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Copyright 2006 Newsweek
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Newsweek
August 7, 2006
International Edition
Bosnia Reborn
Europe's one time wasteland, devastated by war, ideology and ethnic hatred,
is
staging one helluva comeback
By Ginanne Brownell; With Kris Anderson in London
Elvir Causevic left sarajevo in 1990, just before the war engulfed Bosnia
and
smashed it to smithereens. Now 33 and educated in America, a member of Yale
University's research staff, he recently moved back --and continues to be
amazed
at the town's transformation. The city he had seen so often on TV during the
dark years was devastated, full of scarred and burned-out buildings, bereft
of
its once vibrant cosmopolitanism.
But no more. Sarajevo today is the very image of a thriving European
capital,
chockablock with chic restaurants and upscale art galleries. Cranes
punctuate
the skyline, erecting offices and putting a new face on, among many other
things, Bosnia's postmodern Parliament, ruined during the war. Strolling the
cobbled streets of the capital's ancient Old Town--a twisty maze of bars and
tourist shops selling everything from Turkish coffee sets to T shirts
reading i
'm muslim, don't panic--Causevic is positively boosterish. "Now is the time
for
this country," he exults. His plan: to set up branches of his New York
medical-instruments company in Sarajevo and Tuzla--a great investment, he
thinks, because of Bosnia's strong engineering tradition and still
inexpensive
work force. He's already hired 12 employees and expects to grow to 100
within a
couple years. "I see a real enthusiasm here," he concludes, reflecting
national
optimism.
It's hard to believe this is Bosnia--the place that introduced the world
to
the term "ethnic cleansing." A decade after its brutal war ended, the
country is
finally emerging from the wilderness. A recent World Bank report touts it as
"a
post-conflict success story." And it certainly looks that way. "Our economy
used
to be entirely dependent on international aid," Prime Minister Adnan Terzic
tells NEWSWEEK. But these days, he enthuses (somewhat nerdily), the signs
all
point to "serious sustainability." Bosnia's GDP has tripled in the last
decade.
Exports, including steel and timber, are up by 50 percent. The government
has
successfully privatized banks. Foreign direct investment has tripled since
1999
to â¬750 million in 2004--and the trend is fast accelerating upward. Unlike
neighboring Croatia and Serbia, also part of the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia
has
practically no external debt. At 2 percent, inflation is lower than
Britain's.
"I think boardrooms would be well advised to have a look at Bosnia," says
Dirk
Reinermann, the World Bank's country director.
It's been a long time since boardrooms bothered with Bosnia, a country
roughly the size of Denmark with a population of 4 million. The fighting
that
raged from 1992 to 1995 killed 200,000 people, made refugees of 2 million
more
and destroyed almost 90 percent of the country's infrastructure. War damage
totaled more than $60 billion--a magnitude of collapse not seen in Europe
since
World War II. Bosnia's three main ethnic groups (Roman Catholic Croats,
Orthodox
Serbs and Muslim Bosnians, more commonly known as Bosniaks) turned on each
other
savagely, despite decades of intermarriage and living peaceably together.
Rape,
torture, mass killings--Bosnia was a Balkan slaughterhouse, ending only with
the
U.S.- brokered 1995 Dayton peace accords. That agreement became the
country's
constitution and set up two quasi-autonomous "entities"--the Republika
Srpska
(usually referred to as the RS) and the Federation, a shaky alliance between
Bosnia's Croats and Muslims. A weak national government is overseen by a
U.N.-appointed High Representative.
As those awkward arrangements suggest, Bosnia's troubles are hardly over.
In
the central and southeastern parts of the country, Muslim schoolchildren are
segregated from Catholic kids in 52 schools. (When administrators in one
such
district tried to integrate a school playground, they received so many
threatening phone calls that they scrapped the plan.) In the RS, whose
population is 90 percent Serb, there have been rumblings of holding a
referendum
on independence. (With United Nations negotiations underway in Vienna on
Kosovo
's independence, this isn't an entirely idle threat.) Even beer drinking can
still become political. In north-central Vitez, whether you order a pint of
Bosnian-brewed Sarajevska or a Croatian Karlovacko depends on which part of
town
you live in. With 20 percent of the country's population living below the
poverty line, those in rural areas barely scrape out a living. Drug
trafficking,
organized crime and illegal logging are epidemic. Membership in NATO will
remain
a pipe dream until war criminals Radovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic, who may
be
hiding in the RS, are arrested.
Nonetheless, by the end of the year, Bosnia is expected to sign the
Stabilization and Association Agreement, a big step toward EU eligibility.
For
most of the past decade, each of its factions had their own courts, customs
and
tax services; now the federal government has taken control. Three years ago,
according to a Western diplomat, "Serbs would have laughed you out of the
room
if you told them they'd be serving in an integrated army." Today, they're
doing
just that. In June, Bosnia was awarded control of its airspace for the first
time in more than a decade.
In Sarajevo, especially, you can see the country's ethnic groups
reknitting
old ties--not necessarily warmly, but with a heartening mutual acceptance.
Many
of the Serbs who fled the capital during the war are returning to visit. The
ski
slopes of Mt. Igman (remember the 1984 Olym-pics?) are becoming more
culturally
mixed, as are Sarajevo's packed cafés and concert halls. Earlier this
summer,
throngs came out to hear a popular Serbian turbo-folk singer, Jelena
Karleusa.
Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim religious leaders meet regularly and often go
on
walkabouts together in towns across Bosnia. "It is a much more pragmatic and
much less ideologically nationalistic country than it was several years
ago,"
says journalist Allan Little, coauthor of "The Death of Yugoslavia."
The picture is harsher outside the capital. Along the road from Sarajevo
to
Zenica (a new four-lane highway is slowly being built) the scars of war are
still evident: carcasses of burned houses, villages that feel far emptier
than
they should. Yet the signs of progress are obvious here too. The vast
majority
of Bosnia's battered towns and villages have been rebuilt; according to
government figures, 98 percent of properties illegally seized during the
fighting have been returned to their rightful owners or their surviving kin.
The
ethnic mix of some places has changed. Many Serbs, Croats or Muslims have
sold
houses in areas where they might feel uncomfortable and bought another where
they are in the ethnic majority. But others have returned to places they
were
driven from, if only because they are their homes.
Visit the Bosniak village of Ahmici, reduced to rubble by Croat forces in
April 1993. The local mosque's white minaret, toppled during a massacre that
claimed 118 lives, is back. A high-tech stereo blasts the call to prayer
five
times daily. A second mosque, up the hill from the outdoor basketball court,
is
being built. Its skeletal bricked interior is a Sunday-evening hangout for
preteen girls, some wearing fashionable head scarves and flirting with boys.
Along the curving, pine-forested roads of the RS, where signs are infrequent
and
marked only in Cyrillic, minarets and Catholic crosses can be glimpsed
rising in
the distance.
If any place testifies to how far Bosnia has come, it is the northern
town of
Brcko, hard on the Serbian and Croatian borders. This heavily contested bit
of
territory was the "bridge" linking the western reaches of the RS to the east
and
Serbia proper. To this day, Brcko is administered separately from the other
Bosnian entities, with an American supervisor appointed by the U.N. The
region
experienced some of the most intense fighting of the war--and some of its
fiercest ethnic hatred. Yet former Army barracks have been transformed into
a
grassy quad of brightly painted government buildings. Citizens have moved
forward, together. Unlike much of the rest of the country, schools in Brcko
are
mixed. So are the police force and the District Assembly. "Most people here
wanted to live again in a multiethnic society, so we all fought really hard
to
make Brcko work," says Ivan Krndelj, the Croat deputy speaker of the
Assembly.
You readily see that at Zitopromet, a food-processing firm with an
ethnically
mixed staff who work together in two shifts baking 10,000 loaves of bread
and
pastries a day. In offices fragrant with the smell of croissants, the
company's
Bosniak director, Bahrija Agic, says he was surprised how quickly people
came
together. "In the beginning, two employees left, saying they had problems
working for a Muslim manager," he told NEWSWEEK. "But there just aren't
tensions
like that anymore."
More and more, that describes the atmosphere across Bosnia. British Brig.
Nigel Alwyn-Foster, deputy commander of the 6,200 troops of the European
Union
Force that took over from NATO in 2004, describes his theater of operations
as
"calm and stable." The garrison atmosphere of the immediate postwar years
has
disappeared. Bases have shut down and many EUFOR troops are living in local
accommodations among the people. In leafy Bihac, to the west, Canadian
M/Cpl.
Tom Robinson is on his third tour of Bosnia. He's amazed by how much has
changed. "In 1996 Bihac was a ghost town," he says, strolling past a new
multiplex cinema showing the latest Hollywood flicks. "My time here has gone
from being like a parent saying 'No, you can't do that' to being like an
older
sibling standing on the sidelines offering advice when asked." The city,
which
saw heavy fighting, has a trendy new mall with clothing shops like Stefanel.
Its
border crossing with Croatia is a modern complex equipped with the latest EU
customs technology.
That's a metaphor. Bosnia is clearly prepping for EU membership. The
country
's newest high representative, German diplomat Christian Schwarz-Schilling,
recently announced that he would also be the last. Next summer, he will
relinquish his role as Bosnia's de facto head of state and become the mere
"EU
representative" to Bosnia--a job that's essentially monitoring Bosnia's
progress
toward joining Europe and that returns full responsibility for the country's
affairs to the central Bosnian government. "This is a serious change of the
political agenda," says Schwarz-Schilling.
There are other signs of political maturation. In April, the Bosnian
Parliament, usually split ethnically, rejected reforms to the Constitution
that
would have strengthened the central government. The good news is that the
measure lost by only two votes. Says NATO's senior officer in Bosnia, U.S.
Brig.
Gen. Louis Weber: the fact that parties sat down together to reach consensus
is
huge. "In every sphere you want to measure Bosnia, from the military to the
social to the political, it is on a positive slope."
Perhaps most noteworthy is the way Bosnians--Muslim, Croat and Serb--are
slowly coming to terms with the past. This spring, a Sarajevan movie named
"Grbavica" won top honors at the Berlin Film Festival. Directed by Jasmila
Zbanic, it portrays a Bosniak woman, raped by Serb soldiers, who is forced
to
tell her daughter how she was conceived. The movie has helped drive forward
legislation for things like compensation and health care for civilian
victims of
war. Pirated copies have been selling like hot cakes in the RS capital,
Banja
Luka. In June, after a tip-off by locals in the Serbian village of Serovici
about a nearby mass grave containing the remains of 35 men--probably Muslims
killed during the infamous massacre at Srebrenica--the RS and Federation
officials have been working together to solve the crime. That wouldn't have
happened just a short time ago, says Tuzla prosecutor Emir Ibrahimovic,
watching
as pathologists carefully unearthed clothed skeletons from the sodden dirt.
"These days, we're seeing lots of cooperation."
Biljana Josic, a fashionably dressed Serb translator who works for the
European force, sits in a café in Banja Luka. "I love this country," she
says.
"Change takes time but we are getting there." Back in Sarajevo, Elvir
Causevic
stops outside Hacienda, a Tex-Mex bar throbbing with Europop music. "Look,
we're
transforming into a market economy, dealing with the legacy of a horrific
war
and learning how to be an independent country all at the same time." Hitting
that trifecta, today Bosnia has become a different kind of model for
Europe--and
the world.
LOAD-DATE: August 1, 2006
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