who live in that world.
Here, I believe, we arrive at a challenge for a reboot of any politics of
social justice, anywhere in the world. If many people feel indignation at glaring inequalities in the world, and if most are capable of feeling it, how can
this spark be maintained, channelled and articulated into political projects? In
Bosnia and Herzegovina, I believe, the potential of this revolts attempted

95

<Ctrl-Alt-Del> to reboot a politics of social justice relies on it remaining true

to the indignation that caused it precisely because, in principle, this is global
and universal in its potential.

96

Larisa Kurtovi

The Strange Life and Death of Democracy Promotion

in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The ongoing mass mobilization in Bosnia and Herzegovina happened not

thanks to, but in spite of the internationally sponsored promotion of participatory democracy.
During a recent interview, for which I was recruited as an expert on
postwar Bosnia, a journalist posed an unexpected question: What did I think
of the idea of Richard Holbrookes widow that the US government should
send Bill Clinton to Bosnia as a special emissary to help resolve the latest
Bosnian crisis? The wife of a man who will be remembered for helping broker the General Framework Agreement for Peace was, of course, referring to
the incredible new wave of protests that has been rolling through Bosnia for
over two weeks. Truth be told, the journalist seemed rather embarrassed to
ask for my opinion on this specific matter, but he was trying to better understand whether the Bosnian public and protesters on the streets would welcome further involvement on their behalf by the International Community.
Much of international news coverage and commentary has tackled this question in one form or another. Considering the unprecedented role that Bosnia
and Herzegovina played in the consolidation of the International Community
as a political force in the post-Cold War worldas well as the scope and
duration of its involvement in the processes of postwar reconstruction and
reformcontinued media interest in these questions remains expected. In
Bosnia and Herzegovina proper, however, the official statements and diagnoses made on behalf of the International Community by diplomats, foreign
emissaries, various EU officials, mediators and international experts, have by
and large resulted in public ridicule and scorn.
Take, for example, the most infamous of the recent statements, made by
none other than the chief emissary of the International Community in Bosnia
and the current High Representative, Austrian diplomat Valentin Inzko, who
stopped short from threatening the protesters (and presumably the government against which they were protesting) with the use of EU military troops,
if the destruction, burning and looting to which some protestors resorted did
not stop. In response to this unusually forceful reaction, one commentator on
the Bosnian social media, Adnan Beirovi, made his own plea: And finally,
Id like to ask Inzko to continue not getting involved in our problems, just
like hes been doing so far. The snarky comment, of course, was also a

97

scathing criticism of the growing passivity, disinterest and uselessness of the

Office of the High Representative (OHR), which in 2006 adopted the policy
of promoting local ownership of reform processes. The International Community hoped its new philosophy would remedy the effects of the so-called
Bonn Powers, the executive orders which the OHR used in the early postwar years to override undesirable locally-made decisions, remove problematic political figures and put in place procedures deemed necessary for progress. The doctrine of ownership was also conceived as a means of securing
the OHRs exit from the country over which it exercised control for nearly
twenty years.
This calculated withdrawal of the OHR dovetailed with an enormous
and widespread effort to promote democratization and participatory forms of
citizenship among the countrys citizens. Since 1995, innumerable millions
of dollars were spent in Bosnia and Herzegovina building civil society,
which this formerly socialist country was assumed to have been lacking due
to its totalitarian legacies. This top down approach, fuelled by foreign cash
and designed by imported political experts and various holier-than-thou technocrats, created instead a sea of new non-governmental organizations, many
of which existed just long enough to pocket the cash their well-meaning donors had brought to Bosnia to help its people learn to get along. The small
minority of initiatives that did take off often became loyal soldiers of the
international communitys neoliberal reform agenda, which dictated that
many of the former state functions be passed onto the non-governmental
sector. The best among these organizations made themselves useful to their
local communities, by offering support, services and opportunities to needy
youth, returnees and women. What is more, this new sector also offered jobs
to, and consequently kept alive a professional, English-speaking middle class,
which learned how to make convertible its expertise to earn coveted shortterm contracts. Occasionally, these new cosmopolitan elites were able to reap
small financial rewards in this strange postwar political economy, by enjoying the occasional trip abroad or a training seminar at a more or less exotic
location. Among ordinary citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina, these new
NGO-types became known as merchants of fog (prodavai magle) or better
yet, ublehaisuspicious exhibitionists, at once predatory social entrepreneurs and nonsense speaking demagogues and fools.
Yet, despite their best efforts, the international interventionists soon discovered that time after time (and despite brief and misleading interludes),
citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina continued to vote into power the same
nationalist parties who helped stage the 19921995 carnage. Lead by their
own ideological presuppositions and the disinterest in the world that existed
before they came, they presumed this phenomenon to be the result of the
traumas of war, deep-seated ideological commitments and lack of democratic tradition. For some reason, they did not notice that the very same reforms
introduced by the General Framework Agreement for Peace and postwar

98

reconstruction enabled nationalist (and later also non-nationalist) political

parties to grab hold of state-owned companies, services, and institutions
which provided livelihoods for people whose lives they so desperately wanted to improve. Those same people became hostages of these new clientelist
networks run by the very same political parties, and forced to bargain their
political loyalties for a chance to become public school teachers, or janitors in
the municipal headquarters. Such dynamics rarely entered the analyses of
elections results, let alone affected the ways that privatization policies were
implemented on the ground. Yet it was precisely this process of accumulation by dispossession that finally brought Bosnias workers to the brink, and
then eventually, to the street.
When one operates under the assumption that the political and economic
domains are autonomous from one another, one can become oblivious to
even the most obvious of potential outcomes. Instead of addressing the injustices of this mass dispossession, the international interventionists proceed to
develop a whole range of new campaigns for the promotion of participatory
citizenship. This included a myriad of workshops on conflict resolution, advocacy, lobbying and PR. Year after year, new keywords gained ground:
from capacity-building, to local governance, to empowerment, to accountability to transparency, and so on. For a while, internationals looked on in
disbelief as their efforts to wave the carrot of EU accession fell flat, unable to
garnish any meaningful attentionlet alone mobilizing poweramong the
Bosnian public. Last summer, everyone in the nongovernmental sector was
receiving funds for projects centered on the problem of corruption. After
enjoying a momentary glimpse of hope that the international funding agencies finally got down to the root of the problem, I discovered that what they
really wanted to talk about are troubling cultural practices and tendencies
that must be eradicated through new forms of political pedagogy. There was
no effort to place corruption into context, let alone willingness to admit
that it exists in different guises all over the world, including the mighty West.
Faced with having to explain why the prolonged international engagement in Bosnia engendered so little concrete change, the newly fledged NGO
elite came up with an explanation: political apathy among Bosnian citizens
was to be blamed for the lack of progress in nearly everything, from constitutional reforms to the processes of EU accession. This apathy was an unfortunate legacy of socialism and a consequence of political inexperience. The
citizens had to be taught to participate in politics in order to mobilized to take
the destinies of their country into their own hands. If there was to be any
improvement, the people had to rise up and take ownership of the processes of postwar reconstruction and reform.
On 6 February 2014, these apathetic citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in
a spontaneous yet simultaneous effort did just this by raising up against the
incompetent, corrupt and criminal political elites whose cushy lifestyles they

99

have been subsidizing for two decades. A day later, a portion of the protesters, mainly young men whom the postwar transition robbed of their futures, went as far to stone and burn down a series of government buildings in
different parts of the country. In smaller, reindustrialized, provincial towns,
more compact groups of protesters fought off their fear of the local political
oligarchies to publicly demand a livable future for their families and communities. Hours later, some of the protesters reemerged from the smoke and
ashes retraumatized, unsure of whether this was the right move but convinced
there was no going back. Those among them who fit the right demographic
profile soon ended up in the lock-up, where the newly reformed postwar
police trained in human rights beat them senseless as retribution for what
turned out to be a misguided and fleeting moment of political empowerment.
Even before the firefighters managed to curb the flames, one thing was
clear. The mobilization that started in the northeastern town of Tuzla, once
one of Bosnia and Herzegovinas greatest industrial heartlands and today a
site of gut-wren-ching mass dispossession, did not emerge out of the internationally designed civil society. Nor did this mobilization make use of the
strategies promoted by the engineers of postwar democracy, including advocacy, lobbying and conflict resolution. It instead took the form of an unrelenting popular revolt whose fury could not be contained within the moderate,
cowardly, status-quo preserving language of democracy promotion. The
collective indignation of which we were made witness proved that what had
been misunderstood as apathy, was merely a (dis)quiet before the storm. If
there is one thing that my nearly decade long ethnographic trek through
postwar Bosnia taught me, is that ordinary people live not in indifference, but
consumed by worry about their countrys future. For many, surviving this
postwar impasse has become equal to a continuous bodily assaultIve met
people who took valium just to watch the news, and others that described the
political crisis as a physical weight sitting on their chest. Most were skeptical
about the transformative capacity of all political engagementa hard lesson
they had learned in the past. Others secretly dreamed of a world-transforming
revolution that would set the entire society back on the right track, from
which it was violently jerked some twenty-five years ago.
The avalanche of the protests and their intensity surprised no one who
knew even a fraction about this lived reality. It even pleased some of the
internationals, who rushed to make relevant again their hard-earned expertise on the Bosnian political crises and to advocate for more international
intervention, which could presumably replenish the drying streams of donation funds. Others, whose working era in Bosnia was (thankfully) done, chastised Bosnia-born intellectuals and analysts who dared utter in public that this
could be the beginning of a new era. They then proceeded to remind everyone of just how complicated the Bosnian situation had gotten and how the
populous is not to be trusted. Inzko, who up to now lucratively enjoyed his

100

status of a cultural attach, made the aforementioned and most decisive

statement of his uneventful career.
The perfect storm of these diagnoses and statements reminded citizens
of Bosnia and Herzegovina of something they had learned long ago: that the
International Community is a self-serving, self-interested and alienated center
of power that never has been working in support of citizens own interests.
The truth is, the democratic transition which the International Community
promoted was always supposed to be limited, and done according to the
terms of its own design. Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina were supposed
to continue lobbying, advocating, writing petitions and staging charming,
non-violent protests (preferably those that did not make the last summers
error of making foreign visitors and potential investors collateral damage).
They were supposed to continue arguing for greater accountability and transparency of governmentand ignore the fact this government consisted of
war-profiteers, second-generation political cronies and veritable criminals.
They certainly were not supposed to organize general assemblies, those pesky
experiments in direct democracy that allude to their communist past, and let
alone demand a revision of privatization, social protections, pensions and
anything that could be interpreted as socio-economic justice.
Now that they have done all of this, all of the things they were not supposed
to do, one other thing has become clear. The International Community, with
its backhand deals, democratic designs, and ongoing extra-institutional meetings with the delegitimized political elites has been a part of their problem for
a very long time. For many in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is no better than
the political oligarchy that has been riding on the backs of citizens for two
decades. So to echo my aforementioned virtual interlocutorit should continue to do exactly which it has been for a while, which is stay out of the
way. That includes, with all due respect, keeping both Bill Clinton and the
ghost of Richard Holbrooke at bay.
For better or worse, the spotlight is now directed at the heterogeneous
and imperfect, but certainly righteously mobilized mass of citizens of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, whose patience with both national and international political structures has worn thin. In that spirit, let me conclude by relaying their
message.
A Message to International Organisations and Institutions
For years, you have been inviting citizens of this country to act responsibly.
This is precisely what has been happening for the past couple of days across
Bosnia and Herzegovinaus taking responsibility for our lives, the lives of our
parents and our children. We are not a mob that is out to destroy. The sights
from some of the protests may not have been pleasant, but they are not anything
that hasnt been seen worldwide, including your countries. We are inviting you
to treat us as you treat those other protests, where you recognize and celebrate

101

the spirit of freedom, justice, and equality, irrespective of incidents. We are asking international human rights organizations to support our cause.
Plenum of the People of Sarajevo, for the common good

102

Edin Hajdarpai

Democracy in the Conditional Tense:

On Protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina

In early February 2014, thousands of protesters stormed government buildings and offices across Bosnia and Herzegovina. The massive outpouring of
anger in Sarajevo, Mostar, Tuzla, and other Bosnian citiesfollowed by the
creation of plenums, or local citizens assembliesquickly but briefly attracted worldwide attention. While the New York Times and National Public
Radio scrambled to find reporters on the scene, editorials by intellectuals like
Slavoj iek and open letters signed by thinkers like Tariq Ali and Naomi
Klein expressed enthusiastic support for the Bosnian demonstrations and
assemblies.
Since February, more commentary has appeared both praising the protest movement and predicting and lamenting its decline. Amidst all these
debates, the general consensusespecially in the mainstream media and
official government offices in Europe and the United States of Americais a
familiar one when it comes to protests in troubled countries (like Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Ukraine, Greece, or Tunisia): endorsement of citizens basic
democratic rights coupled with a stirring condemnation of corrupt local politicians.
However, such endorsement of protests almost always come with a few
telling qualifications. Tim Judahs assessment of the Bosnian demonstrations
in The Economist presents a good example of this kind of commentary. The
piece is overall well-informed, concisely identifying the immediate factors
leading to the Bosnian protests, which are then endorsed for being antinationalists and even extraordinary. Yet by the end of the article, the endorsement shifts to a series of conditional clauses: If the plenums take root,
if new leaders emerge and if they focus on realistic demands, something
might really change.1
Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are used to having their political
situation qualified with numerous conditional clauses. If the situation escalates, we will possibly have to think about EU troops. But not right now,
said Valentin Inzkothe High Representative of the international community
in Bosniaimmediately after the 7 February protests. If [the international
officials] dont act now, I greatly fear that a situation where secessionism will
1

Tim Judah, On Fire: Protests in Bosnia, The Economist, 18 February 2014. Available at:
<www.economist.com>.

103

take hold could easily become unstoppable as we approach elections, added

Paddy Ashdown (one of the previous High Representatives in Bosnia and
Herzegovina) in an interview with CNN. Such if clauses summon fears and
threats of violence; other conditionals are there to stake their hope in Bosnias many leaders. The leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina should consider to take courageous and decisive steps if they want their country to catch
up, said tefan FleEUs Commissioner for Enlargement and European
Neighbourhood Policyafter last years protests in Sarajevo. The protests
themselves, however, remained murky and saddled with more ifs in popular reporting. The headline of US News and Report summed up the situation
with a familiar conditional clause: Bosnians clean up rubble after violent
protests, but unclear if anything will change.
Taken altogether, these reactions illustrate what one could call democracy in the conditional tense: general endorsement of protest, yes, but also a
little lesson about what counts as proper democracy development.
What does this peculiar political grammar reveal? A bit of structuralist
analysis helps clarify its assumptions and appeal. In the first place, political
commentary in the conditional mood usually assumes a passive, naturalized
voice of reason, appearing as a set of purportedly self-evident syllogisms (If
the protests produce new leaders, things might change) rather than directives
that prescribe desirable and undesirable behaviour (Protesters need to name
new leaders in order to change the situation.) Having posited the voice of
generic reason, the conditional tense then cautions and inoculates against the
dangers of excess, not only the excess of force (protests are good, but not if
they are violent,) but also the excess of political imagination (protests are
good, but not if they have excessively unrealistic and idealistic demands.)
Finally, endorsement of democracy in the conditional tense usually refers to
and explicitly invokes outside observers and local leaders, the real political
actors capable of channelling the protesters allegedly disjointed energy into
more constructive uses (If the political leaders do not listen to the protesters,
no real change will happen.) In this kind of discourse, what is ultimately
endorsed is not democracy as a difficult and broad struggle for social justice,
but ratherto quote the official letter of the High Representative in Bosnia
after the protestsA Reasonable and Constructive Response to Dissatisfaction of Citizens.2
This political grammar pervades not only current reports on the Bosnian
protests, but also wider commentary on similar demonstrations and social
justice efforts, from the Occupy movements in the US to the many forces
fighting for change in Turkey, Egypt, or Ukraine. It provides a way for commentators to preserve their democratic credentials by endorsing the idea of
protest in principle, but also allows them to mask their disapprovalof leaderless structures, unrealistic demands, and so onbehind the naturalised
2

104

Office of the High Representative, Reasonable and Constructive Response to Dissatisfaction of Citizens, 18 February 2014. Available at: <www.ohr.int>.

voice of reason and its seemingly logical conditions. In these ways, one can
both endorse the protests and at the same time pre-emptively qualify and
disavow them as inevitable failures.

Beyond Democracy in the Conditional Tense

What is truly refreshing about the Bosnian protests so far is that they operate
largely oblivious to the logic of democracy in the conditional tense. Immediately after the first demonstrations in the industrial town of Tuzla on February 7, the protests brought about the formation of the first plenuma local
citizens assemblybased on direct democratic participation, involving hundreds of people and defying notions of individual leadership and reasonable responses to an otherwise desperate situation.
The plenums, like the protests that accompany them, emerged as popular responses to the many social ills that have plagued Bosnia in the last two
decades. Since the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995, corrupt dealings, dubious privatizations of state property, and skyrocketing national debt have
combined to strip the country of its major economic resources (mines, factories, companies), enriching the ethnocratic elite while impoverishing the vast
majority of the citizens. The relatively small cadre of nationalist parties has
mastered the art of playing the ethnic card and winning enough Bosnian Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian votes, respectively, to stay more or less in permanent power; of course, the fact that the power-sharing provisions of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP) allots positions along explicitly ethnic lines made these dynamics possible in the first place. In the twenty
years that passed since the war, a set of ethnic parties (Serbian, Croatian, and
Bosniak or Muslim organizations) has decisively capitalized on the postsocialist transition of this war-torn country into a free market economy.
This political class that emerged after the General Framework Agreement for Peace has carried out a sweeping array of policies that have made
the ethno-nationalist elites impervious to pressure from both the citizens of
Bosnia and the international community. These developments seem selfevident today, but it is worth remembering just how astonishing they are in
light of Bosnias post-war history. If someone had said in 1995 that the politicians of this small war-torn and impoverished country heavily scrutinized
by the international community would go on to make themselves the proportionately highest paid representatives in Europe, to expropriate the countrys
key economic resources with impunity, to take out staggering loans for unrealized projects, and to block any attempts at changing this situationall in
less than 20 years after the General Framework Agreement for Peacemost
experts would have dismissed such statements as unrealistic and impossible. Yet that is precisely what happened with the formation of new political
forces after GFAP.

105

As these processes unfolded, places of employment have declined to the

point of disappearance; surviving companies have ceased paying their workers; pensions were slashed below subsistence levels. The health care system
became so dysfunctional that it functioned only when greased with bribes;
desperate appeals on behalf of severely ill individuals are a constant feature
of public life in Bosnia. Educational and cultural institutions like the National
Museum and the National Library are shuttered due to lack of funds while
hefty bank loans and multi-national investments continue to finance market
centres headed by various party functionaries in both entities.
In these circumstances, a new leader is the last thing that most Bosnian protesters want; they have seen how quickly politicians promising reforms
have become complicit with the existing rings of corruption and crime. After
the initial storming of government buildings on 6 and 7 February, when protesters clashed with the police and burned party offices, the demonstrations
have continued in peace and without violence. This is an important point
often overlooked in the subsequent analyses of the Bosnian protests. Much of
the energy of the initial uprising was funnelled not into further violent clashes
against the police, but instead into the creation of local assemblies, complete
with their own internal rules and demands. Modelled after the initial gathering in Tuzla, more assemblies have been formed in Sarajevo, Mostar, Biha,
Bugojno, Brko, and other towns. These public meetingsoften held every
day in the larger citiesformulated new demands, made new local connections, and invited more and more people to participate in the plenum movement.
The first Tuzla Assembly on 9 February explained the plenum idea thus:
A plenum [assembly] is a public space for discussion, without censorship and
without hierarchy of participants, a space for making decisions. () Whoever
wants to participate or feels the need to participate can do so without any restrictions. () The assembly has no leaders; at each session, moderators are
elected to facilitate discussion and allot [the same] measure of time for all
speakers.3

This is currently kept to two minutes so that everyone gets a chance to speak.
At the end of each meeting, a list of common demands is drawn up and voted
on. Each person gets one vote; there is no option to abstain. These direct
democracy procedures overtly turn the table on the familiar discourse of
politics in the conditional tense. As the Tuzla assembly reminded the international public in its 13 February discussion, If [the EU ministers and officials] Ashton and Fle arrive, they can freely join the citizens assembly, but
with the same rules as for us all: raising your hand, asking to speak. You get
two minutes.
3

106

Nedad Ibrahimovi, FAQs about the Tuzla plenum, 13 February 2014. Available at:
<bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com>.

One of the generic complaints about direct democracy is that it is chaotic, disruptive, and excessively argumentative. The meetings of the Bosnian
assemblies will not disappoint their critics on that count. These were not
smooth parliamentary proceedings; speeches were short and reactions are
sometimes conflicting and uproarious; demands covered a huge range of
issues, from reprivatisation to schooling to pension funds to health care reform to struggles against nationalist divisions. In the fray of things, some did
not get to speak as there are often too many people lining up for their turn to
address the gathered citizens. Moreover, external pressures on the assemblies
are growing. Every day, new rumours seek to discredit the citizens gatherings as the insidious work of one political functionary or another. Anonymous threats are targeting the more prominent participants; in Mostar, several
men attacked and severely beat a local labour organizer who helped set up the
assembly.
Despite all this, the assembly meetings follow their rules and provide a
structured and broadly inclusive space for citizens to debate and organize.
One observer on the ground described the assembly participants as old people, pensioners, business men and women, clerks, trades men and women,
moms, old union hacks, all waiting their turn to speak while listening to
each other. As one participant of the Sarajevo assembly commented, Silence
was in power for over twenty years; now it is hard to say everything in two
minutes. Many have described the experience as the largest psychotherapy
in Bosnia and Herzegovina and as a way of achieving collective catharsis
for this post-war society. In the words of Damir Arsenijevi, a key organizer
of the Tuzla plenums, the protests created, for the first time, a chance for
Bosnia and Herzegovina to move from melancholia to mourning: that is, to
face the losses and start counting the gains from the war.4
In this regard, the other generic complaintthat direct democracy does
not really accomplish anythingis wrong on numerous counts. In the first
place, the citizens assemblies have, at least partially and temporarily, broken
the ethnocratic hold that the current political parties have imposed on political organization. In the words of Florian Bieber, an experienced observer of
Balkan politics: these protests have shown that leaders of political parties no
longer have the right to speak in the name of all citizens.5 Banners at the
Tuzla and Sarajevo protests summed up this popular rejection of the postDayton political class: Nothing will ever be named after you.
Instead of calling for new elections and thus allowing the ruling parties
to manipulate the electoral processwhich will go on as scheduled in October 2014 anywaythe plenum assemblies modelled a new kind of political
4
5

Damir Arsenijevi, Protests and plenums: The struggle for the commons, 28 April 2014.
Available at: <www.academia.edu>.
Florian Bieber, Is Change Coming (Finally)? Thoughts on the Bosnian Protests, 10
February 2014. Available at: <www.balkaninsight.com>.

107

conduct that stood in stark contrast with the established parliamentary practices in Bosnia. Whereas the sessions of the countless cantonal and entity
parliaments are dominated by rehearsed party bickering and dramatically
exaggerated yet practically meaningless confrontations, the sessions of the
plenum assemblies were well coordinated, constructive, and united in articulating their political agendas, which were then clearly communicated and
immediately published. For all the complaints about the inevitable chaos of
direct democracy, the plenum meetings were remarkably organized and efficient in establishing their rules and demands, thus modelling a kind of behaviour previously unseen on the Bosnian political scene. The international
community, however, has largely ignored the political significance of the
plenum assemblies despite endorsing the general idea of citizens protest in
principle. For their part, the Office of the High Representative to Bosnia and
Herzegovina, the EU, and other international officials have simply continued
the usual practice of catering to the same ethno-national elites who engineered the current gridlock and refused to alter the status quo; the carefully
staged meetings with a few local participants of the plenum gatherings did
little to change this picture. Nonetheless, the establishment of alternative
modes of political representation was a profoundly important development
for the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Secondly, the assemblies have already brought down several politicians
and have articulated very specific legal and social demands. The entire Tuzla
Canton government resigned in the face of the protests; in its place, the assembly and a new government are now running the city. The Tuzla plenum
not only stripped politicians of their white bread (a set of laws that in effect
provided luxurious severance packages after their removal from office), but it
also made several moves that enabled laid-off workers to return to their factories and renew their claims to at least some of the privatized factories and
enterprises. The social character of these demands, which tied specific local
issuesnaming individual officials, services, and institutionsto the larger
processes of dispossession and misgovernment, is telling of the long-standing
problems that established politicians have consistently refused to address.
Similar demands, backed by daily plenum meetings, were asserted before
cantonal governments in Sarajevo, Mostar, and other towns and continue to
be debated.
But in addition to these local achievements, the assemblies made more
profound and less immediately tangible gains by opening up spaces for new
political ideas, alliances, and possibilities. Thanks to the breakthroughs, unemployed women and men, fed-up seniors, and underpaid workers made the
practice of speaking and listening to each other the basis for their political
relationships and interactions. Many were eager to make the point that their
troubles are not unique to Bosnia, but are the constituent parts of wider developments across national borders. At the third Sarajevo assembly, activists
from Greece addressed the assembly with the message, We are here to sup-

108

port your struggle, because your struggle helps our struggle in Greece.
Damir Imamovi, a musician and activist, issued a similar message ahead of
the first assembly meeting in Sarajevo:
The situation in Bosnia is not a special case and it cannot be reduced only to
ethnic relations () It concerns things that trouble our neighbours and many
other countries in the world, countries that seem to have ideal national institutions: corruption, lock of workers rights, gambling with the citizens wellbeing for the sake of someones wealth. () Disenfranchisement is just as international as capital.

New connections and tentative alliances are emerging on the fragile grounds
of won by the protests and the citizens assemblies so far.
While the outcome of the Bosnian protests remains uncertain, and while
the attendance of the plenum assemblies has certainly declined since February, these are nonetheless extraordinary achievements. Many are determined
to protect these gains. As Asim Mujki, a political scientist in Sarajevo, said
after the second Sarajevo assembly:
A measure of freedom gained, no matter how small, will not be given up easily
and disappear. As the anger and the protests are beginning to gain an institutional form, we are in a way reassured that this time we are serious, and that a
mechanism is set to control the work of future governments, and to supervise
that the protestors demands be met. Now we need more citizens to get involved, and to spread lists of demands.

A Final Taboo
In all this, there is a taboo that is circled in the news reports and proliferating
commentary: the taboo of revolution. To speak of revolution in Bosnia is
foolish and nave, of course, but not for the usual reasons. To call the relatively calm situation in Bosnia a revolution strikes the wrong note because
we associate revolutions with massive, violent upheavals that topple regimes
and install new forms of governmentthis has clearly not happened. This
might seem self-evident, but it does not really get at the issue of why revolution remains a taboo word in Bosnia today.
One reason why it is simultaneously tempting and impossible to speak
of revolution in Bosnia is that the practice of the citizen assemblies possessed
a subversive daily quality, something that has revolutionary potential, but
does not at all fit with the general image of revolution. During the plenum
meetings, various citizens gathered across Bosnia to debate each other, to
formulate new agendas, to call for more protests and radical changes even as
the political structures remained much the same, at least on paper. Writing
about such events is always challenging and risky, particularly amid the ebb
and flow of changing circumstances in Bosnia. Roland Barthes once re109

marked, Revolutionary writings have always scantily and poorly represented

the daily finality of the revolution, the way it suggests we shall live tomorrow, either because this representation risks sweetening or trivializing the
present struggle, or because, more precisely, political theory aims only at
setting up the real freedom of the human question, without prefiguring any of
its answers.
The events in Bosnia are important precisely for raising these difficult
questions of freedom and democracy without conditions or prefigured answers. The protests were certainly not revolutionary in the conventional sense
since they have not achieved some extreme turn-around in the countrys
political structures. Instead, they were simply subversive in proclaimingas
was stated at the first plenum in Tuzlathat the citizens assembly is a
protest for the production of possibility. This is not about creating any particular leader, party, or institution; it is about the fact that other, more humane
ways of life are possible and worth fighting for.

110

Eric Gordy

From Antipolitics to Alterpolitics: Subverting

Ethnokleptocracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Post-1995 politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina is characterized by political

structures generated by outside actors, ostensibly with the goal of assuring
peace and the development of democracy, but in practice maintaining ethnifying monopolies in politics1 and providing cover for impoverishing neoliberal monopolies in economics. While the paradox of entrusting the construction of a democratic state to the very ethnocrats who have no interest in it has
been noted by many scholars,2 as has the dubious impact of international engagement3, the toxic combination of politically-directed monopolisation and
privatisation has received scant attention from researchers. This inattention
persists despite a high and growing rate of unemployment in an environment
where political officials are not only the most generously compensated employees in the country, but also the highest paid in the region. That the systematic dispossession of the population should lead to large scale protests is
in no way surprising; more surprising is that the expansion of protest to a
massive scale should have taken so long.
Foreseeable as they may have been, as they developed from February
2014 onward in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the protests and the formulation of
popular dissatisfaction into concrete demands took on some innovative forms
that make them difficult to dismiss as (one more) angry but barely coherent
display of outrage. Some of the characteristics of the protests derive from
conditions specific to the Bosnian and Southeast European environment,
while others point to directions for the development of ground-level political
1
2

See Paula Pickering, Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View From the Ground Floor
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
See Florian Bieber, Postwar Bosnia: Ethnic Structure, Inequality and Governance in the
Public Sector (London: Palgrave, 2006). See also Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton:
Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002). See also David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (London: Pluto
Press, 2000). See also Azra Hromadi, Empty Nation: Youth, Education and Democratization in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, PhD dissertation (Philadelphia: Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 2009).
See Keith Brown (Ed.), Transacting transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia (Bloomfield CT: Kumarian Press, 2006). See also Andrew Gilber, Legitimacy Matters: Managing the Democratization Paradox of Foreign
State-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sdosteuropa, 60 (2012) 4, pp. 48396. See also
arko Papi et al., Meunarodne politike podrke zemljama jugoistone Evrope: Lekcije
(ne)nauene lekcije u BiH (Sarajevo: Mller, 2001).

111

engagement in the contemporary European environment, which has been

described as a post-prosperity4 and post-democratic5 one. Some of these
dimensions will become clear through a close reading of prominent elements
of the protests, together with a comparison of the alterpolitics6 developing
through the protests (and especially through the plena) in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the expression of public dissatisfaction with entrenched elites
through a series of antipolitics movements in Italy.

Where protests had the greatest impact

Every larger urban centre in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina saw a
protest movement of some size and duration develop, although there was not
a parallel development in the Republika Srpska. But probably the largest,
most durable, most innovative and best-organised movement developed in
Tuzla, where the first events leading to the larger wave of activity took place.
A plausible claim could be put forward that every major development in the
growth of this social movement, from the articulation of grievances in the
first instance to the creation of a citizen plenum, originates from the activists
in Tuzla. While much of this can certainly be credited to the energy and creativity of the people who have been consistently engaged with the product in
that city, it is probably sensible to look at some underlying factors that contribute to Tuzla being a likely place for a particular set of responses to develop.
Certainly one of the first among these is the citys political history. As
Armakolas7 traces twentieth-century Tuzla, it was an early-developing industrial centre, an early focal point of labour organisation and left politics, and a
centre of Partisan resistance during the Second World War. Both the leftist
legacies in the city and its long multiethnic and multinational tradition (its
economic life has long been oriented far more to the wider region than its
immediate surroundings) provided adequate support for Tuzla to maintain a
non-nationalist position during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from
1995, and after the war it remained a centre of social democratic politics and
labour activism. Tuzlas resistance to ethnifying politics made it a target,
however. During the war it was singled out by nationalist forces seeking to
replace Bosnias multiethnic traditions with new, exclusive ones, and after
the war the political structures established by the Dayton Peace Agreement
allowed the power of the city to be diluted. The division of the territory of the
4
5
6
7

112

See Greta Kripner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The political Origins of the Rise of Finance
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
See Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
Daniel Innerarity, Politics After Indignation: Possibilities and Limits of Direct Democracy
in EUI Working Papers RSCA 2012/42 (Firenze: European University Institute, 2012).
Ioannis Armakolas, Explaining Non-Nationalist Local Politics during the Bosnian War,
Europe-Asia Studies, 63 (2011) 2, pp. 22961.

Federation into cantons, in particular, meant that activity in the socialdemocratic city was subject to the oversight of cantonal governments elected
with support from the more conservative and ethnically exclusive countryside. At the same time the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had since 1990 had its strongest base of support in Tuzla,8
showed an increasing inclination to compromise on issues of concern with
the nationalist parties, by way of maintaining its position as a power broker in
the broader politics of the Federation.
It was not, however, only the citys political tradition that was undermined. The industrial infrastructure that provided the base for Tuzlas labour
activism was also gradually dismantled, its capacity hit in the first instance
by the disappearance of the Yugoslav market for the products of its chemical
industry, but in greater measure by asset-stripping, budget-skimming and
credit-bouncing privatizations. For example the former minerals giant Sodaso, which at one time produced 80 per cent of the table salt consumed in
Yugoslavia, saw its production decrease by 90 per cent, its workforce by over
80 per cent, and continuing decline after private owners sent it into receivership9 The rapid decline of local industry and the security and wages provided
through labour and trade was matched by an expansion in both the size and
profitability of the political sector. It would be possible to regard this shift as
a massive transfer of power, both economic and political, from the working
class to party and bureaucratic functionaries. Among the consequences of this
transfer could be counted a shrinking in the earned income and life chances
of working people.
In this environment it is not difficult to see why both the radical rejection of the dominant political structures and the clear articulation of social
and economic demands developed and gained major resonance. In other environments, however, the development of the movement was less certain, partly because of the operation of a different set of political forces and partly
because of a more strongly negative popular response to the rioting that
(briefly) accompanied the protests.

Where protests were hijacked

There were some localities in which it was difficult for the protest movement
to achieve the same sort of resonance it achieved in Tuzla. In Sarajevo one of
the obstacles to achieving popular traction came in the form of riots on the
first days of protests. Although early provocations on the part of the police
8
9

The Central Electoral Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina maintain a listing of results
of all elections since 1996 online at <www.izbori.ba>.
The companys periodic reports are available at <www.solanatuzla.com>. Also see Rahman Nurkovi, Influence of salt production on development of industry in the Tuzla valley, Journal of the Geographic Insttutute Jovan Cviji, 60 (2010) 1, pp. 4756.

113

may well have goaded some protesters to a violent response, the events that
provoked the largest outrage, in particular the arson in the portion of the Presidency building that contained part of the state archives was more likely the
work of professional thugs engaged for the purpose. Regardless of the sitting
authorities neglect of cultural institutionsan international campaign has
been dedicated to familiarising cultural activists around the world to the closing and slow destruction of museums in Bosnia and Herzegovina10city and
cantonal authorities in Sarajevo were largely successful in highlighting the
damage done to the archive, contrasting the gesture to the project of renovating the National and University Library destroyed during the war and portraying its perpetrators in disqualifying, decivilising terms. As self-serving as
this strategy was, it apparently had some resonance with some portion of Sarajevo residents for whom the image of burning buildings was greeted with
some horror, and for whom it recalled memories of the siege of the city between 1992 and 1995. Consequently at the beginning, particularly with the
power of major media harnessed to it, the campaign to discredit the protests
and to call forward fears of violence and disorder had a disabling effect.
A related effort to devalue the protest movement was engaged in Mostar, with its reach more limited to the supporters of the national parties. A
city that was forcibly segregated during the war, and which for a time functioned as the capital of the Herceg-Bosna parastate, its public spaces and
institutions remain subject to parcelled control by ethnically-based political
parties.11 The protests sought, among other goals, to articulate shared interests of the larger population against the domination of entrenched ethnocratic
parties. Among the buildings damaged on the first nights of protest, when
some rioting did take place, was the headquarters of the largest ethnic Croat
party HDZ. In this instance the prime minister of neighbouring Croatia,
Zoran Milanovi, responded: he paid a visit to Mostar and declared the support of his country for the currently ruling institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But he made the gesture in a particularly demonstrative way, travelling not to the capital of the country but to the institutional centre of HDZ, as
if to underline that Croatias support was not to the population but to a portion of the post-1992 elite. A similar effort by neighbouring Serbia (where
officials of the Republika Srpska entity were invited to Belgrade to hear declarations of support) underlined that the effort of neighbouring states was
oriented to dampening popular enthusiasm for protest by again raising the
spectre of disorder and by highlighting the cross-border support enjoyed by
ethnocrats.

10
11

114

The site for the campaign can be found at <www.culturesutdown.net>. The principal
mover behind the campaign is the artist and university professor Azra Akamija of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Azra Hromadi, Empty nation: Youth, Education and Democratization in Post-Conflict
Bosnia and Herzegovina, PhD dissertation (Philadelphia: Department of Anthropology,
University of Pennsylvania, 2009).

Indeed in Republika Srpska hardly any echoes of protest could be noted

at all. A small effort by veterans associations and mostly student activists
attracted some limited support, but for the most part RS officials actively
discouraged public manifestations, deploying at the same time arguments that
the absence of protest in the smaller entity indicated that the parties in power
there maintained better social conditions and enjoyed greater support. This
rhetoric was directed against the Federation and operated with an eye to undermining the legitimacy that RS and the Federation occupy jointly. That it
had the additional goal of rhetorically confining the protest movement to the
Bosniak population is suggested by the fact that a similar construct was echoed by right-wing Croat media outlets.
Fundamentally, the protest movement ran into difficulty in places where
the dominant political party had cultivated a meaningful and identifiable clientele, where partly successful ethnifying political projects had catalysed an
atmosphere of surplus repression, and where violence that occurred during
the course of the protests called forth memories of the long-lasting and widescale violence that occurred as an integral part of the war. However, it was
only in the Republika Srpska, where dominant parties have had a greater degree of success in extending control over a larger segment of daily life and
where efforts to associate the continued rule of the post-Dayton elite with the
national interest of an ethnic community, that existing power structures
appeared able to silence protest comprehensively. Elsewhere, it appeared that
high levels of sympathy for the demands of the protest movement competed
with high levels of trepidation about the possible return of violence.
Plenum as de-detournement
The greatest risk, especially in the period immediately following the violence of the night of 7 February, was that the protests could be hijacked by
political parties, either by way of using the familiar rhetoric of a threat to
public security or by efforts to co-opt the protests demands and claim them
as part of a party political programme. In fact dominant politicians and media outlets with one another raced to do both.12 This is where the innovation
of the protesters both lifted the profile and extended the longevity of the protests. Through the formation of citizens plenums generating and articulating
demands by means of a direct democratic procedure, the protest movement
achieved two milestones: it moved protests away from the streets where they
were vulnerable to being discredited, and it took the production of the
movement agenda out of the hands of the dominant political parties where
they could be detourned and deprived of significance.
Drawing on an older twentieth century revolutionary tradition (the first
citizens plenum was formed in St Petersburg in 1905), the plenum was conceived as a way of articulating citizen demands directly, bypassing official
12

Paulina Janusz, Propagandna mainerija u slubi vlasti: Stranke i mediji BiH ujedinjeni
protiv demonstranata, Kontrapress, 9 February 2014.
Available at: <www.kontrapress.com>.

115

political institutions that were perceived as corrupt and unresponsive. At the

same time it was seen as a way of allowing issues to arise in a more concrete
and articulated form than symbolic street presence or slogans could achieve,
free also of the potential controversy that could (and in a few instances did)
arise from confrontations surrounding public protests. The Tuzla plenum
developed the first framework, and citizen plenums quickly spread to other
major cities in the Federation. Among the responses to plenums by political
elites came resignations on the part of several cantonal governments. One
prominent figure in the Tuzla plenum described the form as open, direct and
transparent democracy in practice,13 while an anthropologist saw its function
as people reminding the political class that they exist and that they have
problems they want solved.14
The plenums proved to be the vehicle that moved the protest from expression of outrage to articulation of social and political demands. Citizens
who gathered at the meetings produced lists of demands ranging from resignation of local governments and reviews of destructive privatization initiatives to limiting sources of corruption and protecting social welfare and education.15 Through peaceful, substantive and concrete discussion, the plenum
vehicle both bypassed dysfunctional government structures and addressed the
standard critique of protests that they represent an expression of dissatisfaction but offer no solutions. At the same time, the practice of direct democracy
recalled some of the more sympathetically remembered moments both of the
Partisan struggle and of Yugoslav self-management, a tradition frequently
denigrated in the contemporary post-socialist environment but remembered
throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina as a bright point in history.16 Both in the
country and abroad, a discourse developed celebrating the citizen plenums as
a precursor of a new form of politics.
As other contributors to the present volume address the plenum phenomenon and its innovative character, there may be reason to discuss some of
its limitations. One of the principal limitations involves time: the structure of
direct democracy is difficult to sustain for more than a short period, and an
elections approach in the latter part of 2014 the established parties have an
opportunity to re-emerge with reinvigorated claims to legitimacy. While
some political parties have made an effort to adopt as their own some of the
demands of the plenums, there is considerable resistance among plenum par13

14
15
16

116

Damir Arsenijevi, Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Practice of a Different Future, Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files, 22 February 2014.
Available at: <bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com>.
Stef Jansen, The Plenum is a Roar of Enraged People, Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest
Files, 27 February 2014. Available at: <bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com>.
A graphic representation of types and frequency of plenum demands prepared by Damir
Mehmedovi (2014) is available at: <bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com>.
Ana Devi, Jaws of the Nation and Weak Embraces of the State: The Lines of Division,
Indifference and Loyalty in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Pal Kolsto (Ed.), Strategies of Symbolic Nation-Building in South Eastern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

ticipants to allowing the movement to be colonised by political parties.

At the same time international actors, whose role of oversight affords them
enormous influence in the politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, have consistently failed to recognise the significance of the protest movement or to
acknowledge its autonomy from the post-Dayton elite they are accustomed to
treating as (junior) partners. High representative Valentin Inzko responded to
events with a promise of the international community to intervene if necessary to preserve the existing power structures. EU enlargement commissioner
tefan Fle paid a visit to Sarajevo as the plenums were getting under way,
where he held an unproductive meeting with political party leaders but ignored the citizen assemblies. A former UK ambassador, Charles Crawford,
wrote an opinion column proposing a fantasy neoliberal agenda for Bosnia
and Herzegovina and describing a Bosnian scholar who supported the protests as exotic.17 A premature post-mortem of the protests attributed its
predicted failure to the inability of the plenums to produce a(nother) political
party.18 While the UN Security Council placed the social and economic situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina on its agenda, an observer agency predicted,
accurately, most likely the Council will hold the debate and take no action.19
With limitations on the reach of the plenums deriving from both the
domestic political establishment and influential international actors, the influence of the movement on policy in the short term might appear uncertain.
As a new movement addressing some of the difficulties faced by both protest
and antipolitics movements over the past several years, however, its contribution could become meaningful over the long term.
Drawing on the Italian case, where a variety of antipolitical movements
have attracted a meaningful level of popular support, it might be possible to
suggest that what unifies antipolitical movements is a rejection of mainstream
politicians as corrupt, unrepresentative, and nonresponsive to genuine public
needs.20 Moving beyond that unifying point, however, one encounters a wide
range of diversity, with antipolitical movements spanning both right and left
orientations, and encompassing forms of activity ranging from intense engagement to disaffection and refusal. Left variants have been concerned with
redefinitions of the scope of the political21 as well as with (re)claiming and
17
18

19
20
21

The article by former ambassador is available at <www.transconflict.com>. The exotic

scholar in question is Jasmin Mujanovi.
The article by Elvir Juki, Why Bosnias Protest Movement Ran Out of Steam, Balkan
Insight, 18 April 2014. Available at: <www.balkaninsight.com>. It relies on interviews
with established party politicians to make the point that social change can only be effected
by established party politicians.
Security Council Report, monthly forecast for Bosnia and Herzegovina, May 2014. Available at: <www.securitycouncilreport.org>.
Vittorio Mete, Four types of Antipolitics: Insights from the Italian Case, Modern Italy,
15 (2010) 1, pp. 3761.
Clive Barnett, Reconstructing Radical Democracy: Articulation, Representation, and
Being-With-Others, Political Geography, 23 (2004) 5, pp. 503528.

117

(re)appropriating public space,22 and while they have been innovative in

terms of procedure and forms of address have faced problems of sustainability and of not all environments proving equally hospitable.23 Meanwhile right
variants (as well as initiatives like the Italian five star movement that seeks
to transcend ideological division through a more purely conceived populism)
succumb repeatedly to the tendency to be transformed into leader-centred
political parties incapable of resistance to the system into which they seek to
intervene.24
The challenge to sustainability of both left and right antipolitics movements appears to derive in part from their moving forces: they are idea- and
situation-driven rather than deriving their base from a public and its needs.
What distinguishes alterpolitics from antipolitics is the question of representation. The plenum alters the calculus by deriving the demands it articulates
from a social base that is brought forward rather than created in the Bosnian
case, a public that is systematically not represented through its official institutions. For this reason, despite the fact that quiet periods may make the
movement appear temporary, and upcoming elections may make the movement appear obsolete, the plenums offer a model that is renewable, resistant
to disqualification, and may have a lasting influence beyond the geographic
place where it was developed.

22
23
24

118

Erik Swyngedouw, Interrogating Post-Democratization: Reclaiming Egalitarian pPolitical Spaces, Political Geography, 30 (2011) 7, pp. 370380.
Razsa Maple and Andrej Kurnik, The Occupy Movement in ieks Hometown: Direct
Democracy and a Politics of Becoming, American Ethnologist, 39 (2012) 2, pp. 238258.
Ilvo Diamanti, The 5 Star Movement: A Political Laboratory, Contemporary Italian
Politics, 6 (2014) 1, pp. 415.

Asim Mujki

The Evolution of Bosnia and Herzegovinas Protests in

Five Theses

Context
In June 2013 and February 2014, we witnessed a malfunction of a dominant ethno-nationalistic system in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its structure
briefly went off the rails. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida warned
that any system functions through a furious repetition of its rituals, phrases,
in shorttheir habitual position, but that that very furious repetition of itself
carries a risk to the systema risk of derailment. Is not that what just happened in this series of protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina? If Bosnia and
Herzegovinas ethno-nationalistic elites did not value the life and parts of the
body, property and dignity of individual members of their people in the past
twenty years (not to mention the members of other peoples), if they disregarded the poverty and the deprivation, if they are characterized by the absence of any sensibility for social justice, if not even the new-borns were of
any significance to the ethical corpus they represent, if, moreover, they were
able to, so cynically, describe the expressed care for the new born babies as
oriental pathetic, or, in February 2014 as s version of Arab spring, while,
at the same time, they described their political mission as the unwavering
defence of the vital interest of their ethno-nationalism, then only one conclusion could be drawn from this: The nation they represent by fighting for its
vital interests is not a group of people made from flesh and blood, who have
everyday concerns, problems, and interests. The nation that they represent is
an abstract category, which they fill with content, as they deem appropriate,
that is, with their individual content that consists of very personal concerns,
problems, interests and frustration. The nation that they represent is all that
they currently claim it to be. In this regard, the objectification of their nation
is not only reflected in specific people made from flesh and blood, but in
concrete material individual winnings of the folk representatives who are
re-contextualized and re-interpreted within the narrative of the ideology of
ethno-national survival and threat. Therefore, it is an ethno-national power
which, thanks to the democratic vote of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
acquires legitimacy, so that they could, in the next four year term of protection of the vital national interest, continue with their self-alienation from the
citizenry, in their own world, materially objectify their representative will of
national interest in immense abundance. To expect from such people to ma-

119

ke an agreement means to expect them to back down, and backing down,

in the ethno-nationalistic correlation, is equal to capitulation and equal to a
death sentence in political life. This will never happen, and it is naive,
although, in these early stages of the rebellion it is necessary, to hold this
expectation from the demonstrators in 2013, and in 2014, that, under the
pressure of civil protest, these people will suddenly become obliging and
accommodate their more-than-justified, existential demands. The alienation
of the ruling elite is so great that it has become a matter of an unbridgeable
gap. They have been demonstrating their lack of concern for their citizens for
the past twenty years. Civil resistance is slowly maturing for its new phase,
which can be summed up by the following phrase: If we are of no interest to
you, then you are of no interest to us! In order further to raise awareness
concerning this phrase, it is necessary to analyse the protests in several theses.

Five theses on protests:

1) This is an uprisinga rebellion and not a revolution:
So, how to understand the JMBG and the February uprising? We could
hear the phrase bebolution here and there, which was clearly a reference to
the term revolution. In the media, in February 2014, we could often hear
the word revolution. And really, if revolution, in terms of common sense,
could be understood as some radical socio-political coup, we can say that
here certainly was radicalism in the past events. What was radical about
them? Maybe it was the radical attempt to terminate all bonds with the dominant model of politics, or of the political production of reality in Bosnia and
Herzegovina as an ethno-politics, through creating opportunities for the birth
of demos; the birth of the possibility for a radically different form of a political organization, which, in the broadest sense can be seen as direct democracy. In this context, the JMBG protests, and the February uprising in Bosnia
and Herzegovina in particular and the short experience with participatory
democracy could be understood as an attempt at a calling-forth of citizenry
in the role of the self-defining subject, body politick (demos, or Lockes
body politick); An attempt to open up opportunities to exit from the sphere
of the ideologically enslaved imagination which is dominated by the identity
vocabulary by means of fear of the Other. The possibility emerged with the
knowledge that things can be different, that there is an alternative
This is whyprecisely because it is merely the emergence of possibilitiesthe February uprising is not a revolution. The rebellion in the cities
of Bosnia and Herzegovina can, therefore, be characterized as an uprising,
a rebellion, a protest, but, by no means, as a revolution. What we now
have is the possibility that the citizens rebellion could slowly spread to the

120

network institutions of direct democracy, with its primary orientation toward

social justice issues, whose solutions are expected from the institutions at the
local level.1 At the moment, the dominant system, with its network of political power, remains largely intact.
However, what is implicitly revolutionary is the followingI do not
see how it is possible to meet the terms of the citizens in an effective and
long-term manner, without there being elements of revolutionary change to
the entire system. Let us consider the request for the privatization process to
be audited. This aims directly against the de-regulatory neo-liberal and capitalist logic, which gave rise to and keeps in positions of power the ruling
political class that, according to Rastko Monik privatized the potentials of
our states. To be clear, Horvat continues:
it is a class that is not typically capitalistic because it is not capable, and because
that is not its goal eitherto produce. It is a parasite class. It is a class, which
Andre Gunder Frank called Lumpenbourgeoisie, and, which sociology refers
to as comprador bourgeoisie. It actually provides services for transnational capital, and takes, not profit, but rentan income which stems from its status
(which is ensured by the total rule of the dominant ethno-nationalistic order
A.M.), and not from the productive use of capital.2

That very same un-productive, rent-seeking, politically cynical dimension of

the ethno-capitalists was witnessed by the citizens and workers of Bosnia and
Herzegovina in the most brutal way. A step toward facing that group and
their ideology in February 2014 will not be made because it implies a crystallized ideological fight, i.e., a contra-ideology. A fight within the imaginary
of a dominant neo-liberal matrix is important but limited and we will be happy if some of the requests from the citizenry to those elites get fulfilled. We
should be ready for that at this stage. Direct democracy, which, today, can be
understood as a tool of this, still-undifferentiated articulation of political
subjectification, must, in order to surviveif it is not remain a Hyde Parktype Speakers Cornergain its ideological articulation, and subjectivity,
through a process which is in constant construction, through an interface of
different concepts, ideas, and visions that collide on the streets and at plena.
This rebellion process is in fact a process of much needed politicization of
the citizenry (if we ignore Election Day, the citizens spend the rest of their
1

Direct democratic action, at this moment, should be understood in the sense in which it
was defined by Goran Markovi in his book The perspectives of participative democracy
where, referrencing J. upanov, he determines participation of citizens to be an act of influence on the behavior of those who have power to make decisions. In so doing, Markovi continues, the action does not lead to different distribution of power, since its concentration is, esentially, unquestionable. Only those who have power can be influenced.
See: Goran Markovi, Perspektive participativne demokratije (New Delhi: Bookwell AB,
2007).
See: Rastko Monik and Sreko Horvat, Bijeda ujedinila Bosnu i Hercegovinu, Osloboenje, Sarajevo, 4 March 2014, pp. 3839.

121

time in a systematic state of de-politicization), which is a precondition of

political subjectification. Remaining outside of an ideology, in a neutral
position is more dangerous for this form of direct democracy which was
conceived in our country: a) the energy of the protests as a threat to the
ruling parties is rapidly weakening, which makes the rebels vulnerable to any
sort of manipulation, spin doctors, both by the ruling parties and by the media, b) in this ideological vacuum, it can easily happen that neoliberal capitalism appropriates this democratic excess and brands it, turning it into folk
entertainment and carnival events, from which they can make some money;
(even today, we have the folk carnivals in Europe when people in funny costumes, for just one day, takeover the power in their little towns and pretendrule).
2) These are political protests:
In contrast to the mainly benevolent interpretations which were mainly aimed
at soothing the ethno-nationalist vampire, and which can be boiled down to
emphasizing that the past protests took place outside any politics (we do not
represent any political party, we do not support any particular political
party or policy, etc., which are some of the things that could be heard from
the protestors present at both protests), I declare that we should understand
them as extremely political. Although, at first instance, we are talking about
the existential extremea barren life (the life of the babies without a JMBG
number, life of workers without salaries, social assistance or any benefits),
we should, at the same time, know that the individual life is fundamentally a
political construct: from birth itself, from initiating the new-born into a certain gender and ethnos, its socialization, the life of an individual is a good
resource for political shaping and instrumentalisation, as, after all, is his or
her death as well. The protests hit the very heart of the political in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and, as such, cannot be non-political. The June 2013 and, particularly, the February 2014 protests opened up the possibility for civic bases,
away from the corrosive ethno-nationalistic acids.
When it comes to the February protests, a clear, new delimitation line of
the political has been drawn: The Bosnian state-republican-patriotic-liberalnationalistic narrative suddenly, but, naturally, in its interpretations of
the terrible events, coincided with the narrative of the Serb and Croat ethno-politicians, so the protests could have, simultaneously and equally, be an
anti-Bosnian and anti-Serb and anti-Croatian, although they are neither antiBosnian nor anti-Serbian or anti-Croatian.3 The state-patriotic intellectuals of
all three constituent peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina have, perhaps, for the
3

122

This is an ironic twist of ZAVNOBiHs (Bosnian revolutionary convent during the

Second World War) November 25 1943 Declaration that defined Bosnia and Herzegovina
as a republic belonging equally to Serbs, Croats and Muslims but to none of them in
particular. The protestors of February 2014, therefore, threatened equally the Serb, Croat,
and Bosniak elites, and none of them in particular.

first time since waving their flags in 1990, spoken with a united voice, only,
this time, instead of flags, they were waving their interpretative constructions. In other words, where there is public antagonismwhich was so very
evident in the recent proteststhere has to be the political, which means that
the protests had the ultimate political character. If we were to believe Carl
Schmitt, the political sphere is the sphere of social merger and separation. It
is a friend-enemy sphere.
The protests have, it seems, made it clear who the enemy is: the government, has come into focus as the embodiment of an inhuman system, and
it is no longer the ethnic other, which constantly lurks out there. The protests
are not, in fact, political, in the superficial manner that is usually ascribed to
them: That is, that there is an existing party structure behind the protests,
which has organized them and steered them in a certain direction. The protests haveas much as it was possibleclearly set a delimitation line and
offered new forms of mutual civic solidarity that transcends the twenty year
old politically imposed form of solidarity that exists on an ethno-national
basis. Therein lays the source of ethno-national elites biggest fear: unpredictability, the opportunity of a new centrifugal force of mutual solidarity
which threatens to exhaust and deprive of meaning the usual channels and
sources of political power (the ethno-national mobilization).
Besides, an answer to the question as to whether these were or were not
political protests, was given by the politicians themselves, through the investment of their maximum efforts to developing a strategy to de-politicize
them: the demonstrators were fiercely pushed outside the political by efforts
to depict them as terrorists (the hostage crisis during the JMBG protests
and charges of terrorism for the events that took place on 7 February 2014),
hooligans and vandals, in brief, by de-civilizing and de-humanizing
them. The strategy of de-politicizing the protests, which is jointly conducted
by the political elites, can also be seen in their dominant form of interpretation, which says: Citizens protests are justified, HOWEVER, we do not
condone the violent way they are being manifested. Here, the cynicism of
the authorities is completeso, the structures which were, in essence, a
product of the ultimate war time violence, and those who are the watch-dogs
of that war-produced reality, which confirms its violence daily, through different breaches of fundamental human freedoms and rights, through a refined
network of discrimination, through total subjection of its citizens in every
respect (spiritual and material) are now the biggest pacifists. However, even
deeper cynicism is at work in that construction. That is, when the ruling ethno-political elite says the protests are justified, HOWEVER..., that is, when
they do not put a full stop after the protests are justified, and utter the howeverword, in fact, this rhetorical strategy shifts focus to what follows after
however. It thus, not only makes irrelevant their own acceptance of the
justified rebellion, but immediately nips it in the bud, because, what follows
after However, in essence, annuls the previous (through a hooligan-like-

123

vandalistic re-description, they squeeze it out of the legitimate political

sphere). The alleged acceptance of justification of some attitude or action,
without accepting its consequences, which are much more dangerous and
far-reaching than an act of arson, or, as burning, or, as philosophers of pragmatism would say, without its imagined consequences, that is, substantive
non-acceptance, that is, empty speech, that is, cynicism. Therefore, the
strategy to depoliticize political protests, has, as its consequence, an empty
position on their justification, and was developed to conceal the following
that this is not about approval or disapproval of violent actions of the demonstrators, but about accepting or not accepting the consequences of justified
or non-justified dissatisfaction. Not accepting the consequences means not
accepting something in general. However, what comes into action in that
strategy is the pushing of that entire problem into the sphere of private moralityof moral outrage over an act of destructionIt is exactly what it is: privatizing-individualization or fragmentation of a rebellion with the aim of
pushing it out of the political sphere.
3) This is an act of self-determination:
One of the most important features of both protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the confirmation of self-perception of the participants and the observers about their own subjectification in the form of a new collective,
which articulates its will. During this long lasting drill of representational
democracyin our case, a representational democracy based on ethnic
pluralismthe citizens reflex of self-determination and articulation of their
interests was numb. Whenever the ritual voting in elections approached, the
will to self-determine was delegated to the self-determination power of a
faction of the (ethno-national) elite, which managed, through the spreading of
existential fear, to mobilize a larger number of voters. That is why our elections do not resemble political elections, but are merely de facto censuses on
an ethno-confessional basis. Every election takes us back to Hobbess state of
nature, of possible war of all against everyone, so, the most reasonable way
out of that hopelessness is offered in the form of delegating ones will to selfdetermine to the ethno-national sovereign, who, in turn, offers the survival of
its collective for the next four years. Representative democracy is in crisis
throughout the world, precisely because of its elitisation, the shrinking of
social plurality and its interests, changes within the discourse of the privileged political elites. And, what can be said about the rigid Bosnia and Herzegovinas ethnic parliamentary democracy? The protests throughout Bosnia
and Herzegovina have reminded usand, especially the managing elitesof
the citizens drive for self-determination. The protests were an excellent
opportunity for the citizens to recognize one another as political subjects and
become aware of themselves as subjects and participants in a collective civil
subject, which may express its will and interest in all its diversity. The gath-

124

ered citizens - on the square, the street, the plenumdespite their differences,
contradictions, have, by gathering in a public place, summoned, as Hardt and
Negri would say a force which joins in action,4 which is quite contrary to
the typical pattern of action of the ethno-nationalistic elites, whose rule is
based on the isolation and atomization of the citizen, of letting him or her
define his or her own selfhoods. This opened up the possibility for a process
of political subjectification which will begin with a clear refusal of the tacit
consent, that the entire ethno-nationalistic system rested uponthat it was
representativethis clear refusal simply says: You do not represent me!
This message is frightening because it dismantles the dominant ideological
framework within which the citizens have so far acted. Ideology is a hegemonic narrative of alienation, i.e., a network of hegemonic narratives of alienation, which are in a mutual relation of greater or lesser coherence. It rests
on a strategy of alienationalienation from what? From the alienation arising from the realization that social reality is a result of our own actions, selfdeterminations and freedom.
In the context of a dominant ideology, a strategic twist takes place: We
are becoming, in a self-determining way, determinedfreely accepting the
enslavement of our own imaginationwhich boils down to a subordinate
position that things are such and such and that they cannot be any different.
That free subordination first takes place in the acceptance the language of
the usurper, the power-holder, in our case, the acceptance of the ethnonationalistic worldview. In that sense, it could be said that the greatest asset
of Bosnia and Herzegovinas uprising and the awakening of the demos is the
start of de-legitimizing the dominant ethno-political pattern of discourse,
which generates the power of the political elites through the submission of
the citizenry to its own ethnos. To hold open and spread the crack in the legitimacy and persuasiveness of the dominant vocabulary of intimidation from
the ethnic other, or from the fragmentation of ones own ethnos, to be indifferent to that story could lead to it simply bursting, like a bubble, just as
has happened to all other ideological vocabularies in the past. The ruling
ideological vocabularyregardless of the kind of ideologyhas always had
the purpose of disarming its subordinates. So, when it, within an ethnonationalistic ideology, calls upon us, in panic, to defend the freedom of our
ethnos, to keep it from disunity, as has just occurred, and argues that, by
doing so, we preserve our freedom, then, we are dealing with a strategy of
ethno-nationalistic ideological disorientation and the disarmament of the
individualthe submissivecitizen, because it seems that he or she is beginning to understand himself or herself as an actor within a much broader
emancipatory effort, that is, as agent of freedom. The consequences of such
an outlookwhich can be seen in the ethno-political practice of the last two
decadesare that the citizen is, in fact, disarmed before the political power
which is ruling at the moment; before a power, that does not consider the free
4

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Deklaracija (Podgorica: Nova Knjiga, 2012), p. 39.

125

ethnos to be a free member of that ethnos, but, on the contrary, it considers it

as the freedom only of the members of the elites and of the political representatives of that ethnos. The de-legitimation of such ideological patter in the
series of protests in 2013 and 2014 is a strategy of counterdisarmament, that
is, the disarmament of the elites. In other words, it can become an action of
the expropriation of the expropriator, of taking on an important part of the
means of the production of political dominance; perhaps the most important
one, because itthat vocabulary of the permanent ethnic mobilization
carries within itself the forms to excuse the corruption, the enormous enrichment, and, within it, political elites gain their rationalization and justification.
(There is an entire string of these rationalizationse.g. the trial of the corrupt
ethno-entrepreneur is always the trial of an entire ethnos; it is argued that
pointing to the thefts and crimes of the ethno-political representatives is an
outer conspiracy forged with the aim of breaking up the national unity,
etc.). That is why the vocabulary of the rebels must remain bio-political, the
vocabulary of prosaic and banal social justice (as Svjetlana Nedimovi
says: They strike us with identity, and we strike them with bread).
What the ethno-nationalistic oligarchs spent protecting for the past two
decades are the ideological concepts of ethnos, which contained the very
particular, individual interests of the authoritative class. And, that is the exact
essence of the ideological alienation of citizens: What is protected, in the
whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the ideological concept, which is a tool
for the production of political power. This is the ideology of the ethnonationalistic authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has lasted and
which will continue to last as long as the vocabulary of fear of the ethnic
other and the breakdown of ones own ethnic community remains convincing. However, as any other vocabulary of a dominant ideology, its duration is
time-limited, because its constant use makes it porous, increasingly unconvincing, and, today, even insulting. Within that gap of understanding that the
insolence of the power-holders has sparked, has grown an awareness about
the conflict of interests between the ruling and the oppressed class; that is,
between the dominant production of ideological relations and the oppressed
production forces, which can no longer recognize themselves in the network
of those relations.
The success of the protest will depend on the depth and width of that
gap, which, through the revolt, maintains and develops awareness of the
oppressive character of the dominant production ideological (identity-culture)
relations. And, therein lays the danger. One of the possible reasons for the
failure of protests could be the following: It appears that there are too many
people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who lead a good-enough life from the
legacy (institutional and private) of the ethno-nationalistic system.
Like most of the countries in the region, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a
state, (I am referring to all of its levels) is the biggest employer. A significant
number of citizens are cast in the role of the states dependants, either direct-

126

ly, through a contract with the statea job position which is supported by he
state budget, or through his/her status as a user of some of the benefits (no
matter how low those benefits are) either indirectly, thanks to the incomplete,
mutually contradictory laws whose ambiguities and loopholes are used for
their own gain. Instead of a middle class, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a
class of clients, in which those who challenge the regime, from which they
gain and accept direct benefit, will be considered enemies. This class of
clients will fight them with silence and ignorance, and even with moralizing (the requests of the workers are ok, but not the violence). This class will
conform to the spin of the power-holding oligarchs, who will view the protests as an attack to the constitutional and legal order of the state, because it
essentially is an attack on the ethno-nationalistic system which supports that
privileged clientelist form of organisation. In other words, a significant
obstacle to the deepening of the gap and open conflict between the Lumpenbourgeoisie and Lumpenproletariat (a reserve army of workers which is
either fired, or on stand-by, at the unemployment bureau, on relief, etc.) is
this clientelist Lumpen-Mittelklasse. The position of that quasi-class is understandable, but only in a very short-term sense. That is to say, even the most
superficial analysis of the state of the economy of that constitutional and
legal order, which that class is so frantically defending, is pointing to an
imminent collapse of its entire institutional network. It can be presumed that
the International Monetary Fund will no longer be able to jump to our aid
with loans to fill our entire budget. And then, most likely after the October
2014 elections, the clientelistic class will no longer have anyone with whom
to extend their collective or individual contract; they will find themselves
in a situation of their own pauperisation and become a part of the Lumpenproletariat. A system that they could serve will simply no longer exist.
To sum up, the two decades of keeping the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a repressive ideological bio-sphere (that is, outside the polis), in a
state of de-politization, as an integral part of the strategy of the ethno-politic
oligarchs, showed its contradictions at the JMBG and February 2014 uprisings: precisely because they were systemically, using the ethnos ideology,
held in the sphere of the bare bios, naked existence, the outlook of that class
of people, over time, began to articulate itself in terms of the bios, in words
referring to the problems of bare existence. This new newly-opened dimension of civic solidarity, which was produced gradually and painfullyand, let
us not forget, its products are, even today - something that the political class
did not notice due to its cynicism and authoritarian arrogance. And then, in
June 2013 and February 2014, the bios finally spoke politically in quite a
different language. The decades of systematic marginalisation of bare existence have led to a rupture, from which has sprung the special political language of bare lifea language off which the already set ethno-political
phrase simply bounces. So, the bios may well serve as a transition phase
between ethnos and demos.

127

4) Who is our Enemy?

A lot of misunderstandings when it comes to the uprising, particularly the
February uprising, comes from the lack of clear naming of the adversary.
Who is, in fact, the adversary, the enemy of the rebelling citizens? The enemy is certainly not this or that political party. It is not this or that politician,
and, it is certainly not this or that ethnos. So, who then? It has already been
stated that the enemy, the opponent is power, but what does that mean?
Power as such? That is where we lose a clear reference. Power is a changeable category. For a specific period of time it is made of those who can be
replaced, as we have seen in February 2014. So, how can we clearly present
it or what the citizens are rebelling against? The problem is that our
enemy is anonymous. How is that possible? The opponent will be more clearly seen if we look away from, what at first glance, can be seen as an ideologically colourful spectrum of political parties, which are proposing their candidates as representatives for governmental institutions. Similar to the colours
of the rainbow spectrum, which in fact, cover the only true fundamental
colour, that is, the white one, from which all the other colours originate. It
seems to me that that entire Bosnian blinding colourful political spectrum of
political actors, who, before our eyes, are fighting for our attention, exists in
order to hide its basic, fundamental colour, that is, an ideology from which an
entire colourful array of alleged political options originates from. Which
colour is that, (that is, which ideology), which so skilfully resists its naming?
By tackling the national project, that seemingly colourful political menagerie entered into the ideological horizon of a nationalist-bourgeoisie class
project. That order rests on two parallel processes: a mastery of the practice
of political production of the nation with all its institutions, and by a mastery
of the parallel economic processes (financial, self-fertilizing flows fit for
twenty-first century capitalism). In these processes of mastering, which are
taking place with the help of parliamentary democracy procedures, which is
characteristic of this nationalist bourgeoisie layer, in the case of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and particular ethno-bourgeoisie, is typical for all of the other
bourgeoisies, and that islet us call upon the old Roland Barthes to help us
an operation of ex-nomination: Namely, as he explains, (the) bourgeoisie is
defined as the social class which does not want to be named.5 It simply
merges with the nation, and it alone is the nation, and its rituals are so natural, self-understandable, simply anonymous and normal; such, that it can be
assumed as normal that they are ruling in the system of such parliamentary
democracy. In fact, their explicit naming would be something abnormal:
that is why we do not have political parties that explicitly refer to themselves
as bourgeois, or, to adapt to our conditions, nationalist, nor are there plat5

128

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,
1972), p. 137.

forms and programs that must name it in an explicit manner. The exnomination, as an ideological strategy, is far deeper and at the same time,
more effective. By observing that anonymous class rule in his own country,
Barthes noted:
The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our
films, our theatre, our pulp literature, our rituals, our justice, our diplomacy,
our conversation, our remarks about the weather everything, in everyday
life, is dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes
us have of the relations between man and the world. These normalized
forms attract little attention.6

5) The protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina are a part of a huge wave of rebellion throughout the world:
For the success of a protest, such as Bosnia and Herzegovinas protests, it is
of vital importance to understand them in a wider context and in the context
of a story, which, from day to day, gains more and more momentum. Points
of resistance against the injusticewhich are reported, each in its own local
context, at irregular intervals (USA, Greece, Spain, Turkey, Latin America,
etc.)represent excesses of social plurality, which cannot be articulated in a
dominant representative system. Our protests should be viewed as part of a
bigger story of resistance, which is searching for new models for the politicization of political unity, for the political articulation of social plurality, which
is pushed to the margins of the dominant model of representational democracy, just whenand, the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina differs only a
bitthe party and the state apparatus or representative bodies of a bourgeois
state machinery are no longer able to represent historical elementary interests
of large parts of the population.7 So, not only is it legitimate to rebel, but it
is also legitimate to search for new forms of self-organization of the life of
the citizens, for which, there is no more room in the dominant hierarchical
construct of the mother state.

Perspectives of further resistance

The dilemma we stand before is almost threatening: to organize in the form
of a political party (to defer to any of the existing parties, or establish a new
one), or to disappear. But this dilemma displays only the pitiful state of our
political imagination, which has already condemned itself as incapable of
offering any alternative to the existing order of power. This position an6
7

Barthes, Mythologies, p. 139.

Oscar Negt, Nema demokratije bez socijalizma, nema socijalozma bez demokratije,
Marksizam u svetu, 4 (1977) 3, pp. 125.

129

nounces the full triumph of the ruling ethno-nationalistic ideology, which has
subtly been sending us a message this entire timethings are what they are
and cannot be any different. Politicians cynically implyif you want to
achieve something in the political life, organize yourselves and go to the
pollsas if our political and public sphere is not already deeply consumed by
a steel network of oligarchic interests and obscure financial flows, discriminatory practices and norms, which, for decades, have only confirmed the fact
that it is impossible to exit the ethno-nationalist matrix of political rule. Voting in the elections is only an irrelevant ornament and a fig leaf of the ethnopolitic machinery, which has taken momentum to the extent that it is governing itself, and carries the legitimacy of its own rule. When speaking of the
democratic change within the existing democratic system we should not forget about an important lesson Hardt and Negri teach us:
the people is not a natural or empirical entity; one cannot arrive at the identity of
the people by summing up or even averaging the entire population. The people,
rather, are a representation that creates of the population a unity.8

The specific constellation of representational institutions, therefore, predetermines and produces a specific political body in what should be its own
will, to which, then, the political oligarchs call upon as the will of the people,
and describe themselves as the representatives of the group and its interests.
It is a closed circle, which delineates a specific design of our institutions and
stories that, within these institutions, there is room for some different political forces is a plain lie. Within such a system one can only wish for what is
already ordered. iek rightly refers to a critique of the representational democracy by L. Trotsky, according to which, the problem with representative
democracy is not that it
gives too much power to the uneducated masses, and, paradoxically so,
makes the masses passive, passing initiative to the state apparatus (as opposed
to the soviets, where the working class is mobilized and directly exercise
power). What we call the crisis of democracy does not arise once the people
stop believing in their own power, but on the contrary, once they stop having
trust in their elites, in those who are considered as the ones who have to know
for their existence and set the guidelines of action, once they experience the
anxiety points to the fact that the (true) throne is empty, and that the decision is
truly theirs. That is why free elections always carry a minimum aspect of
kindness: Those in power kindly act as if they are not in power, and ask us to
freely decide if we want to give them power.9

130

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt Globalization and Democracy in Aronowitz S., and
Gautny H. (Eds), Implicating Empire (New York: The Centre for the Study of Culture,
Technology and Work, 2003), p. 111.
Slavoj iek, Godina opasnog sanjanja (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2013), pp. 189190.

However, what if we understand democracy seriously, beyond representational farce? What if we understand democracy in the sense in which John
Dewey understands it: understood as an idea, democracy is not some alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the very idea of life in the
community itself.10 The analysis of the requests of the rebels, which were
directed towards the authorities shows us a desire for such a serious approach. All requests are, essentially, requests for a stricter, that is, more serious respect for the already existing laws and procedures, and not only that,
but, on a more profound level, the requests of the plenum reflect its serious
understanding of democracy, in the sense that it must include (truly represent) their voices. As opposed to the JMBG protests which remain only
thatprotests, as that was their main flaw; that is, that the protesting mass
was not able to constitute itself into a convent, an assembly, a plenum, which
would then continue to pressure and control the execution of the requeststhe
February uprising has already committed that next evolutionary step in the
process of rebellion. The wrath of the demonstrators was transformed into an
institution of direct democracya plenum. The Plenum is an institution
which calls upon the citizenry (civil society in its inception) in the role of a
self-determining subject, and, at the same time, it is an institutionalized call
to the citizenry for a way out from (as Kant would say self-inculpated)
situation of an ideologically enslaved imagination through (at least for now)
measures of corrections (sending the requests to the executive and legislative
bodies to simply do their job in accordance with the existing laws), pressure (constant demonstrations and plenum meetings) and control (to which
extent the requests are fulfilled) of the existing representational democracy.
Of course, this model, especially because it is developing on the go, carries
with it a series of dilemmas. As institutions of direct democracy, any departure from the immediate environment within which they appear, and trying
to solve a problem, would guide the plenum type of action towards elitisation; that is, towards a need for hierarchal action. In other words, it could lead
to co-opting them into a hierarchal network of power of the representational
democracy, so, in the political life of the country, one more political party, in
the sea of others, would appear. Such a party could become a part of, and not
a possible solution to our initial problems. True, Marxism teaches us that it is
necessary to start the forming of a revolutionary party which would, as the
winner of the class war, claim the state apparatus and its power, with the aim
to emancipate the exploited classes. Let us also not forget that capitalism, in
the meantime, has taught us that there is no sense in the classic notion of the
class (which Marx operated with), and de-fragmented it into a vast majority
of mutually conflicting groups (particularly when it comes to ethnic and
religious groups). Therefore, is there anything left from the state that could be
10

John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press, Ohio University Press,
1954), pp. 148149.

131

taken and used for emancipation? The level of governance, as Sassen, Negri
and Hardt warn us, has, for a long time now, been located in the floating
supra-state bodies. What is actually left from the proletariat (as a class), is
only a reserve army of labour, the lumpenproletariat, which, if we are to
believe Marx, cannot carry change? Failed middle class? The vast majority?
And, how is it possible to act in co-ordination, and much more strongly,
than the current loose inter-plenum co-ordination?11 If we were to indulge in
the development of that concept, it would have to be similar to our wellknown (but highly misused) delegation system, according to which the
delegates should be elected through lottery for short mandatory periods in
the home plena (but plena of what: of municipalities and cantons? What if the
plenum organization startsas I hope forto include workplaces?). Therefore, as I understand it at least, the verticalisation, i.e. hierarchisation of power cannot be allowedthe power must firmly be kept horizontal and as comprehensive as possible, that is, it should reflect as great a social diversity as
possible. In the end, the institution of direct democracy is legitimate in itself,
although, not necessarily legal in the existing positive-legal frameworks. It is
designed to pressure and control governmental institutions that are legal, but
not legitimate, and in that, at least for now, I can see complementarities,
regardless of the fact that the institutions of demonstrators and of the government are not equal counterparts. Direct democracy politicizes citizens in
the sense in which they feel their own political subjectivity, which is a very
useful type of politicization, because the dominant ethno-nationalistic order
relies on the de-politicization of the citizenry, its pushing (of course, immediately after the elections) into a sphere beyond politics. The institutions of
direct democracy, in fact, invoke the citizenry in terms of a selfdetermining subject, an invitation to exit from the sphere of an ideologically
enslaved imagination. Simply put, they represent the birth of a demos, and
demos, within the constellation of the rule of ethnos, must, therefore, remain
outside the system, because, contrarily, if it were to enter the system, it would
itself become ethnos.

Epilogue
What the protesters in Bosnia and Herzegovina rallied for, not only surpassed
the usual ethno-nationalistic contextualisations, which persistently tried to
cause another ethnic conflict from this social unrest. The protests surpassed
the usual European liberal (orange, purple, velvet, etc.) contextualisations, according to which, the problem in Bosnia and Herzegovina is, in fact,
a lack of tolerance between Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. The whoop of the
11

132

It is important to note that this text has been written in April 2014 while demonstrations
and plena sessions were still on throughout the Federation entity in Bosnia and
Herzegovina.

protest which was expressed, for example, in one of the Sarajevo plenary
sessions, did not call for unity between Bosnians, Serbs and Croats, but was
uttered in the manner of St. Paul: I am a Serb and a Croat and a Bosniak!
What happened next could be described using ieks own words: Do not
simply respect one another, but offer them a joint struggle.12 That is exactly
what happened: An offer of a joint struggle that refused the particular ethno-nationalistic vocabulary, as a possible output from the nationalist patposition. Something entirely differenta universal project of social justice
which recognizes no Bosniaks, Croats or Serbs, and in which, all of us are
Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs. This word play on the ZAVNOBIH vocabulary
is not accidental but deliberate. However, what is the most important thing in
all this is that the offer is still open. The offer will gain more traction as
awareness increases, awareness about the limitations and inconclusiveness of
the dominant ideology. There is no doubt that the process is inevitable. Ideology fails not because another, more powerful ideology defeats it, but because
it does not, as iek says, fulfil its promises. The protesters in February 2014
and the majority of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are becoming more
convinced that the ultimate goal of ethno-nationalism and its ideology is not
to fulfil its promisesone of which is the promise to finally solve the national question. Contrary to that, in practice, the ultimate goal of ethnonationalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not to resolve, once and for all, the
national question, but constantly to create and raise new national issues and
problems, so that the reproduction of the ethno-nationalistic ideology is ensured. Let us not forget, as Louis Althusser says, that the goal of every ideological organization is to ensure their own reproduction. The same goes for
the bureaucratic apparatus of that order. iek says that, generally speaking,
the function of state bureaucracy is its own reproduction, and not solving the
problems of societyand even creating problems in order to justify their
own existence.13 With this in mind, then we must agree with iek, that the
biggest threat to bureaucracy, the most audacious conspiracy against its order, comes from those who are truly trying to solve problems that the bureaucracy should be solving.14 Is it not the case that, during the course of the
recent protests, what caused the biggest wrath of Bosnia and Herzegovinas
political and bureaucratic oligarchs was the request of the plenum finally to
resolve the problems, while respecting the laws, which the oligarchs themselves had passed? That notoriety of the most audacious conspiracy of the
demonstrators, their sane claims, were understood in the only correct way
possible: as leading to the destruction of the constitutional order, as a conspiracy (and terrorist action, of course) against that order and other such
orders which are diligently reproduced by the ethno-nationalistic order.

12
13
14

iek, Godina opasnog sanjanja, p. 79.

Op. cit., p. 148.
Op. cit., p. 199.

133

Jasmin Mujanovi

The Baja Class and the Politics of Participation

The spoken language(s) of Bosnia and Herzegovina are replete with peculiar
localisms. Many of these orbit around questions of class and political agency
and are therefore instructive for thinking about the experience of politics for
ordinary citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina or rather the lack thereof. Indeed, much has been made of the phenomenon of the concept of the raja in
English-language scholarship1 but comparatively little has been written on
the rajas antithesis. Yet even a cursory examination of the recurring themes
in popular Bosnian parlance reveals a persistent spectre: the spectre of the
baja.2
The baja haunts not merely the popular imagination in Bosnia and Herzegovina but also, in practice, prevents the emergence of popular politics.
When we say that the plena and protestors in Bosnia and Herzegovina are
confronting and challenging political oligarchy and economic cleptocracy or
that clientalism and cronyism are the prevailing norms, it is to the baja that
we refer. It is the baja figure that represents the entire class of war profiteers,
small-time hustlers and crooked political peddlers who we euphemistically
refer to as the elite in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And it is they who the protests and plena seek to replace.
This chapter will begin with a brief vignette of one particular baja, Milorad Dodik, in his natural element: a bombastic public performance of personal strength and authority. I will then sketch out the principles of the actually existing political economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina as created by the
baja class and conclude thereafter with a discussion of why the plena, as a

1
2

William Hunt, Ferida Durakovi, and Zvonimir Radeljkov, Bosnia Today: Despair, Hope, and History, Dissent, 2013, pp. 2326.
I opt for this term, as shall become clear in a moment, because it is currently quite topical.
A literal translation is difficult though I hope the following discussion will be able to explicate some of the terms subtleties and, thus, importance to thinking about Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Nevertheless, the terms head honcho, big man, boss man, or the
Spanish caudillo are somewhat approximate. Other, though not identical, terms in the
local language(s) include rumpalija, ilkoa, kabadahija and guzonja and their sheer prevalence speaks to my point about the ubiquity of the concept of the criminal-political elite
in the local popular imagination. I also examine elite-mass relations in my above-cited
2013 article on the phenomenon of the raja. Finally, my thanks to Marina Anti, Bojan
Bili, Harun Buljina, Dario epo, Margareta pii, Julian Saurin, and Anita Tavra for
their linguistic insights into this terminology.

135

politics of practice, represent such a terrifying challenge to the baja establishment.

The Glavni Baja in Banja Luka

After having insulted and curtly dismissed a female reporter at a campaign
stop in March of 2014, Milorad Dodik, the President of the Republika
Srpska (RS) Entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, regaled his audience with the
story of another one of his plainspoken encounters. He recalled how rebuffed
the attempts of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) to bring him to
heel, as he told it, by telling them to go fuck [themselves], adding the he
was the glavni baja in the RS. The audience erupted in laughter and applause.3
Elsewhere, this might have been a gaffe but Dodik continued to pepper
the remainder of his speech with similar vulgarities. Nor was this the first
such incident either. Rather than a gaffe, his speech was part of a broader
political strategy, one marked by personal bravado and machismo, on the one
hand, and sensationalist nationalism on the other. In the same speech, Dodik
declared that without his administration, the RS (and with it, presumably, the
Serb people in Bosnia and Herzegovina) would disappear in six months.
Dodik the baja is a character who exists for two purposes. The first is to
reposition all political tensions and animosities in this polity along an ethnonational axis and, in the process, elevate himself not to the status of President of the RS but President of the Serbs as a homogenous whole. Questions of economic management and reform, corruption and accountability are
thereby made to disappear and if they are still raised, they are raised only by
those who can quickly be dismissed as enemies of the nation.4
The second purpose of this performance is the crystallisation, for the
audience, that is, the voters and residents of the RS, of the intersection between the father and the godfather. The Europeans and Americans can do
nothing to us, Dodiks performance declares, and it is thanks to my strength,
my courage, and our collective, celestial might5 of which I am, in any case,
the truest incarnation. But the baja is an inherently sinister figure, almost
explicitly criminal. In Dodiks original statement he follows his comment by
3
4

136

Vijesti.ba, Dodik: Ja sam rekao OHR-u je..te se, sad sam ja glavni Baja u Srpskoj,
Vijesti.ba, 27 March 2014. Available at: <www.vijesti.ba>.
Gerard Toals article is arguably the best study of Dodiks rhetoric and performance in the
English-language and clearly documents his cynical transformation from communist reformer to war-time smuggler to post-war moderate to, finally, ultra-nationalist. Lily
Lynchs recent reporting on Dodiks ties to Western lobbyists, cited later, is also noteworthy, however. See Gerard Toal, Republika Srpska will have a referendum: the rhetorical
politics of Milorad Dodik, Nationalities Papers, 2013, pp. 166204. See also Lily Lynch,
The Self-Destruction of Republika Srpska, Balkanist, 7 March 2014. Available at: <balkanist.net >.
See Gojko Beri, Letters to the Celestial Serbs (London: Saqi Books, 2002).

adding that it is the (opposition) media who label him as a baja but this does
little to negate his own self-identification with the title. His joviality is menacing, feigning bewilderment: youre not afraid of little old me, are you?
Yet the whole exercise clearly establishes that in this entity all roads lead
through Dodik and he, in turn, decides who is granted safe passage. It is, in
short, a pronouncement revealing the criminal paternalism at the heart of the
Dayton regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Accumulation by Dispossession
The baja phenomenon is not without parallels, however. In volume one of
Capital Marx describes the origins of bourgeoisie capitalism via a process of
what he refers to as primitive or original accumulation:
[The] historical movement, which changes the producers into wageworkers,
appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the
fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians.
But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves
only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of
all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And
the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in
letters of blood and fire6
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement
and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the
conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren
for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the
era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta
of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the
European nations, with the globe for a theatre.7

To Marx the origins of capitalism are in a period of explicit and brutal violence, where producers (nominally free, that is non-wage labouring, peasants) are dispossessed of their land and thus ability to subsist without entering
into the wage-labour force. The geographer David Harvey maintains that
these practices continue to this day, a process he refers to as accumulation
by dispossession:8
All the features of primitive accumulation that Marx mentions have remained powerfully present within capitalisms historical geography up until
now. Displacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless
proletariat has acceleratedin the last three decades, many formerly common property resources, such as water, have been privatized (often at World
6
7
8

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Marxist Internet Archive, 2010).
Available at: <www.marxists.org>.
Marx, Capital, pp. 501527.
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003).

137

Bank insistence) and brought within the capitalist logic of accumulation, alternativeforms of production and consumption have been suppressed. Nationalized industries have been privatized. Family farming has been taken
over by agribusiness. And slavery has not disappeared (particularly in the
sex trade).9

Surveying the literature on Balkan political economy, particularly events in

Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 1980s onwards, we see a similar pattern as
the one described by Harvey following Marx. The central argument here is
two-fold. First, that the primary component of the political economy of the
polities of (the former) Yugoslavia (SFRY) for the better part of the last three
decades is best described as a prolonged process of accumulation by dispossession and that this, above all, is the critical aspect of understanding the
emergence of the plenum movement in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. Secondly, as I will go on to argue towards the end of this chapter,
because contemporary Bosnian elites are a bandit class (that is, baje), a parasitic class, they have no potential to be democratic agents. Therefore, the only
possibility for democratic reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina comes exclusively from the creation of popular, participatory civic and social movements.10
To begin with then, though a comprehensive review of the aforementioned accumulation practices cannot be provided in this chapter, vignettes
are again instructive. In 1978, Slobodan Miloevis first major political
appointment was to become the head of one of the countrys new commercial
banks, Beobanka, one of the largest financial institutions in Yugoslavia. By
the time he was in the process of orchestrating the dismantling of the Yugoslav Federation in 1990, the then President of Serbia, used his contacts at the
Belgrade bank to move approximately 1.5 billion USD to offshore accounts
in the Republic of Cyprus.11 Radovan Karadi, Miloevis man in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, was by contrast a petty criminal. He and his close associate
Momilo Krajinik, then an economist working for the Sarajevo energy giant

9
10

11

138

David Harvey, The New Imperialism, pp. 145146.

To be clear, this is not to suggest electoral politics is completely meaningless. I take very
seriously liberal rights theories and the democratic potential entailed by any democratic
experiment, even contemporary neoliberal parliamentary democracy. However, my argument is that even truncated exercises in democratic administration are only possible when
the aim is something more substantive. Therefore, at the heart of any democratic society
must be a continuous process of conflict and contestation. In this respect, as David Chandler argues among others, one of the central failings of the GFAP regime in Bosnia and
Herzegovina has been the fact that it is an anti-political peace, elevating supposedly
immutable ethnic identities to unassailable supremacy, while completely marginalizing
any other model of association. What one is left with, as I note below, is not consociational democracy but an Ethnopolis. See Asim Mujki, We, the Citizens of Ethnopolis, Constellations, 2007, pp. 112128. See also: David Chandler, Peace without Politics? Ten Years of International State-Building in Bosnia (New York: Routledge, 2006),
pp. 113.
Louis Sell, Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002), pp. 187189.

Energoinvest, were in and out of prison throughout 1984 and 1985 for real
estate fraud and embezzlement.12
For his part, Fikret Abdi, a wartime Bosniak collaborator of the Serb
nationalist camp, made his fortune as the head of another flagship industrial
enterprise, Agrokomerc. In 1987 it was revealed that the management of
Agrokomerc, including Abdi, had been involved in an elaborate Ponzi
schemeborrowing in excess of a billion Yugoslav dinars from Yugoslav
banks, using the money for bribes and posh residences and inflating the actual performance of the firm. The scale of the corruption is difficult to understate: The profit of the entire Bosnian economy for two and a half years was
roughly equal to the money Agrokomerc owed when the scandal was discovered.13 While it has since been speculated that the Agrokomerc Affair was
an early attempt to weaken the position of prominent Bosniak leaders by Serb
nationalists, (e.g., Hamdija Pozderac, then Vice President of the SFRY, who
lost is his post in the process), Fikret Abdi became a willing accomplice of
the Karadi regime once the fighting actually began. From his fortress in
Velika Kladua, with the aid of the Agrokomerc factories, he created the
Autonomous Province of Western Bosnian (later referred to as the Republic). The Province/Republic was a Karadi-backed para-state and as a result
of his activities there, Abdi was later sentenced to 20 years in a Croatian
prison for war crimes committed in the greater Biha area.
The widespread criminality of the war has also been documented more
generally.14 Astute observers have analysed the events in similar terms as
those established here, namely, ethnic cleansing as a kind of accumulation
by dispossession.15 Post-war economics, however, have only continued wartime dispossession by other, bureaucratic means.16 Especially problematic
has been the dual turn towards de-industrialization and asset stripping (i.e.
privatization) and the adoption of predatory microfinance lending practices.17
The result has been that the one-time heartland of Yugoslav industry has been
12
13
14

15
16

17

Philip J. Cohen The Complicity of Serbian Intellectuals in Genocide of the 1990s, in

Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Metrovi (Eds), This Time We Knew: Western Responses
to Genocide in Bosnia (New York City: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 3964.
See Neven Andjeli, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The End of a Legacy (London: Frank Cass
Publishers, 2003), p. 55.
Peter Andreas, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of
Sarajevo (NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). See also Meho Bai, Osnove ratne
ekonomije: s osvrtom na rat u BiH 1992.-95. godine, Ekonomski Pregled, 2006, pp. 130
145.
Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 117.
See Emin Eminagi, Yours, mine, ours? Were all in this together now! (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe, February 2014). Available at: <www.rosalux.rs>. See also: Boris Divjak, and Michael Pugh, The Political Economy of Corruption in Bosnia,
International Peacekeeping, 2008, pp. 373386. See also Timothy Donais, The Politics
of Privatization in Post-Dayton Bosnia, Southeast European Politics, 2002, pp. 319.
Milford Bateman, Marinko kare and Dean Sinkovi, How to destroy an economy and
community without really trying, Post-Crisis Recovery in South Eastern Europe: Policy
Challenges for Social and Economic Inclusionconference at the LSEE, March 2014.

139

reduced to a smattering of cottage industries, reminiscent of production methods at the turn of the last century,18 massive and chronic unemployment, a
bourgeoning grey economy, while approximately fifty per cent of the countrys GDP is owned by eighty-five individuals, most of them elected officials
or their close associates.19
In short, economic criminality in the 1980s and war crimes in the 1990s
should be understood along the same continuum, as the latter were only the
most extreme version of the former and in most cases perpetrated by the same people. After 1996, what little social property was not plundered or destroyed during the war was progressively dismantled through a series of neoliberal reforms. The absurdly fractured divisions of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP) are today not merely an exercise in
apartheid cartography,20 they are also a mask for a system wherein [under]
the cover of the legitimacy conferred by free and fair elections, citizens as
individuals are stripped of any political power.21 Electioneering in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina thus obscures the political economy of the
Yugoslav dissolution and, indeed, the lasting political power of the same
class of elites (if not literally the same individuals).22 As Gagnon notes:
() The violence of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s was part of a broad
strategy in which images of threatening enemies and violence were used by
conservative elites in Serbia and Croatia: not in order to mobilize people,
but rather as a way to demobilize those who were pushing for changes in the
structures of economic and political power that would negatively affect the
values and interests of those elites. The goal of this strategy was to silence,
marginalize, and demobilize challengers and their supporters in order to create political homogeneity at home. This in turn enabled conservatives to
maintain control of the existing structures of power, as well as to reposition
themselves by converting state-owned property into privately held wealth,
the basis of power in a new system of a liberal economy.23

18
19
20
21
22

23

140

Danijela Kozina, Products from BiH craftsmen conquer the U.S. market, eKapija. 15
April 2014. Available at: <ekapija.ba>.
Wealth-X, World Ultra Wealth Report 2012-2013, Wealth X, 2014. Available at:
<wealthx.com>.
See David Campbell, Apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial
effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia, Political Geography, 1999, pp. 395435
See Asim Mujki, We, the Citizens of Ethnopolis, Constellations, 2007, p. 113.
Nevertheless, even a cursory survey of the roster of Bosnia and Herzegovinas political
leaders reveals the origins of their positions and privileges to be a potent mixture of classical nepotism (Zlatko Lagumdija, Bakir Izetbegovi), banditry and smuggling (Milorad
Dodik, Fahrudin Radoni) and general post-war looting (Dragan ovi). See Lily Lynch,
The Self-Destruction of Republika Srpska, Balkanist, 7 March 2014. Available at: <balkanist.net>; Petter Lippman, Biljeke Petera Lippmana: to je drugima korupcija, to je
Bosni politiki system, Radio Slobodna Evropa, 2 October 2012. Available at:
<www.slobodnaevropa.org>. See also Denana Karabegovi, BiH iscprljena korupcijom, Radio Slobodna Evropa, 13 June 2012. Available at: <www.slobodnaevropa.org>.
V.P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006), p. 15.

In other words, we should understand the dissolution of the second Yugoslav

state not as an eruption of ancient ethnic hatreds or any variation on this
theme but rather as the decision(s) of a collection of provincial oligarchs to
forestall their ouster from power by an emerging civic-democratic, panYugoslav movement of ordinary citizens. As the heirs and progenies of these
oligarchs are still in power in Bosnia and Herzegovina today, the established
political contests that take place, as with Dodiks performance, continue to
express themselves in the language of ethno-nationalism. By and large, the
potential for other models of political association was physically destroyed
during the war and is today constitutionally prohibited, in essence. In reality,
however, these seemingly intractable ethnic feuds are typically little more
than [inter]-mafia clashes.24
As a result, I argue when we survey this political economy as a whole,
we can conclude the following. One, nationalism in contemporary Bosnia and
Herzegovina exists almost exclusively to obscure the process of economic
dispossession by a class of criminal-political elites (i.e. the baje).25 And two,
that this process cannot merely be understood as one of banal corruption as
there is no functioning system that is being corrupted, per se. Instead, this is
the inherent reactionary inertia of the GFAP arrangements coming to the fore.
No other outcome can have been expected given i) the oligarchic origins of
the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and ii) the unwillingness of international
actors (later the architects of the post-war settlement in Bosnia and Herzegovina), from the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis, to promote and implement decisions and policies that would foster meaningful democratic accountability of elites, participatory civic engagement and the creation of a
robust minority rights regime rather than exclusionary ethno-chauvinism.26

Reclaiming Politics from the Baje

In the process of economic dispossession are lost also political rights and,
still more importantly, political agency. Any comprehensive democratic theo24
25

26

International Institute for Middle-East and Balkan Studies. BiH: Sejdi-Finci case in the
shadow of (INTER) mafia clashes, International Institute for Middle-East and Balkan
Studies, 8 May 2012. Available at: <www.ifimes.org>.
I would, however, suggest that perhaps (though not entirely) with the exception of the
workers self-management experiment in the second Yugoslav state, nationalism in the
Balkans has always been an anti-democratic, indeed, anti-political project championed by
elites whose origins were almost exclusively bandit-like and who could thus only ever
produce economies based on dispossession and plunder. See David B. Kanin, Big Men,
Corruption and Crime, International Politics, 2003, pp. 491526. Also see Karen
Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994); and P. M. Kitromilides, Imagined Communities and
the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans, European History Quarterly, 1989,
pp. 149194. Statism and violence are, in this respect, intrinsically linked phenomena.
Josip Glaurdi, The Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia
(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011).

141

ry recognizes, however, that political and economic concerns cannot be separated.27 Because substantive democratization must also entail the democratization of the economy, the plenum movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina
understandably began in Tuzla, an overwhelmingly industrial and working
class city, and that the exercise in reclaiming political agency was intrinsically linked with returning socio-economic questions as the central element of
public discourse.
This reassertion of political agency is, in short, a process of reclaiming
the political itself, as defined by the theorist Sheldon Wolin. Wolin writes:
I shall take the political to be an expression of the idea that a free society
composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality
when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or
protect the well-being of the collectivity. Politics refers to the legitimized
and public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers,
over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity. Politics is continuous, ceaseless and endless. In contrast, the political
is episodic, rare.
(...) In my understanding, democracy is a project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and
modes of action for realizing them.28

Wolins conception of the political is focused on moments and he seems to

resist the possibility of making such exercises permanent. In one respect, the
relative decrease in the ferocity of the protests and attendance at plenum
assemblies appear to bear out his point. But taking stock of not only the entirety of Wolins theoretical canon but also, more importantly, the rise of new
democratic movements across the globe over the past decade and a half, it is
perhaps still more accurate to argue that the political is defined as a process
of continuously striving to make momentary instances of the political permanent. Attempting therefore to decide whether a community or society has
succeeded in this effort is to fundamentally misunderstand the proposition.
Neither success nor failure is, in this sense, possible because the process is
one without end. The political can thus only exist if it is and remains a politics of continuous practice.
This also means that the plenum experiment will never completely recede even if political and police pressures temporarily dismantle current
organizing networks because what they represent is the only possible exit
from the existing paradigm. Today we can reflect on the highly truncated
experiment in workers self-management in the Yugoslav state, as well as the
27
28

142

Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1948.
Sheldon Wolin, Fugitive Democracy, in Seyla Benhabib, In Democracy and Difference:
Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996),
pp. 3145.

corresponding literature concerned with this subject, and see that, at least
from an ideological standpoint, the ideals of self-management still permeate
Bosnia and Herzegovina and post-Yugoslav society more broadly.
If Yugoslav socialism was indeed undone by authoritarianism and oligarchy, then it was nevertheless the longest period in the regions history of
consistent mass exposure to even rhetorical commitments to democratic participation.29 Unsurprisingly, despite the cleptocratic trends that began this
experiments unravelling in the 1980s, their genocidal eruption during the
1990s and, finally, their institutionalization post-1996,30 insomuch as there
remains an organic conception of democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina it is
deeply coloured by the self-management experience; demonstrating that even
fragmentary experiences with praxis politics are thus potent.
This also means, however, that we should recall that when democracy
remains stunted in practice, performative and rhetorical politics substitutes
authentic politicisation. This, in turn, means that ordinary citizens are excluded from participating in anything other than the most fleeting of experiences
with decision-making and so become unable to contest the megalomaniacal
schemes inevitably born of intra-oligarchic contests; citizens are stripped of
their political and economic agency but also their very lives in the case of
(the former) Yugoslavia.
This is why I offer the concept of the baja as an analytical category. It is
not merely an attempt to rewrite the global experience of neoliberalism or
even the regional post-socialist31 experience with Bosnian characteristics. It
is instead an invitation for a new kind of intellectual and scholarly discourse
about class as a socially constituted phenomenon. While inevitably structured
by global forces, class dynamics are also internally constituted. And in the
case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and arguably (the former) Yugoslavia as a
whole, the baja phenomenon is one that holds more explanatory potential
than generic references to trans-Atlantic neoliberal capital(ists).
The baja is different, at least, because of two primary reasons I propose
in this chapter. One, the only rhetorical commitment they are capable of is to
the ethnos and the nation. They are unable to offer anything akin to even
perfunctory, if ultimately performative, commitments to parliamentarianism
as other neoliberal elites do, not because they are new to liberal-democratic
practices per se but because they are fundamentally a non-liberal class, altogether.
Secondly, accumulation by dispossession is not merely part but is indeed, and has always been, the exclusive means of their accumulation
29
30
31

iga Vodovnik, Democracy as Verb: New Mediations on the Yugoslav Praxis Philosophy, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2012, pp. 433452.
Jasmin Mujanovi, Institutionalizing Crisis: The Case of Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina,
in Deric Shannon, In The End of the World as We Know It? Crisis, Resistance, and the
Age of Austerity (Oakland: AK Press, 2014), pp. 147164.
VadimVolkovs text (Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian
Capitalism) makes for an important parallel case study to the experiences of the postYugoslav region.

143

beginning from the original moment of state formation in the Balkans in the
nineteenth century. Thus, their perennial commitment to ethno-nationalist
discourse exists precisely to obscure the process of accumulation by dispossession that is the raison dtre of their regime(s). While they are certainly
embedded into broader circuits of dispossession (as Harvey describes them),
their objectives and systems of control are eminently local; this is then perhaps further suggestive of their ultimately parochial rather than truly neoliberal-global aspirations.
The only possible response to this radical reductionism and predatory
chauvinism is a similarly dramatic assertion of agency and inclusive, participatory association. Much as the plena have already done, any genuine political project in Bosnia and Herzegovina must base itself on the expansion,
indeed, explosion of socio-economic concerns, identities and relations. If this
politics proves difficult in the short term, it is nevertheless the only genuinely
emancipatory project possible.

144

Jasmina Husanovi

Traumatic Knowledge in Action: Scrapbooking Plenum Events, Fermenting Revolt

Proposition
The Plenum process is a classroom we need to master, for the future
repoliticisation events ahead, which will articulate the political truth of social
antagonisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and open space for the emerging
political subject, demanding social and economic change in line with
universal principles of equality and freedom.

Reflecting and Re-membering

Reflecting on the plenumatrix (my shorthand for the plenum processes
throughout the turbulent year of 2014, by which I usually mean the everyday
affective politics of bodies in the plenum space), I found a note in my scrapbooking archives. Notwithstanding that my archives have kept piling up in
these ruinous years, with no time for reflection: it is, nonetheless, those numerous files and papers that make possible for us to re-member the past few
years and decades, in the form of digital, printed, hand-written images,
sketches, and notes; records and sounds; drawings and words; all
wit(h)nessing a material community of people, ideas and actions in the spaces
I/we inhabit and work in, with and for. We (that plurality of political bodies I feel a part of) all have an archive like that, and our stories of it, of the
means necessary to think, read, write, speak... and live politically.
Back to the notebook page that I found: it is an undated red-penned
sketch from last autumn (2013), a brainstorm for a possible argument and
intervention in the form of a diagram of concepts and keywords: bodies in
disaster, economyecology; new pedagogies and new social practices; economies of affect/exploitation, governing labour in transition through violence; witnessing; labour, violence and social transformation. It ends with a
possible title for something: Economies of Affect, Bodies in Disaster: Governance and Public Good in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As things turned out, this brainstorm annotation did not become something that was written about, but rather something that was experienced in its
political truth, through the events and bodies of the protests and plenums in
Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina since February 2014actions that were
145

catalysed by deepening economic and ecological disasters, and by the depoliticising death-dance of domestic and international elites, their ideological
apparatuses and regimes of governance.

Observation
Writing as personally now as I did in my 2013 scrapbook archive, I see no
revelation or new critical insightI see what many of us always-already
knew. Some of us even have talked about it togetherprior, during and after
the February events. And more than that, we create public classrooms for
such discussions in various formats. However, the events of February 2014
were not about suddenly acquiring new knowledge/information of what was
at stake, but seizing the moment of utmost emergency in the key five days of
protests (between 5 and 9 February), and somehow finding the space to articulate the political truth of social antagonisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and
universally).
In other words, the space for the possibility for political truth to emerge
was occupied by the plenum processes and populated with new collective
subjects springing from the state of emergency. Precisely in the moment
when violence and arson were about to slide to the retrogressive right and
repression, the crowd declared itself as opting for the progressive left, for the
political truth that people protesting in Tuzla, and elsewhere, alwaysalready knew: this was evidenced in their slogans which proclaimed death to
nationalism and demanded an end to economic devastation and exploitation.
These demands recalled antifascist and socialist legacies and led to the enactment of methods of workers and peoples political solidarity such as
plenums/plena.
The truth of these legacies has been carefully masked or co-opted by the
various hegemonic ideologemes and strategies of governance in the public
space, through the usual aculturated practices of codification, mobilisation
and commodification by ethno-nationalist and multiculturalist regimes.
Hence the offensive, in the last several months, on the plenums and their
political truth from various elements of the international and local apparatuses, including state, police, media and education.

Postulate
The very political truth, embodied and articulated by the plenums, is our
socially traumatic knowledge: what we learn from violence, exploitation,
oppression, injustice, subjugation and repression, and how we follow the
political consequences of this knowledge, through the demand for and the
enacting of social and political change. There has been an extreme accumula-

146

tion of this kind of knowledge in the last three decades. This knowledge is
traumatic because, through it, we engage critically with the fundamental law
of capitalism that Marx postulated: the accumulation of misery in all its
form and shapes is a necessary condition of capitalism, corresponding to the
accumulation of wealth.1
Fascism breeds in this misery. The increasing wealth for some, and the
spiralling poverty, unemployment, economic and ecological disaster for the
others, is creating unprecedented levels of misery amongst people in their
everyday lives, and in the public domain where, through identitarian matrices, all forms of radicalisation and fascisation, culturalisation and depoliticisation abound. The lives of citizens and workers have been depoliticised,
victimized and commodified over and over again, through the 1990s war and
its post-Dayton aftermath, sold into impoverishment, misery and hatred,
cynicism and hopelessness.
It is possible to say no to the fascism and capitalist exploitation that is
raging in everyday life. The protests and the plenums are were an affirmation
of its subjects as political beingsthe opposite to the mere victims of the
war and transitional turmoil in the post-SFRY region that was brewed and
served both at home and abroad. They spoke and embodied the political truth
of capitalist misery in a society where the transitional primitive accumulation (from socialism to a so-called liberal democracy/market economy) was
conducted through the logic of extreme political violence (from genocide,
ethnic cleansing and ghettoisation, to various similar- in-principle postDayton experiments in statecraft, privatisation and reforms of economy and
governance).

Corollaries and Challenges

Between two seminal performances or spectacles of the identity politics of
terror in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with all its deadening ethno-nationalist,
multiculturalist and neoliberal paraphernalia, in two consecutive Octobers
the 2013 Census and the 2014 General Electionsthere is the fracture of the
protests and plenums in early 2014. These civic actions were attempting to
formulate an anti-identitarian and internationalist form of political belonging
and class solidarity. The ethico-political demand subjectivising a plenum
collective has been that of equality and freedom, universalising the predicaments of social and economic injustice, and its accompanying geopolitical
security arrangements of ghettoisation and impoverishment.
The challenge for the event and its process is to grasp what lessons are
there to be learnt about the newly opened fronts and by those who have
formed those fronts. Most importantly, the learning available from the inabil1

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Marxist Internet Archive 2010).
Available at: <www.marxists.org>.

147

ity of local and international elites to face the political crisis and the
possibility of social and political conflict once again. The same old road is
takennew depoliticisations and appropriations of the vocabulary of social
and economic justice, through further securitisation and culturalisation of life
in Bosnia and Herzegovina (conflating the questions of terrorism, ethnic
conflict, and protest against exploitation in newly produced states of emergency around identity and terror through the security-justice-development
triad).
There is a brutal destruction of human life and rights going on, as well
as that of the public good in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Corruption, impoverishment and banalisation are contaminating all spheres of production. The
symptoms of alienation, terror as usual or fear, congealed by the illusions
of post-Dayton order, in all public spaces affecting collective action on the
grassroots level, are plentifulresulting in an affective landscape contaminated by mistrust, horizontal hostility, cynicism and malicious banalisation.
The people are worn out. In the past few decades, their capacities to think and
act together, and nurture political solidarity and bonds of hope, have been
devoured by the terrorising experience of precarious life, in the clutches of
sovereign politics and its weapons. The enemies, traitors, sycophants and
manipulators encircle the remnants of the working class, its intellectual life
and social action, stifling its potential to be or become politically conscious
of its utter subjugation and dependency. The capacities of social bodies to
maintain their collective effort on a daily basis have been approaching neardestruction. It is exactly the coming together of this experienceof bodies
learning in the affect of becoming social abject/human wastewhich brings
forth the collective revolt.

Propositions
There is a community, a collective subject here, in its potentiality to speak in
a manner that, politically, traverses the ideological pitfalls and which knows
how to employ the means necessary to bring together bare survival, some
knowledge production and authentically political action, in a society where
unemployment is over fifty per cent, and for those younger than thirty-five,
over seventy-five per cent. What is this community in need of, in terms of
knowledge as social praxis? The road we are only beginning to tread needs a
critical understanding of the political economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
including making sense of and producing political truths of todays key social
antagonisms, as well as creating possible economic futures for its people.
This is an imperative for collaborative work in the bloodstream of the socialist-leaning plenums at the moment.
There are those who see through the ideological phantasms of war and
genocide, the terror of separation and exclusion between victims and mon-

148

sters, who might collide and stand in for the universal. The politicallyengaged people in Bosnia and Herzegovinaworkers, students, the unemployed, teachers, activists, all citizenshave a capacity to build politics,
which hegemonises the space of fundamental human rightsequality, freedom and social justice. However, this requires a new form of collective work.
To produce direct democracy is a matter of freedom, and affirmation of its
universality, an authentic political gesture in the quasi-democratic political
and social fabric in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It implies readiness to face the
illusions and the hard-core realities of poverty, regression, humiliation and
shame. This work is a matter requiring the material and affective endurance
and sustainability of all means of production and the actual producers committed to social change and self-transformation it implies.

Question marks and the Unknowns

Current actors in local and international civil society cannot muster this form
of collective work unless they revolutionise their approach to matters of justice and development. Sticking, as they are doing, to the same old democratisation, civil society, reconciliation paradigms and implementing practices
called projects, they remain caught in the rules of the sovereign order; that
is, stuck in the current ideological institutional frames and antagonisms operative in their (non)transparent public life and work, with their own, often
obscene, political economies and interests at play behind the scene. They are
blind to the political meaning of the historical events of 2014 and of the years
before, because their own politics has foregone and given up the universal
demands for justice, both on the local and international scene. They know the
rules dont apply universally, but have thoroughly repressed or masked their
own knowledge of this fact.
The same diagnosis goes for much of the alternative civil sector failing, as it has, to counter the hopelessness produced through corruption, impoverishment and/or banalisation in everyday life. There is precious little
capacity for self-criticism; for acting less as individuals and more as a collective. They have not proved themselves up to the task of materialising an affective commons and being-in-common capable of opposing the all-surrounding misery and sadness: an affective commons which refuses to reproduce
the conditions of its own enslavement and the all too typical symptoms of
alienation in everyday life and work, such as is produced by the governing
ideological regimes and their affectivity of mortification. On this front, the
paranoiac structure is competing with the hysterical. To produce solidarity
politically is traumatic knowledge, and more.

149

Observation
The year of 2014 is a much more significant one for Bosnia and Herzegovina
than the macabre grounds of the 100th commemoration year concerning the
Great War, and the Sarajevo Assassination. Indeed, the promenade of the
Great Powers in their new millennia outfits, and their local princes, still playing the colonial game, their old and new resentments, mythologies, and ideological phantasms produced a travesty of symptomatic events in June 2014
throughout Sarajevo. It started only two weeks after the May 2014 floods and
landslides had caused catastrophic economic damage in Bosnia and Herzegovina, comparable to the war damage.
In June 2014, we were confronted with a series of distractions in the
Bosnian publics attempt to make sense of social reality The public was faced
with yet another disaster that galvanised the citizens solidarity with one
other, but which met with no adequate political response. Added to this, it
faced the humiliating spectacle afforded to it by New Europe, played out in
front of the eyes of those beset by the literal and metaphorical floods and
landslides both of the history of oppression and of the torrential rains. Thus,
both incompetent local and international authorities, totally failed to make
sense of what was/is going on, and, in the face of a catastrophic natural
disaster, abandoned Bosnian citizens to manage the devastating state of affairs mostly by themselves. Across the board, civil society at international,
European and local level, disgraced itself, failing to tackle the situation in any
of its manifestations: Bosnia and Herzegovina is a microcosm of all the new
crises and upheavals globally and regionally, whether they be imperialist,
fascistic, economic or concerning the security interests of the elites of todays
world. Indeed, so much money has been obscenely, maliciously and cynically
wasted by so many agencies and organisations that it is impossible to single
any one specific perpetrator out. In this sense, Bosnia and Herzegovina
shows the obverse side of politics everywhere. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a
continual state of emergency and exception, and the threat of violence and
radical insecurity, are normalised as the hegemonic form of political life
through various culturalisations and depoliticisations. And yet still the Bosnian public revolts. Its grassroots political fabric focuses its ferocious attention
on some emancipatory spaces, a commonality of political action, which within which it eludes the clutches of the dominant regimes, and their coordinates
of intelligibility or reasoning. Until they catch up, that is.
There is a reason for the alarm being shown by the Old Continent and
the big boys in Bosnia and Herzegovina. What might be unleashed, they ask
themselves, once the events in its less metropolitan areas possibly take up the
old socialist ideals, etc., speaking about the public good, demanding some
radical changes? They might even endanger the plundered assets that have
been accumulated and shared out by the elites! The plenums are repoliticising
democracy per se, but they take it furthertowards matters of equality and

150

economic redistribution. This is deemed dangerous by many for them, what

must be repressed, co-opted or appropriated here is the demos and the agora
which the plenums embodied through their radical demands for justice and
economic redistribution; their insistence on universal ethico-political principles and their enactment of direct democracy. Particularly bewildering to
many is the call to go beyond the obsolete and incapacitated institutional
representative frame, when trying to put the brakes on the spiralling economic devastation in the country. Much easier for the institutions in both state and
civil society sectors, to organize a big ball for the elites and a carnival for the
masses.

Problem
Despite, in its own actual work, embodying all imaginable antagonisms that
direct democracy is likely to throw up, the Plenum processes have unmasked
embedded opportunism as the strongest ideological mechanism of imposed
identification and governance. Thus, the very work of the plenum embodies
the truths of the social antagonisms, which continually threaten to implode it.
The people engaged in the plenums are complex political subjects, bringing
their own subjective politics and their own understanding of the events
around them to the plenum space. The political truth is that they are able to
act to change the status quo. Such collectives emerge as grounded in themselves, with no external causal factors or sources of authority but themselves,
through an exquisite gesture of sovereign self and subjective autonomy, from
the zero-point of their experience, without fears of facing the new and the
unknown. The plenum in Tuzla started once one part of protesters repoliticised their past and current experiences of nationalism and capitalism,
their palpable wounds of war and post-war violence and exploitation and
tuning their speech, their work and their bodies in step with that repoliticisationmaking space with all other protestors, in-common.

Corollaries and dangers

This praxis echoes Boris Budens insights: to take over the repressed freedom
of radical change of your own miserable everyday reality and to create new
forms of political solidarity, over and beyond the mass graves and ruins; to
give political meaning to this experience; to enact solidarity through a clear
and firm political actualisation of emancipatory matters and horizons; and to
respond to the challenge of freedom to make what we want of and for ourselves.2
2

Boris Buden, Boris, Truth and Reconciliation Are Not What We Really Need, Experiments with Truth, Documenta, 11 (2001) 2.

151

The question is how, through the new language of political truths, do we

articulate this experience? The question is a critical one because it is that new
language that undermines the overly successful ideological and repressive
multi-state apparatuses operative in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally.
The seduction of profit and power, through ethno/multinational/corporate channels, seeds the partisanship of particular interests and the brethren
of neoliberal, neo-colonial and neofascist practices and forces so uncompromisingly and ruthlessly engulfing the social. The petit bourgeois norms and
mechanisms leave maps and footprints that are much easier for the opportunist to follow and tread. There are always safe-havens for the weakhearted to avoid revolutionising matters of social and economic justice, to
avoid taking up the political consequences of collective political labour.

Challenge
Do we have enough conceptual strength and human resources to respond
collectively and individually to the economic and political crisis in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, as a universal fractal of the global one? To be able to interpret the present critically and understand the information we are saturated
with concerning the miserable future that awaits us, we have to turn these
into political facts, understandable only if there is an alternative social imaginary as a referential coordinate system of values, rights and responsibilities.
That imaginary is there to articulate, it is woven with the socialist and antifascist coordinates of its origin. The historical trauma of socialism and Europe as a whole has been in misrecognising fascism, flirting with nationalism,
and pretending not to know how much of it evidences the growing underside
of capitalist exploitation. It will rupture there, where its constitutive cowardice, idiocy, miserable farce of authority, and fascination with power, consume
it from within. Reckoning with fascism means fighting itit requires the
cold courage of engagement.
On the other hand, and to recall Buden once again, a collective learns
that things in their life can get worse, not when life is going well, but to the
contrary, only when things in life get unbearable for them, only when the one
and only thing that keeps them living is the vision of a radically different,
better tomorrow.3 The dispossessed of Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina; its
scum, outcasts and hooligans have been ready to recognise and stand up to
the real dangers of its actual social realitythe power of the capital and its
logic of profit breeding on misery, the impunity of the criminal, and its cronies from top to bottom. Misery as the underside of capitalism, as Marx postulated, is pervading us all with utmost speed and devastation. Fascism
3

152

Boris Buden presented this at a lecture titled Recognising Fascism, at the Vienna-based
Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, 1997.

breeds on misery. The protests, the torched buildings, the plenums, their
activist circulatory system and ca are all political foreshadowings of what is
to come, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Europe and the world, pushing us into
the future. Of a new antifascist and anticapitalist struggle to come.
Knowledge from the reflection of those messages and emergences of collectivity, materialised by the plenum process, is like the theory of a martial art,
necessary for future martial moves that will be necessary to make in practice to re-politicise the political agenda and to embed the possibility of emancipatory horizons.

Lemma or what we must learn

Navigating protest, exodus and resurrection of bodies in daily political motion, enables one to see that revolt is streaming and fermenting in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Looking geopolitically and in terms of the internal political
situation, the situation might be radically different in six months time. The
new state of affairs or crisis must be read through a proper materialist dialectic, and articulated through political education and interventions, in the midst
of the in-security madhouse that local and international elites are preparing
for the months ahead. Indeed, the fronts to which the fight must be taken will
be multiplying, fracturing and saturating the protest potential.
The new collectives must forge materialist dialectic readings of social
antagonisms and its everyday experience, articulating the traumatic knowledge necessary for a new form of collaborative work. It will be necessary to
strike at fascism and speak the authentic political truths of social justice in
the very demanding times ahead. This presumes shared work on concrete
experiences of material and affective labour, economies of protest and their
affective and affirmative resistances to the dominant economy of mortification. Materialising solidarity presumes new forms of action, and a collective
subject bonded by an imaginary and experience of life and work, which resists misery and violence, alienation and exploitation. What will these new
forms of action take? How are we to share and preserve all the necessary
capacities for this taska task, which is already sending us fearless voices of
solidarity from the future? As some of the protest banners in Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina called for: Death to capitalism, freedom to people.
This is the affective state of affairsmany of the protesters know that there
is an antifascist as anticapitalist battle in the heart. But, to materialise this
political creed is to undertake a courageous and sacrificing road to the future,
with a common task: to continue forging (however slowly, but steadily) a
collective life and labour ready to bring about an end to human misery of
violence and poverty. Our horizons of hope are the experiences and the lessons of such battles that bring us into a commonsin the past, in the present,
in the future to come.

153

Selma Tobudi

Protests and PlenumsA Remembering

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
Melancholia is a wound. Like the uncanny, doubled figure of the vampire
at once alive and dead- melancholia is ambivalently divided, at once internally and externally. Melancholia suffers, in other words, not only from internal wounds and bleeding but from balkanization.
Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity

In Danilo Kis collection of short stories Early Sorrows: For Children and
Sensitive Readers from 1969 there is a story entitled The Meadow. The
first person narrator, a boy, called Andreas Sam in the story, recounts a
childhood eventtaking a walk to the doctors villa in order to buy sulphur
sticks, he urgently needs as a remedy for scabies. Walking along the river
bank, through the meadow, fearing to the point of nausea the upcoming humiliation: the conversation with the doctor and the soon to become evident
fact that the sum of money he is carrying, everything his single-motherdeported-father family has been able to scrape together, is not enough to buy
a single egg, let alone cover the cost of this desperately needed treatment,
Andreas plays the whole event in his head before it actually takes place.
Its not going to last forever, I thought to myself. The doctor surely cant
need more than half an hour to deal with me, then theres the walk back, so
this whole uncomfortable business will be over in an hour at most. In one
hour, in half an hour even, I will be walking back along the Kerkas
riverbank, and the doctor, the pretence, the lie and the shameit will all be
behind me, just like a dogs tail. It will all be in the past. I had never before
understood the difference between those two tenses. But, on that day, the
day of the visit to the doctors, I learned: when youre in a sickening situation, you should think of what comes after. It is like a meadow on the way
back.1

Danilo Ki, Rani jadi (Podgorica: Nova knjiga, 2008), pp. 478 (translated by the author
of the article).

155

The most common question posed in relation to February eventsone

that is still not fully answeredis this: when the workers of five privatized
Tuzla factories had already been protesting over the course of years, and then
regularly, every Wednesday, for monthswhat made so many people join
the protests on that particular day? The numbers taking to the streets in solidarity with the workers were unlike anything experienced in the last couple
of decades. A gathering of so many was unprecedented. From the perspective
one might have had preceding the events, it was unimaginable that, just a
matter of days later, buildings would burn. That there would be no looting of
surrounding shops, no rioting, no shots fired would have been unthinkable.
Black smoke rising across the citys horizon as the cantonal building burnt
was a sort of dj-vu; the first day of war in Tuzla, 15 May 1992, inscribed
itself in the citys history in flames as well. After the cantonal government
resigned on Friday 7 February, an uncertainty set in. There was a sense of
void in the air, of an order similar to the paralyzing wait in 1992 as to what
would come next. During the protests, the words circulating among the people indicated that this cannot go on any longer; that this is not the future
our children need, that this is not what we were fighting for. It was as if
everyone on the street subconsciously remembered the possibility of a different future from the one that the ongoing presentof living in transition
has, for years, been heading towards that is, an endless perpetuation of the
promise of what is to come; a void disguised by the mere fact of constant
repetition. And similar voids have a long history of repeating themselves in
Bosnia and Herzegovina.
What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into present,
connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to
lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward into a
void. Memory depends on void, as void depends on memory to think it. Once
void is thought it can be cancelled. Once memory is thought it can be commodified.2
What the official regimes of memory and ways of remembering in Bosnia and Herzegovina masterly teach is that to remember is to honour the
victimsto commemorate our victims, as opposed to all the others, which
are not ours. From different ethnic perspectives which share the same approach, the dominant way of existence framed in accordance with the General Framework Agreement for Peacethe past forever in the presenthas
shape-shifted and encoded itself into every area of daily living. In every aspect of life, what one is and can be, including how one is to remember, is
encompassed and encapsulated within an ethnic identity. In this country,
being has come to be thought of only within the parameters of belonging to
either/or one of three nationalities. These nationalities are then (un)represented by the major avatar-like political parties. The imposed and imposing
2

156

Anne Carson, Economy of The Unlost. Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Kindle edition location 380.

regimes of remembering have proved to be crucial, particularly since they

serve as a tool to overwrite any other remembering out of the general code of
belonging. This enactment of belonging confines it to a clearly delineated
and patriarchal collective. It is this patriarchal collective which has repetitively ensured, for the past twenty years, the (re) production and (re) mobilization
of the electorate, enabling the continuity of the positioning of political elites
in power - more or less unchanged.
In The Hilt, Marko Veovi writes the knowledge of war as
knowledge, which will gain us nothing:
()
We who passed through the siege of Sarajevo
shall, of course, gain nothing.
An experience that will serve no purpose:
as if you lost your arms and won a violin,
as Rasko would say. You cant even tell
others about it. Can you reconstruct an ancient
jug from the lonely handle that made it to
our time? We should lock it all up in the soul
and forget. But at least we shall, from now on
have a touch more self-respect, I hope,
like the fighter who takes a billion blows
but stays on his feet and his mangled face
in the mirror tells him who he really is. We
experienced our own limits. For to know who
you are, has always been the victims privilege.
To know how much you can bear, without
explodingthat is the only property that you
shall, if you survive, bring from this war,
endless like the handkerchief a magician pulls
out of his hat. This knowledgea saber which
we shall not draw very often from the scabbard.
But at least I will keep my hand
on its hilt.3

Seemingly, the poem conveys that what the war taught us is worthless
other than knowing how far the limits of our endurance will stretch; and
above all, that we do not want to come face to face with them again. All is
good as long as there is no shooting, as the proverbial post-war Bosnian
wisdom goes. Living and dying for four years under impossible conditions
left an impact in the way it extended our human capacity to adaptto adjustto almost anything. On the other hand, this knowledge is also not nothing, because the reality lived since confirms how, among other solidifications
that are actually serving to support the perpetuation of the ancient warring/victimized ethnicities trope, the management of remembering involving
3

Marko Veovi, Balak / The Hilt, <www.spiritofbosnia.org>, 7 (2012) 4.

157

knowledge of war taken as such is a priority for the elites. This management relies upon firm official, collective and de-individualizing interpretations turning, returning and playing into an economy particularly profitable
for those politicians enjoying the financial benefits. These beneficiaries
also enjoy the security of not being accountable, nor held accountable, for
their doings and non-doings. In this approach to memory management, the
roles are strictly defined and the role of the victimwhat Veovi termed as
its privilegehas ultimately been absorbed into a spectaclea rigid who,
when and how the mourning is performed.
Much like any other segment of Bosnian society, permeated by the fact
that being a member of an appropriate political option and/or ethnicity has
become the dominant mode of existence, the remembering also is an activity
not only the manner of which, but its content too are pre/proscribed in advance, following the overarching ethnic key and guaranteeing an expected
outcome. Over the years and across innumerable lines of divisions, this ensures an on-going deepening of the existing separations and their invariable
multiplications.
The victims image and its generalized and manipulated meaning have
been absorbed by the gluttonous transitional state, in a country where flexibility unto living death, adaptability to whatever may come has become one
of the most prized individual and social characteristics. Survival (mis)taken
for life is still in place, years after the wars end, upholding the status quo and
the positions of those continuing to profit from the clear cut, fixed and unchangeable distinctions between this and that side, ours and theirs, these and those and three ethnic identities.
To follow the poem and delve further into the mirror - can a mirror ever
reflect back completely what one really is? Or to phrase it along the lines of
identities and identifications so important for Bosnia and Herzegovinas
inhabitantsis one ever identical to ones mirror image? If the divisions
produced and upheld in the Bosnian society constantly project back, from all
four sides, like some mirror armour,4 powerlessness to peoplethe impossibility of changing the established positions which are fragmenting still further
across/into/over individualsdoes not that mirror, as any other, also carry
within it a blind spot, a beyond to the image, which is unseen and can perhaps be only assumed? Veovis figure of knowledge as a sabre, even if a
knowledge of nothing, points towards what is yet unseen and unknown, what
is invisible in the reflection and to the reflectedthat which is created, sustained and screened by the existing, mutually mirroring social relations and
standpoints.
If the poem inhabits the realm of poiesis, of the creative making act, of
everything that is conveyed by and in language, but also, simultaneously,
4

158

The precursor to flack-jackets, mirror armour was a type of armour used up to the seventeenth century in Europe and Asia, mostly rectangle-shaped and usually serving not only
as a shield but was believed to protect from being given an evil eye.

conveys an outside to what is saidthe sense of poetry as a sense that

is always still to be made5 then perhaps a parallel can be drawn via this
poem with the situation arising during the February 2014 events in Bosnia
and Herzegovina; a thin thread, a connection in between the non-lessons of
war and the protests and plenums. In the story that opens this article, Ki the
narrator performs a paradoxical (and parallactic) move, situating himself,
retroactively, into the remembrance of a childhood event. In the narration,
this also entails a brief moment of thinking forward into the future. The
boy takes his present walk in order, in his imagination, to make it already
past, via holding the going to and the going back together in the same
thought. In this way, an additional layer is inscribed into this particular notion
of rememberingmaking it a glimpse into what is to be/come. The present
tense as split three-ways into what was, what is and a future state that
although still to comeis already imagined to be (over).
Remembering, itself, can never exactly and fully remember the pastit is
always within the Nachtrglichkeit that one introspects and then follows its
traces. There is always already something missed and missing, something
(dis) placed, something not (or that will, perhaps, never be) seenalso something that might only be visible from another, future (retro) perspective. What
is evident is that the established and instituted practices of living, and of
remembering, aim to ascribe totality to being, to not being and to meanings...
From a point where a poet saw the impossibility of reconstructing an ancient
vase from a remaining fragment to the present extends a time and space in
which the jug, and the knowledge, is not only represented as completely
reconstructed, but generally taken and consumed as precisely equal, and
unambiguously so, to what was. When the past holds numerous voids, (and it
always does), to face that nothing, the unknown and the unidentified
some of which, literally still remain to be excavatedis almost unbearable. When the remembering becomes fixed and fixated, it also becomes indistinguishable from not-forgetting, and the mourning can never take place.
Knowing, with certainty, that to remember means to reminisce, to pay homage and commemorate, and to stop there, leaves no room for a reminder that
remembering already contains the knowledge of this severing; the memory
that is voided; the acts that continue to void it of meaning. Remembering,
conceptualized and practiced exclusively as evoking the painful experiences
of the past as such, constantly (re) activates and retroactively (re)inscribes the
events as traumatic and therefore (re)traumatises. Yet, to remember, also
inherently involves thinking-into-being the threads that connect the nothings
- as some parts of some other, not yet discernible knowingwhich might
broaden the existing self-enclosed/ing view. Remembering as connecting
again, a re-gathering of memberselements, particles, fragmentsdifferent
5

Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006),
p. 4

159

and to be re-pieced in a different way. Remembering which is again, a repetition, and anew, a creation. And also, to remember, sjeati sea (self) reflexive verb in the local languages, in the infinitive form.
It is through bodies, standing in the streets, as parts of some other collectivean as-yet unformed onethat reconnectings began. During the
assemblies, the mere fact of speechpersons addressing others and themselveswas novel enough. Filled with frustration, the participants spoke
about their daily limitations, mostly identifying themselves as belonging to a
groupthe workers, the unemployed, the teachers, the parents, the members
of various associations. Initially, simply to state ones name and start speaking was not considered enough. Out of plenums, the meetings held in more or
less crowded spaces, the speaking brought relief, refilling the vacuum installed after the governments resignation to be emptied into an exchange and
circulation.
To retake Veovis image in the mirror, the participants speaking revealed not so much how the absence of opportunity to voice dissatisfactions
shapes and subtracts deteriorating social bonds, but also that the role usually
attributed to the peoplemost often by themselvesas those divided in
between different categories through formal institutions, such as unions and
associations (in addition to a complicated post-Dayton state organization and
administration) and additionally separated from those in powermight
also shed some light on why the protests participants turned up in such numbers and why so many took part in the plenums. The worthif worth is regarded as how Veovi values itworth nothingand if only to be attributed in retrospectthe worth of the protests and plenums lies in the cominginto-awareness that the feeling of powerlessness is at once imposed, created
and supported by both sides of the people vs. the politicians dichotomy and
that it is not all. Beyond complicity with how the people are produced and
producing themselves within this us versus them mechanism, as always
too few to change anything, too divided, too ignorant, lacking too much, the
protests and plenums movement introduced and gave rise to the notion that
nothing, not even this manner of accepting everyday living, and ourselves,
as unchangeable and always lacking something, is really as presented, reflected and perceived.
The violence that the protests involved, the destruction of the buildings,
symbolising the lack of any excuse left to justify that the political and the
meaning of politician, has been degraded simply to occupying an empty
form, cannot be disregarded. Both because the protests were denounced as
acts of hooliganism and nothing moreindicating, if nothing else the obvious illusion of a free media that some still held ontoand because it is an
ever present motif, underlying Bosnian political discourse through, at times
more or less visible, manipulation by fear of the other, concealed beneath the
usual discourse of multiculturalism and tolerance, in a practice emptied of
any meaningful substance. Tolerance, in which everyone merely tolerates and

160

is tolerated, but without crossing the wall, from within or withoutwhile the
others, those not declaring themselves as belonging to either of the three
nationalities, remain the invisible, unrepresentable6 surplus. The protests also
revealed how deeply divided, though not at all unequipped, the police is
lines of command following the interests of parties in power, which in most
cases ultimately means, the interests of those few within the parties in power
making self-serving decisions, as employees of the state, and paid by the very
people standing in protest. So the protests also inserted a cut into what could
have been conceived as violence, having gone through the experience of a
war such as it was in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not to make such a distinction
entails denying how, after the war, a sort of war continuedas business, as
trade in people as the electorate body, as the consumers of ready-made solutions never put into action, as a mass, distinguished only across all the existing bordersshrouded in silence, perceived as non-violent precisely because
being nothing like the war everyone remembers.
In History and the process of mourning in Hegel and Freud,7 Catherine
Malabou applies her concept of plasticity8 to the work of mourning, which
she describes as impossible. Drawing on the notion of plastic in Hegel and
Nietzsche, as well as on recent neuroscientific research, and connecting it to
Freud, Malabou defines the impossible mourning as a third option to the
standard differentiation between mourning and melancholia, and between
standard mourning and that which is not. Between the right proportion of
idealization and Aufhebung, Malabous impossible mourning is an alternative to the extent that it renounces at the same time the appropriation of
the idea of the other as well as pure grief and lamentation. This mourning, in

7
8

The word unrepresentable is here used literallyas not being able to have an elected
representative in the government, since Dervo Sejdi and Jakob Finci, as members of
Roma and Jewish minorities won their case at the European Court for Human Rights in
2009, disputing the provisions of the General Framework Agreement for Peace, which is
the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1995. Five years later, no changes have
been made to the constitution. Recently, during the Bosnian general elections, many added Mr. Sejdi Finci to their ballots, in protest to the fact that there is no candidate for the
tri-partite presidency from the category of the others, but also demonstrating that the
two men have at least successfully merged into the vast corpus of Bosnian jokes.
In Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy, (2001) 106, pp.
1520.
So Malabou: Plasticity designates the form of a world without any exteriority, a world in
which the other appears as utterly other precisely because she is not someone else.
(...)Existence is not a transparent and inoffensive grammatical or logical category, a harmless property of persons, animals and things. Existence reveals itself as plasticity, as the
very material of presence, as marble in the material of sculpture. It is capable of receiving
any kind of form, but it also has the power to give form to itself. Being the stuff of things,
it has the power to both shape and to dissolve a particular facet of individuality.(...) When
identity tends towards reification, the congealing of form, one can become the victim of a
highly rigid framework whose temporal solidification produces the appearance of an unmaleable substance. Plasticity situates itself in the middle of these two excesses. Catherine Malabou, Plasticity At the Dusk Of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010).

161

the manner of a merely apparent paradox, is an affirmation.9 It is perhaps in

this sense that the forgetting that Veovi mentions, the forgetting that is
disabled by the remembering that is managed as a remembering of always the
same, a pre-set form and content, is a sabre-knowledge of nothing, and could
be linked to remembering a knowledge of nothing. As the impossible mourning, which moves in-between, within the very lack of what is to be mourned,
since it is nothing, or no thing yetit so redoubles into the mourning of
mourning itself.
Everything surely could have taken place otherwise, could have been
other, could have been completely other chance. This vertigo of the completely other origin is neither a shadow nor a phantom; it is neither appropriable not idealisable by the psyche. Yet, it doubles up the present with a
mourning, the mourning precisely of the possible, of everything that the present excludes as unaccomplished (...).10
To grieve (and/or cling to) the fact that the protests and plenums failed
to bring such a much- desired change would mean that the protests and plenums had had a fixed and expected function and meaning and that they had
had it in advance. It would mean that there was a structure before one had
even begun to be constructedthat there was some point of reference from
which to draw, or copy, valuable knowledge in order to repeat. But, retroactively, it is evident that this could not have been so. To trace a trajectory of
potentiality, linking the protests and plenums to what is yet to show itself out
of the past, allows for the acceptance that there is a trace and, again, Malabou draws upon this trace in Freud as a trace of the non-event (nonadvenu) or of not having happened (non-arriv)11even if what it traces,
what is being traced is nothing, an inconclusive, an incomplete sentence...
Many events in the recent pastfrom a group of strollers in Banja Luka
organizing a park occupation in 2012, across various initiatives undertaken to
reconnect individuals and resist amidst general disillusionment, to the Babylution protests in 2013 occurring all over Bosnia and Herzegovina12have
perhaps been forgotten, or considered unimportant, since nothing visibly
changed. However, it is exactly due to this perceived failure that a connection
can be made to what came after, not only in attempt to search for continuity
at all coststhough that is sometimes not unwelcome when partitions are in
abundancebut to (re) create, to affect and set forth discontinuous and discontinuing connections where they were not.
Acknowledging these connectionsthat people engaged in creating
them during these cut-up events, and at most times unknowingly soallows
9
10
11
12

162

Catherine Malabou, History and the process of mourning in Hegel and Freud, in Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy, (2001) 106, p. 19.
Op. cit., p. 20.
Ibidem.
<www.jmbg.org/babylution-bih-battle-for-the-elementary-rights-of-new-born-childrenidentity-and-healthcare>.

for a possibility in, yet again, the impossibly hopeless situation in Bosnia and
Herzegovina; the possibility to start thinking to/from the future-in the-past.
It is interesting note perhaps that futur drugi, the second future tense as it is
referred to in local languages, is notorious for bringing confusion to the
speakers, not less to the learners of Balkan languages, especially in its redoubling of the conjugation of the verb to be. Perhaps the most important thing
to bear in mind, in the after effects of the Bosnian Springgiven that the
general elections are already bringing a sort of 1992 flashback, againis this
lesson about nothing, which was and is always already there? The fact of this
nothing is what drives the moving towards, it constantly calls for something to take its place but leaves a salvaging absence at all timessome
space to breathe, a measure of distance which allows for the sudden, the
unexpected, the impossible to happen. Or just for knowing that nothing, not
even this nothing is everything there is. We always already saw and yet
(will) have to see. And this too is not all that can be written of the protests
and plenums.

163

Vanessa Vasi Janekovi

Remembering Work as Political Sovereignty

treba visoko staviti rad da bismo mogli vidjeti njegovu granicu. U emu
se sastoji ta granica?
[ positing work high will let us see its limit. In what does that limit consist?]
Vanja Sutli1

The people who took to the streets of Bosnia and Herzegovina have, simply,
by demanding the return of the right to life that was stolen from them, initiated the creation of a new politics. We saw living, protesting bodies putting
together (metaphorically speaking) the scattered parts of the murdered Yugoslav self-governing worker. The extreme violence that dismembered this
subject had had a clear, simple purpose: to replace the Yugoslav system of
self-governance and societal ownership, with the current, violent, totalising
and excluding form of neo-classical capitalism. Genocide, localised forms of
imperialism and colonisation were strategies that served merely as the means
of delivery. We must thus view the continued processes of genocide through
the category of work; see the working human,2 not homo sacer, as the
most internal point of sovereign power.
The Bosnian protests and plenums have washed off the ethnic formaldehyde that had threatened to turn the body of the working human into an
eternally ethnic mummy.3 Moreover, they have initiated a process of repoliticising, of political self-subjectivation by those who have, drawing on
the continuity (however faint, and with all its breaks and irruptions) of selforganisation and revolutionary essence of being,4 decided to demand more
democracy and more politics of their making. In the plenums, the workers
and citizens (rather than ethnic bodies) of Bosnia and Herzegovina are reclaiming a common destiny, recalling the commonality buried in mass
graves. Thinking new politics requires unearthing that which is most represssed, most subjugated and most invisible, in this case, the distant memory of
the subjectivating status of work. Contradictions, incompleteness and impos1
2
3
4

Vanja Sutli, Praksa rada kao znanstvena povijest (Zagreb: Globus, 1987), p. 272.
This term includes women engaged in reproductive labour, students, pensioners and the
unemployed, as well as all other as yet unrecognised, but excluded groups.
During the protests in Sarajevo, Emir Hodi pointed to the exit of the ethnic and the
arrival of the socio-economic. Available at: <www.slobodnaevropa.org>.
As put by Gajo Petrovi.

165

sibility reside within remembering work as political sovereignty. Where do

we locate their sources?
Sovereignty resonates (causing some discomfort) within the anticolonial mobilisation.5 Establishing state sovereignty was the means of liberation from colonial exploitation. State sovereignty is, however, inherently
oppressive, as it demands rule over objects whose work produces value for
the sovereign. Therefore, to conceive of work as political sovereignty may
demand somewhat of a leap. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia6
(SFRY) was such a leap: constitutionally defined as the state of the working
people, her sovereignty thus lay in her being ruled by the working people.
Impossibility, however, arises within the notion of state as the site of power,
for it becomes obsolete under self-rule by all. This is part of the definition of
communism, and communism is what this period of relative socialist authenticity claimed to wish to achieve. On paper, the rule of the working people
persisted until the break up of the SFRY. In reality, this was only true in the
short period of balance between internal state supremacy and upward distribution of governance,7 pointing, above all to the incompleteness, a lack of
revolutionary process, as the essence of being, as an ontological category.
This demand for sovereignty in work was as much the result of anticolonial struggle,8 as it grew out of a strong, broad socialist and communist
movement, dating back to the nineteenth century. Though very active in prewar days,9 this movement achieved its most authentic form in the WWII, as
the Peoples Liberation Struggle (NOB) by the Yugoslav revolutionary Partisan movement. Branimir Stojanovi identifies the NOB as a historical sequence of a collective thinking of politics ... a feature of emancipatory politics par exellence or of politics as invention. This was political subjectivation within the regime of resistance by logic or the logic of rebellion,
through which they [the Partisan fighters] constructed radical conclusions:
their own words, slogans, political declarations, places, forms of organising,
theatre, newspapers and their own logic of functioning that, whilst placing
them within the regime of revolutionary politics, transcended each of them
individually.10 Stojanovi dates the end of this sequence of political subjectivation as May 1943, when the Peoples Liberation Struggle, was renamed
the Peoples Liberation Army, turning its horizontal structure into a hierar5
6
7
8
9
10

166

The need for which has not yet waned.

First declared in 1943 as the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia, then in 1945 Federal Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia, to, in 1963 become the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, reflecting the transformations and elucidations of its constitutive politics.
From about 1950 to 1968, though it can be argued that this period stopped in 1958, with
the first strike, in the coal mine in Trbovlje, Slovenia.
Not just the Austro-Hungarian and the Turkish, and later, the colonialism of the fascist
occupation, but also the planned post-war division of Yugoslav territory between Britain
and the USSR.
Two decades of mainly illegal anti-colonial, socialist and communist activity preceded
WWII.
Branimir Stojanovi, Partizanska histerija istina jugoslovenskog socijalizma (Belgrade: Up-underground, 2010). Available at: <www.up-underground.com>.

chical one.
Gal Kirn describes the dialectical sharpening and encounter between
the oppressed nations and revolutionary people [that has] emerged in the
NOB as the crucial political ground, where the masses were mobilized,11
participating in and supporting the struggle. The Partisans self-organisation
translated into political, cultural and economic self-organisation within free
territories, including forms of self-governance within production.12 Work
thus took the form of an associative practice of self-creation. Residues of this
important sequence of collective thinking of politics have persisted to this
day, manifesting in various forms, most obviously in the free territories
carved out by the protests and plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is to this sequence that we must trace back the rooting of the dominant
identity in the figure of the oppressed, the working human.13 In this encounter, as Kirn puts it, the ethnic or the religious, even gender and sexual orientation were relegated to the margins of broad antifascist solidarity.14 Importantly, this was taking place in a sort of a stateless flux (to paraphrase
Kirn), in the occupied, broken country. Today, Bosnia and Herzegovina finds
itself in a similar flux, as a state with internal borders, brokered along the
logic of war profiteering and the exploitation of the fetish of the ethnic, and
its seamless absorption by the international humanitarian politics.
And yet, it was in WWII in Bosnia, in 1943 in Jajce, that the new state
of the working people was first declared. In 1949, this state, founded on a
revolutionary, anti-fascist and anti-colonial impetus became the only new
socialist state to break away from what Tito, the Partisan leader and the President of the SFRY, later referred to as Soviet imperialist expansionism.15
The move was equally emancipatory in its rejection of the Soviet style state
socialism.16 In a stroke of visionary self-reflexivity, the Yugoslav Communist
Party leadership began developing self-governance and societal ownership
over the means of production and capital: this revolutionary turn was initiated
in the period between 1948 and 1951. The turn was implemented downwards,
as, by then, the new state had already created a political oligarchy. However,
the crucial members of this oligarchy had retained the memory of the truly
subjectivating sequence that was the NOB.17
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

Gal Kirn, Conceptualisation Of Politics And Reproduction In The Work Of Louis Althusser: Case Of Socialist Yugoslavia, (PhD diss., Nova Gorica, 2012), p. 214.
Of food, ammunition, cultural production, etc.
The working human does not stand in for the proletariat here, but as a far more universalising figure, working, in fact, and in mutuality that this work creates, on its own subjectivation.
Though the new state was founded as a federation, taking into account the state-forming
aspirations of the recently colonised.
Darko Suvin, Samo jednom se ljubi (Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2014), p. 72.
Following the implementation of it, between 1945 and 1948.
And, as Tadej Kurepa pointed out, of the Spanish Civil War, in which around 1,500
Yugoslavs fought against the fascists. Those who returned brought with them the experience of guerrilla warfare, as well as of self-organisation in the anarchist free territories.
See also: Joel Rogers, Wolfgang Streeck, Works Councils: Consultation, Representation,

167

Their vision of socialist democracy and self-rule by the working people

was implemented primarily through the establishment of Workers Councils,
a system of direct governance over production, means of production, income
and surplus value created by work. This concept can be traced back to Paris
Commune,18 a strong source of inspiration for this turn to horizontality, but
also to the origins of Italian communist party in Torino and to the Spanish
Civil War.
Various initial documents, mainly by Boris Kidri, testify to strong political commitment. The distribution of power initially attained an upward
motion: from the basic working collective towards the state apparatus.
Such a collective or enterprise was not the object of state administration or
the state accumulation of capital, but a subject, creating income and retaining its accumulation, as well as participating in political processes (to a degree).19 The economy was planned, though operating within a regulated market. Income gap was kept strictly at the ratio no higher than around 1:5.5. The
benefits of self-governance were obvious and are still impressive today: full
employment, free education, income for work instead of wage labour, free
health services, the highest employment benefits in Europe, and access to
extremely affordable housing, as well as childcare. The growth rate of the
gross national product was between 6 and 10 per cent20 in that period, a figure most countries would be envious of today. And yet, the expected or desired upgrade of self-governance into an upward spread into the very centre
of authority, the desired democratisation of socialism, did not take hold. This
key problem holds crucial insights into how to think about the creation of
new politics today.
The common view of the end of the Cold War, however benevolent the gaze,
is that socialism failed, including, of course, Yugoslavia and its form of socialism. This view is blind. To paraphrase Pavluko Imirovi: in order for
socialism to fail, two conditions must be met.21 The first one is that it has to
be socialism. No country could claim this in 1989, including the SFRY. The
second condition for failure is lack of democracy, for socialism can only
survive as democratic socialism. What we name as Yugoslav socialism never
became truly democratic, and thus never truly socialism.22

18
19
20
21
22

168

and Cooperation in Industrial Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p.

154.
To the revolutionary workers collectivism of Eugne Varlin, in particular; see Amde
Dunois, Eugne Varlin: militant complet, Bulletin communiste, 11 (1922) 3. Available
at: <www.marxists.org/francais/dunois/works/1922/03/varlin.pdf>.
Suvin, Samo jednom se ljubi, p.132.
Op. cit., p. 241.
Pavluko Imirovi, Juri na nebo tree generacije 20. Veka. Available at: <pavlusko.wordpress.com>.
Nor does the notion of what is truly democratic have anything to do with the type of
partocratic liberal parliamentary democracy ruling Europe today.

The second delusion about the end of Yugoslav attempt at creating socialism combines the errors of identifying when it began and when it ended
with its perceived lack of reliance on the so-called free market. Contrary to
the all too widely accepted fallacy that the Yugoslav economic crisis and
rampant inflation were the result of insufficient reliance on market mechanisms and capitalisation, it was precisely because of the Yugoslav turn to
capitalisation and the deregulated market that the crisis took place. Boris
Buden wrote: the Yugoslav experiment did not move according to the
prophecies of liberal capitalist ideology, from a market regulated by the party
state to a free market, but from a market regulated by the party state to a
market that escaped any democratic control and that was ruled by the centres
of international financial capital.23 (Herein we also find the true causes of
the various economic crises we are all suffering under today.) The Yugoslav
escape from regulation took place long before the late eighties: at the beginning of the sixties. Furthermore, it was not spontaneous, but the result of
deliberate policy, the beginning of the dismemberment of the body of the
Yugoslav self-governing worker. Thus, we arrive back at the scene of the
crime.
The break up of the SFRY was, in fact, set up as far back as 1974, when
a new constitution further decentralised the federation. And whilst this devolution of power may appear constructive and democratic, it was anything but.
Just as the ethnic discourse now masks the economic dynamo behind genocide, so did the discourse of tensions within the Yugoslav ruling elite, between centralisers and decentralisers, in fact, mask the simple interest
shared by both positions: to preserve their power through the continued control over the surplus value of work.24 This they did by refusing to allow the
full implementation of self-governance: by refusing democracy, both economic and political. How was it possible, in the context of an authentic social
revolution, for this oligarchy to take so much power? The answer lies in a
neglected area of research: the residues of colonial rule. To stage the frames
within which these residues operated, we need to return to the period of the
so-called Soviet model state socialism, just after WWII. Early critics of this
model have referred to it as state capitalism, but this was rebuked through
describing it as the initial post-revolution phase of building the state and
economy, a necessary phase of transition to socialism, a phase of consolidation and creation of the initial accumulation of capital, without which it is
impossible to plan and implement industrial development.25 In the Yugoslav
case, this phase, between 1945 and 1951, produced three strong state capital23
24
25

Suvin, Samo jednom se ljubi, p. 274

For an extended, truly brilliant analysis of the various issues and impacts of centralisation
and decentralisation, see Suvin, Ibidem.
Vilim Ribi, Pregled ekonomske literature na osnovi teoretskih, koncepcijskih i
konkretizacijskih problema (Zagreb: Institut za historiju radnikog pokreta Hrvatske,
1988), p. 172; and Suvins analysis of Boris Kidri warning against state capitalism back
in 1950; in Suvin, Samo jednom se ljubi, p. 215.

169

isms (the critics were right): in the republics of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia,
following the rates of development under colonial rule.
The colonisation has left behind a deeply subservient culture of behaviour within power relations, a strain of submissive reverence towards societal
status. It has left a bureaucratic apparatus and a culture, set up, in the first
place, to assist in the extraction of value, by cataloguing it, categorising and
appropriating it. Very importantly, the colonial administration also left behind a fetishisation of the ethnic, coupled with strong patriarchality.26 Frantz
Fanon very clearly describes the processes of post-colonial organisation and
the involution they enforce as, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might
have been.27 The elites (established by colonial rule) of the formerly colonised do little more than emulate the exploitative ways of the coloniser. In the
SFRY, the memory of (rather recent) colonisation has been pushed back into
the deepest recesses, and it still lurks there, largely unproblematised.28 Resistance to democratisation found a natural ally in this set up of deep repression and affectability. By exploiting this continuity over the decades, the
decentralised power structures (state capitalisms) were able to develop into
the current ethno-national oligarchies, ruling through the structural violence
imposed by genocide. Their rule is presided over by a transnational set-up
that can only be described as a continuation of colonial rule by other means.
This turn to capitalism was not executed with ease: from about 1958,
the working people of Yugoslavia took to striking and protesting with comforting regularity, demanding, first of all, more control over their income, but
also more democracy, more self-rule and more freedom. Their understanding
of the potential of work to be the site of their political subjectivation, as well
as the site of their subjugation was reflected in their refusal of work, echoing,
perhaps, the contemporaneous Italian Autonomia movement.
Significantly,29 as Neca Jovanov observed, the strikes started in the
most developed area of the country, Slovenia, and it took 15 years for the
wave to spread southwards, toward the less developed areas of the country.30
With the gradual move towards capitalist-type exploitation, the number of
strikes increased. By the time self-governance was fully dismantled, thou26
27
28

29

30

170

The English language does not, at present, accommodate for the necessary precision:
patriarchality is used here to denote the basic structure of society that favours the male
experience, marginalising the female.
Fanon, Frantz, Wretched of the Earth, (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 119.
For a start, perhaps, to follow Aim Csaire and to reveal to the very distinguished, very
humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware
of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, , in
Discourse on Colonialism (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p.36.
Especially in the view of the agonising rupture, as experienced by the left, the Frankfurt
School (this was pointed out by Peter Osborne) in particular, following the defeat of the
German revolution and the consequent rise of fascism, and as articulated in Gyrgy Lukcss view that the impossibility of revolution grows proportionally with the pervasiveness of exchange value relations.
Neca Jovanov, Dijagnoza samoupravljanja (Zagreb: Sveuilina naklada Liber, 1983), p.
214.

sands of strikes or, as Jovanov refers to them, conflicts of class character

had taken place.31
This continued resistance to a return to capitalism could, ultimately, only be interrupted by genocide. The result is a devastated life in which work
has become the site of utter contradiction: work has been imposed, against all
societal logic, as the only means of survival, the condition of life itself, and
yet, even the right to work has been privatised, the subjugation thus having
been extended to the very access to the right to life. Within this subjugation
began the process of re-politicisation, of remembering work as a form of
political sovereignty, that, however stunted it has become, still holds the
potential for liberation of work and from work, for subsuming work in the
category of life and imagination, rather than the other way around. For work
has become the site of libidinal investment, producing pathologies and depression, its very agency extended to assist in the utter colonisation of all of
the human being by capital: what Franco Berardi refers to as: soul put to
work.32
The protests, as the fire of dissensus,33 and the plenums, as a model for consensus,34 are part of the same durational and yet still emergent revolutionary
process that could, perhaps, be said to have started in the Paris Commune,
and that could also be said to have barely even started yet. The literal meaning of plenum is full space. Bosnian plenums were thus a space full of work,
its fullest movements oscillating in registers of absence as found outside this
space: absence of commons, of collectivity, of politics, of bodies in politics,
of work as political sovereignty, as subjectivation.
In registering these (and other) absences, the plenums have initiated the
process of re-membering, of putting life back together as a collective thinking of politics. What is to be done? In elaborating the necessity of the high
category of work, Sutli states a constitutive demand for re-philosophising
the implication of liberating production forces from the shackles [of]
production relations. When we liberate work to that extent, it will become
clear in what its limit lies.35 To find this limit is to reclaim life.

31
32

33

34
35

Jovanov, Dijagnoza samoupravljanja, pp. 174184.

Jason Smith, in preface to Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work (New York: Semiotext(e),
2009), p. 19.
Dissensus as in The essense of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence
of two worlds in one. Rancire, Jacques, Dissensus (London: Continuum Books, 2010),
p. 37. Dissensus then denotes the rift constitutive of this surplus of absences, the rift between those who can and those who cannot partake in power, but also a demand, a state of
being, by those who decide to partake in the creation of politics (through the protests and
the plenums).
However incomplete, due to having resorted to the majority principle.
Sutli, Praksa rada kao znanstvena povijest.

171

Nigel Osborne

The Plenum Brain

The Bosnian plenums, or citizens assemblies, were formed in early February

2014 after factory closures resulting from corrupt privatisation led to workers protests in Tuzla. For the first time in a quarter of a century of genocide
and stagnation imposed from outside, Bosnian society rediscovered its authentic voice and its capacity to take its fate into its own hands. At the time of
writing the plenum movement is in the first trough following the first peak of
its waveform; but it is clear from both its amplitude and frequency that the
energy is unstoppable and the next peak will arrive soon.
The plenums are a remarkable phenomenon that evolved spontaneously
almost fully-formed. This essay explores the physiognomy of the phenomenon through a physiological metaphorthe idea of the plenum brain.

The genetics of the plenum brain

The plenum brain, like the human brain is built by its own genetic code. Although genetics provides both a general blueprint for the brain and a number
of hard-wired systems, much of the brain is an open booka set of general capacities and potentialities formed into functioning structures by external stimulus and internal neural impulses. A popular but nevertheless useful
characterisation of the brain is as a dense jungle through which experience
and impulse clear neural pathways and open up complex geographies of
intersecting tracks.
So what is the basic genetic code of the plenum brain? Is it hard-wired?
To what extent is it an open book? What are its capacities? Which impulses
form it? What does the map of its jungle look like so far?
The common definition of a plenum is a meeting of a deliberative assembly in which all members are present, as opposed to a quorum, where
only an agreed number need attend. It is tempting to look for romantic
origins for the Bosnian plenums deep in social history - the putative leaderless structures of early South Slav society, the apparent absence of hierarchy
in the Bosnian church. But more realistically there is within living memory
the experience of socialist collectivity in former Yugoslavia and most recently the experiences of student movements in Croatia in 1971 and 2009.
There is also, interestingly, a genetic line that seems to lead almost directly
173

from Athenian democracy. The ideas of power being invested in the assembly or ekklesia (), of direct rather than representative democracy, of
motions voted on by show of hands and carried by simple majorities, of officials elected by the assembly and of the crucial citizen-initiator all figure
in the Bosnian plenum process. To this extent, aspects of the plenum brain
appear close to being socially and historically hard-wired. What is fascinating for the movement is that the creation of a new assembly brain offers the
prospect of forming entirely new maps in plastic neural space, and through
these pathways innovatory democratic process. The quality and usefulness of
these maps will of course depend on the nature of external stimulus and internal neural impulse. Reward is an important factor in building brain capacityso for example, in the simplest terms, some palpable success for the
movement will be a crucial for its healthy development. Equally the quality
of growth of the brain will depend on the nature of internal neural impulse, in
particular impulses from the lowest parts of the brain related to consciousness, awareness and the idall discussed below. But all of this is linked to
another, more complex source of genetic material.
Bosnia has traditionally had three principal religions: Islam, Orthodox
Christianity and Catholicism (with a significant representation of Judaism), a
single language, and a common profile of genetic haplotypes, primarily Balkan and Slav. Bosnian Islam arose in part through the Ottoman occupation,
but also through a process of conversion from the independent Bosnian
Christian church, oppressed at the time of the Inquisition. Bosnian Islam
retained many features of the Christian Bosnian church, including wooden
mosques and a number of aspects of ritual. It is a gentle and liberal faith
whose members survived for centuries in relative harmony with their Christian relatives and neighbours. By 1981,16.8 per cent of marriages in Bosnia
were of mixed religion, and by the early 1990s in some cities the figure had
reached close to fifty per cent. For better or for worse, Bosnias life was
overwhelmingly secular.
Its people shared the same genetic code, lived largely secular lives,
dressed the same, enjoyed the same cuisine, listened to the same music, went
to the same schools, fell in love with one another and spoke the same languageBosnian dialects of Serbo-Croat, in which minor linguistic differences were defined by region rather than by community. It is misleading to
speak of different ethnicities in Bosnia and Herzegovina; by most anthropological definitions it is a single ethnicity. The fact that ultra-nationalists
and the international community conspired to create the illusion of difference
and to generate a vocabulary of malapropisms (nation, race, ethnicity, people,
entity, Serb, Croat and Muslimall reduced by nationalist rhetoric to meaninglessness) to support and justify the division, is one of the great intellectual
disasters of the era. A crucial aspect of the plenum brain is the recovery of
the genetics of oneness and solidarity, and the restoration of a meaningful
democratic language based on inclusiveness and citizenship.

174

The epigenetics of the plenum brain

Epigenetics is the science of how environmental and experiential factors may
change genetic codes, even within the lifetime of an individual. The extent of
the power of epigenetics to transform is a crucial question for the plenums.
The fate of Bosnia was decided at a meeting at Karaorevo, Vojvodina,
between Serbian President Slobodan Miloevi and Croatian President Franjo
Tuman on 25 March 1991. The outcome was a Hitler-Stalin, RibbentropMolotov style agreement to go to war and to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina
between them along ethnic lines. The division would be implemented by an
ethnic cleansing policy first hatched in the corridors of the Serbian Academy of Sciences in the mid-1980s and in some ways reflected publicly and
politically in the SANU Memorandum of 1986.
The process of implementing the Karaorevo agreement, and of breaking apart a society so closely integrated, was horrendously cruel beyond the
imaginations of the Belgrade academicians. There is still debate about the
number of people killed, but a figure of between 120,000 and 200,000 embraces the differing estimates. All people of Bosnia suffered - there were as
many serious woundings as deaths, 2.2 million people driven out of their
homes and up to 50,000 cases of rapebut the largest group of victims were
Bosniaks (Muslim, or of secular Muslim heritage). It was a genocide, but for
the perpetrators, many of whom were not Bosnian, it was also a cultural suicidethe wanton destruction of the common life identity of the Balkan
heartland. The situation was compounded by weakness, apathy, misinformation and at times connivance among the international community. Even
when a peace was negotiated in the General Framework Agreement for Peace
of 1995, a structure of governance was imposed that implemented the policies of Karaorevo, and empowered nationalists in so-called-ethnic partitionsa system that proceeded to generate oligarchies and corruption and
paralyse all democratic political process.
The major question is has this epigenetic assault on identity significantly, permanently changed the genetic code? After all the suffering, is it an
illusion to believe that the common life of Bosnia could be restored? Is this
simply Yugo-nostalgia? Are Bosnians still able and prepared to work together as citizens, rather than as members of externally determined factions? The
evidence so far is that, remarkably, very little has changed in the basic code.
The strong social genes of the plenums have proved themselves to be resistant to the ravages of epigenetics.

The subcortical plenum brain

The most ancient part of the brain is the brainstem. It is in essence an extension of the spine, and is responsible for processing elemental consciousness

175

and primitive, reflex responses, including the need in evolution to process

sensory danger signals efficiently.
For example the acoustic startle reflex (the human physical reaction to
sudden unexpected sound) involves a pathway directly from the cochlea of
the ear along cranial (auditory) nerve VIII to the caudate reticular nucleus,
whence there are descending projections to spinal and limb motor neurons,
thus provoking the jump or blink effect. There is also an ascending
pathway to the amygdala, a key centre for both negative and positive emotional processing, where receptors potentiate the effect of acoustic startle, and
activate autonomic and endocrine systems for stress.
The inferior collicus of the midbrain roof above the periaqueductal grey
appears to be an important collecting point for such information, and generates powerful neuronal responses to significant changes in intensity of sensory information. There are pathways ascending to emotional systems, as well
as a descending, emotional feedback pathway from the amygdala. It is the
location of coherent self-representation of the organism.
This is likely to be a vulnerable part of plenum hard-wired neural systems. Brains which have been subjected to excessive trauma and shock tend
to develop exaggerated startle responses, and heightened negative emotional
reactions to what is unwelcome and unexpected. There are therapeutic processes that can help, and interestingly the plenums have begun to develop a
collective self-therapy process: in their fair-minded and empathetic reception
of individual expressions of pain, and the building of a shared resilience
capable of absorbing and attenuating dangerous startle responses and negative reflexes and emotions.
But these small potential dysfunctions count for little against the richness of subcortical impulse which appears to be a feature of the plenum brain.
Lower brain affective phenomenal experiences provide the energy for the
construction of higher consciousness. These impulses are either anoetic (unthinking), and may be intense without necessarily being understood, or noetic
and linked to perception and cognition. In the neurology of nameless essential energy negative and destructive experience can become positive and
creative forces and neural impulses. All of this takes place in the core emotional areas of the brain described above, the most likely location for Freuds
Id, and, by all appearances a powerful segment of the plenum brain.

The limbic plenum brain

The amygdala (arousal, affection, expression of mood, fear) is part of the
limbic system, where more noetic consciousness is processed and emotions
are generated and felt. There are a number of related limbic and paralimbic
structures, including the hippocampus (memory, regulation of HPA axis,
stress), parahippocampal gyrus (recognition, memory retrieval), insula (va-

176

lence), temporal poles (connectivity), ventral striatum (expectation and experience of reward), orbifrontal cortex (valence) and cingulate cortex. The limbic system is an important driver of the autonomic nervous system, which
controls a number of functions of the body ranging from heart rate to pupil
dilation, sweat and sexual responses. Most endocrine functions, including the
hormones that travel through the bloodstream to emotional receptor sites,
as well as much emotion-related neurotransmissionthe biochemical agents
that communicate the electrical firing of cellsare related to limbic processing.
It is in the limbic system that damage from psychological trauma is evident. There was a major psychosocial industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina
after the war directed towards addressing symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD). In some ways this was useful, but in other ways it lacked
an appropriate social understanding and relativity. Most Bosnians swallowed their trauma. Sometimes this produced resilience. At other times it
had dangerous physiological consequences, including significant increases in
the incidence of acute coronary syndrome, cancers and perinatal mortality.
With these caveats in mind, it is important to consider the potential individual
and collective effects of trauma on the population that created the plenums.
The Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders 4th edition
identifies four diagnostic criteria:1
Exposure to a profoundly traumatic event, including sensations of terror, horror and helplessness;
The subsequent recall and re-experiencing of the event, including intrusive recollections, distressing dreams, acting or feeling as if the event were
recurring, psychological distress at exposure to cues or physiological reactivity at exposure to cues (one symptom needed for diagnosis);
Avoidance and numbing symptoms, including avoidance of thoughts or
feelings, avoidance of activities, places or people, inability to recall important
aspects of the trauma, diminished interest in activities, detachment or estrangement, restricted range of affect and a sense of a foreshortened future
(three symptoms needed);
Hyperarousal symptoms, including difficulty falling or staying
asleep,irritability or out- bursts of anger, difficulty concentrating, hypervigilance and exaggerated startle response (two symptoms needed).
For diagnosis, these symptoms must persist for more than one month
and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social or occupational functioning. There may be associated features, including guilt over acts
of commission or omission, survivor guilt, reduction in awareness of surroundings, derealisation and depersonalisation. Significantly, there are
clear physiological and neurophysiological indicators associated with PTSD
1

See: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., text rev. (American
Psychiatric Association, 1994).

177

in both adults and children, including accelerated heart rate, marginal increase in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, reduced heart-rate variability,
delayed heart-rate recovery from shock, respiratory irregularities, dysregulation of hormonal and neurotransmitter systems related to stress and relaxation, and altered movement repertoires. PTSD may also either overlap or be
comorbid with other difficulties, including major depression, and attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder.
A study of 1,505 children in Sarajevo in 1994 found that forty-eight per
cent of girls and thirty-eight per cent of boys over the age of thirteen, and
thirty-eight per cent of girls and thirty-four per cent of boys under thirteen
had PTSD. A longitudinal study carried out between 1993 and 1997 revealed
that seventy-eight per cent of children had experienced traumatic events. In a
survey of 364 internally displaced children in Central Bosnia conducted by
the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard, ninety-four per cent of children
from the Sarajevo region met the criteria of DSM-IV for PTSD.
Chronic trauma, accumulated by persistent neural flow of stress signals
from the amygdala, puts the autonomic nervous system on permanent alert,
which among other things permanently raises heart rate by six or seven beats
a minute. Stress signals from the amygdala also activate endocrine systems
for stress, including the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis, which
leads to the secretion of cortisol into the bloodstream to reach receptor sites
which inhibit the immune and digestive systems and open capillaries in hands
and feet for fight or flight reaction. But excess of cortisol also leads to
biochemical attrition (through glucocorticoid activity) of the hippocampus,
associated with both memory and stress, and thus reduces HPA activity.
People with PTSD have to deal with uncomfortable, heightened neural responses, without the biochemical resources to support themlike being confronted by a heavily armed aggressor, unarmed and naked.
A particularly unfortunate aspect of limbic activity associated with
trauma is increased paranoia and suspicion. Recent research suggests that a
functional disconnection in autonomic and central systems for threat-related
signals, associated biologically with amygdala-prefrontal systems, may lead
to cognitive misattribution of these signals (imagining danger where it does
not exist) and the dysregulation of the system as a whole. People with good
intentions may be seen as bad, innocent accidents as conspiracies, and so on.
The limbic system, with its capacity to generate and regulate emotion, is
potentially one of the most creative parts of the plenum brain. But it also
harbours dangers. For people who may be individually or collectively traumatised, there are dangers of being hypervigilant and hyper-reactive in nonproductive ways, of lacking the biochemical energy to support this reactivity,
of avoiding emotionally demanding situations, of lacking concentration, of
chronic lethargy, of impatience, of depression, of lacking optimism for the
future and of being unnecessarily suspicious and mistrusting of others and of

178

one another. For the plenum brain, these are perhaps the most significant and
dangerous enemies within.

The plenum neo-cortex

The most powerful defence against these dangers is the neo-cortex: in evolutionary terms, the youngest part of the human brain. It is the centre for
autonoetic consciousness, or the capacity for reflection on awareness and
consciousness of consciousness. It is where the plenum brain may understand
itself, and be aware of the nature of sub-cortical and limbic impulses, in order
to modulate them, to self-diagnose avoidance and paranoia, and to turn negative responses to positive action. Important in this process are feedback systems between the neo-cortex and limbic system. In other words it is possible
to change the sensation of an emotion by being aware of it and thinking about
it. This is popularly known as emotional intelligence, Anyone who knows
Bosnian culture knows that this intelligence exists in abundance.
Bosnian culture has also always been strong in processing language and
number, which implies significant capacities in the Broca and Wernincke
areas. In more specific terms mathematical intelligence is associated with the
horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus, supported by a left angular
gyrus area and a bilateral, posterior superior parietal system. It is related to
the temporal-spatial systems that make Bosnians good chess players and
strategists - attributes that will become increasingly important for the plenum
brain as the movement progresses to re-wire the political brain of Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
The musical traditions of Bosnia, and in particular Sevda, suggest strong
connections between basic brainstem impulses, rich limbic activity and a
highly tuned Heschls gyrus, with acute cognitive processing and powerful
feedback pathways to the limbic systemin other words the capacity to
process deep impulse, emotion and reflective thought in a single system.
The origins of the term Sevda are as profoundly intercultural as the music itself. The underlying concept of Sevda derives from the Ancient Greek
melas (), meaning black, and khole (), bile (the English melancholy) one of the four Ancient Greek medical humours, first introduced
from Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian thought by Thales (640-546 BC)
and adopted by Hippocrates (460-370 BC) as one of the four bodily liquids or
temperaments responsible for human attributes and dispositions. The idea
passed into early Islamic medical theory and practice through the works of
Al-Kindi (801-873 AD) and Avicenna (980-1037 AD), who associated the
humours with music. The black bile came to be described popularly as
Sawdah (from sawaad meaning black) in Arabic, or Sevda in Turkish, although in the Turkish tradition the word has cognates in Persian, and denotes
more specifically love or lovesickness. From Turkey the word spread

179

through the Ottoman Empire to the Balkans (fourteenth-nineteenth centuries)

to describe a music of lost or unfulfilled love, pain, sorrow, regret, longing
and deep emotion. It also arrived with the Berbers and Arabs in Portugal
(711-1249) and is probably the origin of Saudade, the music of the love that
remains when someone has gone.
Sevda is one of the most intercultural musical forms of Europe, a historical synthesis of many diverse social and cultural identities, embracing Slav,
Balkan,Turkish and Sephardic Jewish social traditions, four religions, and a
diversity of musical cultures ranging from the Makams (musical scales and
melodic patterns) of the Near and Middle East to Slav folk music, the Dalmatian melos, Italian bel canto and Viennese romanticism. On the other hand
this diversity of identities is entirely integrated and nested in a unique,
characteristic, coherent musical and poetic language, which expresses a collective cultural identity with profound implications for the common life of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, for the region, and indeed perhaps for Europe as a
whole.
In some ways the plenum brain resembles the Sevda brain. The capacity
to receive deep, primal impulses of consciousness, integrate them in rich
limbic, emotional activity, process them in the cognitive and reflective neocortex and return them to limbic, autonomic and endocrine systems as meaningful feeling, experience and action is the real strength of the plenum brain.
The plenum brain also shares with the Sevda brain an indestructible genetic code stretching from Ancient Greece and the origins of European brain
science and thought to a single nested identity combining a Slav-Balkan
genetic code with a benign epigenetics of Eastern knowledge and influence,
and onwards to an all-embracing common life and a neural open book
ready to define new ways of thinking and living, andif the plenum movement is ready for the challengeto assume leadership in the next phase of
European cultural and political evolution.

180

Contributors
Emina Busuladi - Trained as a chemical technician, Emina has been a worker in the Dita
factory, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, for 38 years. She is a lifelong trade unionist and the
leader of the Dita strike board and, from 2009 onwards, led the protest for the continuation of
production in her factory.
Miralem Ibriimovi - A worker in the former Polihem factory in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 1975 until its enforced closure. He is also a shop steward of many years standing,
who led the strike committee in this factory, and organised the public protests against corrupt
privatisation in Tuzla in the early 2000s. In February 2014, in Tuzla, he played a crucial role as a
moderator of plenum sessions.
Zlatan Begi - Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law of Tuzla University. He is the author of several scientific papers on Constitutional Law which have been published in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally. As the secretary to the project and a
member of its expert group, he was deeply involved in the reforming project Proposed Recommendations for Amendments to the Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Damir Arsenijevi - A Leverhulme Trust Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester, U.K.,
leading the project Love after Genocide. He is an activist, academic and a psychoanalyst in
training, working in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His book Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry
in Bosnia and Herzegovina was published by Nomos in 2010.
Emir Hodi - An artist and human rights activist from Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has
been involved in social movements internationally, and is one of the founders of the initiative Jer
Me Se Tie (Because it Concerns Me) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as an activist of the
Stop Genocide Denial.
Aleksandar Hemon - The author of The Lazarus Project, The Book of My Lives and several other
books in English. He has been writing a column in Bosnian for the past 20 years. He is angry in
both languages.
Haris Husari - A journalist from Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He gained his degree in
journalism from the Faculty of Philosophy in Tuzla. He continued his education in the field of
sociology at the Faculty for Social Sciences at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic,
and is currently working on his Masters thesis, which deals with the February 2014 events in
Tuzla.
Adis Sadikovi - An activist from Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, who participated in the mass
protests and plenums in 2014. He has a B.A. in Economics and is currently unemployed.
Emin Eminagi - An activist and translator, based between Tuzla and Teanj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, he holds a BA from the University of Tuzla in English language and literature, and an
MA in nationalism studies from CEU in Budapest. He was one of the members and initiators of
the Students Movement/Students Plenum Tuzla, he is also a founding member of Lijevi, a small
political organisation. He is also part of the Psychoanalytic Seminar Tuzla.
Igor tiks - A Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art, the University
of Edinburgh, UK. His monograph Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav
States: One Hundred Years of Citizenship is forthcoming by Bloomsbury (Summer 2015). His
novel A Castle in Romagna received the Award Slavic for Best First Book. His second novel Elijahs Chair has been translated into a dozen European languages.

181

Sreko Horvat - A philosopher and the author of What does Europe want? (Columbia University
Press, 2014) with Slavoj iek, and Radicality of Love (Polity Press, 2015).
Stef Jansen - Dr Stef Jansen, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK, has conducted a series of long-term ethnographic studies in the post-Yugoslav
states since 1996. He spends much of his time in Sarajevo, where he has also taught a range of
courses at the University. For details, see: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/stef.jansen
Larisa Kurtovi - A political anthropologist and Adjunct Professor of International Studies at
DePaul University in Chicago, USA. She is currently writing a book about grassroots politics
and the prelude to the ongoing protests in post-war Bosnia, entitled Future as Predicament.
Edin Hajdarpai - Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, USA. His
research explores conflict and memory, ethno-national politics, and imperial legacies in southeastern Europe. His book, Whose Bosnia? Political Imagination and Nation-Formation in the
Modern Balkans, is forthcoming in 2015.
Eric Gordy - Senior lecturer in Southeast European Politics at the School of Slavonic and East
European Studies, University College, London, UK. He is the author of The Culture of Power in
Serbia (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) and Guilt, Responsibility and Denial: The
Past at Stake in Post-Miloevi Serbia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). For details, see:
http://eastethnia.wordpress.com/
Asim Mujki - Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Author of We, the Citizens of Ethnopolis, Kratka povijest
pragmatizma (A Brief History of Pragmatism), Pravda i etnonacionalizam (Justice and ethnonationalism).
Jasmin Mujanovi - A PhD candidate in Political Science at York University, UK. His research
focuses on the democratization of post-war Bosnia, with a broader interest in the role protests
and social movements play in post-authoritarian democratic consolidation.
Jasmina Husanovi - Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy,
University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her interests are in cultural and political theory
and praxis dealing with the politics of witnessing, governance of life, culture of trauma and
emancipatory politics. She has published widely on these themes in the post-Yugoslav region
and internationally.
Selma Tobudi - An independent researcher from Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She completed undergraduate studies in English and French Language and Literature at the Faculty of Letters
and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is an activist engaged in various local and international
networks and initiatives. Her research interests focus primarily on the intersection of teaching
and translation.
Vanessa Vasi-Janekovi - she works in the intersections of art, theory and activism, researching
and articulating registers and distribution of tensions inherent to knowledge production hierarchies and their economic underpinnings. Previously a journalist, Vanessa has covered all of the
major 1990s conflicts, reporting on the existence of the camps in Bosnia and covering the war
crimes trials for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Nigel Osborne - A composer and pioneer in using the creative arts to support children who are
victims of conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Africa. He is Emeritus
Professor of Music and Human Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, UK; visiting Professor
at the University of Rijeka, Croatia; and Consultant to Peking University, China.

182