Consider This from NPR - In Bosnia, Fear Mounts Over Rising Ethnic Tensions

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

As the standoff over Ukraine continues, tensions are rising around another old conflict in Europe. Brutal ethnic fighting left at least 100,000 dead in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. The U.S. brokered peace there, but the fragile, multi-ethnic state is once again in crisis, as NPR's Frank Langfitt saw on a recent trip. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. As Russian troops continue to gather near the Ukrainian border, one big question looms. Is Europe on the verge of a major land war? The last big wars in Europe were three decades ago, fought over the future of the former Yugoslavia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bosnia-Herzegovina held a vote on independence in 1992. With most ethnic Serbs boycotting the referendum, it was left to the majority of Muslims and Croats to decide on the republic's future. Western governments fear the fragmentation of Bosnia could throw the republic into a civil war. Those Muslims and Croats voted overwhelmingly for independence.

Bosnian Serbs responded by shelling the capital Sarajevo from the mountains above. They forced Bosniaks, or Bosnian Muslims, from their homes and into detention camps. A British-based human rights group claimed civilians had been executed in 11 Serb-controlled camps. They also alleged torture, rape, starvation, and murder as part of the so-called ethnic cleansing policy. More than 100,000 people were killed before the U.S. eventually brokered peace. The presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia have made a historic and heroic choice. They want to stop the slaughter. They want to put an end to the violence and war.

They want to give their children and their grandchildren a chance to lead a normal life. Consider this. Bosnia faded from the headlines, but the ethnic tensions there never really went away. Today, the fragile multi-ethnic state is once again in crisis. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Wednesday, February 9th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend,

or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. NPR's Frank Langfitt visited Sarajevo last month, and he met up with a senior official from the Biden administration who's trying to support peace and prevent a return to violence. When Samantha Power graduated from college back in 1992, the Bosnian war was nightly news in America. It just seemed unbelievably terrible that people were just being rounded up or expelled from their homes or targeted with gunfire because of their ethnicity, their religion.

Power is now head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. And this morning, she's sharing her story with a women's volleyball club in a school gym. After college, Power came here and reported for news organizations such as the Washington Post and NPR. We were writing about these camps and we were writing about parents not being able to feed their kids. And I think we all had hoped that if we wrote a lot, a lot, a lot, that someone would do something. It took years and NATO airstrikes, but in 1995, the U.S. brought the various sides together to sign a peace deal in Dayton, Ohio. An international tribunal in The

Hague eventually convicted Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic of genocide and crimes against humanity. And there was hope, which has been fading. After power played a few points, team members shared how disappointed they are with their leaders. Almadina Dedic is a 24-year-old chemistry student. Politics in our country is so hard that we don't want to even read or watch anything about politics. We only see the problems in our country. Almost everyone I spoke to recently summed up the problems like this. Political leaders play up old ethnic tensions to distract from their corruption and mismanagement of government. Adnan Huskic teaches politics at Sarajevo University of Science and Technology.

Yes, they're thieves. There is no doubt about that, right? But I mean, the reason why they steal money so openly is because they know that they enjoy impunity, that the system cannot reach them because they control the system. The system has three presidents, Serb, Croat, and Bosniak, or Bosnian Muslim. It's an unwieldy government structure put in place after the war to try to balance competing ethnic interests, a system that people here say has not delivered. Hopeless. I mean, in 25 years, nothing's basically changed. That's Ivan Valeta.

He's studying electrical engineering and plans to move to Germany. A UN survey in November found nearly half of young people are thinking about leaving Bosnia. When you have a diabolical political system that has three useless presidents, what can you expect? Valeta singles out President Milorad Dodek, an ethnic Serb. Basically, huge nationalism to control the masses. After chatting with the volleyball team, Power spoke somberly of Bosnia's trajectory. The dream was the war would end and people would get reacquainted and remember all they had in common.

And unfortunately, there has been a lot more polarization than the peacemakers had hoped. Among other things, USAID supports war camp survivors from the three main ethnic groups who share their stories of mutual suffering in hopes of preventing a return to violence. Power said the agency has invested more than $2 billion to help Bosnia recover. Many of the buildings that you see, including this school that we are sitting in right now, were restored thanks to the generosity of the American taxpayer. The U.S. is also applying pressure. In January, the Treasury Department hit Dodik with fresh sanctions for corruption and threatening Bosnia's stability.

Power also called him out at a press conference here. President Dodik in particular has created a climate of tension, one that is vulnerable to miscalculation and the risk of escalation. Dodik says Republika Srpska, the Serb-ruled entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina, doesn't have the autonomy it should. He's threatened to create a breakaway Serb army and has threatened secession for years. He calls the U.S. sanctions against him a farce, and at a gathering of fellow Serb politicians, mocked America with this song. It goes, America, America, oh you vast country, an inch of my village is worth all of America.

At a recent news conference, Dodik said the U.S. had no business telling his country what to do. Who invited and who gave the right to America to interfere in these issues here in Bosnia and Herzegovina? This is becoming a serious issue of interference in domestic affairs. So in the hills above Sarajevo, there's this monument that gives you a sense of just how divided this country still is. It's made of black marble, and it's to General Ratko Mladic. Bosnian Serbs see him as a hero of the war in the 1990s. But of course,

in The Hague, he was convicted of war crimes. And every couple of years, somebody comes by here and they smash it to vandalize it. And just across the street, there's a police officer who's here to guard it. Borko Kovidarica is a retired beer factory worker and a Serb who lives here in Republika Srpska. He defends Mladic and former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. How is he a criminal if he just defended his army? At the beginning of the war, we just dug the trenches.

We didn't attack. Neither Milosevic nor his generals ever said kill Muslims. In fact, the International Criminal Tribunal convicted Mladic for his role in sniper and shelling attacks on civilians here in Sarajevo and the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. A little later, I bumped into a man named Dragan Vasec. He's also a Serb and works here in health care. He was strolling hand in hand with his daughters, who were age five and nine. He complained that Bosniak politicians paid their people as the exclusive victims of the war. When I was two years older than she is right now, 11 years old, I was the lone survivor of a firing squad.

My entire extended family was murdered, 13 of them. When you say something like that in Sarajevo, no one believes you. Vosic says he survived by playing dead. Despite rising tensions here, he does not expect a return to war. Vosic says he's teaching his children to judge people by their actions, not their identity. Just a bad man, good man. Nothing else. Not ethnicity. No, no, no, no, no.

But people here do worry about a sudden outbreak of violence. Damir Arnaut is a member of the House of Representatives with Our Country, a liberal multi-ethnic party. What Mr. Dudik is doing right now can be described as playing with fire. What I'm afraid the most of is of isolated incidents. People perhaps being drunk and being emotional about the increased nationalist rhetoric, throwing a rock, God forbid, using a gun on somebody, and then things slowly spiraling out of control. In a nation where so many were slaughtered just several decades ago, even individual acts of violence can instill fear.

That was NPR's Frank Langfitt reporting last week from Sarajevo, and now he's with us on the line. Hi, Frank. Hey, Ari. My first question goes back in history a little bit. I mean, for those old enough to remember, Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984. Eight years later, the city became a killing zone. Bosnian Serbs shelled shoppers at an outdoor market. People raced through an area known as Sniper Alley, trying to avoid getting shot. So I was there in 2014 doing some reporting

on the 100th anniversary of the assassination that started World War I. And if you bring us up to today, what's it like in the city? Describe Sarajevo for us. Well, it's so completely different. And I'm glad I went to the exact same spot where Archduke Ferdinand was shot, which started World War I. So I know exactly what you're talking about. It's so completely different, Ari. I mean, it's a lovely setting. I would actually recommend it for tourism. It sits in this valley, mountains above. When I was there, there was snow and pine forests. And also, it's very much as you would remember this crossroads of empire. So the most picturesque part of town is this Turkish bazaar with mosques, which I'm sure you walk through, and dates to back when the area was

controlled by the Ottoman Empire. And then you walk down the street a little bit, and it quickly shifts into these European style buildings, pastel colors from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So it's one of these great places that's sort of one of the places in between that we often talk about that's caught between major forces. And a great place actually to visit these days. I will never forget walking through cemeteries where the death date on every gravestone was in the 1990s. How much is that war from 25 years ago still felt in Sarajevo today? I think it is and it isn't.

I mean, I still saw, as I'm sure you did, some pockmarked buildings. Most of them, though, have been rebuilt and sort of painted over. But at the human level, and this is the contrast to sort of the physical part that you see of Sarajevo, is everyone we met was affected by it. And just as you and I worked in Northern Ireland, it's very, very similar. That on the surface, things look much, much better. But when you talk to people, everybody has a story to tell. Our fixer, the guy who was helping us translate and set up interviews, a Bosniak person, his father, a soldier, was killed during the war. The guy that we were just listening to a moment ago, a guy named Vasich, who survived the massacre

of his family, I stopped him randomly on the street, Ari, when he was walking with his daughters. And I just stopped him having no idea that he had this story. And as we were chatting, he actually on his cell phone showed me that there had been a documentary that just came out in December about this massacre. So even when you stop people just by chance on the sidewalk, almost everybody has some kind of story. What were your big takeaways from this reporting trip? You know, one, I guess, is that this conflict is not remotely over. And, you know, we often think when there's a peace deal, you know, the reporters leave, the cameras leave, and the situation is solved. But that's not really the case here. You know, in fact, the Dayton

Accords, they simply stopped the fighting. But as you can see, particularly with President Dodik, there is still this battle for power going on in Bosnia over the future of the country. And it's still, frankly, those conflicts are alive and well. They are unresolved. And it remains quite a risky place. That's NPR's Frank Langford. Thank you, Frank. Great to talk, Ari. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.