SIX MONTHS AFTER DAYTON

FECL 43 (April/May 1996)

A tour round the three republics in former Yugoslavia whose presidents signed the Dayton Agreement demonstrates the extent to which the much heralded peace process has increased the international "legitimacy" of the regimes in place, enabling them to reinforce their authoritarian hold on power.

Croatia

Let us start with Croatia, a republic so long held up as a Catholic and western oriented partner. When the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (CoE) announced that the question of membership of Croatia would be included on the agenda of the April session of the Parliamentary Assembly (PA), it seemed as though it would at last be accepted into the "family of democratic nations". Having accepted Russia despite Chechenia, it was highly unlikely that the PA would refuse Croatia. And yet President Tudjman and his HDZ party immediately proceeded to do all they could to confirm the fears of those not yet convinced by Croatia's democracy and human rights record. They set about violating, in an even more arrogant and crude way than usual, many of the 21 conditions which Zagreb had accepted in order to gain membership of the CoE.

One of the key points is the election of the mayor of Zagreb. In the last municipal elections a coalition of opposition parties won over 60 per cent of the votes and yet Tudjman has refused to accept all of the four candidates put forward by the coalition. His appointee has refused to resign although the municipal assembly twice voted a motion of no-confidence in her, and the government annulled the budget adopted by the assembly. Tudjman is simply incapable of imagining that the capital city should not be ruled by the HDZ. The opposition has been accused in the main TV news programmes of treason and serving foreign interests. The President finally decided to solve this problem by annulling the elections and calling new ones in the autumn - only for this decision to be declared unconstitutional last week by the Constitutional Court.

Clamping down on the media

Zagreb has been particularly active in the media field, clamping down on independent voices which criticise the regime. When the only independent daily, Novi list in Rijeka, dared to denounce Tudjman's dictatorial behaviour it received the visit of the financial police, resulting in a totally fabricated accusation of tax evasion and a fine of 3.7 million DM, equivalent to almost the entire value of the newspaper. A purge has been carried out even in Vjesnik, a Zagreb daily much closer to the regime.

A recent reform of the Criminal Code has enabled the state prosecutor to take to court those who insult or defame the President, the Prime Minister or the Presidents of Parliament, the Constitutional and Supreme Courts. As the satirical weekly, Feral Tribune (FT) put it, "in contrast to England, instead of mad cows Croatia got five holy cows".

Tudjman is returning to the worst methods of the old regime to silence journalists. The first to suffer, within a few weeks of the new legal reform, was of course the FT which the President is determined to destroy. On 3 May, an Interior Ministry policeman arrived at the FT's office and demanded that its editor, Victor Ivancic, come in for questioning. Soon a second FT (and AIM) journalist, Marinko Culic, was also taken in for an "informative talk". They have been charged at the request of Tudjman and face a possible three years in prison.

What did they do to so upset the President? They simply dared to criticise his recent proposal to turn the Jasenovac concentration camp site, one of the worst centres of mass extermination of the 2nd World War, into a "memorial area for all victims of the war" by transferring the remains of Ustashe fascists killed by the partisans. The FT published an article, "Bones in a mixer", and a photo-montage showing a skeleton with a presidential ribbon entitled "Jasenovac, the largest Croatian underground city". If Tudjman goes ahead with his "spectacular mass migration of the dead", the well-known Zagreb Jewish intellectual, Slavko Goldstein, has announced that he will take him to court for necrophilia.

Ethnic totalitarianism

Another field in which a kind of ethnic totalitarianism can be seen is women's rights. A new "National Programme for Demographic Development" (NPDD) has been approved. It strongly reduces the right to abortion and calls on all publics figures and media to promote the role of women as mothers of large Croat families. The Franciscan priest, Ante Bukovic, a former Secretary of State for Demographic Development and the driving force behind the NPDD, recently ranted at a public meeting at Zagreb city hall that "since the foundation of the state, 180,000 abortions have been carried out and Croatian doctors have therefore taken the lives of five or six times more small Croats than the Chetniks have". The NPDD also calls for a massive return of Croat emigrants in Canada, Australia or the USA, but of course says nothing about facilitating the return of the Serbs expelled from the Krajina. It even creates a right to conscientious objection - for doctors not wishing to carry out abortions on moral grounds.

Campaign of hate against Muslims

This ultra-nationalism can also be seen in attitudes towards Bosnia-Herzegovina (B&H). The Herzegovina lobby, headed by the defence minister, Goyko Susak, refuses to accept the alliance with the Muslims and is determined to keep its "Herzeg Bosna" statelet. Recent events in Mostar are the best proof of this. Recently, much of the Croatian media has stepped up its campaign of hate against the Muslims accused of seeking a fundamentalist state and of wanting to exterminate the Croats. Many have compared the atmosphere to the one before the Croat-Muslim war in 1993 and wonder if certain circles are preparing the ground for a new conflict once the IFOR troops have left B&H.

To get back to Croatia and the CoE, despite the regime's arrogant methods, the PA indeed went ahead and gave the go-ahead for Croatian membership, causing many observers to fear for the CoE's continued attachment to its traditional role as a defender of human rights. Strangely, it is the Council of Ministers of the European Union which finally said that enough is enough and recommended that Croatia's membership of the CoE should be postponed to a later date - perhaps, some people think, simultaneously with B&H and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).

Serbia

President Milosevic may now be praised by the international community for his positive contribution to the peace process, but his central preoccupation remains as ever holding on to power. If this means abandoning his Greater Serbia policy, dropping his support for the Krajina Serbs or Radovan Karadzic and refusing to allow Serb refugees from Croatia and B&H to enter Serbia (refugees who earlier had been trumpeted as proof of Croat or Muslim aggression), then so be it. Nationalism had given him the key to power, but he was quite happy to adapt to circumstances if this would bring an end to sanctions.

Total control of the electronic media

As in Croatia, one of the main "battlegrounds" is the media. Like Tudjman's HDZ, the ruling SDS totally controls the main electronic media, above all state TV. Until recently, Belgrade had an independent station, Studio B, but this was taken over by the authorities early this year. The regime has also moved against the written press, taking over control of the independent newspapers, Borba and Svetlost, whose journalists refused to accept state control and have since launched new independent versions.

In April the public campaign against independent media was taken a step further when Politika and the main TV news published the list of media which had received funds from the EU, accusing their editors of driving Mercedes cars and living in expensive villas thanks to the money they had "earned" through their subversive activities against Serbia.

A few days later, the police arrived at the Albanian-language Kosovo newspaper, Koha, and ordered it to stop publication (this decision was later reversed - at least for the moment).

Once again, what most seemed to have annoyed the regime were photo-montages "which flagrantly offend President Milosevic". One showed him in the company of a young fascist and another an army in nazi uniforms marching in front of the suspended Assembly of Kosovo.

Mounting tension in Kosovo

Kosovo has recently witnessed a severe increase in tension. During the "black week" at the end of April an Albanian student was murdered in cold blood by a Serb, five Serbs (four of them policemen) were then killed in different parts of Kosovo and then an Albanian boy was killed in an explosion. Some observers believe that a well trained and equipped organisation of extremists was behind the violence - either Serbs determined to prevent any form of autonomy for the Albanians or Albanians who refuse to accept that Kosovo should remain within the FRY. What is certain is that after years of fierce police repression which has caused a climate of fear among the Albanian population, it is now the Serbs in Kosovo who are also afraid. Many are beginning to think of leaving, but worry that they will be treated no better than the Serb refugees from Krajina or Slavonia who have been so badly received in Serbia.

Absurd effects of the regime's obsession with power

The obsession with power often has absurd effects in the economic field. For example, in Voivodina, the bread basket of the whole of former Yugoslavia, only 43,000 hectares out of the planned 1.2 million hectares of cultivated land (3.6 per cent of the total) had been sown by the end of March. The optimal sowing time was coming to a close and only 6,000 ha out of 80,000 ha of vegetables had been sown or 10,000 ha out of the planned 64,600 ha of sugar beet.

Despite repeated promises, no money had been made available. The regime had preferred to use its budget to pay pensions because the elderly form a crucial part of the electorate.

The recent dismissal of the governor of the Central Bank, Dragoslav Abramovic, is also significant. He is famous for having overcome hyper-inflation two years ago. Now he has fallen into disfavour because he refuses to accept that the regime simply prints money to counter a wave of social and economic unrest and because he sought an agreement with the IMF without insisting as a precondition that it recognises the FRY as the legal successor to the former Yugoslav federation. Many fear that his departure will cause a long delay in the re-establishment of FRY's international economic integration.

Bosnia-Herzegovina

The Bosnian Serb leadership is even more obsessed with its political agenda of nationalism and is willing to sacrifice all economic good sense to it. The recent dismissal by Karadzic of his Prime Minister, Rajko Kasagic, was the climax of a struggle between the pragmatists based in Banja Luka, the richest part of Republica Srpska (RS) with many private enterprises wanting to develop commerce, and the fanatics in Pale. The Dayton Agreement lays down that economic aid will only be provided if the two entities in B&H accept a unified financial structure, linked transport and electric power systems . .

Such a cooperation with the "enemy" in the Federation is unacceptable for the hardliners. "We shall oppose such plans", says the Energy Minister, Milorad Skoko. "We shall not give in and will therefore have to rely on ourselves". A proposed agricultural seed program for both B&H entities has been cancelled for the RS because Pale refused to accept EU funding through a single Bosnian channel.

Kasagic was in favour of cooperation both with the Federation and the international community and was therefore seen as a traitor by the radicals, many of whom would seem to live in a world of demented illusions. One mad scheme, proposed by the same circles who prefer to lose all international aid for the sake of their nationalist obsession, is to build a series of new cities. "New Sarajevo" would have a population of 140,000 and its construction would swallow up the entire national product for 15 years . . .

Izetbegovic's strategy of ethnic domination

Meanwhile, Sarajevo itself has lost almost all of its Serbs because the leadership in Pale told them to leave. But it has also lost its Mayor. Izetbegovic's SDA party simply decided to dissolve the city and turn it into a canton with more districts. This is all part of a strategy aimed at ensuring ethnic domination and mono-ethnic authorities, a policy fully shared by the Croats in the HDZ who are in the process of buying as many of the houses abandoned by the Serbs as possible in order to create a Croat part of Sarajevo linked to the officially unrecognised but very much present "Herzeg Bosna".

Present situation suits the "local kings"

The economic development of the Federation will be made almost impossible if the ethnic argument wins the day. Christian Schwarz Schilling, a German CDU member of parliament who has been appointed a mediator by the Federation, almost despairs for the future: "I had the opportunity to see for myself the `local kings' who are opposed to Dayton. The present situation suits them just fine - they maintain their power and make plenty of profits. The Federation must create a joint police force to ensure order and remove the illegal checkpoints in many places which charge thousands of DM for the transportation of goods from Croatia to cities of B&H". He is particularly critical of the Croat side, but "different fanaticisms advocate the same programmes and feed on each other".

Returnees are threatened

Schwarz Schilling, like many others, criticises the fact that almost no refugees have been able to return to a zone dominated by a different ethnic group, even in the Federation. "The Croats have problems returning to Muslim areas and the Muslims even greater problems. This is justified by the fact that many houses are occupied by one's `own' refugees, but the fact is that the returnees are threatened".

Recently in Mostar an OSCE official succeeded in bringing 40 Croat families back to the Muslim part of the town and when he attempted to bring four Muslim families to the Croat zone, they were rounded up the day after and taken 80 km from the town and left in the middle of a minefield.

There would be much to say about developments in B&H, particularly with the prospect of forthcoming elections. But this will have to wait for another article. Let us conclude with one good piece of news after this bleak picture of the post-Dayton situation. Early in March, the Democratic Alternative met for the second time within B&H at Tuzla. The DA brings together civic movements, independent media and opposition parties from both parts of B&H. It had already met twice in Italy in 1995 and now this year has been able to bring together people from all over the republic (with the logistical support of the OSCE) who refuse ethnic division. They are convinced that the vast majority of the Bosnian population wants genuine peace and friendly relations.

The problem is that such an initiative has received almost no coverage or interest in the foreign media and has been generally ignored by the "international community" which ever since the beginning of the conflict has chosen to negotiate with the war-lords and not put its full backing behind the forces for peace and dialogue. The next meeting of the DA is planned for Banja Luka - if the authorities of Republica Srpska allow this. It should be a top international priority to ensure that this meeting can take place there, so that the Bosnian Serb population is able to hear another voice than that of Karadzic and consorts. The very fact that a network like AIM of journalists from all of the republics, regions and communities of former Yugoslavia has existed for three years is proof enough that there is a potential alternative to ethnic hatred and division.

Nicholas Bell

For more information contact: AIM, 13 rue Gazan, F-75014 Paris; Tel: +33/145898949, Fax: +33/1 45809940; E-mail: admin@aimpress.org