Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo

Primary Researchers:
Hariz Halilovich and Paul James

Global-Local Database for Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo

In Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, NATO finally responded to a situation of violent conflict with Operation Deliberate Force. Years later, the International Crisis Group report for March 2002 summarized the legal situation in Bosnia as still chaotic: 'The law does not yet rule in Bosnia & Herzegovina. What prevail instead are nationally defined politics, inconsistency in the application of law, corrupt and incompetent courts, a fragmented judicial space, half-baked or half-implemented reforms, and sheer negligence. Bosnia in short is a land where respect for and confidence in the law and its defenders is weak.' Life for ordinary people is difficult.

In Kosovo, things are not any better. Kosovo's entire aid reconstruction budget for 2000 was the equivalent of the cost of half-a-day's bombing during the Kosovo intervention. The total USAID budget for Bosnia & Herzegovina for 2003 was US$30.1 million of which 34 per cent goes to economic restructuring. By comparison, NATO's eleven-week bombing of the former Yugoslavia, which killed between 500 and 1,800 civilians, also inflicted an estimated $4 billion damage on public infrastructure such as bridges, factories and electrical plants. Put this figure alongside the budget has sought by George Bush to continue the War on Terror: $87 billion. The War on Terror thus has had consequences other than the obvious-namely, it has set up a hierarchy of aid priorities which means that some places are no longer seen as strategically important enough to support more than minimally, while money continues to pour into Iraq.

In Bosnia & Herzegovina, economic and political life is gradually being regularized under the custodial control of the Office of the Higher Representative (OHR), however the country is caught between this outside authority with adjudicating power to veto any parliamentary decision and a series of parliaments with divided interests. The need for reconciling with the past, including the recent history of concentration camps, genocidal rape and mass killings, is being left to the private memories and intense discussions of individuals and families. Meanwhile, far away in The Hague, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Miloševic (though not Karadic or Mladic who are both at large) is being judged for crimes against humanity. The effect on the ground is still very qualified.

The present project is intended to track the present processes of reconstruction and reconciliation, and to analyze the alternative pathways to sustainable community and political life. Reconstruction and reconciliation clearly needs to be a long-term and comprehensive process: cultural, political, legal and economic. The evidence suggests that after the upheaval of war, reconstruction cannot successfully happen in one country in itself operating without support, but neither should external support take the form that economic 'humanitarian intervention' now tends to take.

Sarajevo

Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has marked the beginning and the end of the last century, not only locally and regionally but also globally.

More information...