Will the Dayton Agreement help bring about peace, recognition of states and cooperation among them? Or will political instability plunge the region into more conflict?
#36: Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska):
A Gentle People at Odds with the World, Part II
9 July 2002
It was 6:30am when I arrived at the Bus Station of Banja Luka. The city center was 3km away. I didn’t have any convertible mark (KM), the official currency of the BiH, but could neither find any exchange office, or anyone willing to change money with me – not even taxi drivers were willing to do that. Classic chicken and egg story. I had no KM and so couldn’t take any bus or taxi. And because no one was willing to take me to town, I will not have any KM. I could hardly believe how unentrepreneurial these people were! In the end, I had to walk the 3km into town with my heavy backpack.
Due to frequent earthquakes in its history, Banja Luka has few historic buildings. The local Serbs worsened the tourism scene by expelling all the Bosniaks in town, and blowing up all 16 of their mosques, including Ferhadiya, the famous architectural gem in the north of Bosnia, built in 1580 by a Bosnian-born grand vizier (senior minister) of the Ottoman Empire. The grand vizier’s clan had persuaded the Turks to revive the Serbian Church following the conquest of Bosnia, and so helped revived Serbian culture during the period of Turkish rule. So much for the repayment of deeds. I took some pictures of the empty site, now fenced up with aluminum sheets and stone stools with the famous Serbian logo – 4 “S’s” – “Only Unity Will Save the Serbs”.
I checked into one of the three hotels in Banja Luka. There are hardly any tourists in town. The locals, aware of their international pariah status, are fairly open in expressing their views. My hotel receptionist, S., a burly man in his late forties, soon spoke proudly of their struggle for freedom when we started the conversation about road maps. S. spoke nostalgically about his people taking to arms against the Mujahideen (that’s how they refer to the nominally Muslim Bosnian Government forces) and the Utashas (the Croats, using the name used by the hated Croatian fascists during WWII).
“Yes, we heard the Muslim fundamentalists shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ all the time in the jungle. They cut off the heads of any Serbs caught. After September 11, why is the US still supporting these Mujahideen?” he asked.
I have long heard the Serbs’ love for describing the Bosniaks as fundamentalists. Well, if you go to Sarajevo, you will see how Islamic they are – girls walking around half-naked in the summer heat. Well, S. warned me not to fall for Sarajevo’s pretense that it was secular and multiracial. Even then, S. reckoned, the war years were hard, and he loves peace. But he and his countrymen, i.e., the people of RS, would readily take up arms if their rights were infringed. Well, issues like war crimes and ethnic cleansing were considered by most Serbs to be enemy propaganda, and hence not worth speaking about. Like many Serbs I have met, S. was also an enthusiast in all sorts of grandiose geopolitical conspiracy theories on why great powers did this or that.
Okay, it was not all talk about war and death. S. also spoke about his younger days, when he backpacked across Europe without the need for visas. His face glowed when he spoke about the amorous Swedish girls he met in summer time while basking in Dubrovnik, now part of Croatia.
I also met J. and his friend P., both talented locals about my age, with a lot of knowledge and war stories to share. We had a great time chatting in a riverside cafe along the beautiful Unas River, and then a great Serbian dinner in Banja Luka Castle, with live music by BiH’s candidate at Eurovision – she’s Serbian (of course, said J.).
The war had forced them to arms, and the conflict had turned them into fierce supporters of their cause. I do not agree with all their beliefs and theories, but I admire their courage and strong personal sense of purpose in life. The Serbian people are passionate about their history and heroes, as well as the land where their ancestors had lived. I can appreciate why the Serbs would like to see all their people live in a common land. Unfortunately, the Serbs often failed to appreciate the irrevocable changes of demographic landscape and that the views of the current inhabitants of these lands do matter. It is also highly regrettable that the struggle had led to such atrocious loss of lives, something that most Serbs do not want to know about even today. Even then, too often did the international press portray the Serbs as the sole villains and others as victims. The reality was a lot grayer than that.
Banja Luka was a town where few tourists ventured and any stranger aroused immediate attention. I received an invitation to meet Mr D., owner of my hotel and one of RS’s largest conglomerates, with interests in banks and all sorts of enterprises. I was surprised as to why an important man like him wanted to meet a Singaporean backpacker.
I popped by his office, at the top of his group complex overlooking the City, and there he was with his team of advisors and interpreters. Not many tourists passed through town, he explained, and most either worked for UN, EU or NATO. He was curious: What was a Singaporean doing in town?
Since Singapore was an international financial center, his guess was that I might be a banker of sorts, and he wanted to know my impression of Srpska and investment opportunities there. And so we went into a two-hour conversation. I hated to bust any notion that Banja Luka might be a future Singapore or Hong Kong of the Balkans; any short-term hot-money, fly-by-night type is probably fine if you are using private capital and have the risk appetite. For longer-term ventures, apart from the usual emerging market risks, I don’t think anyone wanted to sink long-term money into a smallish state of 1.4 million people, whose unstable relationship with its neighbours was tainted with a recent and rather bloody war. RS is forever bickering with FbiH and the EU High Representative.
In addition, do you put money into companies that might own land taken over in an ethnic cleansing exercise, whose real ownership was highly uncertain, and who knows, that might even have been involved in slave labour and concentration camps, of the sort shown on CNN during those war years? Just look at how German and Swiss companies get sued for class actions relating to the Holocaust after all these years…
RS is a statelet built on the ruins of Yugoslavia. It is the symbol of Serbian desire for the unity of their lands. Unfortunately its more noble objectives have been tainted by an unsavory process. The problem with the Dayton Agreement was that the Serbs pretended that it was full international recognition of their state and a step closer towards unity with Serbia, whereas the Bosniaks see it as a first step to full reintegration of all parts of BiH into a centralized country. The Croats believe that they might just agitate for their own constituent state. The result of the struggle of the Serbian people – one which was neither wholly successful nor a complete failure – has resulted in the creation of a strange BiH, whose state structure is inherently unstable and almost guaranteed to generate more future threats to peace and economic development.
With a lot of mixed feelings, I hopped onto a train for Sarajevo.