Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Fight for the Commons

Southeast European Integration PerspectivesUnbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina Damir Arsenijević [Ed.] Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina The Fight for the Commons Nomos | 10 BUT_Arsenijevic_1634-0.indd 1 11.11.14 09:07 Southeast European Integration Perspectives Edited by Wolfgang Petritsch, former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Special Envoy of the EU for Kosovo Christophe Solioz, Secretary-General of the Center for European Integration Strategies Damir Arsenijević [Ed.] Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina The Fight for the Commons Nomos . No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means. Germany 2014. recording. All rights reserved. Damir [Ed. Printed and bound in Germany.dissentprojectsltd. or any information storage or retrieval system. detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.com Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie. ISBN 978-3-8487-1634-0 (Print) 978-3-8452-5674-0 (ePDF) 1. ISBN 978-3-8487-1634-0 (Print) 978-3-8452-5674-0 (ePDF) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arsenijević. without prior permission in writing from the publishers. .] Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina The Fight for the Commons Damir Arsenijević 182 p. electronic or mechanical.This publication benefited from a special sponsorship by Vanessa Redgrave & Carlo Nero of the “Dissent Project” www. Includes bibliographic references. including photocopying. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Nomos or the author.d-nb. Baden-Baden. Edition 2014 © Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Under § 54 of the German Copyright Law where copies are made for other than private use a fee is payable to “Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort”. This work is subject to copyright.de ISBN 978-3-8487-1634-0 (Print) 978-3-8452-5674-0 (ePDF) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Munich. and Beyond 83 Stef Jansen Rebooting politics? Or. towards a <Ctrl-Alt-Del> for the Dayton Meantime 89 5 .Contents Damir Arsenijević Introduction 7 Emina Busuladžić Why? 11 Miralem Ibrišimović My Union Fight 27 Zlatan Begić War. Peace and the Protests 35 Damir Arsenijević Protests and Plenum: The Struggle for the Commons 45 Emir Hodžić Jer me se tiče – Because it Concerns Me 51 Aleksandar Hemon Beyond the Hopelessness of Survival 59 Haris Husarić February Awakening: Breaking with the Political Legacy of the last 20 years 65 Adis Sadiković February Stirrings 71 Emin Eminagić On the University of the People: Protests and Plenums as Sites of Education 79 Igor Štiks and Srećko Horvat The New Balkan Revolts: From Protests to Plenums. Larisa Kurtović The Strange Life and Death of Democracy Promotion in Bosnia and Herzegovina 6 97 Edin Hajdarpašić Democracy in the Conditional Tense: On Protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina 103 Eric Gordy From Antipolitics to Alterpolitics: Subverting Ethnokleptocracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina 111 Asim Mujkić The Evolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Protests in Five Theses 119 Jasmin Mujanović The Baja Class and the Politics of Participation 135 Jasmina Husanović Traumatic Knowledge in Action: Scrapbooking Plenum Events. Fermenting Revolt 145 Selma Tobudić Protests and Plenums—A Remembering 155 Vanessa Vasić Janeković Remembering Work as Political Sovereignty 165 Nigel Osborne The Plenum Brain 173 Contributors 181 . All this led to an accentuation of social conflict and the introduction of a sharp divide in the social: breaking from pseudo-activity. tested. Up until February 2014. the February 2014 protests and plenums rescued politics itself. nepotism. and voice. They went further. as the processes of the privatisation of the commons ground on and poverty stared them in the face. and clientelism. The political consequences of breaking away from “representation” alone mean that new forms of actively organising politics needed to be invented and tested. predominantly considered as synonymous with corruption. returned into the public domain as a common concern. Politics. Anticipated by various site-specific protests that had been manifest in previous years throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina.Introduction The February 2014 protest and plenums are the only genuinely novel development in Bosnia and Herzegovina since end of the war in 1995. As a popular revolt and a form of political organisation. Popular revolt escalated in response to unprecedented police brutality and the arrogance of complacent ethnic oligarchs. the February 2014 protests changed from merely voicing dissatisfaction to inventing methods of making decisions that concern the future of all citizens. showed that these disposable bodies still matter and cannot be as easily discarded as they were in the carnage of the 1992–1995 war and through their subsequent post-war exhaustion. which had been directed at protesters. In the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. a boundary was crossed: from the “exhibition of dissent to dissent in action. 7 . to which most of the so-called “civil society scene” has acquiesced. the protests and plenums disrupted the passive fascination with the management of identitarian differences and created an active. in whose view. practical site for new social ties and new solidarities to be forged. the predominant mode of protest in Bosnia and Herzegovina was one of pseudo-activity. body. and lived in the street and in the plenum venues. In this reclamation of space. citizens are mere disposable bodies.” From now on. the stakes for any future protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina can never be the same. they put an end to the predominant fascination with the “one” of power—with an image of the unity and homogeneity of power—and they proved in practice that it is possible to disperse and dispose of the symbolic guarantee behind the existing ruling structures. which followed the logic of making records of injustices—of representing the obvious. The fight back against the physical violence. as forums.More importantly. The language in which these strategies were 8 . transparently. many strategies and forms were tried and tested: from street marches and protests where it was critically important to “keep bodies moving in space”. was rescued from being held hostage by those who were all too ready to relegate it to history. through its insistence on war-time victimhood and the creation of trauma. All these are ideological positions at their purest: the former. as a means of making demands visible and being able to address them. In the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina. said: “It feels like a holiday!” In the protests and plenums. Condemnations ranged from claims of alleged re-traumatisation of citizens because of their exposure to images of burning buildings. turns a blind eye to the systemic violence of ethnic oligarchs. the renewed enthusiasm and energy gave us all—in the streets protesting and in taking part in the plenums—a sense of being alive and a chance to meet one another anew. Such rekindled enthusiasm is probably best expressed by a newly-met friend who. caused by the rupture of a different possibility for life and a move away from mere passive resignation to the only choices previously being posited. In this. Solidarity. as its act of creation has brought about a new modality for contemplating and enacting politics. Moreover. to the public and to the authorities. amidst the uncertainty and risk that any true political gesture entails. The enthusiasm and energy have to be affirmed. through the plenums. a crucial change took place: the position of victimhood was discarded. as supposedly some kind of comfort. However. Hence. people have re-invented ways of declaring and enacting their presence in public spaces. the “violence” of protests must be defended to the very end. jointly. thus. in this fight back there lies a shift: from being a helpless victim. a strategy for survival and our pledge for the times to come. and who had hitherto lived in their separate social circles. both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally. This is a violence that politically opposes and strikes against the disposability of life itself. the February 2014 protests and plenums are primarily a site of renewed enthusiasm and energy. It is worthwhile recalling that. as a concept and as a practice. the latter through projecting the terror enacted by the state apparatus onto the citizens-in-revolt. and in so doing. transformed public space into social space. to the continuation of bureaucratic terror by attempting to criminalise the protests and protesters. were quick to condemn this fight back—the “violence” of protesters—in the course of which several government buildings were burnt. It became an everyday word and a lived experience that we had to prove through words and actions. and brand this fightback as an act of terrorism. to assuming responsibility for one’s life with no external guarantees. on our way to a plenum meeting. people who had never met before. as their context is almost 20 years of a predominant ideology that threw all of its persuasive and practical efforts into making impossibility seem convincing. It is. This is why many who were and are invested in maintaining the status quo. to make demands. wherein public demands for justice were made. came together. to manifestos. to speak. from which we must learn and draw our strength and inspiration. justice. evident in the decisions and symbols of these protests and plenums. not only between different cities— Tuzla. Mostar. not just material assets and natural goods. called us bagra (scum. is a powerful reminder that we have a tradition that actualises the idea of and the fight for emancipation. 9 . is the implication that the political scum are daring to claim public space. but. and to act heretically. the banners reading “We are hungry in all three languages. This is how we recuperate and make. dating from the eleventh century. A short note on who “we” are. but “all life” that has survived. some politicians. causing the collective and individual escape into private helplessness. 1 Most telling in the etymology of the word. This point of equality is the minimum. All the contributions in this book uphold such a stance. However. voicing their contempt for the protesters. lower than which benchmark any future revolt cannot go. the insistence on unbribability means not settling for the crumbs of freedom but reclaiming and returning to common use that which has been stolen through privatisation and maintained in privatised units of all kinds. nothing). a significant appellation that symptomatically said more than they intended. more importantly for us. It is precisely in bagra that we should notice not just the fantasy of purity that preoccupies the ethnic oligarchs. We have already commenced. which we all partake.articulated left no room for ambiguity. nobody is left behind. Their accounts stand as powerful reminders how the many have been sacrificed by the selfaggrandising few in the chase after capital and how we are fighting for a dialectically qualitative change. on an equal basis. and better life. In the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In such recuperation. Bihać. Sarajevo—but also within these cities.” “Reverse corrupt privatisation” and “End nationalism” spoke clearly about newly re-identified and new political priorities: that it is still possible to demand freedom. as our commons. is the evocation of debauchery and the reference to the Bogumils. with complicated affect. Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina—The Fight for the Commons affirms this benchmark and links the insistence on equality with the concept of “unbribablity”—as an individual and collective refusal to be bribed and coerced into submission and servility.” as that in. as the etymology of the word suggests. At the start of the protests in February 2014. as a particular political sequence—and the protests and plenums are nothing less than this—they shared the same principle: the principle of the insistence on the “commons.1 We are now beyond daring. not some tinkering with minor quantitative adjustments. The legacy of previous workers’ rebellions and all anti-fascist struggle. where privatisation partitioned and sold off social space. This is why the book opens with contributions by two workers who led the strike actions and first protests that started in their factories—Emina Busuladžić from Dita and Miralem Ibrišimović from Polihem. The protests and plenums were themselves heterogeneous. Christophe Solioz nurtured the book to its existence.” who made it possible for this book to see the light of day. for their insights and suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Tag McEntegart. The contributions range from those written in the early days of protests to those taking into account how protests and plenums subsequently developed and the effects of the big floods that happened in May 2014.This book would have been impossible without the enthusiasm and camaraderie of all the contributors who answered the call to take part in this endeavour. 9 November 2014 10 . My special thanks go to Vanessa Redgrave and Carlo Nero of “Dissent Projects. my trusted collocutors. Damir Arsenijević. Nebojša Jovanović and Šejla Šehabović. Alma Fidahić and Besmir Fidahić selflessly translated the majority of the contributions. Because I do not like injustice. Why do I love Dita. Dita was busy helping the troops. But. At that time. celebration and compliments.Emina Busuladžić Why? Why the strikes. maturing within and alongside Dita. Merdžana Fišća. In whose interests was it. who devised the worst possible scenario for their colleagues of many years. Because I am brazenly persistent and because. providing for pensions. All of us who worked there were of a similar age. when I start something. Because I genuinely love my country. I have to see it through to the end. citizens and refugees. What this meant was that people who had worked in Dita for over 30 years started destroying and killing Dita. I have no chips on my shoulder. still have potential—it can continue educating some other children. and why am I struggling for its survival? I came to Dita straight from school. we all had similar problems and were working on them together. I grew and matured alongside Dita. healthcare and education. getting them off the streets and bringing them back from Afghanistan. the frustration. the chanting on the streets? One thousand questions come before one thousand answers. to destroy Dita and to crush underfoot so many years 11 . However. As I was young and green. Dita was headed by a great woman. instead of praise. During the war. We received regular and decent wages. giving jobs to young people. and they cannot bribe me. and the chemical products it manufactures. Because I’m not one to bow my head. Because I grow stronger from the blows that are inflicted. Dita was still a successful operating company. Dita can and must continue to work in order to build and rebuild this afflicted country. for the education of my children and was there for me in difficult times. But. Dita provided for my food. the protests. the demonstrations? Why the uprising. bringing in revenue for the country. Blackmails and threats can’t stop me. Together for years. feeding some other families. To obliterate it. upholding the vested interests of others. I see the connection between all these recent events surrounding Dita and the end of the war. Inevitably. we had shared laughter and tears. including party chief. someone took it into their heads to set about destroying and killing Dita. she got in the way of somebody’s political interests and was physically removed and insulted by the then self-styled “benefactors” of Dita. exporting and developing new products. to what end? Dita. And where are we now? People no longer fear God. their workers. They lied when they said that nobody wanted our products. It was just another scam. invalidity and premature death? For those. when Dita began working. but believed it to be ours now. turned everything social into state-owned. are the consequences of Dita’s destruction. in the 80’s we bought Marković’s shares. We only produced a little. Dita’s Director received the Manager of the Year Award. was a member of the 12 . we were growing up in Tito’s country. too. relatives. i. Will we get paid. which. to purchase shares.e. After all. things will get better. like myself. it was too late. We thought the factory hadn’t been ours in the previous system.” But. We harbored no hopes on our walk from buses through the gates of the factory. destroying that which is held most sacred: the families of colleagues. In the 70’s. Many workers. to serve their own interests. A few years ago. looking at the chimneys in vain. into the arms of the growing disaster. get our hot meal allowance and other reimbursements? But. driving many into ill-health. Production and the sales were curbed. But. In vain.” It was our way of inquiring whether the factory’s machinery was operational. everything remained the same. because they imagined themselves to be gods. we were busy paying back the loans required to start the factory. Our friends. wages were declining and being paid later and later. we called from home asking “Are they smoking yet.of friendship. between 2004 and 2005. where everybody was doing their job. What did we know about shares. which issued a largest part of the loan to Dita. neighbors and acquaintances were stopping us on the streets asking how come we’re no longer operating? How come our high quality and distinctive products are no longer on the market? History repeated itself: Dita needed new investments and in just one year. I heard the then-Director publicly express his remorse: “We did not need this. Management and Supervisory Board lied – pushing us. Looking back. In the late 90s. This was the third time that we were buying back our factory. No investment was made in new products.” we thought. Production was becoming increasingly stagnant. did not know their way around politics. indeed. urging us to take loans and buy out the state-owned capital. economics and privatization and were easy targets to fool. The newly elected Director. The absurdity only grew bigger: Marijanko Divković. no. with no balance sheets or income statements kept. Slowly and gradually. where people feared God and the law. And then they proceed to violate those same laws. in 1994. Director of Hypo Alpe Adria Bank. which we then re-purchased from the state. “Once we start producing. that seems to have been part of the plan and the beginning of slide into destruction. the Management took out an 8 million Convertible Marks loan. and no monitoring of resources expended. everything started going downhill. They do not fear the law because they tailor their own grotesque laws with impunity. dividends or capital? We only knew about matters to which we were accustomed: making high-quality detergents and earning honest wages. ” Does such a cynical answer merit passivity. in whatever amount and we had to be happy or had to pretend to be happy. “Director. The payment of salaries was delayed and the workers were taking loans to buy shares. “Mum. we lost the apartment that my husband had been allocated during the war as a soldier of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Or more accurately. and our two children. only God and the gangs know. The question was whether their thensalaries could even have covered the full amount of loan repayment instalments? My sense of dissatisfaction grew. Some received even more. That is what I said to the then-Director during one of our discussions.000 Convertible Marks. lack of reaction or combativity? My children were attending university at that time. let’s stop our studies for the time being. it was Kata Iveljić. We’ll continue later. I was one of the few who did not receive 10. that’s for sure. but was offered its 13 . and I began raising my voice. good. and my daughter was beginning to study architecture. honourable people. Dita was giving away apartments that were becoming vacant when workers could no longer afford the rent. Where those millions ended up and in whose pockets. Members of Dita’s management got themselves individually indebted for the sum of 100.” My response to him was full of rage because I felt humiliated as a parent and as a person and I continued fighting for my own and for other children. Repayment of the Management’s loan was questionable. The wages would arrive whenever.Dita Supervisory Board.” they used to say. He used to respond by saying: “I am pleased if it is because of me. I’m the mother of a highly esteemed and respected doctor and the mother of a civil engineer who is full of knowledge and confidence. Something didn’t feel right there. aware of the situation. We were left on the street. We had to sell our shares to keep our jobs and livelihoods. Dita was also giving away non-refundable funds of 10. who was on stand-by employment without pay from the “Soda” factory. His comment went against the grain: “Not all young people should get a university education. My family consists of my husband. Their final destination was not in Dita. But my parental duty and obligation was to attend to their education. as an individual. Today. Parts of the wages were paid through the bank and the other part in cash.000 Convertible Marks. Those were very hard times for my family. To make things even worse. At that time. But more about the trade union later. honest and industrious students and favourites among their friends. This was possible because the criterion for receiving such apartments was “suitability” of adopting the same outlook as the management.” I used to tell him.000 Convertible Marks in cash. My son was finishing medical studies. The Trade Union took the leading role. my children are going hungry because of you. only the elite. to former employees who no longer resided in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thus begins the second battle against the already distraught workers. the President of the Independent Trade Union of Chemistry and NonMetals. fish. others transferred to other companies. But no one who left without work to go to was finding other employment. There were two menus in the restaurant: one for the management. you be our representative. The value of the meal voucher was 5. but I also have my shares and my integrity. Sometime in May or June 2005.” My response was “No” each time.” So. People were leaving: some were retiring. I held my head high and soldiered bravely on.counter-value in construction material. A low level of production started up.5 Convertible Marks. the Sarajevo company Lora emerged as Dita’s saviour. for Dita. but everyone seemed to have forgotten the real function of trade unions. that a small number of workers were satisfied. Something was wrong. you have no doors or windows in your house. she simply replied: “Well. Other operating units also elected new representatives and thus began our fight for the workers.” We employed a few orphans. which. They were trying to force me to sell my shares persuading me to follow example of majority of my colleagues. The meal vouchers could be used to buy groceries: one voucher bought one litre of oil or two cans of fish. Out of necessity. Today. 14 . in 2009. We were paying our meals with the same vouchers. why they would toy with people’s lives in this way. I was elected onto the Executive Committee of the Dita Trade Union. the meal allowance was doled out in cash or bonds. As for wages. even though the humanitarian organization Koraci Nade regularly paid the money for their salaries to the management on contract. was not satisfied. the other for the workers. Later. I could see that the life of the factory was increasingly stagnant. Some came back to Dita on short-term contracts or so-called “internships. which cost 5. but we were not eating the same food. I simply could not stand idly by watching all that happening. meat spread or cold cuts and yogurt. and for the state. My friends looked at me in amazement: “Minka. one kilo of cheese. When I asked the trade union representative in our operating unit what they were doing. go ahead. in that time of plenty. I have doors and windows in my house. it was disbursed only in bonds. were busy selling workers tons of meat at discounted prices and sending them on jaunts to the coast. and some went to Afghanistan. however. cost six vouchers which meant that one kilogram of cheese cost 33 Convertible Marks. I did not succumb even then. but they were mostly minimal. But I did not want to. I took issue with those calculations. The calculations made to arrive at this figure were unsound. Something about it stank. Initially. We had our trade union. because it seemed to me they were a way to belittle and undervalue workers by stealing what was legally theirs. who did not receive salaries. They thought that the unions of today were like the former ones. they depended on who was at the receiving end. but that the majority. mostly production workers. The second and the third shifts’ meal consisted of a quarter of loaf of bread. I learned then what the shares were.5 Convertible Marks. during this period. behaved like immature teenagers. Although the strike was legal. The trade union tried launching a warning strike. but without any projects to work on. temperatures were reaching 42 degrees. we began our strike. the maintenance service workers.” was how Sead Čaušević. Outside. we had been struggling with the management. we turned into a packing plant. Although he was a highly skilled worker. Dita management. We have constantly threatened strike action since 2009. they owed us seven months of salaries and 22 months of pension and health insurance. but on August 24. from being a production company. We later learned that. When the new cantonal government was formed. We were on strike until winter. Ever since 2009. All these years the Branch Union. 2011. in the open. with them. the strike took us one step forward and three steps back. between the reservoirs. they were constantly delayed. because not a single item of that agreement was fulfilled. the workers. It is only then that they allowed us to enter the premises of the trade union. We just wanted to earn our salaries. So. 15 .All those years the Chairman of the Executive Committee of Trade Unions. the owner told us that the banks would no longer give him loans and that we would have to wait until the beginning of following year. Ramo imagined himself to be like Tito: the president for life. getting a little. he had taken loans galore. In late 2010. the cantonal government and other institutions of the state. Ramo Ramić. a company from Serbia. on the instruction of their manager. Dita’s owner and director promised better times and asked for patience. By then. a number of workers were under a working obligation to pack detergent that had been brought in from Beohemija. giving a little. and the administration staff was with the director and the management. We scheduled the first strike for August 24. They also tried to break us in every possible way: “Get them laid on stretchers and remove them from the factory that way. would vividly describe his position. We negotiated with management every day. in accordance with the Law on taking strike action. Inspectorate and judicial institutions. former Prime Minister of Tuzla Canton. such as the Tax Administration. But. The document consists of few pages I found on my desk one day. stood against us. were against us. every day between 7 am and 3 pm. Ramo Ramić. When I read the agreement and showed it to labour lawyers. it was through pushing through the ranks of the union and after most of the other engineers were driven out of Dita that he became Chief Maintenance Engineer. Whereas most dissatisfied workers were on strike with commitment and integrity. that we. They would give us a penny or two to keep us quiet. the line ministry. they all said it provided prima facie evidence of a crime. we expected they would help us and fulfil what they promised before they came to power. We set up our strike camp in the perimeter of the factory. had been tricked and robbed. but there was no progress. 2011. Management gave us a copy of an agreement that would give Lora possession of Dita. but we did not gather enough interested people. At least Tuzla Canton’s Ministry of Internal Affairs received the documentation—I went to the State Investigation and Protection Agency three times. One Friday. I felt I was being punished. when the workers came to the factory. whereas production workers were regularly dispatched home. The strike lasted until March 19. after a lot of pressure. one by one. instead of existing in this economic misery. lobbying and threats stopped. Željko Knežiček. A dozen workers in the administration continued to work regularly. you would see posters that read “REPORT CRIME. and stare in disbelief at all the information I found in them.” He was probably not expecting me to reply. At the meeting. They are clearly so busy in their work that we should all be bathing in milk and honey. One of the security guards stood in 16 . But. And what could I have do. but the production stopped again as soon as the media left. The Trade Union Executive Committee and the Strike Committee had two options at their disposal: they could either freeze or stop the strike. A couple of workers. were outvoted. at which point. although I was a chemical technician. as they did regularly at the beginning of every month. Ramo Ramić came to my office and said: “Haris (Haris Abdurahmanović. Wherever you turned at that time. and all they do is use them neatly to tuck away the documents. but the duty officer told me that the economic crime investigators were “busy working in the field” and that they would call me when they become available. I was moved from a large laboratory to an office ten meters square. We realized the situation was not going to get any better. wanted to enter the factory by force. provided the guarantee to re-launch production. I was surrounded by folders and numbed by boredom. I and another member of the Strike Committee. We went back to our working stations and started pretending to be working. providing all the appropriate documentation. I am still waiting for that call to this day. The strike. the Minister of Industry in the Cantonal Government.I brought the first criminal charges in the midst of this first strike. other than open those folders. to find increased security at the gates. we were again promised that “better times will come.” Thus began the period of silent rebellion. so we asked for a meeting with the Management. where they spent their unspent vacation days for who knows what year. They gave me a computer. I was moved to a new position in administration. They gave me a job as an economist. so I reported the crime. Television stations recorded the glorious day when Dita restarted production. “I can only talk to Haris on the factory premises and before 3 PM.” Our daily strain continued until early October 2012. although I had no idea how to turn it on. the owner of Lora) has called us to request a meeting somewhere in the city after 3 PM. 2012. or on paid standby. including me. We were now banned from entering the factory. Although it was supposedly a promotion. there are many drawers in the state’s administrative offices.” I thought the poster’s encouragement was genuine. who supported option to freeze the strike. coffee and hot meals. we received regular visits from members of the organizations the Neformalna Grupa Mladih Tuzle. then-Director. There was no electricity. heating or phones in Dita. All the rents they were paying ended up in Lora. It was easier for them to be on duty when they knew their families at home were not going hungry. not a single voice spoke up with me or for me. The thought that we were living without wages. poisoned by accusations of Kata Iveljić. when we asked the representatives of the trade unions for help. We remained at the gate and decided to fight 24 hours a day.front of me. The rain and the wind hampered our protests. We shared it in such a way that workers could carry it home to their wives and children. Hunger! Dita workers had nothing to eat in their homes. which was attended by Ismet Bajramović. Indeed. water. and I’ve been working here for 35 years. They were with us when the mercury on the thermometer fell below -15 degrees. the attacks and insults merely increased! They accused us of erecting the tent settlement illegally. Thanks to the good people and the solidarity of workers from other companies. For many workers. that was their only meal. We received only one response to our request for assistance and that was from the Solana factory. the President of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Bosnia and Herzegovina. and we did not allow them to go outside the factory. Then I realized that the value of my stocks is not pertinent to the struggle. “How come I can’t come in. had banned everyone from entering. We sent a formal request for assistance to the members of the branch unions. we were forced to build a tent settlement and divide ourselves into two shifts: women took charge of the tent settlement by day and men manned it by night. We stayed on duty 24 hours a day. and members of the Social and Economic Council. I own stocks in this factory. as if it was the sole Owner of the factory and as if there were no other shareholders. So begin the protests. At a meeting of the General Board of the Independent Trade Union of Chemistry and Non-Metals. They did not allow us onto the perimeter of the factory. The greater part of Dita’s 17 tenants left the factory because of that. we had enough food. let alone bringing some food with them to the factory. of pursuing our own interests or the interests of some of Tuzla’s tycoons. without being able to go into the retirement we had earned never crossed their mind. I did not have the right to defend myself at that meeting. Many companies started sending food and money. Lijevi and Revolt.” I told him. Citizens supported us by bringing food. everyone. without health insurance. Ever since then. bringing us tea. I used the shares only as a means to further the struggle. but not those whose workers who were in the Trade Union of Chemistry and Non-Metals. From the very beginning. The food started arriving when we approached workers of other factories and citizens of Tuzla for help. grabbed his gun and told me that Adnan Đidić. Among us were workers who would come on foot to serve their turn on the 17 . They called the Dita workers to visit their factory in Zrenjanin for a tour of their facilities and to talk about the future. sons gave their lives and limbs. “We were there for you when you needed us. you. mainly those who were at home and were not protesting. It was clear that he already meant to sell the factory to someone else. “We cannot do anything”. Jasmin (Jasmin Imamović. and that. People started talking more openly about bankruptcy. Once we had a new. they say.picket line. Since there had been no results from the earlier claims we had lodged. Visit us now. Advisor to the Prime Minister. A bus full of workers. claims for unpaid wages and unlawfully paid salaries were added to a claim against Lora for failure to fulfil that part of the agreement that related to the transfer of shares. in some cases. So. We are here to preserve a part of Tuzla for which our brothers. without even trying. the tactical games started. husbands. Look around Dita. Jasmin. The Courts weren’t functioning.” I used to say. why abolish the Court of Asso- 18 . the pride of Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina. it was not ours to sell. if you wanted. being interested in Dita. The judges. A disgraceful reflection of your own and many others’ shame. walking more than 20 kilometers. municipal elections were held. Mayor of Tuzla and member of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party). I refused to go and talk without a majority shareholder who did not go. Representatives of political parties came to visit. It was once an industrial zone. And what’s become of it? It’s been turned into a barren twilight zone. promising to resolve our situation and bring food! Only one party did not send a single representative: The Social Democratic Party. A few months previously. Igor Rajner. There was also an additional complaint against Dita for malpractice and a lawsuit against the Agency for Privatization for failure to fulfil its obligations. and nor were the lawyers who were representing us. Yes you can. Show how much you love the people of your Tuzla. told me that the factory did not belong to us. have a lot of work. He advised the Libyan delegation to contact the owners of Lora. Those suits still stand in the Court to this day. Yet it was an open secret that it had been interested since 2005. when I was visiting the cantonal government with a delegation from Libya who. when we need you. They would stay for a few days and then go back home. There has been no movement at all since the time they were lodged. People from the government went as well. went and came back even quicker. Haris Abdurahmanović had bribed everything living thing that had a pulse. you keep talking about people from Tuzla. the workers’. you say. was interested in buying stocks and starting production at Dita and several other factories in Tuzla. You could. who quietly watched it being degraded and destroyed. Beohemija. lawyer in place. at that time. functional. At that time. we concluded that we needed to find a new lawyer. therefore.” Later. there was some talk about the company. “Good God. surely you can. I was against the it. Should I deliberately do something against you good people. Discontent and fear 19 . gave up. again.ciated Labour—a functioning court. The workers were exhausted by the snow and the cold. may God. diligent hands. save for the promise to pay three months” worth of salaries that were owed anyway. bribed or blackmailed person. nothing came out of it. Naturally. which existed before the war and which did not need years to deliver a single verdict? Throughout the whole time of our struggle. there were many burst pipes leaking and it smelled. However. This was at behest of the government. vulgarity. looted. and some. honest workers’ will and the desire to work very quickly brought order. We produced very little. Much of it has been dismantled. We went back to the same old story. because this Protocol. over the winter. They could hardly wait to start producing and earning their salaries. But. humiliation and. unwillingly. Enormous pressure was brought to bear on the workers: harassment. the radiators had broken down. we were under pressure to comply with the legislation. When we started our struggle. but no heating because. we were mostly engaged in packing for Beohemija and even that. Should I make a mistake from ignorance. Our protest was already entering its third month. Then we received word from the cantonal government that Beohemija was interested in taking over Dita. Once the workers received three salaries their spirits immediately went up. because we knew that many would like see that happening and would seize on it. When Beohemija’s delegation arrived. due to pressure from the majority of workers. Unmaintained. met under the leadership of Kata Iveljić and made unanimous decision to accept the Protocol on Cooperation between Beohemija and Dita. and you forgive me. I spoke with workers and said: “As God is my witness. and those who had given up in the meantime. Every media outlet released my statement where I said that something like “such a protocol can only be signed by a crazy. destroyed. They were ready for new working victories. By early 2013. only for a very short time. even accidentally. being dispatched back home. the factory had been abandoned. dirty. to not run foul of the law. A group of 40 workers who were taking part in the protests. The pressure was overwhelming. will not bring Dita any good. money. may God punish me!” It was late December. we stopped the protests on 29 December 2012. Clearly this meant sellouts! The group of 40 even accepted the Protocol that was only committed to writing several days later. the negotiating team was numerically expanded by workers who were not taking part in the protests. Times were difficult. While we were on all those paid and unpaid leaves. It was a pitiful sight that caused great grief to those of us to whom it mattered. We received only the three months’ salaries. the workers were in their factory units again: we had electrical power. I took on reading the legislation really closely and consulting with our lawyers so as not to make a mistake. But. I will do an honourable and honest work. the administrative workers openly approached the production workers. pitfalls and problems in life. the Director had stood up and asked me: “Woman. On several occasions. I often told my children that they will face many obstacles. In one of the talks. we divided the day into 12-hour shifts. We have to be persistent. Let them tell you how they want to live. One of the companies that remained—leasing Dita’s reservoirs—paid rent which allowed us to get the electricity back on to light up the perimeter and security sheds. in our struggle to save it from destruction. Across all those years someone had been working to turn Dita into another HAK 1. You promised us a state in which people could live productive lives. more audacious and more persistent. We wondered whether they did it sincerely or whether they were pushed to do so. but theirs to overcome and conquer. “We’ll strike. honest and enduring. they also provided food packages to the striking workers. of course. but they usually they did not.ensued. because they will make them stronger. the more you spit on me. Did the Management really think we would give up so easily? In one of the earlier meetings.. Sead Čaušević told us: “I would resolve the situation. brave. There was no electricity. we had been waiting to strike for a long time whilst we collected the necessary documents.” I said. We will fall over again and again throughout life. Because each strike must be carried out according to the Law on strikes. Sometimes they would call us to talk. We started gathering in front of the cantonal government every Monday and Wednesday at 9 am. blackmail me and belittle me. we picked you. That was not what the owner expected. because that is the only way we can hope to succeed in life. I grow stronger. but Sarajevo is not going to allow that to happen. We did not trust them much. We realized how grave the situation was and that all the mighty promises were futile. we went on strike again. Again. This time the situation was reversed: they could not come in. Even the workers who had been supporting the Protocol were committed to looking at what we can do.” Turn to your constituency. Worried about the future. but we have to stand up and fight and become stronger because that is the only way we can expect to succeed in life. how come you have so much strength and will to continue fighting?” Little did he know that the more you beat me. You promised us a better tomorrow. “We voted for you. The sewage system was clogged.” “Well?” I replied. no water and no heating. The Management left the factory. Let go of the policies of the proverbial “men in black. In mid-2013. HAK 2 and Gumara—all factories that were once successful that were similarly destroyed and razed to the ground. You see they all are unhappy. Again. but we got together in agreement. Don’t preside over 20 . but that these obstacles are not there to halt them. we guarded the factory 24 hours a day. Why are you crawling to Sarajevo to ask them how Tuzla can become economically healthy and how we’re supposed to live well enough lives here? Address the suffering citizens here in Tuzla. the more you punch me. could not afford medical treatment. when schools and universities are going into reverse. to make the state institutions work. engineers. but he did have information that Dita could not survive in the marketplace any longer because Dita’s products were no longer of a high enough quality. They are not warriors or assassins. My sole satisfaction will be to see the end of the looting and the thieves brought to justice. could not retire. The workers received no salaries. I could not believe what I was hearing. In one of the meetings with the Office of the Prosecutor. whilst its Lora owner was buying villas. postponing the payment of taxes and contributions owed to the state. although we workers knew that the then-Technical Director deliberately degraded the quality of recipes. supposedly. yachts and planes. as few people who are supposed to protect public interest do anything. and everybody kept quiet about it.. but it’s been two years since we received their courtesy response. but are mostly busy chasing their own interests.. union dues and allocations for 21 . making trashy products and chasing the customers away. The economic crime investigators of the Tuzla Canton Ministry of the Interior were on Dita’s premises collecting evidence for months in 2012. they will consider the events that had happened and were happening in and around Dita when they have time available. He should know that better than me. they are economists. The High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council were constantly busy. for what and for whom is the education of children being undertaken? How are they to be taught when teachers are unhappy?” And that is when he began to avoid us. The union’s criminal charges were languishing. Of course. They would take years to discover what everyone knew all along: that there were crimes of theft. stashed in the depths of some drawer or other of the Office of the Prosecutor and the Court. Where will they work if the economy collapses? Who will earn our pensions if they all disperse to all corners of the globe? Enough of them have already left. instead of improving and progressing? Under such conditions. lawyers. He did not know about my interests. Dita was piling up debt. looking straight into my eyes. How are we supposed to receive medical treatment when health funding is shrinking. The same prosecutor apparently believes that there is no criminal offence committed when a factory director takes loan instalments. fraud and other economic crimes taking place in Dita. Because his role is to help citizens. inquired as to what my vested interests in the matter were – that I had seen fit to launch criminal charges against these thieves. I’ve asked myself all these years: is it likely that Haris Abdurahmanović would not dare do what he was doing if he hadn’t had such strong backing. He did not find elements of crime in my first criminal complaint. that it is not politicized! Indeed. too.conditions where our children and up going to Afghanistan. We complained to Mr. the prosecutor. And they say that the judiciary is independent. He did not know what other lie he could tell that might make us continue to believe him. Valentin Inzko. I’d like to know what law allows such a director to do so and remain unpunished. We do not ask much. The government employees enter the government building with their heads down. we ask to work. The police would not let them have anything. I felt fatigue and cold sweats.” They were talking to me. that has always been the first point of discussion of demands. They gave up in only a few days. would look at us and often condescendingly commenting. and an oxygen bottle.the fund for special purposes from workers’ salaries and does not pay this money into the accounts where it was intended that they should have been placed. in tones laden with disgust and irony: “Here they go again. Months fly by without any progress. “Dear God. give us strength not to succumb and let us find the strength to endure. Few people were on the streets. we seek to earn our bread. do it with dignity. and the workers did not have anything to protect themselves from the rain. They saved their lives and preserved their dignity. because we do not have anything to hide. we were all on the edge of poverty. My eyes got blurry.” It was yet another Wednesday. It was already autumn. The temperature descended below zero. The workers were growing more exhausted. We can look anyone in the eye. The whole country was hungry. I was thinking what to say. instead taking it for himself. a group of workers who were gathered in front of the government building made a unilateral decision to start a hunger strike. I’d like to meet someone— anyone—who is remotely concerned and who will take responsibility for bringing these people to justice. I walked slowly towards the government building. the launch of production. and I suddenly felt a severe chest pain. both mentally and physically. Sometimes we would gather at the Office of the Prosecutor or the Tax Administration. how to react if yet again we are turned away. help us in our just struggle. Do not fall asleep! Open your eyes.” At a certain point. will this 22 . One of them got sick. That December morning was cold and windy. And then what? About halfway. who receive salaries. Running and shouting “Quick. Our first demand. you put us to the test too often. “God. we wondered whether he would talk to us. If you should die. It was cold. The next thing I remember were the doctors with masks. have their health insurance and retirement funds. The workers stopped the hunger strike. Just numbers. In all the talks. but to them we are just statistics. The employees of the cantonal government and other institutions. What have we done that is so wrong that we must be punished in this way? How long until they exhaust us and break us? Dear God. A new Minister of Industry had recently assumed office. I was returned to my pain. we’re losing her. Every Wednesday.. we gathered in front of the government building. but it was after 3 am when he got sick. Should someone die? Become a chronically sick invalid? The passersby seemed unaffected. I no longer remember the exact day and date. and we headed for the front of the government building again. was crossed off from the list of demands by Sead Čaušević personally.. where there are no strikes. I told my family I was going for a checkup. I had to be with them in these crucial and difficult moments.. start with something new from scratch. I turned numb. together with my workers. When Thursday came. she just fell asleep and died in her sleep. she was having her usual coffee…the cups were still hot. He stayed with me in the beginning. He came rushing with medication. where the law is respected. I stayed only very briefly because I did not feel all that good. and we must monitor its course. She provided for all her children and raised fair and honourable people. relatives and friends were talking about the chaos that was taking place in front of the government building. No one ever knocked on her door to make any complaints. I had been through thick and thin all these years. criminals and thugs are where they belong. That was the first time I had ever walked silently past my mother’s door. But. My soul wanted to be there. On Wednesday. inquiring about what was happening. She was a very lively old lady.. They said there were many people there and that the demonstration was due to continue until Thursday. He was on his way to pick me up. I felt some discomfort. or the medications started working.” one of the doctors explained. they dropped tear gas.” he said. though the medications helped.. where people are treated with respect. There was something weighing on me. too. neighbours. I quickly found myself slipping into a state of inertia. beating our young 23 . I called them in secret. doctors advised me to go for walks. “Where am I? What are they doing to me?”… I did not understand what was happening. But I was in the front line. I decided I would attend. “Go to the back. but now you must undertake a strict regime of rest.. who had been a widow with four children for 55 years. However. My family looked at me in disbelief.. “Thieves. He looked sad and dismal. where there is law. my husband stuck to me like a shadow. don’t go to grandma’s house . She was not educated. get out!!!” it echoed. It hurt me that I was not with my workers. But instead. but my real heart was making it hard. “Minka. I educated my child to become a doctor and to be there for me.” he told me. He left Bosnia to go to a foreign land where the majority have jobs and those jobs are carried out legally and properly. The following Wednesday I had to perform the appropriate religious practices for the soul of my mother. The police were beating up young protesters. “Drop your shields!” people were saying to the police.. A large blood clot is travelling around your blood’s circulatory system. everything in me died. Halfway home I met my husband. “You suffered a strong myocardial infarction. she did not suffer. I thought. you’ve arrived just in time. You know. After all was said and done. thieves. And he was. January 29. but she was courageous. watch good movies.(he was referring to my 92 year-old mother). But. but I went and joined those who were gathered in front of the government building instead. but had to go back to his home abroad and treat other people. read books.ever stop?”.. I did not even have the strength to cry.. where the thieves. they responded to the violence by throwing carnations at them. Why Plenum? Because it consisted of honest. persistent. the government resigned. 2. did they support their struggle. one situation that will always stick in my 24 . young people that I knew. but none of the mighty dared come out before the people and speak to them. I received a message from Sead Čaušević. to save jobs.. as we. On Friday. everyone has the right to express their problem. The February protests gave birth to the Union of Solidarity. “Come out and make your offer. They knew no one would do anything except they themselves. The traffic was completely blocked and there were a huge number of television reporters. hitting the hungry. All carried out with human dignity. He did not come out because he had nothing to offer. educated youth. the people of Tuzla took their destiny into their hands. happened! When Dita and workers of other factories were joined by so many other forces: school pupils. surrounded by young protesters wearing masks. pensioners. Riot police were busy dispersing people all day long. But.” I replied. They expressed their discontent by throwing rocks. Columns of people came from all sides. everyone has the right to vote in the Plenum. are wont to do. The rest were all the next generation of our young and educated people. the citizens exploded with the pressure of the pent-up yearning that had been building up in them for years. However. 5. for the first time. this was no longer only about Dita’s workers. While riot police hurled their truncheons and tear gas at us. Why the Union of Solidarity? The unions were one of the main culprits for the degraded state of the economy. stubborn. There were a lot of youth. hitting the just. Since we have no leader. war veterans and the marginalized. we were there again. They even distanced themselves from the February 2014 events.000. those who had been with us during our struggle. He had decided to call us to talk. That day. We asked for the resignation of the government. because they did not take the side of the workers nor. At this moment in history. There were about 20 people there.people with truncheons. called me to come to Kuća Plamena Mira. crouching somewhere in the depths of their souls. youth I trusted. smart. All their despair and anger came to surface. college and university students. at noon. those who were following us through the struggle to save Dita.. 10. people I had known for some time.000 people. no privileged few.000. 1. It would take me many more pages to write about the crimes of the trade unions who were defending the interests of the government and employers.000. Later that day. and creating candle-lit vigils around which people could gather. fearless young people. the unemployed. at any point. I was the oldest. students and the unemployed. the workers. hitting people who merely wanted a job so they could earn their bread. That is how the Plenum was created. decent. no one could count them anymore. And what happened. because hidden in the small print of the new “Decisions on Work. which amounts to half of our annual dues. The Management had promised to pay up three months’ worth of unpaid wages if we accepted a new “Decisions on Work” agreement and acquiesced to a minimum wage rate that was altogether pitiful. regardless of whether they can afford to pay the membership dues. i. That means that if we had signed. the Branch Unions issued assistance worth 10. In late 2012. the legislative body whose duty it is to monitor the work of the government. supporting both Dita workers and workers of other ruined companies. We discussed the question of the wages they owed. For 20 years we have experienced the same people and the same policies. Why the Union of Solidarity? Because workers founded it. to vote for them. During that 25 . In the end. Why the Communist Party. Because the members of the new trade union were with the workers all the time. The economy was collapsing. I sent a letter to the Cantonal Assembly. first the workers were divided . supporting them to break away from the influence of the state.set against each other and then the Unions themselves fragmented.” was the information that this contract was valid only for a fixed period of six months work. banks and the state pay-outs are settled. have been paying into the unions’ accounts all those years. The workers are always the only losers. In the last five years of our struggle for Dita and for our workers. until all the assets are sold. Bankruptcy usually means liquidation. dissatisfied workers or pensioners. I proved to have been being correct to do so. wholeheartedly. rather than uniting and strengthening the workers. People did not trust them. I found myself on the electoral list of the Communist Party. Kata Iveljić. and the bankruptcy trustees. After all. Where are the funds from the dues we paid for all those other years? When the destruction and decline of the industry and the economy were planned. unemployment had reached 65%. I warned my colleagues against signing it. but we only spiral deeper into the pit of economic and social decline.mind is a meeting in 2010. The state was becoming mired in chaos. It took them a year to put Dita and the economy of Tuzla Canton on the agenda. because they did not know how the so-called “officers” of the unions spent the Union dues that they. the workers. you may ask? This year is election year and it is pretty questionable as to whether there are any candidates who offer the kind of integrity and trustworthiness that would encourage you. and regardless of whether they are students. bankruptcies are taking up to 15 years to resolve. I waited for their response for a year. as President of the Branch Union gave her consent for that plan.e. All have access to membership. where Kata Iveljić was also in attendance.000 Convertible Marks. after six months we would probably have lost our jobs. All it takes is a reading of the draft of the new Labour Law to understand whose side the union was taking. And the trade unions remained silent on the issue. they had actively participated in the drafting of that very same Law. Most of them were completely uninterested and passive. your child or your grandchild will ask what you did for Tuzla. but now they want to make it accessible only to a privileged few. in those hard times? And what will you say? Will you tell the truth. I was looking the Assembly representatives in the eye…but saw only a handful of interested people. maybe. I did not want to represent a democratic party. something to be remembered by. I’ve even stood at the lectern on the Assembly platform. but now the sick give half of their earnings to pay for their medications. Human beings should leave something good behind them when they die. demand and warn. that you did nothing. jobs and the survival of this country depend on them. Since then. We all had the right to medical treatment. we would never have seen collecting boxes. But. asking for charitable assistance for medical treatment for our country’s citizens. to beg. because democracy has never been more absent. all agreed that the economy is in a disastrous condition. Yet. have we not been witnesses to the folly of other parties? Earlier. in the markets or at the entrances to stores. Earlier. I often ask people: “Tomorrow. thousands of lives.session. for the country. That is the reason I agreed to be put on the list for the Cantonal Assembly as a representative of the Communist Party. but with no valid claim to being part of humanity?” 26 . or will you lie and remain what you are now – a living creature. Why the Communist Party? They say that the Communist Party means singlemindedness. we all had a right to education. I’ve been to a few more sessions. but often 27 . adequate permitted time for vacations. In all this. even after the war and after the declaration of independence. not protected by the law. as workers were working ten-plus hours a day. in order to asset-strip the former state much more easily. for working overtime. People championing the nationalist parties. This fragmentation meant more suffering for the workers. a five-day work week. suffered major human casualties and on-going material destruction. The firms that were thus led to bankruptcy were then bought. In the factories where the workers were working in three shifts. and continue to do so even now. and not remember what Tuzla once was—a significant industrial centre with a huge number of employed workers. regular health and pension insurance. the shifts lasted up to a maximum of eight hours a day. in the end. set about turning the peoples who lived in the former Yugoslavia against one another. which were established. or by the unions. to support the policy of destroying once strong state-owned firms. At that time. At successive union congresses. continued. then. or those close to them. In the privatized companies. A oncestrong and unique Alliance of the all the unions of Bosnia and Herzegovina was now fragmented to entity level. The 40-hour working week was a distant memory. into “independent-sector” unions. Bosnia and Herzegovina got the shortest end of the stick. for working during holidays. It was fatal for the thousands of workers who had been promised everything. and. proper pay for undertaking night work. and the workers were significantly better protected from various forms of exploitation. and paid holiday became just a fantasy. for working on Sundays. putting their very existence in question. Business owners did not permit the workers to organize or to form unions. there was an enviable fraternal organization of unions. whose productivity and profitability they had built and their jobs. lost the factories.Miralem Ibrišimović My Union Fight It is hard to write about the events of February 2014. by devaluing them and burdening them with huge loans. as private companies. rapidly found themselves subject to exploitation. and those workers. and the nationalists. even after the war. a small number of workers were employed. so that left the employees time to rest and time for social improvement. by those same people. we requested and fought for our rights: better working conditions. By the end of the 1990s. Health and pension insurance was irregular. and. what used to be Yugoslavia was now becoming various new states. and who. they would never be employed again. yet again. failed them too. the dissatisfaction of the workers reached breaking point and a strike was announced. after the war. because. For several years. most likely. our most important product. salaries or the cost of the health and pension insurance of the workers. as they were often eased into their positions by the political parties. In addition. many of the workers. In preparation for my responsibilities.. The question is why? Was it because of their incompetence or was it due to political reasons? Either way. The existing unions did nothing then. aware that. It seemed that the leadership of the Polihem factory was not able to solve the situation. and when a large number of workers lost their jobs. However. propylene. the Polihem factory found itself in a difficult situation because of failure to ensure the necessary delivery of raw materials. put on so-called “stand-by. the production of polyol. water. the verdicts of the court were in favour of the workers. the courts. I had fought for the workers’ rights and for better working conditions. in which I was unanimously elected as the leader of the strike committee. they were. In such a situation. they did not find a way for the production to continue. and without any other alternative. they had reached an age when they should be thinking about retirement and not about finding another job. which are hazardous to human health (chloride. I studied the relevant Labour 28 . Although another part of the factory continued production. ethylene. ceased. as they waited for production to start up once again. in practice. In most of the cases. so. In 2000.” during which they received some sort of minimal financial compensation. So. the Polihem factory did not manage to receive approval for the delivery of raw materials. the workers who had lost their jobs were sent to the employment office. and did nothing later.. to stop the wholesale destruction of Tuzla’s industry.) because the road traffic rules did not allow it. which were trusted by the workers. The railway was the only way to deliver raw materials. soon after. since my arrival at the factory in 1975. While it was still a part of the Sodaso group company. All of my colleagues knew that. the people from the factory returned to their jobs. The new owners also benefited. as the disunity of the unions also played into their hands. One example of such scandalous behaviour on the part of the courts is the case of the Polihem factory. keeping their heads down when notable parts of Tuzla’s industrial group company. were devalued and sold off at ‘bargainbasement’ prices. Despite the drastic reduction in their terms and conditions. but the verdicts were almost never enacted. due to the owners of the companies’ failure to comply with the collective labour contract were forced to seek their rights in court.the leaders of those unions benefited. such as Sodaso. and that I had never succumbed to pressure exerted by the management. And. Nor did it cover the loans to keep even reduced production going. the volume and value of this production did not cover the costs of electricity. Initially. the strike board decided that the strike action should be moved from the factory to the street. and. with hindsight. and when no one—not even after keeping us waiting for two hours—no one responded. and I tried to run the strike by complying strictly with the legal framework. after a while. During those years. Nationally. and then searching. for a meeting with the relevant minister for the time. due to a lack of political will. I realised that the majority of them did not want to. When the workers. incidentally. an hour or two after we arrived at the intersection. while speaking with my colleagues. can be identified as a series of dirty moves on the part of the government. One of the basic requests of the strike committee was that the then-director and management of Polihem must be replaced. and after—by sheer presence of numbers—we blocked the traffic. blocked the road to the city. which was met with full support from the union. During the strike. the issues surrounding Polihem would not easily be resolved. However. but their response was to send in a special police unit. however. Because of these machinations.Law and the Law on strikes. the Tuzla Canton Government— the majority owner of Polihem—refused to give the program the go-ahead. engage in union organisation. Workers were aware of the fact that. We thought that that would make them take concrete steps towards resolving the issue. and requested that the management should remain. and went to the Sodaso building to ask. that they had acquiesced to the “stand-by” arrangement and its puny financial compensation. and finally dismissing them. the Polihem union was very well-organised and gave its support to the Polihem workers strike board which began talks with Tuzla’s cantonal government. which was. However. Nonetheless. it was dishonest people within the government who let us down by outwardly accepting our requests. we spontaneously headed toward the intersection (located on the main route into the city of Tuzla). or were scared to. the majority owner of the factory. a sizeable police force 29 . the majority decided that the director and the management must go. behind the scenes. thinking this would force them respond to our request. And this was one in which. During that period. saying that there were no financial resources to implement it. a new director made a plan and program for the re-launch of production. as we had done in countless other occasions. which was now used by the cantonal government as a government building. I personally suffered a huge blow. after five years dominated by such a powerful fear of losing their jobs. Although opinions varied among the workers— some were only dissatisfied with the director. over 500 workers joined the strike. everything seemed to be going well for us—the Government fulfilled our request. and gave their consent to the strike board’s authority. already desperate. This was yet another in what. in front of the Sodaso building. the Polihem factory was the only company in the city of Tuzla which was systematically searching for economic salvation through looking to re-launch production. for reasons and excuses not to fulfil them. However. who works in the police force. after giving our statements. let alone tried to help us in our fight to 30 . After more of my colleagues had been detained. After several years. One of my friends. and were shocked by the police procedures. A Polish factory called Organika bought Polihem. getting the traffic moving again. I thanked him for the information. and then set up a “new” factory. We were taken to court to be charged with minor offenses that same day. by the orders issued by the so-called “responsible” people from the government. is what happened. which they called Poliolchem. I was also detained on that occasion. Having found that there was sufficient evidence indicating that Poliolchem failed to comply with the contracts. and the police officer. we were transported to the special police unit HQ in several police vehicles. I told him that I am not a criminal and that I will never allow him to handcuff me. all of the workers from Poliolchem were fired and sent to the “employment” office. and the court had to rule in our favour. if necessary. there were a large number of disabled persons and women. would give up our request. because there would have been no disturbance of public order and peace if someone from the government had spoken with the workers that day. has never declared its position on the issue. even more. After all of these events. even if the price to be paid would mean conflict with the police. Among the people at the intersection. we were issued with fines for violations of public order and peace. whose aim was to devalue and destroy Polihem. the union alliance did not provide support for our fight for the preservation of the factory and the jobs. the workers (and I among them) have also lost all trust in the union alliance because. We all found ourselves in one room. we sued them. so that it could be purchased for the purpose of a final asset-stripping in the near future. who was leading me up to the vehicle wanted to handcuff me. the court never issued the order to enact the court’s judgement. that they had received an order to get the intersection moving again. using force. The aim of all of that connivance was to ensure that those who were the immediate creditors of the organisation— the workers—could not collect what was owed to us. That. nor any of the 500 workers. in the end. Of course. and said that neither I. instead allowed Organika to sell one part of Poliolchem to a factory called Organika Bosnia and Herzegovina. Then I asked the judge to explain why those who are really guilty for the creation of the situation were not the ones who are being punished. told me a few minutes before the police action started. and. but. the judge chose to ignore my question. and to initiate bankruptcy procedures in relation to the second part of Poliolchem. to this day. Although the verdicts were binding and had to be executed. The management of the union alliance.and the police special unit started to remove us by force. where. in this case. I knew that this situation was being influenced by several individuals. whose headquarters is in Sarajevo. but that did not stop the police from arresting 32 workers and by force. Not even cases such as these influenced the opinions of the so-called “responsible” parties in the governmental structures. I found it especially painful to witness members of the special police unit chasing and beating the younger protesters. an increasing gulf between the salaries of those employed in the private sector and those in the state sector. I was asking myself why the police were responding to our legitimate requests with force. I have lost any optimism and faith that I previously had in our prospects for a better tomorrow. sparked an explosion of public opposition. I was in front of the Sodaso building on that day. nepotism. I remembered the events at the intersection from 2000. A large majority of workers did not have any means of support. I have.bring the factory back to life. thrived in those intervening years. One of our colleagues opted for suicide. together with a several thousand of my fellow countrymen. which only suited those who could be lured into taking a criminal path. and lack of any interest on the part of the politicians to resolve this. who in their “get-rich-quick” pursuit. experiencing a 40 per cent unemployment rate. and. several thousands of the citizens of Tuzla and Tuzla Canton publicly sided with the workers—pupils. and the growth of dissatisfaction. Job opportunities were minimal. personally. They just kept their union alliance offices secure. While I was watching the behaviour of a large number of police officers and the special police unit as the situation developed. lost any will or motivation for any sort of engagement in union organizations or political parties because I have not seen a single indication that any of them are working for any improvement in our situation. 31 . low pensions. but in other citizens as well. jumping from the 10th floor of the building in which he lived. They remained deaf to the cries of thousands of dismissed and desperate workers and mute as to what they were going to do about the situation. We were and are only of interest to them when pre-election campaign time comes around. however. The prevailing conditions. That was the day when the arrogant and the uninterested conduct of the government. The most difficult days for workers were after the sale of Polihem. As a result of everything that has happened in our country since the end of the war. facing an uncertain future. On that day. the disabled. pensioners—all of whom were unhappy with a situation which had prevailed and become more desperate over a twenty year period. have no pity for anyone else. not only amongst the workers of the destroyed factories. up until 5 February 2014. and. together with corruption. who are refusing to accept the overall situation in the country. On that day. afraid that it would happen again. an ever growing crime rate. regular gatherings of the workers of destroyed industry grew into a mass protest of a large number of citizens. Numerous smaller strikes and gatherings of workers had usually gone unnoticed in previous years. students. one of the positive things that have occurred after the riots are the plenums. the police were guarding the Sodaso building from its rightful owners—from the factory workers. I pointed out that I could not and did not support any existing union organisations. The uprising of Tuzla citizens has sparked a reaction in the whole of the Federation precisely because the situation is no better in other parts of the country. sparked the wrath of the people. In its attempt to stop the escalation of violence and to channel productively the dissatisfaction of the interested citizens. Thanks to a group of young intellectuals from the University of Tuzla. overall. but. I had expected a larger number of interested citizens to join us who would pressure the government. I had expected that a greater number of citizens would create pressure for drastic changes be achieved. can be deemed to be the instigators. and should be held responsible for the events of that day. (not the academic community as a whole) the Plenum has shown that in this city there are still young. find like-minded people and ideas to solve things they were unhappy with. Yet. This idea took 32 . the gathering went well. and once the police. it would be a nucleus from which ideas about how to exit from this crisis would develop. one which will not be a puppet “front” for the vested interests of political parties. they could express openly their dissatisfaction. the Plenum of Citizens of the Tuzla Canton was formed. both before and on the day. every day brought fewer and fewer activities and the positive developments tailed off. in the future. Another positive outcome from the February 2014 explosion of discontent is the formation of the Union of Solidarity. at that moment. the kind striven for by all citizens in this country who are now accustomed only to the dominant transitional democracy. and that a new union should be established. educated and brave people who may. only the government and the police. the situation got out of control and the Sodaso building was set on fire. despite the fact that the Tuzla Canton Government has been using the building for a number of years to house government departments and the civil servants who work in them. I don’t yet know why there was a decline in interest for the plenum. In a speech at one of the plenums. This was a huge step toward real democracy. How absurd! And even more absurd that. by individuals from the government. by using force. more advanced ideas. In such an uncontrollable situation. be holders of new.I wondered why. I am very disappointed with the outcome. no civil servant was in the building on that day. In my opinion. but it all died down. and in order to try to prevent the riots from escalating. Although there was no intimations of violence at the very beginning. It seemed to me that the way in which the plenum functioned (one man-one vote) did offer a “light at the end of the tunnel” for all interested citizens: in that forum. after the way that the protesters were being treated. but the opposite happened. but. their procedures. In the beginning. I had expected that the plenum would become stronger. and schools has will not happen as a result of any “promises” by current incumbents. as a form of the fight for the rights of workers. but such organisation must be established and led according to the will of the majority of their members brought together in the struggle for their rights and led by the principles of securing offices within the union. must continue to exist. Union organisation. Of necessity this was done swiftly and without true and fair election of the management. who were still organising themselves through the remnants of the former unions of the destroyed factories. for the sake of their children and grandchildren. 33 . new factories.root and later the employees. Ground down by 20 years of disempowered. Will it have to take another 20 years for us all to realize who wrought such a havoc? That is why all the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina should make a decision in principle that they will not go on like this—at the very least. citizens must surely recognise that the creation of new jobs. founded the Union of Solidarity. . back in 1994. there will be genocide. the front lines intersected. after its admission to the UN. The response of the Bosnia and Herzegovina’s legal institutions in Sarajevo to the aggression. de facto. There is difficulty with water. This is the first deception that was perpetrated upon the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. over the past fifty years. was at times also surprising. at the proposal of the Government. the starvation of its citizens. in combination with the protected zones of the United Nations. food. enabled the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. which. the mass executions. The battles are being fought within the city itself. In Western Bosnia. to the daily shelling of civilian targets. convoys of humanitarian aid that only arrived after the international recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Sarajevo. of course. where. This was. in less than a year from now. after the start of aggression and after the embargo on the import of arms that could have equipped the legal institutions of the government of this young country. the Parliamentary Assembly of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. the rapes… All of this was happening at the heart of democratic Europe… And what was the response of the International Community at the brutal aggression on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s young democracy? Convoys of humanitarian aid. the Bihać enclave is also besieged. That was also the response of the democratic international community to the “crisis in Yugoslavia”—as the “civilized” Europe and the World called the slaughter they were witnessing. it was the embargo on arming the defenders. There are several enclaves in Eastern Bosnia which are besieged. had amassed a military capability worthy of a third military force in Europe. the capital. In fact. in the end. at 35 . the massacres. passed a Law on Ownership Transformation.Zlatan Begić War. in the midst of war. For example. As is well known. Everyone was waiting for the response of the International Community to these medieval-type sieges of cities. The embargo. the starvation. the siege. of course. applied to all of the warring parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina—a decision which did not worry the generals in Belgrade. Peace and the Protests War The year is 1994… War is raging throughout the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina with. the mass executions and the organisation of systematic rape. one of which is Srebrenica. which. medical supplies and other life necessities reaching the citizens. Therefore. which dictated the structure of state institutions). refers to the privatisation.the time when the conflict was at its fiercest. when the public focus was directed simply towards survival. 36 . the legal institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina in its capital city.. where. i. and what is now considered as the biggest robbery ever witnessed in this territory. the passing of this law went completely unnoticed. only a few months later. That is how the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina were deceived for the second time—only this time by the institutions of the state. cast off by society. they were all sent off. there would be genocide in Srebrenica. the state would issue shares— the mechanism used to privatise the companies. the means of production were then owned by the state in the shape of its institutions—institutions that were structured along the logic of political parties. they had to face the fact that the socially-owned property they worked for decades to create. which was transferred out of the workers/citizens hands and placed into the hands of the state. By passing this law. after the war ended. Why is this law. and. so important? Because this law represented the preparation for what was to follow after the war ended. they were astonished when. which was conducted after the war. but the preparation for its implementation was carried out during the fiercest warfare. now belonged to someone else. After that. that is. Straight from the factory gates. the legalisation of privatisation represented the final act of a highly planned process. it was then at the disposal of its institutions. at the time when areas under the protection of the UN were suffering daily attacks. which they had defended with their own lives for a full four years. so. which was carried out according to the following model: public-owned property (simply put. ultimately to be followed by the further privatisation of state-owned property into private property. while the workers of numerous companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina had defended their country on the front lines. Simply put. Sarajevo. Bosnia and Herzegovina. some later. when the remaining patches of territory under the control of legal institutions of the young Bosnia and Herzegovina could barely be defended.e. conducted the transfer and legal transformation of all public-owned property into stateowned property. after which the majority of these companies were ruined. Under such circumstances. some sooner. the property of the workers/citizens) was turned into state property (as the property of the state. to the bureaus for the unemployed. since there was first mention of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the history books. which was passed during a period of all-out war. This assertion of course. composed of all the means of production. then. And. defended their state. the party elites. by the new private owners. they granted themselves the legal right to dispose of an enormous amount of property. represented by the Office of the High Representative. In the early stages. the domestic masters of life and death. but to fit the needs and desires of individuals within the parties. still preformed its obligations as set by the General Framework Agreement for Peace. The process begins thus: very subtly. concealed behind various piecemeal legal changes and seemingly unimportant governmental decisions. So. over years. all facilitated through a developed network of party sympathisers within the institutions of government. the period from 1995 until today can be referred to as a period of peace.” Powerful party elites control absolutely everything. this process progressed subtly and slowly. But. I say that the process was subtle and slow in the beginning. which are under complete control of various party elites. carefully and yet again. the public media. are adapting themselves to fit themselves into this newly established constitutional structure of the country. each canton in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina finds itself led by a few local powerful individuals. goes on to remodel all public institutions in its own image. in the organizational sense. natural resources. That was back in the day when the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. which then. as well as a cause to marginalise those who dare to think for themselves. in such a context.Peace If peace is defined as the absence of war. However. or replacements and bans on engaging in public affairs. the Office of the High Representative chose not involve itself in the privatisation thievery which was being conducted by these “infiltrated” domestic institutions. and all other resources of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However. the breath-taking asset-stripping of the industrial wealth of the country is being carried out. under the 37 . a network of obsequious subjects is developed in public institutions. At that same time. then. all organised through the party-family axis. Individuals’ own abilities and their critical thinking gradually becomes an antireference for anything. The situation is the same at the Entity level.” by using the devious party machineries that have developed. Often. We are witnesses to the abhorrent erosion of industrial. little else can be considered as providing conditions worthy of the description “peace. leading to the destruction of thousands of prospective enterprises and the creation of mass unemployment and dispossession. That is how a party-family infrastructure was slowly built. various other interventions by the Office of the High Representative enabled the functioning of legal state. wrapped up in the justification that “it is all perfectly legal!” The adjustments to the Law were no longer undertaken to fit the needs of certain parties or policies. apart from the absence of war. begin to enforce the punitive isolation of citizens who refuse to toe the party-family line. using the power of the aforementioned Law. Fearing the possible sanctions. Intra-party structures. who rule over the lives and deaths of the disempowered citizens “from the shadows. since the Council is not a contracting party to this agreement. More specifically. all the while there is a deliberate ignoring of the fact that. instead of acting as the guarantor of the agreement’s implementation.” developed extensive party-family networks within public institutions and companies. After such positioning of the International Community in 2006. which is the essence of his position.claim that “it is all perfectly legal. In doing so. only Bosnia and Herzegovina. the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. However. However. The parties to this agreement are Bosnia and Herzegovina. the local powerful political figures began to impudently and publicly do the things they had once done subtly and gradually. to violate the terms of the Agreement. the International Community was the first. What is particularly hypocritical is the justification given for such an unlawful decision: where it was stated that the Bonn Powers. and the responsibilities of the Office of the High Representative for Peace. In this particular case. the Republic of Croatia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i. In this way. the High Representative is the sole and final authority regarding the interpretation and implementation of the General Framework Agreement for Peace. in the legal sense. Thus. patiently awaiting the moment of absolute freedom. a crucial moment happens: the Peace Implementation Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Office of the High Representative make a decision that they will no longer execute their obligations as laid down in the General Framework Agreement for Peace. by its legally binding nature. was and is an international contract that is bound by the regulations and provisions of the Vienna Convention regarding the Law on International Contracting. Finally they had arrived at their 38 . the Republic of Serbia). in essence to repeal one of its Annexes (in this case Annex 10). let alone be responsible for making any decisions.e. formally and unequivocally. violated the international law assuming the role of a party to this agreement. Annex 10 of the General Framework Agreement for Peace defines the rights. the obligations. In accordance with the provisions of the Vienna Convention and international law. represents the necessary definition of the form through which the High Representative is to carry out the obligations defined by the General Framework Agreement for Peace. by deciding. in fact. which define how the High Representative and his office in Bosnia and Herzegovina is to perform its obligations. which define the position of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) are not a part of the Agreement either. the International Community rode roughshod over the fact that the General Framework Agreement for Peace. if we were to abide by this logic. can repeal one or more Annexes of the Agreement—not the Peace Implementation Council. Contrary to this. And then. only the contracting parties are authorized subsequently to change an agreement they made. then the PIC should not exist either. the provisions. Croatia and Serbia. The document on the so-called Bonn Powers. are not part of the General Framework Agreement for Peace. Apart from the fact that a significant amount of property has been carved up between them. without fear of sanctions or dismissals. in such a way that the key issues are not debated and decided on within those institutions. most often in pubs—five. Far from the public eye. as set forth by the public employment vacancy documentation. This model includes the disempowering public institutions. On the contrary. There are numerous cases when e. along with their failure to execute the obligations from the General Framework Agreement for Peace. transparent competition. the representatives of the international community imposed a model. which contributes to the ruin of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s institutional system. With all this. Thus. This is all being indolently observed by the International Community. We see the government giving grants from public funds to private firms run by the spouses of ministers who work in that same government. in the presence of and under the supervision of the grandees of European and world democrats. the policy of “not meddling” has actually meant a policy of violating the General Framework Agreement for Peace and international law. arrogance becomes the basic principle in communication with citizens. the main role of the official institutional system of Bosnia and Herzegovina is that of an automaton. the corruption and criminalization of system institutions is deepening. where the elected officials should only formally raise their hands for what their leaders agreed on during private parties. which implies that the key decisions are to be negotiated with the leaders of the strongest political parties. simply according to party merit or family affiliation. but cutting straight to making appointments without any public. according to their family or party affiliations. It created the conditions for the negotiation of everything by an inner circle of “leaders. they have embarked on finishing the project of creating a state in their image and driven by their ideological stance. So.moment of absolute freedom. and a complete system of party-family structure is fully embedded. they also promote a model of strong and powerful leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina. envoys and other senior public officials appointing their closest relatives as directors of public companies. or employing immediate family members in public institutions and companies. a sports officer in the Cultural Correctional Institution should be a mining and geology engineer! The arrogance finally goes as far as not advertising the employment vacancies publicly at all. how to implement the decisions of the constitutional court in Bosnia and Herzegovina. the preconditions. This has led to 39 . outlines that the applicant for the position of.g. Every day we see prime ministers. six or seven people discuss and decide on issues that relate to all citizens. and. In the first place. assembly presidents. Such actions by the International Community have had several significant consequences for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Employment vacancies in public bodies are being advertised without any objective criteria so that it is clear predetermined candidates are being lined up for the posts.” Their decisions have included both if and then if so. for example. 80 outstanding verdicts, which, having been taken by the constitutional courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, have never been implemented. This is about failure to implement verdicts and judgments, which found that there had been numerous violations of the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Entities’ Constitutions, and thus violations of the General Framework Agreement for Peace as well. If the implementation of just one of the most significant of these verdicts had been enacted when it was made—i.e. several years ago—e.g. the one concerning Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state property, then Bosnia and Herzegovina, today, would be a member of NATO. This situation illustrates the importance of implementing these verdicts. Although failure to implement court verdicts, especially those of the constitutional courts, is deemed a criminal offense under the law in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its domestic judicial institutions have not once initiated a single prosecution against the persons responsible for this failure. However, in addition to the responsibility of the domestic holders of public functions, there is also clear legal responsibility for the current state of affairs in this country that lies at the door of the Office of the High Representative. Within the deadline stipulated by the Constitutional Court for the implementation of verdicts, which note violations of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitution, and the General Framework Agreement for Peace, the duty of the High Representative is also proscribed—which is political in nature. Such duty can be exercised through official discussions, negotiations, warnings and other appropriate measures. However, upon the expiration of the deadline, the duty upon the Office of the High Representative increases, transforming from a “political” into a “legal” duty. Simply put, after any deadline which is set forth by the Constitutional Court, the High Representative is legally obliged to ensure the implementation of the Constitutional Court’s decisions through his own decisions, otherwise this means that the General Framework Agreement for Peace is being violated. This is meant to eliminate the emergence of an unconstitutional state. This right and this duty stem from Annex 10 of the General Framework Agreement for Peace, since, as stipulated therein, the High Representative is the final authority who should ensure its implementation. By pushing this idea and practice of strong leaders, the international community has placed individuals above the citizenry of the country, and by disregarding its obligations; the Office of the High Representative has placed the very same individuals above the law and the Constitution. In such a context, one can hear statements made by one of the political “leaders,” who concluded that the Constitutional Court makes unconstitutional verdicts. All of this has led to a rapid disruption of the principles of the rule of law and of the mores and norms of a legal and constitutional state, without which a democratic state cannot function. The strong-leaders approach has caused citizens no longer to trust the system’s institutions and has led to great electoral apathy which suits very well some of the existing party elites. 40 After the protests that took place in February 2014, a series of meetings between the protest and plenum participants with representatives of the International Community were held, including almost all ambassadors or representatives from embassies. At these meetings, I personally warned about the violation of the General Framework Agreement for Peace by the International Community, and explained in detail, from a legal standpoint, the implications of such violation. What took me aback was that the senior officials of these foreign embassies seemed to be completely surprised to experience Bosnia and Herzegovina’s lawyers taking a legal approach concerning the General Framework Agreement for Peace and the obligations on the International Community through the Office of the High Representative, according to the very terms of that agreement. This was a new approach for the overwhelming majority of those present. In connection with what I have outlined above, I remember the reaction of a Slovak Embassy official in particular. There was an all-day meeting with ambassadors and representatives from 16 Embassies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was held at the residence of the Belgian Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The officials gathered to deprecate the lack of responsibility being taken by domestic political leaders and stressed their inability to sanction them. After I elaborated on the rights, obligations and responsibilities of the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina enshrined in the General Framework Agreement for Peace and understood from the standpoint of international legislation, one younger diplomat, a Slovak embassy representative, with a smug smile, said something like this to me: “When I studied Law, the first thing that I learned was that, where international law is concerned, there are no sanctions that are effective against those who do not comply with their international legal obligations.” I then asked him: “Then what is the difference between the local political leaders, about whose irresponsibility we have been talking for the entire day, and you, as leaders within the international community? Clearly, there are no effective sanctions against either of you for your failure to complete each of your obligations.” That’s when I realized that the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been deceived for a third time. The Protests The development and the consequences of the demonstrations are, more or less, well known. However, what we do need to shed light upon is the phenomenon and the tactics of this corrupted political structure as it has impacted on the criminalization of the protests and protesters. On the very first day of the demonstrations, the regime’s puppet-media published information that accused the demonstrators of mounting campaigns of robbery, as well as reports that 12 kilograms of drugs had been found among the protesters in 41 Sarajevo. The public and private regime puppet-media were filled with frightened political “leaders” who upheld the truth of this misinformation and assisted in its spread. In doing so, these public officials, running around like headless chickens, often contradicted one another. For example, while a member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bakir Izetbegović, was stating one piece of misinformation through one media outlet, e.g. that 12 kilograms of drugs had been found among the protestors, a second media outlet covered a report from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Sarajevo Canton, which stated that, as a result of police action against drug traffickers, the 12 kilograms of drugs had actually been found in a completely different part of town, and that it had nothing to do with the demonstrations. It was absolutely surreal to stand in front of an undamaged Omega shopping centre in Tuzla, and, at the same time, read statements on the internet, issued by politicians and reports made by the regime’s puppet-media claiming that that very same shopping centre had been robbed by crazed hordes of protesters. During the past couple of days a report made by North Korean state television has been in circulation, which states that this country’s football team is a step away from the World Cup finals, although the North Korean team has not actually made it into the competition! Watching this report took me back a couple months, and made me feel as perplexed as that morning in February 2014 when I stood outside the Omega shopping centre and read the statements about it having being stripped and trashed by the protestors. There is the case of the director of the Federal police administration, whom one journalist referred to, on air, as “the General of police.” That “General” had spent days visiting the media and claiming that the protesters were in fact terrorists; that a coup d’état was in progress and similar such nonsense. The “General” seemed to have forgotten that he is the head of police under whose auspices a privatization process that has looted all public assets has been carried out, and that that this same police force, along with the judiciary, has failed entirely to react in an adequate way. The “General” seemed to have forgotten that that police, including the judiciary, has spent years neglecting the majority of cases of apparent corruption and serious crime. Yet, ultimately, the “General” was not ashamed to appear in front of cameras wearing the uniform of such a police force. Also, it is interesting to note that after the downfall of the Government in Tuzla on 7 February, there was no functional government whatsoever for nearly two weeks. State services, including the police, did not function at all. What is even more interesting is that, during this period, not one criminal offence took place. This speaks volumes about the discipline of protests and even more about the protesters, which the regime puppet-media so badly wanted to depict as hooligans. While I write this, the “independent” judiciary of Bosnia and Herzegovina is working hard to imprison demonstrators, with the aim of intimidat- 42 we must rejoice in the fact that the citizens have not yet been cheated for a fourth time. for corruption or serious crime. and numerous other egregious failures.” After the protests It remains to be seen. corruption and servicing of the interest of the criminalized political elites and the structures they have built. This claim is supported by the miserable results of the work of judicial institutions. However. but also the fact that no one has been prosecuted for the looting that has accompanied privatization. 43 . It is not “independent” in anything else. Fool me twice—good for you. hypocritically. they defend themselves on this issue by asserting the so-called “independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s judiciary. Fool me three times—shame on me. That judiciary functions as a “stick” in the hands of the political elites. and is no different from other political structures in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The tendency for voluntary consent to multiple frauds is so characteristic of Bosnians and Herzegovinians that there is an old saying in our country which goes like this: “Fool me once—shame on you.” The judiciary in Bosnia and Herzegovina is indeed “independent”—“independent” of any connection to legality and completely untouchable in its idleness. There is a significant responsibility on the part of the International Community in this aspect as well.ing the population and discouraging them and others from participating in future protests. but. That judiciary is part of the same system. . Out of rage and despair. the citizens. How do I live? I live with my eighty-five-year old mother. Imagine how many of us are in the streets now. Local and international politicians. Why now? Because people took to the streets. the unemployed. Tuzla The protests The protests that started in Bosnia and Herzegovina in February 2014 continue. former worker in Polihem company. common goods and capital in the blood of war and genocide. have exhausted the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina for almost twenty-two years. forced to give bribes for basic services. The cases of theft through corrupt privatization have been deliberately sidelined for fifteen years.Damir Arsenijević Protests and Plenum: The Struggle for the Commons You don’t have to wonder and ask. as it is. People are the strongest. underpinned. Their message is clear—the time of the unquestioned hegemony of the ethno-nationalist elites. is over. many left with no choice but to rummage through dustbins to survive. which is 150 Euros a month. “why did it happen in Tuzla?” Tuzla was probably one of the strongest industrial places in former Yugoslavia and now everything is destroyed. who stole the country’s resources. The prosecutor’s office should hear us. Mensud Grebović. nobody can beat people. all came together to oppose this privatized slavery. We survive on her pension. After fifteen years they now think of forming a committee that will allegedly speed up the review of illegal privatizations. pensioners. have finally stood up and are demanding an end to the everyday terror of ethnic privatized slavery. students and academics. They proved in practice that solidarity is still operative as a way of materializing and thinking equality. I haven’t worked since the end of the war. by the internationally imposed multiculturalist apartheid that “brings” peace and democracy to Bosnia and Herzegovina. people refused to occupy the identitarian category to which they have been neatly assigned for over two decades. At the threshold of hunger and despair. That is why we fear no one. youth. And you think this is all? The employer hasn’t paid my national insurance contributions and I worked for twenty-seven years. who has three heart stents and I have to give her insulin every day. The image of the protest is heterogeneous: the disenfranchised workers. Pro45 . who in concert have maintained and allowed the parasitisation of the unwieldy and nepotistic ethnic bureaucratic structures. war veterans. the newly-elected ethnic elites mobilised the working class to carry out the final stage of the counter-revolution. This final 1990s stage was the war against Yugoslavia and the attempt to eradicate all anti-fascist struggle. Against the fetish of difference and reification of ethnicity—enforced by the alliance of ethnic oligarchs and the members of the so-called “International Community”—the people in the protests insisted on commonality and joint demands for justice for all.” the street reminds us that the ultimate barricade is the human body and that this body stops the flow of everyday terror. at the extreme point of genocide. the ethnic elites amassed huge wealth and became oligarchies. The displacement of the hitherto imposed social classifications by these joint demands took place in the street and this is why the street functions as the metonym of the protests. All this violence seems to have served one double-stranded purpose: for ethnic oli- 46 . and thousands of missing persons. And the metonym of the terror is the continuation of corrupt privatization. These graves are the foundations for the ethnic manipulation of fear and grief. over a million refugees and displaced persons. These ethnic elites distributed the weapons among the workers to kill one another in the war. grief is manipulated in such a way that it is used to promote the view that there is no alternative other than the ethnic reality. International and local bureaucracies administer post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina through the ideology of “reconciliation. as opposed to the privatization of death from which the ethnic oligarchies still extract capital. it was workers who buried the bodies in mass graves. the street shows that you may be destitute. In the war. commemorations of loss in public spaces are cast along ethnic lines and they are predicated on the creation of “ethnic” victims. but you are not alone. Why the street? The street enables the emergence of the previously censored speech of commonality and proves as a lie that we live parallel lives that never intersect.” which imposes an “ethnic” logic on the loss resulting from the war and genocide. the street brings us all together as “bodies in movement. It was the recognition of the workers’ demands as a universal demand that brought the street together. In the 1992–1995 war. whose remains are scattered around the country and buried in as yet unknown locations. The effects of the ideology of reconciliation are the following: loss resulting from the war and genocide is further mythologised in favour of the ethnic oligarchies. which now continue to profit from the mass graves—both the discovered and the clandestine ones. and then. And the results of this war? Hundreds of thousands of dead. It tears apart the spatial hierarchies. In the ideology of reconciliation.tests at the same time brought together these various groups and brought down these identitarian walls. which had started immediately following WWII through the bureaucratisation of Yugoslavia. This unity makes tangible in everyday life in Bosnia and Herzegovina that this is the way to stand up against privatization. The street stands for the recuperation of public space in the interests of the living. garchies force capitalism on Yugoslavia and.” What the protests “fired back” against—what they literally set on fire—are the sites from which the ethnic politics enacted its brutalising corruption: through everyday bribes. as organe irréel. threats. enacts its refusal to be bribed. which spaces have got smaller and smaller. the Bureaucrat. through which collective decisions and demands can be made and action taken. beyond guarantees of 1 2 I discussed this previously when analysing the corrupt privatisation of ethnic remains from genocide through the strategic collaboration of: forensic science.”2 The plenum Plenums are public gatherings. “Gendering the Bone: The Politics of Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 47 .” Journal for Cultural Research. in its demand for and its insistence on the politics of equality for all. The reduction of public space and the silencing of public language that can speak of equality have been further deepened by the NGO compradors. with identity politics. The etymology of corrupt is most telling here: not just as “to bribe. and intimidations. continues the logic of the politics of ethnic death and the law of the mass grave. Corrupt privatisation. and the Priest. 15 (2011) 2. life that. See Marx’s discussion of estranged labour in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. These were the sites from which the police were ordered to attack the protesters. to become millionaires. through their programmes and projects obsessed. Setting these sites on fire symbolically and creatively made space for a new type of politics to emerge: rescuing the idea and the practice of politics itself from the corruption of the authoritarian accumulation of capital. it continues the dismemberment of solidarity and seeks to destroy even the last lingering traces of commonality that resisted and survived the war. as life that refuses to be corrupted and bought off in the face of a politics that aims to desensitise such life in relation to the workings and effects of the terror of the corrupt privatization.1 It is a life that is not individuated. open to any citizen. The street recovers and brings together what I call unbribable life. In the protests. is also a wartime reminder not to acquiesce to helplessness but “to fire back when fired upon. and religious ritual—an uncouth alliance between the Scientist.“altogether” + rumpere “to break”. multiculturalist post-conflict management. unbribable life tears down the division that is produced by the imperative of corrupt privatization: “what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.” but as cor. that comes together through the protests against the corrupt privatization. using brute force. Fighting corrupt privatisation. personally. pp. Unbribable life can also be talked about through Lacan’s notion of lamella. in all its manifestations. hand in hand with that. The terrorising post-war “reconstruction” forced people to accept helplessness and escape into their private spaces. such as the cantonal governmental buildings in Bosnia and Herzegovina. as they are. 193–205. including when it means burning its sites. See Damir Arsenijević. with its politics of reconciliation. insur- 48 . who. The plenum is a public space where. the plenum enacts an emancipatory politics that confronts authorities with demands for a cessation of all forms of violence.” These local NGO compradors further promote the neoliberal framework of the rule of law by assuming the proscribed idiotic position: as mere rapporteurs and monitors of violence.” to have a say about the matters that concern them in everyday life. To end impunity means that nobody can be immune from prosecution. through calls for a different kind of justice. as the form of self-organisation and the method of work. The Plenum is now under attack. arrest. in which citizens come together to articulate demands. failed to end impunity by disregarding financial crimes. The first have everything to lose: in over twenty-two years of killing and stealing. who vilify the Plenums’ demands for openness. whose activities predominantly insist on resignation to the status quo and the upholding of the ideological stance that “there is no alternative. in which decisions about the commons are made without prohibitions on speech and without leadership. in which activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina was confined to a range of so-called development projects. direct. working to strengthen the capacities of the “weak” ethnic bureaucracies. “transition to democracy. This is the ethics of the plenum. the plenum is a setting for speech beyond prohibition and censorship. First and foremost.000 local NGOs. The latter also have everything to lose: international organisations have given credibility to ethnic oligarchs by negotiating a range of deals with them for over two decades—from imposing censorship on talk about war-time atrocities to maintaining ethnic segregation in schools. The threat of protests legitimises the plenum. and poverty. International and local actors. The Plenum. To end impunity means to interrupt the international and local flows of capital that were amassed in the war and genocide.leadership. is a way out of corruption. Throughout the same time. This type of setting is crucial to fight corrupt privatization and the fear it instils when it comes to making decisions about the commons. The plenum model of work creates a different public language by enabling people. the eighty-five wealthiest oligarchs in Bosnia and Herzegovina are collectively worth $9 billion. to locate and arrest war criminals. People now recognize that the open and transparent model of plenum work. is underpinned by the action of the protests. The plenum puts an end to this idiotic position. and transparent democracy in practice. as a result of war. they have encouraged the creation of over 10. and prosecute war criminals. despite their calls and concrete activities to locate. who have been stunned by the outstanding class solidarity expressed in the plenums. In doing so. hopelessness. They are open. transparency and non-corruption. have withdrawn from public life and the so-called. The attack comes from all quarters: from the corrupt and complacent ethnic oligarchies and their media. demands for equality are spoken. to the incredulous and hedging local NGO compradors and various international actors. 3 Raymond Williams wrote extensively on this subject. The protests and plenums created.” Since the end of the war in 1995. For over twenty-two years. moving and practicing that possibility—because this is our only chance of staying alive. servicing those wars. to face the losses and start counting the gains from the war. mentally and physically abused women. in which speaking and acting is only permissible if they embrace the status of victims.” that they live in a “black hole”. that they face a shapeless future and the best they can hope for is to “get by. they are the ways in which to keep the body-politic functioning. from off the backs and bodies of whom the ethnic elites can steal the commons and thus. Emancipatory politics is not mere reporting on violence against freedom.3 For over twenty-two years. I remind myself that the protests and the plenum are one and the same thing. Ours is life that has been brutalized by the corrupt privatization of public companies. instead of mourning the horrific losses. citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina who survived the war were told that they are a “charity case. a chance for Bosnia and Herzegovina to move from melancholia to mourning: that is. It does not settle for the crumbs swept from the table of the international donors and ethnic oligarchs.ing our seriousness with the threat of mass protests. to acquiesce to an imposed censorship. And it is this life—unbribable life—that in agony and pain gives up on mistrust and works hard to produce and practice a different possibility now.” and be grateful if their children are offered a chance to work on American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the life from which we have now to recuperate—to create anew more humane and social ties that offer all of us hopeful. citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been forced. ethnic oligarchs have raped and killed. life that knows that its only certainty is that it can die in solitude and hunger. 49 . men and children alike in the carnage that was heralded as “transition into democracy. How do I know this? I am part of this life and every day. Emancipatory politics harnesses all the courage we have to materialize hope against the predominant insistence on making impossibility convincing. Ours is life that has survived war and genocide. in public space. by local and international actors alike. and not a resigned future. for the first time.” “put up with it. life that only dreams of fleeing this country. amass their obscene fortunes. has survived the feeling of deep mistrust whilst expecting some salvation. . it is important to note the difficulties activists are facing throughout the Balkans. However. and spread to other cities in February. creating an artificial crisis that allows both them and their cronies to plunder with impunity. crimes against humanity. of police brutality. I am of the opinion that for the past few years we have been wit- 51 . We are talking about genocide. they are materially successful. It is now clear to everyone that the political “elites” are using nationalism for their own personal gain. The expectation was that plenums were to become a significant. the scare tactics. the weight of expectation and the inability to defend against a powerful media onslaught. that is. Under the enormous weight of expectation though. that’s all. the surprising speed of events— the scale of the protests. everyone paid attention and everyone had expectations. then local and international elites scream about the rule of law. when the downtrodden respond against institutionalized violence with violence. The worker protests that started in Tuzla. to force a twenty year old ethnocracy to change. colossal destruction and a General Framework Agreement for Peace that nobody is happy with. However. were seen as that opportunity. popular public opinion has been largely critical of plenums and their inability to maintain pressure and mobilize. a time for corrupt politicians to finally reap what they have sown. continuing the conflict through other. Any analysis of social movements and activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina must be addressed from a post-conflict.Emir Hodžić Jer me se tiče—Because it Concerns Me Many observers have written about the February protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the subsequent emergence of people’s plenums. to cynical dismissals coming from socialites and other “elites. Opinions ranged from delirious revelations that the revolution is upon us. We are talking about a country that has never truly recovered from the bloody war of the nineties. more covert means. deplore all forms of violence. War criminals are presented as heroes. and war profiteering thugs have put on suits and drive Audis. or cold-peace perspective. catalysing political factor in a corrupt system run by oligarchs—simply. has left many activists burned out and losing the propaganda war.” But regardless of ideological standpoint. Having said that. ethnic cleansing. While the people involved in organizing plenums across Bosnia and Herzegovina have made many mistakes. and from a refined perspective. there was a general feeling of acceptance that protests simply don’t work in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “who are you protecting?!” It reminded me of an identical scene during Occupy Wall St in New York. and inform people of the importance of standing in solidarity with our brothers and sister in Tuzla. Mostly familiar faces. the authority that has caused them such hardship over the years.” When we returned the following day. when protestors clashed with police and broke into the government building in Tuzla on the 5 February. … When workers of five of Tuzla’s factories took to the streets on the 4 February 2014. we didn’t really know what to expect and we were prepared for a low turnout. Sarajevo police answered in the same way. when demonstrators asked the police the exact same thing and the NYPD answered with batons. thieves!” By the 7 February protests had begun to spread throughout much of the country. and they took personal risks in expressing their desperation. “Demonstrators clashed with police. Bosnia has seen its fair share of localised worker protests in recent years. Describing the general mood of the gathered citizens as “angry” would be an understatement. That evening. many of them disregarded or ending up in the margins of leading newspapers. 6 February. But we were pleased to be proven wrong. Needless to say. After the watering down of the JMBG1 protests last year. In Sarajevo there were around 3000 people in front of the Cantonal government building. there were already a few hundred people standing in front of the government building. the media took notice. most people didn’t have high expectations. 1 52 JMBG—Personal ID number. “Mass protests in Sarajevo.nessing a social movement in its inception and the February protests were just the spark needed for maturity. However.” Upon hearing about the events taking place in Tuzla. Protests started over the inability of politicians to agree on personal ID number amendments. a local Sarajevo news portal published the sarcastic headline. a certain melancholy infected most activists. As in Tuzla the previous day. We had only two hours to organize a call to action via social media. people screamed out “thieves. Riot police made a cordon in front of the building while enraged people shouted at them. mainly in the Federation. nor tolerate. several friends and I agreed to organize a solidarity protest in front of the Cantonal government building in Sarajevo. . hardly anyone paid any attention. As the online headlines said. People in Tuzla decided that they were no longer going to recognize. Late in the afternoon on 5 February there were approximately thirty of us protesting outside the Cantonal building. some were even unhappy to see each other at the protest again. During the game of cat and mouse. beating everyone in their way. and many other towns. Mostly young demonstrators. I foolishly believed that I wouldn’t be hit while taking photos with my DSLR. one of the senior officers came into the room and threw the pho- 53 . It seemed I was in the middle of a counter attack. When he arrived there. incensed by their fight with the police. Behind them a number of demonstrators rushed at the cantonal building and smashing their way in through the main door. We received reports that several people were arrested the previous night. However not all journalists were as easily intimidated. While many citizens did indeed support the protests and are well aware of the corruption and criminal elements of the government. terrorism and other inaccurate portrayals of socially and economically disadvantaged demonstrators. Bihać. Eventually. but Mostar. Hundreds of demonstrators charged back at the police lines. The police were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people ready for a fight—people who threw stones and charged at these symbols of authority. there are those who are easily frightened by such reports of hooliganism. violence. projected their anger onto the government building. He was visibly shaken and watchful. Most of the mainstream media was quick to report on hooliganism. I saw a young girl near the flaming entrance write with spray paint. violence and paid gangs.All of a sudden riot police charged the demonstrators. confusing and inaccurate broadcasts. On 8 February in Sarajevo. angry and confused people on the streets. there was a point at which the police lines were in disarray and they had retreated back to the park between the Presidency and cantonal government buildings. while we were protesting in front of the burned out Presidency building. Misinformation and fears of further arrests spread quickly. As the building started to burn. On the eve of the 8th of February. He told me how he was invited into the police station to photograph the items that had been confiscated from the homes of arrested protestors. we had thousands of determined. Zenica. As a result of such conflicting. a building that represented the power structure. he had been taken through a number of rooms and was told to wait in one of them. “Who sows hunger.” … What started in Tuzla engulfed not only Sarajevo. one of the journalists who had been invited by the police to see the “evidence” came over to me. many citizens were reluctant publicly to join the protests. Reports were coming in that the police were beating up and intimidating people indiscriminately in the evening hours. Then I noticed that the police were now running in the opposite direction. Many media outlets published unchecked police reports of large amounts of illegal drugs being confiscated from those arrested. reaps fury. ” Nonetheless. he had printed photos thrown at him. it had been agreed to organize the first plenum in Sarajevo.” The following day the police issued a disclaimer. When he showed me the photos. warning them that these protests were Bosniak and aspiring to destabilize Republika Srpska. all with the objective of making such a plenum possible. Somehow. “it is not a coincidence that the government buildings were attacked on territories defended by ARBiH”. a man. Following Tuzla’s example. . 2 54 ARBiH—Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Even the convicted war criminal. … The events that took place in Sarajevo on the 6. anger. Plenums were seen as the only viable way forward in articulating demands and fending off attacks. that there were posters printed warning citizens not to join the “Bosniak protests. people did protest in the RS. handguns. coup d’état and other types of insidious nonsense. as well as the police brutality and the media attacks. you were getting rich. In the Federation. claiming that the drugs allegedly seized from arrested demonstrators were in fact from a drugbust that was carried out nearby at about the same time as the protests were going on. and twelve kg of the drug “speed. amongst the madness. I understood why he had been so nervous and had decided not to publish them as requested. but instead of seeing and photographing the actual confiscated materials. people started working together. In the wake of the violent outburst of protestors. suspicion and disorganized synergy.tos of “evidence” on the table and said. Bosniak nationalist Bakir Izetbegovic said. described the situation in one sentence—“While we were shooting at each other. 7 and 8 February were a mixture of chaos. Milorad Dodik. “Publish these. The photos showed AK47’s. introducing new volunteers that had never worked together before. “If you protest. Basically.” He had been invited to photograph the evidence. attacks on democracy. Biljana Plavsic. panic.” So with politicians fostering ethnic tensions and most of the mainstream media reporting on hooliganism.Such was the paranoia of RS politicians that the protests would cross the border into the tranquil Serbian entity. went to the public and warned. a number of activists and academics met to figure out a way forward. The ruling oligarchs know that nationalism is their best defence. in his address to Dodik. told Serbian citizens not to protest. volunteers proceeded to find a location for the first citizens’ plenum. These protests and the emergence of citizens’ plenums were attacked precisely on that basis. you’re jeopardizing RS. knives. and during one of the war veterans’ protests in Banja Luka.2 While the leader of Republika Srpska entity. such alliances would have lost the support of large number of protesters. which for a brief time truly frightened some political leaders. should. Plenary sessions were run on a direct democracy principle. Despite external and internal pressures. 1979).. the constant attacks have forced volunteers and organizers into a position of perpetual damage control. At some point. Volunteers and all the plenum organizers throughout the country have made many mistakes. creative. but it turned out to be much more difficult than predicted to have productive sessions. 55 . due to distrust. trying to prevent plenums from becoming psychotherapy sessions for traumatized citizens. volatile setting. how. The animosity that was directed at the political elite soon turned inwards. therefore. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and how They Fail (New York: Random House Inc. they typically acted in ways that blunted or curbed the disruptive forces which lower-class people were sometimes able to mobilize. rights. applicable pressure. and so on. In that energetic. gave everyone a chance to participate equally. the plenums quickly lost their relevance. some of whom spoke publicly for the first time about their situation and concerns. paranoia. leadership and any noticeable “wins. Protest energy.3 wrote about the sudden rise of disruptive forces and how “Organizers not only failed to seize the opportunity presented by the rise of unrest. the general observation is that during most protests and movements.” Without the disruptive energy on the street. organizers opt out of escalating mass protests in favour of organizing a structure. hoping that it will grow in importance or power. or making strategic alliances with NGOs. democracy. infiltration and other similar disruptions.people self-organized due to the vast amount of mistrust held against politicians and political parties within the ethnocracy we live in. They believed in the importance of providing a space for people to voice their concerns and offer suggestions. There was no long-term strategy as such. so much energy was focused on running the plenums. gradually vanished off the streets due to a lack of direction. Traumatized. articulating demands and fighting off external and internal struggles. and the accusations of political infiltrations. However. The calls for social justice.” Excluding the why. however. Some analysts have also criticized the work of plenums for being apolitical. most of the people I know worked very long hours without rest and truly believed in what they were doing. that the legitimizing force—the number of people on the street was eventually lost. in an atmosphere of distrust of NGOs. without real. for instance. downtrodden and distrustful people were competing for dominance of ideas. a lot has been invested in articulating and legally formulating hundreds of demands. Piven and Cloward. have energized everyone involved in attempting to provide an alternative model to the institutional ethno-nationalist one. their position to make demands. Numerous volunteers worked under very stressful conditions for the plenums to be productive. 3 See Francis Fox Piven and Richard Colward. for not openly backing non-nationalist parties. Plenums. Organizing campaigns directly to challenge the status quo. isn’t an easy task. with a special focus on civil victims of war crimes. They have shown the importance of emphasizing the dangers on society if these issues are not tackled. Rather than focus only on fighting a small. had great hopes and expectations for the “n spring. . from a violent overthrow of the government.Plenums have ignited a way forward for future social movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina. in a country that adopted dehumanization as a necessary process in mobilization for atrocities. we must also pay attention to the importance of work on the ground–understanding peo4 56 JMST (Jer Me Se Tiče. Building a movement that attacks hostile divisions. corruption and the criticism of inattentiveness to the value of a human life by our political elite. and applying pressure in order to force a response from the opponent—in most cases that response will be something that can be exploited—is the way of rehumanizing our society. occupations of public spaces. But it is a task we must take if we are honest about our dedication to a fairer society. especially those over the border. but powerful elite. however. The humane mobilizing force resulted in rejection of nationalism. as well as challenging the dominant irreconcilable nationalist narratives. backdoor politics. What did occur. guerrilla actions. I understand that a lot of people. recently we have seen attempts at rehumanization. Grassroots initiatives and social movements that aren’t motivated by financial gain. For twenty years citizens have been living under leadership that had no interest in making peace with the past. to forming a new political party ready for the October elections.” Everyone had his or her own opinion on how and what “should” have happened. together with action to reform the corrupt unions. as is also the case across the globe. Because it concerns me)—Activist initiative fighting segregation and discrimination. or simply burning down the political elites’ homes. With elites defending their war criminals. Alternative grassroots movements will be an important aspect of the struggles that we need to continue in Bosnia and Herzegovina. are some of the ongoing engagements we need. or in some instances glorifying them. forms of civil disobedience—is a legitimate struggle for rehumanization. and at the same time explores alternative political models. Nationalists have succeeded in imposing a model that they promote as irreplaceable—that is fed by the divisive forces of capitalism and ethnicity. denying war crimes. was a change in the political discourse. or institutional employment. formations of free territories. that builds on solidarity. The disruptive power of such different approaches—through artistic interventions. Last year’s baby revolution is another example of a loud call from below. the proper political solidarity shown by the activists of Jer Me Se Tiče (Because it concerns me)4 paves the way for different approaches in addressing the recent past. Under such repression. None of which occurred. “everything. Sometimes events take place quickly.ple’s desires and fears and the way these. are fuel for change—for adjusting political discourse and the demands for reform. we also need to work on infrastructure and long-term commitment. affect the situation politically. as we saw this February. too. neither should we dismiss citizen plenums as alternative models of organising and acting. However.” 57 . To those asking “what’s in it for me?” I say. While we should not dismiss the significance of institutional forces applying pressure. street protests. Guerrilla actions. occupations of free territory. . apart from maintaining entity jurisdictions and related power and wealth distribution. let alone beyond. People were routinely assuming inaptitude. It is not only often assumed but repeatedly asserted by those in charge that nothing or. The on-going catastrophe of the so-called transition provides plenty of permanent excuses and finger-pointing for the mismanagement and destruction of national infrastructure. or a crisis group. the social contract seems to have been exposed as non-existent. Reproducing despair has thus become 59 . not much can be done about the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. but the entities and the power monopoly they allow must last forever. for the endemic graft and corruption. whose members continue to claim spurious ethnic kinship. the bully at the helm of Republika Srpska—were far more invested in maintaining control over their sorry domain than helping the people who lived inside it. they assumed. structural inability and casual indifference when it came to helping the citizenry the said government is supposed to be serving. Everything. Floods. The Bosnians have once again found themselves alone in their own country with a familiar-looking gang. or any sign of coordinated effort to relieve the suffering. for the absence of the very notion of a common civic future and a shared responsibility for it. will come and go. Neither was there money in the state budget for any kind of emergency relief—it had either been pilfered or the government had wagered on nothing ever going wrong. Because there is nothing that can be done. or trained units quickly mobilisable to help the people. It certainly didn’t help that neither during the spring flooding nor thereafter. one survivor said: “We’ll figure something out!” (Snaći ćemo se!) It is one thing when the government gives up on its citizens and their welfare. at best. nothing presumably needs to be done. was there a centralized emergency-management plan. Additionally. Answering a question about what he was going to do now that his life and property have been destroyed by the flood. it is quite another when the citizens forgo asking for basic things from their government. went and then continued to go wrong. likely both.Aleksandar Hemon Beyond the Hopelessness of Survival Nothing says more about the state of affairs in Bosnia and Herzegovina than the fact that after the cataclysmic flooding that hit the country in the past few months no one seriously expected much help and support from their government. the socalled leaders—and particularly Milorad Dodik. In Bosnia and Herzegovina. of course. conveniently ethnically drawn. the Bosnian and Herzegovinan population is so thoroughly discouraged by the constitutional paralysis. We.a policy. and not the people. the insistence on maintaining “entity competences” (entiteske kompetencije). makes more sense than ever. Programmatic despair is further reinforced by a presumption of the democratic rulers’ ruthless selfishness and certainty that what little wealth in Bosnia and Herzegovina is left will be redistributed along the well-known pyramidal lines of political loyalties. the political elites don’t bother to submit even unrealistic promises of a better future. everyone is helpless before the consequences of the catastrophes—the original one the war. the Bosnian political elites have managed to convince the foreigners (EU. guaranteeing that the sick would not escape to contaminate Europe’s bright and/or complicated future. a demand for strict application to the Dayton-agreed division of domains. Brimming with confidence in their inability to change anything substantially. which are. a kind of hospice care for the moribund infrastructure and those who depend on it because they have no place to go. Hopelessness is hence the true underpinning all party platforms. improved chances of individual and collective survival and. so exhausted by the ab- 60 . US. The greatest damage inflicted upon Bosnia and Herzegovina by the gang that governs it is therefore the systematic elimination of a common vision for a better future. The notion of helplessness has been reproduced in a two-fold manner: on the one hand. which appears manageable simply because we’ve managed to survive so far. Their election platforms offer. it is brazenly used as a means to buy votes for the fall elections—aid is distributed according to the needs of the ruling parties and entity competences. As long as no one can imagine a better country. the only consistent political program the parties in power share or ever manage to offer. Now that some relief money has arrived from abroad. disrupting our already well-practiced figuring out. on the other hand. the only options are imagining a worse one. After all this time. in order of indifference) that there is no one else who could manage the survival and/or hospice. they say. NGOs. at worst. the most recent one the floods—which exceed our abilities so much that all we could truly hope for is mere survival. the people (defined as/divided into three “constitutive” ethnic units) are frightened into thinking they would be helpless without the experienced leadership of the elites. at best. must be realistic: the disruption of the system would endanger our very survival. In that light. Fully dedicated to the extinction of any ideas as to how such a future might be achieved. as we know. the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are expected not to interfere with the actual way the system works while figuring out how to attempt living a dignified life. for which “ethnic” tensions and hostilities are ever useful. Forever in a kind of holding pattern. or accepting the status quo. citizens could hope that out of the slime pond of Bosnian politics a new. Elections relegetimise actual disenfranchisement. exposing along the way the fact that they didn’t do what they should have done. then more money or training or pressure from the foreigners would effect some kind of change. A consensus seems to have been established all across the political smorgasbord: if the country is eventually going to tank than it is not unreasonable to grab what can be grabbed before the boat is to be jumped. over and over again. While the Americans and EU believed—and. commonly coupled with obedience to the so-called leaders. If that were the case. If that were the case. And they’re certainly willing to keep it comatose so as to be able to watch it die in perpetuity. Yet one must not make the mistake of thinking that the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a natural consequence of political and/or managerial incompetence and mishandling. The only common future they can imagine is the one in which the state is about to die. political and business elites more than mutually indistinguishable—they merged into one happy realm. limited competence and absence of imagination are cherished political assets. It is a political agenda unto itself. the upside of the situation being that its assets are to be shared by the elected few who have long taken up the seats at its deathbed. while graft and corruption are tools of social control. The redistribution of scarce wealth under the guise of slapdash transitional privatisation made criminal. civil society by the few NGO idealists who believe in the local version of democracy would bear some visible fruit. evolved organism might emerge. If anyone is entitled to the spoils of the catastrophe. equipped with new eyes and an ability to transcend the divisions and constitutional paralysis and unite the populace in pursuit of the common civic project called Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hence hopelessness in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not merely a consequence of the war and difficult transition. that they’re still not doing it and that there is no reason whatsoever to believe they would ever actually get around to doing it. What the political elites perpetuate could be well called the Great Dayton Ruse. it is those who worked so hard to maintain it. incredibly. where neither ethnic differences nor law matter one bit.sence of action and change that elections are routinely reduced to choosing from the lists headed by the same cast of characters. the results of a combination of instinctive and malignant political intelligence on the part of Bosnian politicians. still believe— that the General Framework Agreement for Peace and the Constitution were 61 . restore hopelessness by ensuring identical outcomes. For the same reason. The common vision they share is of a state that is constantly and constitutionally blocking its own functioning. If that were the case. The sinking-ship platform and the related incompetence are systemic and deliberate. since any possibility of change undermines those in power. the persistent pursuit of a civic. The dysfunctional government has established itself as the largest and the only reliable employer in the country. The crucial operation of the Dayton-enabled mafia is a full and thorough elimination of any imaginable alternative to the existing system. The system hence works hard to disabuse citizens of the notion that anything can be done. let alone endorse or nurture anything outside the predictably and comfortably malfunctioning Bosnian system. even if slowly and toward the top of the list of the poorest ones in Europe. the Europeans and Americans would never listen to. simply continues not to die. It is thus important to commend Zlatko Lagumdžija and his SDP for their seminal and permanent elimination of a viable partisan counterforce to the nationalists. Bosnian politicians are repeatedly committed to keeping Bosnians inside Bosnia and Herzegovina. while EU/US are concerned about is the possibility that a deluge of refugees could be unleashed by new hostilities. federal and national institutions. The bureaucratic behemoth absorbs much of political intelligence. They saw from the beginning how it would play out in the end. as an Edenic zone of endemic patronage and graft. though no politician would dare or be coherent enough to formulate it. all in return for a fair share of the spoils. is the behemoth of Bosnian bureaucracy. particularly now that they’re busy with making all the wrong decisions regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They knew that the US and EU would sooner or later lose interest (which they did in 2006. with a plethora of ministries and local. is a country without citizens. The distant utopian goal. while effectively (or actually) depriving them of citizenship. including the so-called opposition. in return the Bosnian political elites have a free reign to mismanage the country as they see fit. national subjects are presumably content if the nation. as well as making sure the country moves in predictable directions. The token of that false stability. comatose as it might be. cantonal. The 62 .just the beginning and that some kind of carrot-and-stick-stimulated advancement of the people and their government was inevitable. the diamond in the Dayton crown. implicitly or explicitly promising relative comfort as long as nothing changes. The main and only threat to it are the people—some would call them citizens-who insist that something be done. the political forces (the nationalist parties) in charge of Bosnia and Herzegovina realised that they could well afford to wait out the initial burst of Daytonesque enthusiasm and let the things settle into something they could comfortably mismanage. This is why the educational system in Bosnia and Herzegovina had to be calibrated to produce national “subjects” rather than citizens. It is a truly Kafkaesque situation in that the whole purpose of the system is never to get anything done. No boat rocking means no boat people. While citizens might be able not only to imagine but to demand a better future. if not earlier) and felt confident that they were in fact the ones holding the carrot and the stick over the innocent foreigners who would always be happy to settle for not having another troubling war on their hands. In their alleged pragmatism. in the end. The claim of the parties in power that they’re necessary can no longer be sustained. constitutionally—it is. As any external pressure (global politics. the first time they outright rejected the politics of despair. Even if the movement fails to accomplish quickly a major transformation of the Bosnian society. the first time they refused to believe the powers-to-be that nothing can be done. rain) exposes its rickety structure. This winter’s (2014) protest was the first time that people assumed agency outside the political system. as was the glee when the movement. on the actual physical survival. many rejoiced when the value of inaction and passivity seemed to have been re-established—all of which expressed fear of understanding that the plenum movement was a crucial precedent. regardless of the outcome of the fall elections. The speed with which the plenums in Bosnia were undermined and dismissed on the left and on the right and all across the political range was symptomatic of the politics of despair. The water has inflicted so much damage on the livestock and spring crops that the increase in food pricing is inevitable. But the functioning of the political system that is willing to offer mere survival depends. it has shaken to the core the creaking despairmongering structures. While the system believes in itself as stable— politically. did not spread like a wild fire (outside Tuzla. The people’s reaction to the catastrophic flooding showed why the plenums were so important: abandoned and ignored by much of the government. then. Recent flooding destroyed so much infrastructure that the functioning of an already dysfunctional state has been irreparably impeded at the very basic level. some actual food and basic service are irreducibly necessary. Many couldn’t wait to see the comforting confirmation that nothing could ever change. the first time they stood up to the violent incompetence of their list-elected leaders. The needs of the population cannot be ignored indefinitely. in reality. 63 . financial markets. at least). activate citizenry—those who would see and fight for their future beyond the fog of “national interests”—and. the utopian project of a state devoid of citizens is not ultimately achievable. Bosnia and Herzegovina is but a catastrophe away from complete collapse. organize them in a way that allows them to speak as such. more than precarious. spontaneous as it was. But what happens if we disregard the knee-jerk hopelessness and imagine and pursue alternatives? What if the self-perpetuating trap of things-as-theyare can be transcended by looking for a different and/or better way to.voting-for-the-list electoral system further ensures that no one outside the stranglehold of the established parties could dream of rippling the scum pond. Rampant climate change will inflict more damage. which might well lead to further social unrest. first. further exposing the weakness at the sordid heart of the political system. The false alternative between survival and whatever else is the opposite has been reduced to a pile of mud. then the country is soon to be coming apart at its seams. If the voters have learned that their government is constantly and systemically depriving them of citizenship and the basic services and minimum welfare that comes with it. The flooding brought up the inescapable question: if the government cannot ensure its voters’ survival. let alone have a decent life. the stakes are raised. The starting point has to be the civic solidarity discovered by way of plenums. 64 . the change is coming. Either way. which are actually far less ethnic than infrastructural.people had to work together. and the struggle will intensify. the only political space where people could actually practice their citizenship. Either way. The trap of Bosnian democracy has to be transcended. help one another and seek solutions across the ethnic divides. what is its justification? What is its purpose and legitimacy? The entire Bosnian body politic needs rebuilding from ground up. then a change can be made in the voting booth. The fall elections are a turning point one way or another: if everything continues as it has been. these changes forced the majority of citizens to struggle to survive. Applying the same model. after the local 65 . The stagnation of social life has emerged as a deadly legacy of the previous twenty years. Tuzla had been left on the brink of collapse when the state-owned factories were sold to the private owners. Looking at these workers. in the post-socialist transition. the de facto enslavement of its citizens and the creation of a seething conflict that finally exploded in the acts of violence witnessed in February. just like they had done every Wednesday before that—and which the authorities ignored on that day. who were then obliged to invest in them and make them work. I have become aware. week after week. encompassing the forced take-over the industrial complexes and national resources. when contrasting these people’s expectations with the actual legacy of the past twenty years. the major industrial centre of the region. the political elites and the judiciary are still turning a blind eye to the collapse of the formerly state-owned factories. the industrial sector was also destroyed in similar fashion and workers came to grief all over Bosnia and Herzegovina. of how poetically ironic life can be. However. asking for justice to be meted out against those who have obliterated the industrial complexes of Tuzla. leaving the indebted factories in the hands of banks. On 5 February. and then spread to many other cities— large and small—that same day. Why Tuzla? Once the heartland of the country’s labour force. and in most cases. as they had on all the others. after some time.Haris Husarić February Awakening: Breaking with the Political Legacy of the last 20 years Eight months after the February 2014 riots in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was not by chance that the series of social and political riots in Bosnia and Herzegovina first began in Tuzla. What began peacefully turned into the most violent scenes since the end of the war in the 1990s. this time. the workers gathered in front of the cantonal authorities’ building to express their discontent. the creation of extreme stratification within the society. while workers continue to gather every Wednesday in front of the local court. built and expanded after the Second World War. a legacy that takes Bosnia and Herzegovina through the post-socialist and post-war transition. simply filed for bankruptcy. standing at the junction of Maršal Tito Street and Alija Izetbegović Alley. In Tuzla. Instead. these new owners sold the assets or raised loans. On 7 February. clashing with the police. put garbage containers in the middle of the street. around 10. whilst the traffic in the city was brought to a standstill by the crowd. blocking the movement of traffic in the city centre. shouting. acted in a well-known. and to throw things out of windows at them. mostly workers with family members. blockaded in their flats. Schools were closed and classes were cancelled. when thousands of citizens took the streets. only the police were on the streets. and easy-to-anticipate way—using tear gas and excessive force. at entrance and exit points. which is against the law. the local authorities rejected the request for dialogue and the city experienced repeated scenes such as had been seen the day before—at first. will be marked as a major act 66 . the police. residents of surrounding buildings. destroying the things inside. started to chant against the police. were controlled by the police. who cordoned off the cantonal authorities’ building. On 6 February. and setting fire to some of them. and throwing things at the building. Then.000 people gathered again in the same place. people started to throw things at government building. retreated and left the building. their anger fuelled by the brutality. and putting the neighbourhood under siege. terrified that further escalation of social discontent would catch fire in many other cities. Late that night. The police. the police also invaded academic space.000 people spontaneously started to walk toward the City Hall. the three-day’s events in February 2014. The police. even on peaceful observers. who stormed into it. They were acting out of fear. Yet once again. resulting in even more people taking to the streets the following day. the demonstration again blocked the city centre. a mass of 500-600 citizens. In the recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina. fully armed. the gathering for the demonstration had increased hugely—to around 5000-6000 people this time students and jobless citizens joined workers. The brutality with which the police responded to this non-violent action caused a public outrage. most of the 10.authorities yet again rejected the workers’ request for dialogue. fighting off the police. all over Bosnia and Herzegovina. By forcing the demonstration into the University campus area. and burning authorities’ buildings. Believing that they could stop further escalation of this expression of social discontent. Their retreat abandoned the fate of the building to approximately 100-200 disaffected youths. all of which ultimately set light to the building itself. and united in mutual anger and social discontent. and while they scared people off the streets. The police brutality continued into the night. and entering university buildings. which again catalysed the conflict with the police. controlling the situation. forced them off the streets using excessive force. Social life in Tuzla came to a standstill—the city’s main routes. against the grain. confronted with the scale of the crowd and too few in number to do anything. before they smashed their way into the City Hall and set it on fire. and non-functional state that has been steadily exhausting its society. under the burden of social and political discontent. which legitimized social stratification and granted permission to private capital to exert its absolute rule. Bosnia and Herzegovina is. Suddenly after years of the build-up of pressure—of continuously seething conflict with the political and capitalistic elites. it has continued. it is both a real and a symbolic act of liberation. acts that finally made labourers into political subjects. which. since then. The majority of the citizens of Tuzla consider Bosnia and Herzegovina to be a failed state—a bureaucratic structure established almost twenty years ago to stop the war. also. While some consider the act of setting fire to authorities’ buildings as calculated. strengthening the institutions of the entities. in the last four years. which exploded on 7 February 2014. has actually continued the legacy of the war. as ordinary people who expected social justice. the so-called post-socialist transition to liberal democracy has been experienced as a never-ending story of looting that. This political violence is inherent in the system as a subtle form of the politics of neglect: neglect of the interests of the majority. For them. Twenty 67 .of citizen rebellion against terrible social conditions. This has led. to a complete institutional deadlock throughout the country. living in a failed. led by nationalistic political elites. bureaucratic. at the very least. Nevertheless. This was accompanied by the possessive expansion of the capital of the few. for me. whilst at the same time obstructing the entities by the use of the power to veto. Rather. we can safely assert that the war never actually finished. Hence. but simply uses more subtle methods: creating and consolidating ethnic tensions between people. up to and including whenever they so much as feel that their so-called ethnic interest is being threatened. after the collapse of the welfare state. To make matters even more complicated. All of these ethnicities have the constitutional right to issue a veto on any matter. insisting on conflicting agendas. legalized looting and the systematic theft of the industrial complexes and national resources of the country and citizenry. In the eyes of the most of the protestors. Facing a featureless future. through a constant political conflict between the ethno-national political elites. who established themselves as the political subject of the post-socialist transition. and. also liberating them from the legacy of the past twenty years. led them to the streets. What occurred in Tuzla on 7 February was an escalation of the social discontent of workers. Considering the political situation over the last four years. ordinary people finally gave way. For almost twenty years. recent events may also be considered as acts of liberation. a state comprising three ethnicities. the destruction and burning of the buildings associated with the government was one answer to twenty years of political violence that has most evidently existed in the form of transitional looting. by its Constitution. burning the authorities’ buildings was an act of anger that burst. ” as the media categorized the citizens who destroyed the building.000 deeply outraged people walked through the city. everyone together. The “hooligans. and members of the academic community spontaneously gathered to look for next steps. youth activists. members of the academic community. nor was there excessive violence from the demonstrators. could be nothing other than a liberating act—it liberated those in the demonstration crowd from memories of a politics that betrays things in which they believe. then in the National Theatre. they organized a forum open to everyone. even though. and judicial authorities. Rather. in which Majid. and at its high point. the number of people attending these plenums increased. and encouraged by new solidarity.years ago. Faced with solitude and the strong likelihood of “more of the same” politics. in the very act of punishing his friend. the Sodaso building was actually stolen from the same workers who gathered to ask for health care for themselves and their families. including the very building that caught fire and burnt down. setting fire to a building that the workers literally built with their own hands.. In many ways. The next night. at first in the House of Peace Flame Foundation building. such as had exhausted everyone for far too long. as the gatherings grew. after they set the cantonal authorities’ building on fire. where everyone’s voice could be heard and where everyone’s actions counted. This act of self-flagellation. Majid’s way to face the past was to slit his throat in front of the friend’s eyes. all of whom had felt injustice. are actually the children and friends of the workers. Night by night.. around ten workers. The night after. we were taking control of public places and organizing this forum. one of the lead characters. in the Bosnian Cultural Centre. They drew in workers who had not been paid for almost four years but were forced to work every day without health insurance. kills himself in a most brutal way in front of the friend with whom he had tacitly shared some terrible memories. In the same way. During February. local. workers who had stood in front of their factories for several years. students. while the smoke from the buildings still hung in the air. wanting to share that search for answers as to what the next steps needed to be. is at the same time a liberating act – liberating him from the memories of guilt and betrayal. and it sent a clear sign that they do not want to be silent observers any more. all the while strengthening belief that an alternative politics was possible. or are themselves the workers who built those factories. youths and pensioners. 68 . around hundred people gathered. city. the overall situation reminds me of one of the scenes of Michael Haneke’s film Hidden. mothers whose sons had been severely beaten by the police on 7 February. they expressed their rage against those who they held responsible for their situation: the cantonal. It was an act of anger directed towards institutional buildings— there was no looting. 10. saving them from organized looting. although it is such a violent and disturbing one. when the gathering passed the 1000 people mark. suffused with guilt and betrayal. joined in creating a place of direct democracy. confronted with the political and media obstructions to the expression of social discontent. While this is. then the series events of February 2014 were successful. In the existing social context at the time. symbolically mapping his historical significance. students with academia. of the kind that brought together jobless citizens with workers. most of the time. and needing rapidly to organize the existing solidarity more sustainably. Looking at aggrieved workers standing. the political activists’ efforts shifted to establishing the Sindikat Solidarnosti (Union of Solidarity). which is reflected not only in transitional looting and collapse of the welfare state. such a thing was inconceivable. many of the people attending expected to find alternative solutions to social and political crisis “over night. and. the three days of the February events gave birth to a new kind of political activism. had its peak when the state-owned industry was sold off. At the same time. streets named after leaders with contrasting political legacies (one of socialism. believing that they would change a political system was naïve. Hence. at the same time.However. the political elites were too strong—they were in control of the media and they kept obstructing the self-organized forums. and in which politics exists only within ethnic categories. which imposed themselves as an observing and correcting subject of the electoral democracy working in the public interest.” criticising the violence in the streets. I believe the February events were also a social awakening—an authentic act of liberation from the existing legacy. as well as with a set of extraordinary challenges. but also in the break with existing historical narratives. youths with elders—all those who felt insignificant—into a political subject. naively believing that the potential for political change was in political anticipation. at the junction of two streets. the legacy of that post-socialist transition). Hence. While Alija Izetbegović has his alley. week after week. the politics of the last twenty years has created a society in which social life is categorized within ethnic identities. in such as way as was not possible within a direct-democracy forum framework at that time. Up until that time. that runs through a central street in Tuzla. Years of post-socialist transition. February events were an explosion of social and political discontent that made a change possible. If a significant measure of successful rebellion is in the change in thinking both in and about a society that occurs. most of the characters and events from the socialist era are tacitly erased from the collective 69 . In February. people took to the streets confronted with the impact of the post-socialist transition. Although such change is certainly necessary. explained as a rebellion against terrible social conditions and the collapse of the welfare state. and the other. in the twenty-year long history of post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina. creating more possibilities for the power of action than any activism before. leaving an entire generation on the street. I see the February events as acts of liberation from the political legacy of the last 20 years. industrial growth and a thriving life. one of the most significant events in the history of Tuzla and of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The best example is the Husino rebellion. Just as it was no coincidence that one of the February 2014 awakening symbols in Mostar. that grew into armed rebellion against authorities. Instead of stressing the solidarity between people. who wanted to arrest them. has been treated as of less significance or completely erased from the collective memory. in the turbulent period after World War I. In the last twenty years. against the injustice of industrial slavery in the coalfields. which has the Husino collier as its symbol. in line with most of the events from the socialist history of Bosnia and Herzegovina. and compel them back to work. the city divided into two by the war. colliers of all nationalities started the General Strike. It was not a coincidence that this explosion of social and political discontent began in Tuzla.” 70 . This was a strike. confronted with the refusal of the authorities to meet their demands and eviction from the colliers’ colony. I believe that the February events were an awakening that is the break with this political legacy. It took place in 1920. Indeed. always attempting to set them against one another. the politics of the last 20 years has emphasised ethnic identities. was a sign that read: “Freedom is my nation. the Husino rebellion. sparked by the colliers’ demands for a better life and improved work conditions and it is one of the most significant events of class struggle in Bosnia and Herzegovina.memory. Noisily and confusedly they proclaimed the emancipation of the Proletarian. the other. anthropologically. is the best-selling media fodder in today’s global neoliberal cannibalism. As the day went on. was mostly ignored by the world media. parallel main road was blocked. Printed in People’s Paper from 19 April 1856. validating once again that death. Karl Marx1 For the first time since the war of 1992–1995. As soon as this was certain. i.e.Adis Sadiković February Stirrings The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents—small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. since the 1 A speech given by Karl Marx on 14 April 1856. who had held several joint protests previously. A protest began in Tuzla on 5 February 2014. All that followed. sociologically. for the first time. there would not be mass slaughter again. This news broke on social media and the number of protestors slowly started to increase. only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock. Let us start from the beginning. they denounced the abyss. Available at: ˂www. there were only a few hundred people there. the eyes of the world.org˃ 71 . continued to follow the current developments in Ukraine. which enabled the blocking of one of the two main roads. the protest gathered more people than any of the protests before it. the secret of the ninety century. Polihem.m. the February protests brought Bosnia and Herzegovina back into the spotlight of the world’s media. saw people take to the streets to join those who began it. along with sex. they betrayed oceans of liquid matter. Still. and by the afternoon the number of people rose to almost a thousand. the protest was growing. after all. at 9 a. Beneath the apparently solid surface. Guming and Konjuh). Poliolchem. in the here and now. focused by the media. which caused complete traffic gridlock. and of the revolution of that century. the sensationalist nature of that media coverage provided this country with just enough attention to ensure that. things would change radically.marxists. which. Soon. not dwindling. Of course. and no one could imagine that only a couple of hours after it started. However.. showing their solidarity to and with the workers of the 5 factories looted by privatization (Dita. and which was politically. economically and historically far more important and innovative than the stoning and burning of buildings. Right from the start. Mostar and some of the other cities. Although the banners with the pro-workers slogans had been brought. Thus began the spiral of violence. During this time. The conflict became much more violent than on the previous day. the payment of wages etc. The Cantonal Government headquarters was burnt and the police seemed to be behaving in a substantially different manner than on the first two days. After an occasional stone hit a window or walls of the Government building itself. the atmosphere in front of the Government of Tuzla Canton started to heat up. twice as many people appeared on the streets. This ultimately triggered the police to react and to form a cordon and start to disperse people. Gradually. only led to an even larger number of people to take to the streets. massed in ranks and equipped with teargas.town was now divided in two. because the stoning started at the very beginning of the protests. These tactics. In the ensuing chaos. which. as in Tuzla. the police entered a nearby school and faculty buildings. used to draw the public’s attention to the problems of the workers. Soon. a group of protestors went to the car park behind the building to stone official vehicles. News about police brutality echoed not only around Tuzla. just as that day itself started out quite chilly. only for the sun to be shining brightly by noon. a significantly larger number of people were involved in the blockade. While chasing the protestors. Twice the number of citizens were met with triple the number of police. However. this time. mostly in response to the overreaction of the police during the previous day. smaller groups of citizens in Sarajevo and Banja Luka organized support protests for the workers of Tuzla. The situation eased during the late afternoon. had been popularized by the workers of Tuzla’s shoe factory Aida. During the blockade that day. News about the Tuzla protest echoed throughout the region. since the schools and faculties were closed that day. were already in full gear and waiting at the entrance into the building. 6 February. a significant number of people started to gather. and the police had reacted immediately this time around. There was hardly any talk of the workers’ demands on 7 February. payment of unpaid national insurance contributions. Tyres were brought and burnt at the blocked intersection. Zenica. The spiral of violence continued to escalate. the protestors very soon clashed with the police. The large number of people was due to a large number of pupils and students that joined. but also around the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. in Sarajevo. although only few in number. In Sarajevo. At the same time. there were banners which had the workers’ demands written on them: to revise privatization. 72 . Riot police. at the other side of the town. The protestors’ main demand was for the Government of the Tuzla Canton to resign. The next day. never previously before seen in Tuzla. A real war was being led on the streets. The people that gathered in an even greater number than the day before. they were not exposed for long. one group of people was arrested while another group was injured. who had done the same thing in 2009. came to confront the police. in Tuzla. In Tuzla. there were several consecutive student protests in Tuzla. and they were not hidden. and other places in Croatia. Since the protests started out as protests being undertaken by the workers. only the demands that a majority of protestors could identify with survived. is the media “spin. and the rule is: one man equals one vote. one of them resulting in a one day long blockade of the Faculty of Philosophy which resulted in a student plenum. it was the first time the word “plenum” was used in public dis- 73 . However. which definitely marked February. other institutions were burnt—institutions which represented symbols of state terror—and the Governments of those cantons started resigning. there were stories of kilograms of drugs being circulated amongst the protestors. This event was closely connected to similar events that occurred. and even March. The demands of the workers that were expressed on 5 February are very political demands. one after the other. Any protest in itself represents a political act. Therefore. such as the abolishing the Cantons. which also has its political implications. Truly. which has barely been used in Bosnia and Herzegovina up until 2014. a neo-Nazi group called the Bosnian Movement of National Pride (BPNP) read out their proclamation in public. The opposition parties had their activists on the streets of every city. and to characterize them as hidden. abolishing the entities. There were other political demands coming from the protestors. reinstating the Constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And those were not the only demands that emerged during those early days of the protests. looking for ways to turn things to their parties’ advantage. This last story is particularly interesting. to say that there are political interests behind the protest.” The word spin. For example. in Zagreb. Over time. In 2009. suddenly became as common a word as thank you. A plenum is a direct-democratic decision-making mechanism. and even one demand to name a King. None of them were hidden. of a hidden political interest behind the protests. One thing. There did not exist “a political interest”—there were many of them. of buses of special police units coming from other cities to disperse the protestors. it was something that had already been experienced for a handful of those involved. the demands which were articulated as joint demands had to have come from the left. replacing the state’s tripartite presidency with only one president. the sheer volume of unverified and false information being poured out of media outlets was such that one could only believe one’s eyes. there was a demand to bring back the factories under workers’ control. This means that everyone is welcome to participate. is beyond comedy. In Sarajevo.Sarajevo. Although the plenum was an entirely new forum and practice and for most of the citizens of Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The plenum form was chosen to be the means of articulating the demands of the workers. Zenica and Mostar. of buses of protestors coming all the way from Sandžak to give their support. everyone has the right to join in the discussion and has the right to vote. at that same time. the plenums greatest advantage is also its main disadvantage.2 The same goes for the talk about the entities. it proved necessary to make certain changes. in2 74 More on this in: Jake Lowinger.course in the post-war period in this region. under circumstances where to radicalize such talks would lead to war. Thus. planted disruptions from within the plenum. de facto. which would enable a particular tactical advantage. However. dilution. decrease the democratic deficit 2014 was simply not the right year to discuss this. and herein lays the importance of the plenums. were counterproductive. but a conceptual turning point as well. their political leaders see the sole guarantee of their so-called “ethnic survival” as lying in the Cantonal structure. although this would then lead to antagonising the Serbian and Bosniak ethnic groups. there is a constitutional majority of Croatians. was based on similar principles. it was necessary to filter out the demands that would not benefit the workers. there is no place in which to manoeuvre a different form of organisation. Demands such as this one could only have put the workers at a disadvantage and. 2009). which broke the club tradition of the plenum and made it an open type of gathering. to adapt the plenum into a fighting method and tool. However. amongst which were some that were mutually exclusive.e. this term denoted large sessions of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. So because of those four Cantons. Not only the students. would make significant savings in financial and operational terms. all the while respecting the principle of subspidiarity. in four out of ten Cantons. and to a division of the working class along ethnic lines. in the new circumstances. the 2009 student protests marked not only the revitalization of this term. thus. counterrevolutionary demands could be critically questioned. media spin. Every such idea is subject to the scrutiny of the public. . to a certain degree. This is precisely why its enemies (governments and those with vested capitalist interests). only make up one tenth of population of The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. tiredness. the Plenum of the citizens of Tuzla. Although abolishing the Cantons and transferring their jurisdiction to higher and lower levels. Such a scenario was already experienced by and in this region in the late 1980s and the beginning of 1990s. and even. The Plenum was a place where such counterproductive and indeed. i. but all citizens were invited to the Zagreb student plenum. To explain more clearly: in a situation where. Since the plenum is always open for all to participate. Why plenum? Bearing in mind the numerous demands that emerged at the protests. Economic reform and the ‘Double movement’ in Yugoslavia: An Analysis of Labor Unrest and Ethno-Nationalism in the 1980s (Baltimore: John Hopkins University. have at their disposal a wide range of weapons with which to fight against it: infiltration. During the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ). bribery. although. In 2014. despite the fact that Croatians. any kind of talk about abolishing the entities would lead to a denial of support to workers from the Croatian ethnic group. At this point. at the request of the Plenum. voluntarily. At the same time. the second option was wisely chosen. which was repeated. Since the very beginning of the protests. the position the government intends to take/keep can already be seen. All of these methods have been used extensively so far. corrupt. in order to ensure that there would be no hiatus or paralysis in the public sector. transferred the jurisdictions of the ministers to their deputies or secretaries. by some miracle. Since there was no consensus within the Plenum as to whether the Plenum itself should propose new ministers and prime ministers. owing to its sophistication. However. would encourage the capitalists to employ new workers. the Association of Employers of Tuzla Canton emerges into the spotlight. all taxes. After the Government of the Tuzla Canton resigned on 7 February.e. the Tuzla Canton Assembly. should not be politically or professionally compromised and that they must be capable. or whether it should only approve the proposal of the Tuzla Canton Assembly. and by a declining number of people at the protests and attending the Plenums. claiming to be listening carefully to the voice of the people. will fail. of steering Tuzla Canton in a progressive direction in the following few months. Although the situation in Tuzla Canton is still chaotic. very wisely. a “lobby group” which is the enemy of the people who started the protests. Since the state inspection apparatus remains unchanged. resorts to something that could be compared to the Aikido philosophy: he uses his enemy’s energy against him. then employing workers illegally will remain the most profitable employment practice. the mantra. However. allegedly. is set apart from the rest.timidation etc. Encouraged by a lack of consensus within the Plenum. and the 75 . hit upon a perfect counterrevolutionary idea: a solidarity fund. i. And that is precisely why the economic programme. in every country.” The new prime minister. to give up a part of their earnings. that the taxation has always been mandatory. until the regular elections in October 2014. which. which is largely based on the Solidarity Fund. should not be members of political parties. seriousness and range. even if. capitalist business people did decide to employ new workers on a regular basis. there is still the question of how the coffers of the Fund would be filled. the Plenum requested that the new ministers to be elected. that is not going to happen. one of these methods. was “Solidarity. A solidarity fund is a fund which would be filled by voluntary contributions of working citizens—an amount that would equal five per cent of their personal earnings—and which would fund the taxes and the contributions for the newly employed. and he. Of course. The Employers suggest one of their own to be the prime minister. as the most influential “lobby group” amongst the people who are in intense negotiations with the Tuzla Canton Assembly: moreover. It is precisely because it is not so. would be voluntary. the Tuzla Canton Assembly called upon all the groups and individuals to make their nominations for the prime minister and the ministers. if people were willing. professionally and competencywise. Namely. As it did in 1848. and the workers of the Aida shoe factory blocking the main road. which instead was seized avidly and used by the counterrevolutionary forces to secure their own aims. in a protest catalysed by the State’s failure to issue identification numbers. there are very few people who believe that change is NOT possible. the solidarity. the students occupying the faculty and forming a plenum. solidarity. but not the war. They have shown that the Plenum is actually a form of upfront clear speech. the ethnonationalist barrier between them. there were violent protests of demobilized soldiers in Sarajevo. few people believed that any sort of change was possible in this country. As the experienced gained in the previous years connected and educated the people who had already started to think more profoundly about social change. nor the police are untouchable and invincible. All of these methods: the occupations. former members of the Republic of Srpska Army. And they will. ensuring a mass presence at the protests.marxists. Tuzla radicalized the tactics used at various protests: for example. matters are not yet concluded. Today. for the first time after the war. when the former members of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Army helped their enemies during the war. once “the oceans of liquid matter”3 start to move. This was the year when. connected and educated an even larger number of people. This also proved to be an issue that connected protestors from various cities. They have shown that neither the government. The enemies of working class people have won a battle. the violence. Plenum after Plenum. the hundreds of problems that have emerged are clearly stating people’s understanding that cosmetic changes will essentially change nothing: things have to change fundamentally. i. finally breaking down. the connecting—were used in February of 2014. the revolution emerges in 2013. so the February experiences mobilized.government will proceed to label any future people’s rebellions. the working class missed out on an opportunity to have the final word. Also. the plenums. to quote Marx form his 1856 speech. Available at: ˂www. They have shown that people can join forces against their oppressors. Before 5 February. The experience gained in February is immensely important for any future action. the plenums. To paraphrase Marx: the February cracks have revealed the abyss beneath the Bosnia and Herzegovina society. in April of 2010.org ˃ . The demobilized soldiers were in the spotlight once more. There has been an increase in the frequency of mass protests in the last couple of years. However. 2009 is especially important. this February also brought new problems. 3 76 The phrase refers to Karl Marx’s speech from 1856. as utopian. in the most radical manner possible.e. However. Herein lays the enormous potential of the February protests and plenums. People used the possibility of speaking publicly at the Plenum to speak about their personal problems. After several years of silence. The pressure from the ruling structures has been stronger than ever. the openness/vulnerability of the Plenum. 77 . There is no doubt that there is room for improvement. are all problems that have yet to be resolved.. probably because. February of 2014 can and should be a solid springboard for a meaningful and sustainable social transformation. then that sort of perspective enables the observation that this trend—of connecting and educating—is pushing ahead with greater vigour and momentum than previously. the media spin. for the first time. If we look at the events in February as merely a step forward. etc. The police repression. the rulers are truly afraid. . 000 people gathered in front of the building which housed the Canton Government headquarters. anyone who feels discontented with the state of affairs in the country. They were a reaction to the privatisation of a number of Tuzla’s large companies. Afterwards people moved to the Municipality’s headquarters. something. such as Konjuh. 79 . where a police officer enters a university campus and peppersprays a student. directed at citizens. students. As rocks were thrown at the Canton Government building. in an attempt to make them believe that the only possible sort of community was an ethnically exclusive one. as a result of the privitisations. which was also set on fire. the unemployed and retirees. halting traffic for several hours. for example there is a video circulating on the Internet. but are instead workers. were promoted and perceived as providing some of the main sources of income for the city and its region. and the birth of a grassroots democratic movement. The situation kept escalating over the following two days. on the first day of the protests 3.000 people took to the streets and occupied the two main roads in the city.Emin Eminagić On the University of the People: Protests and Plenums as Sites of Education The protests by the workers of Tuzla’s privatised industrial base that began on 5 February were the start of something no one expected to see happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina. when the police decided to join the protestors. many people lost their jobs. However. According to news sources. which is finding expression through citizens’ assemblies called plenums. Resod-Guming and Polihem. riot police were mobilised to disperse the protests. The movement established a platform in which people engage in a learning process by rediscovering their own political voices. On 7 February over 10. which the ethno-nationalist elites in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina denied to its citizens through constant threats of new wars and violence. which was marked by several episodes of state violence. The participants do not belong to the political elite. which was hit by stones for several hours. Dita. after which the protests moved towards the Cantonal Court. thus alienating people from each other. which was then set on fire. and in the first post-war years (1996–2000). The situation calmed down later in the evening. which in the former Yugoslavia. This was the first protest of its kind in Bosnia and Herzegovina. What ensued in the following days and months after 7 February would prove to be the beginning of a true democratic movement. . Derrida continues in saying: … the university might be in advance not just cosmopolitan. or even the authority of the question form itself. Looking at the plenums and protests. invented and posed. I use this term “terror of everyday life” here deliberately. 2002). instead of being dominated by all the predicaments people are facing on a day-to-day basis. Without Alibi. they can share their thoughts with grievances and fears with one another. . the plenums and protests themselves are sites of profound learning. whilst engaging in a struggle against the political hegemony present in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. on the production floor in summer. After almost two decades years. are attempting. where the temperatures go beyond 50 or 60 degrees Celsius and you try to complain about this. in real time and space. in reference to the late comedian George Carlin. face to face. we see that both the protests and the plenums can indeed be viewed as a university of the people. The plenums certainly represent a step forward for the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. working in a privatised company. if you are a worker in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. extending beyond (…) economic powers (to corporations and to national and international capital). and that the same should always be reflected. not even the current manifestations of democracy.” The French philosopher Jacques Derrida. you will automatically be silenced by threats of being laid off and replaced. Protests and plenums create spaces for all citizens where nothing is beyond questioning. The plenums. 204.The Plenums as a University The plenums became sites of freedom for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. as they are finally waking up from the dream of the transition from socialism to democracy. in his essay titled “University Without Condition”1 states that the principle of unconditional resistance lays at the core of the university. Without Alibi (Stanford: Stanford University Press. as. for the first time. to the powers of the media. but universal. in that. p. religious and cultural powers…2 Following this line of argument.g. people started talking about new possibilities. in light of what is happening during a plenum in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. what can be done. It thus has an obligation to question everything. we can see a strong emancipatory potential here. by giving the people a chance to speak.e. Derrida. and I choose the word “dream” here. and so far managing to break through such fear. who says something similar about the “American Dream”: that. i. however. It is at this point that I would like to relate the plenums-as-sites-oflearning to the notion of a “people’s university. while creating a learning opportunity for people. while bearing this in mind. and I cite “You have to be asleep to be1 2 80 See Jacques Derrida. ideological. congealed by the terror of everyday life. e. pp. Antonio Gramsci3 This quote. “we” were constantly being told. In the past we have witnessed several protests and acts of social decentralisation—for example: the JMBG protests for ID numbers and workers protests. there was no attempt to show that precariousness does not know boundaries. And not only this. the elites promised the people a prosperous life in a democratic society. 2011). but start caring for each other. 32–33. actions that. But as we have seen in the last months. Why are the Plenums successful? The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. Thus it was thought that protests and resistance would only be organised along ethnic lines. that “we” are always under threat and that “we” were always alone in whatever “we” did. having been robbed for over two decades.lieve it. the people have been given something that was the complete opposite of a democratic society. where people care less and less about nationality. people no longer believe the stories of ethnic exclusiveness. This problem points to something more traumatic in Bosnian and Herzegovina today. if they ever did. In fact. by “our” respective ethnically interested leaders. During these events. 81 . at an earlier point. This phenomenon was not only an immediate consequence 3 Antonio Gramsci. people are starting to rediscover the long lost solidarity between them. it just seemed to each group that their interests were exclusively their own. the plenums and protests proved that. an accord that denounced them as the working class and categorised them as exclusively ethnic subjects. But since the protests started. The plenums are a place without restriction. and for over two decades this has deceived people. Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press. ethnicity or religion. were completely disconnected from each other. and start working towards a better tomorrow for all of us. and give voice to their concerns. in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. people are finally reclaiming the language that was taken away from them. precisely pinpoints the political and emancipatory stalemate that people in Bosnia and Herzegovina were forced into by the signing of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in 1995.” Prior to and after the wars in former Yugoslavia. with which they now can articulate their anger and their discontent. through the plenums. free to exercise their right to national self-determination. by Antonio Gramsci. and did not share their logic with other protester groups. arising on grounds of ethnicity. as. and in this way obscuring other problems that face the country. regarding any forms of resistance. But what happened through the plenums? How can we read the struggles. social justice. the political elites. we are. solidarity and commonality. we deserve to claim the right to be optimistic about the outcome of the plenums and protests. It is has become a historical moment of fighting back and resisting. and their concentration is focusing solely on their demands. in Bosnia and Herzegovina. threats of conflict and ethnic difference. which ended in 1995. The weapons the elites use against the people and plenums are the usual politicking lies. The workers now univocally express their “No thanks!” to the bits and pieces the owners and the system are presenting to them as a choice. 82 . That is. every failed revolution brings more fascism—but here. in the last twenty years. Before the plenums. What is happening now. we were confronted with the muteness of the community. based on equality. and are starting to share a common vision of the future together. which represent the real needs of the people. but still continues today. The plenums are now under attack by the same hegemonic forces they are fighting against. through education and knowledge production. thus we identify with each other. but also that we all are facing the same problems and the same struggles. fundamentally. the workers accepted nothing less than that which they are owed. brings people together again in new solidarities and reviving a long lost commonality between each other. have consistently used and are continuing to use ethno-nationalist manipulation and threats of potential new conflicts. But as the plenums indeed are sites of learning. divided in their concerns and their sympathy or lack of it. after two decades. and have always been together in this.of the war. on the one side we have workers strikes. in the fight against the hegemonic imaginary that the political elites and the international community imposed on them. On other side of the enforced division. phrases such as: “Yet another doomed strike!” were the mostly frequently heard type of comment. which began when there was no connection between social groups and disbelief in making a change? As Walter Benjamin says. People are realising the importance of this. which is being legitimised through and by the protests. which catalysed the method of plenums. a certain degree of cynicism was omnipresent. I believe that. people soon realise that these are empty threats. have a constant and yet under-reported echo in other Balkan states. In this article we will sketch a typology of these movements and actions by dividing them into five main blocs: anti-regime protests. multiple “crises. The well-known mobilisations. in Greece and Turkey. last but not least. in all of these states. today in many of these states they are for the first time facing a serious resistance coming directly from the streets. However. especially among the youth. The political regimes in the Balkans have been following this general European trend with similar disastrous results. In accordance with Thatcherite ideals. their ideological orientations and their strategies. Given the multi-faceted situation described above. labour laws are regressing to the early years of the twenty-century. student movements. struggles and street violence in the southern part of the peninsula. a period of violence. conflict or general instability and economic hardship has been followed by a seemingly endless transition to liberal democracy and a neoliberal economy.” from economic to institutional ones. workers’ struggles and. and most dramatically across the former Yugoslavia. the European welfare state is now almost completely dismantled. These new social movements reflect a need for a deep transformation of Balkan societies. and a growing right-wing extremism from Greece. and public services have been gradually privatised. hegemonic cultural and intellectual efforts. mobilisations for the commons. But now the EU itself seems to be a project without a clear direction and whose prospects are uncertain: continuing austerity measures. they often serve as hubs for new ideas and more proactive projects offering a progressive vision of their societies. These have had a different historical trajectory: after the disappearance of the state socialist regimes. They are mostly a reaction to the deteriorating social and economic situation and numerous abuses of power by corrupt political elites. and Beyond Over the last couple of years we have regularly witnessed popular protests and uprisings in the post-socialist Balkans. rising unemployment rates. Transition was meant to be a process ending in accession to the European Union.Igor Štiks and Srećko Horvat The New Balkan Revolts: From Protests to Plenums. Nonetheless. it is unsurprising that the movements differ in their methods of struggle. France to Hungary. 83 . on 5 February 2014 workers from several privatised and destroyed factories united on the streets of Tuzla to demand their unpaid salaries and pensions. in response to unbearable social conditions and continuing austerity measures. and to smaller cities such as Bugojno. and the formation of new state-level and local governments filled with people with proven expertise and no record of corruption. with different intensity.From Anti-Regime Protests to the Struggle for the Commons Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008. Enraged citizens simply rebelled against the degrading conditions of social and political life and spontaneously adopted citizens’ assemblies and horizontal forms of democracy as a way to articulate their demands and organise themselves auton- 84 . almost uniformly. Soon. up to 10. In Slovenia in 2012 and 2013 general “uprisings” mobilised the whole country.” self-governed citizens’ assemblies that spread throughout the country. anti-regime protests have been erupting regularly across the Balkans. And while the media and political class were denouncing “hooliganism” and “vandalism. Only eight months after the 2013 protests that for the first time significantly transcended imposed ethnic divisions. they were joined by students and other citizens from all walks of life. Brčko. have been seen also in Serbia. although the participants themselves are of various political stripes and cannot be easily identified as left-leaning or belonging to the left.” the protesters were busy establishing “plenums. In our view. The form is clearly radical. In Romania protests have been sporadically erupting since 2010. Macedonia. Bihać. for a whole month. Similar types of protests. For weeks masses protested against political elites and their ties to powerful mafia and media moguls. Clashes with police resulted in burning of government buildings in Tuzla. In Bulgaria in spring 2013 huge protests triggered by drastically increased electricity bills brought thousands to the streets only to be followed after the general elections by even larger protests in summer 2013. Travnik and others. After long deliberations open to all citizens. from Tuzla itself where the first plenum was formed. regional centres such as Mostar and Zenica. Zenica and Sarajevo. they demanded the revision of privatisations. the plenums of Bosnia and Herzegovina represent the most radical experiment in non-institutional politics that can be found across the Balkans since the collapse of Yugoslavia. In Croatia in Spring 2011. Most canton governments resigned and cantons’ assemblies mostly accepted—the implementation remains another issue—the main demands by the plenums. Montenegro. with some regional variety. the end of excessive politicians’ benefits.000 people were marching across Zagreb every evening denouncing the political system and all political parties. Probably the most important social upheaval in the post-socialist Balkans erupted in Bosnia and Herzegovina in February 2014. Kosovo and Albania. to the capital Sarajevo. contributing to the fall of the right-wing government and a number of corrupt officials. which was replicated in other cities such as Mostar. forests. To sum up. no governing families and are not characterised by open repression and censorship. political and economic situation in the Balkans. in Dubrovnik citizens organised to defend a nearby hill from being turned into a golf resort. they are also characterised by volatility and by random triggers. but the nature of the post-socialist Regime that has been (almost) cemented over the last two decades but susceptible to crack under the weight of its own contradictions and products such as. in Belgrade smaller mobilisations were triggered by cutting old trees in one of the main streets. It also compels us to understand the nature not only of state institutions. However. All these examples—and the Bosnian one especially—show that for the first time we have more than an anti-government rhetoric per se—instead there is a true anti-Regime sentiment. with various successes depending on the local situation. surprised both ethnonationalist political elites and the international community and opened new spaces for social and political action. In various forms. this time centred on the question of social justice and equality coupled with a profound critique of the disastrous capitalist economy implemented in this post-conflict country. urban spaces and public utility infrastructure (electricity. landscape). Banja Luka. and elsewhere in post-socialist Eastern Europe. their weakness or failure. One of the most developed areas of struggle concerns the commons. citizens tried to defend one of the few public parks. Engaged citizens understand now that plenums represent a precious instrument that can be easily reactivated. Rebelling against these Regimes is all that much harder because they often do not have a single face. The plenum movement shook the foundation of post-war Bosnia and the wider post-Yugoslav region. rampant poverty. nature (water. These occasional expressions of anger are indeed the seeds of a new political and social dynamics that might result in wider movements. railways etc. in Romania in 2012 against privatisation of emergency services.omously. and again against an ecologically disastrous gold mine project in Rosia Montana etc. for almost three months. Not only the state but the whole apparatus on which the current oligarchy is based is called into question by sometimes chaotically self-organised citizens. and are usually followed by confusing and often contradictory political messages.) Examples are abundant: The Right to the City movement in 2009–2010 in Zagreb mobilised thousands in defence of a square in downtown Zagreb. hills. no dictator. The plenums were operational. The emergence and nature of these protests invites us to rethink the categories used to explain the social. or by destruction of a neighbourhood park. via working groups. in Bosnia’s second largest city. for instance. a growing social movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina came out of the protests and the plenums and re-defined the public sphere and imposed a new political agenda. in Bulgaria in 2012 people demonstrated against privatisation of forests. many plenums are still active. the defence of public and common goods such as public spaces (often parks). so to obtain more parking space. These single-issue movements proved to be channels of general 85 . Serbia and. 2010). During thirty-five days in spring and two weeks in autumn in 2009. do not see direct democracy limited to the referendum practice but rather as a means of political organisation for citizens from local 1 2 86 We have written extensively about the student and civic rebellions that involved occupation of universities but also of public spaces in Zagreb in our book Pravo na pobunu – Uvod u anatomiju građanskog otpora [The Right to Rebellion—An Introduction to the Anatomy of Civic Resistance] (Zagreb: Fraktura. Workers. but the way they occupied and ran the universities deserves our attention for its originality in a much larger context than that of the Balkans or Eastern Europe. 2011). triggered massive student mobilisations as well. It is precisely the emergence of plenums within these movements to which we can trace the current Bosnian practices of direct and horizontal democracy. While students mostly protest in classic ways in Bosnia and Herzegovina. and to a certain extent in Bosnia and Herzegovina. in Slovenia. The new Croatian Left. what many see as the ultimate common and social good. which was seen as a necessary corrective of electoral democracy and partitocracy and. whose ideas quickly spread around the postYugoslav space. possibly. and Intellectuals? Since 2009 strong student movements have developed in Slovenia. protests and petitions). Back to the old Alliance: Students. Kosovo. Montenegro and. especially.1 In itself nothing new one could say. The most active plenum at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb each evening gathered up to 1000 individuals deliberating on the course of action. more than twenty universities all over Croatia were occupied with students practically running them. it is worth paying special attention to the Croatian case. .public dissatisfaction and enjoyed support from the vast majority of citizens who see privatisations of the commons or neglect of public interest as intolerable practices. where an independent student movement articulated a strong resistance to the privatisation and commercialisation of higher education. Croatia. Montenegro and Kosovo (by marches. in addition to that.2 This event gave rise to the movement for direct democracy. in Croatia the student movement extensively experiments with occupations and direct democracy. a true alternative to it. recently. but indeed to the general political and social regime. The commercialisation of public education. or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb (New York: Minorcompositions. They invited to their plenums not only students but all citizens to debate issues of public importance such as education and. In this context. to decide upon the course of the protest movement. For a detailed overview of the student actions in Croatia see The Occupation Cookbook. Their protest against neoliberal reforms in the field of education turned into probably the first strong political opposition not only to the government. Serbia. the 2008 economic and financial shock.communes to the national level. reviews and online magazines (from Zarez. hegemonic cultural and intellectual efforts whose aim is to change the general public climate. Introducing a progressive agenda and radical thinking into the dominant discourse was an almost impossible task until recently. summer schools. this general post-socialist orientation was coupled. They are not uniform and range from classic strikes. right-wing extremist and anti-communist dominance. However.g. Plenums. finally. Its primary goal is to undermine the (neo)liberal hegemony that since 1989 has successfully delegitimised left traditions and promoted electoral democracy—although often ending up in autocracies— and the free market as the only game in town. Finally. workers’ strikes. opened a space for until then marginal movements to articulate their critique of the current political and economic regime. followed by the crisis of the EU. We are also witnessing a new cooperation between different social movements (such as students) and workers in building a common anti-capitalist strategy. the efforts focused mostly on institutional reforms and EU integration process that problematised only criminal privatisations and practices—but not the general neoliberal orientation. and. forums and festivals (such as the Mayday school in Ljubljana. The recent period is also marked by reinvigorated workers’ struggles. These attempts range from public gatherings. there is another type of struggle deserving of attention: namely. series of activist and academic workshops and conferences to newspapers. and re-introduce progressive ideas into wider society. or Mladina in Ljubljana). Movements. from Occupy movements to street marches. workers’ influence in running companies in majority state ownership and defending them from further privatisations (Petrokemija factory in Croatia). to examples of workers’ successful and unsuccessful takeovers (e. It clashed though with liberal attempts at “democratising” these societies. by protestors in Bosnia and Herzegovina. and Le Monde Diplomatique in Croatia to CriticAtac and LeftEast in Romania. This horizontal model has been used since then by many collective actions across post-Yugoslav space. Jadrankamen and TDZin Croatia) and the models of workers’ share-holdership (Jugoremedija in Serbia and ITAS in Croatia). not always harmoniously. the Subversive Festival in Zagreb or Open University in Sarajevo). Parties The political strategies of the movements described above remain for now confined to occasional protests and occupations—often marked by questioning of representative democracy in the name of horizontality—petitions and 87 . and farmers’ protests. In the post-Yugoslav context. with nationalist-conservative. the dominant media discourses. Bilten. on a larger scale. in order to get out of its “current impotence. Only two months later at the national elections in Slovenia. In turn. Without the protests. among a number of small left-leaning parties. Instead of being overwhelmed by new “spring(s). the protests would lose their legitimacy and articulation. or what Walter Benjamin called the “melancholy of the Left. plenums. any future attempt at party and representative politics will have to be based on. together with other progressive left parties. what the Left. inspired and guided by social movements. Although. In other words.” must rethink is the complex dialectics between the 3 Ps: protests. It formed. so far is a political party in Slovenia (Initiative for Democratic Socialism) that grew from street protests. the plenums would lose their potential to apply pressure.” But. 3 88 Maybe the only noteworthy exception. . what the current protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina clearly show is that protest energy can soon vanish and turn into an even bigger despair.” what we need more than ever is a long-term political and social work that will combine all organisational forms and be open to changing local and global circumstances. and without the plenums. is widely appreciated. a coalition of movements engaged in parliamentary politics. and parties. the model offered by Greek left party Syriza. the United Left won six seats in the Parliament.even referendum initiatives.3 Nonetheless. a “United Left” list of candidates for the European elections in May 2014 but failed to elect a MEP. usual fragmentation. we cannot detect so far serious attempts at taking these struggles towards institutional politics. if protests turn into some sort of institutionalised politics—be it the self-created parallel institutions such as citizens-led assemblies and/or new political parties that are ready to face electoral struggles—the progressive movements’ potential for a wider social and political impact can remain strong. I put other duties on hold and became a participant in the Sarajevo protests and plenum. Since 2008 I have lived in Sarajevo most of the time. orders everyone to get back into the car. In what follows I propose an interpretation of the 2014 revolt in a series of towns in Bosnia and Herzegovina through this metaphor of an attempted forced reboot. Confused. Much of my work seeks to develop an analytical register to discuss Bosnian lives outside of the dominant identitarian paradigm of “ethnonational conflict” and the normative categories of the liberal “transitional justice” industry. but this does not do the trick either. They do. an IT engineer. When my computer gets stuck in a so-called “endless loop”—a series of operations that continue infinitely in a self-perpetuating circle—I press the <Ctrl-Alt-Del> combination. I. on matters of redistribution over those of recognition or representation. takes a sample of the contents of the tank and adds some high quality petrol. He instructs them to open all four doors. does not really intervene in the computing process. I mostly remained in the background. 89 . Now close all the doors. for one. The first one. a chemist. fiddles with a few screws in the engine. Wary of the damage my presence as a presumed “foreign mercenary” might do. After following the events through the media for a couple of days.Stef Jansen Rebooting politics? Or. I have no idea why or how. as far as I understand. It is here that I learned about the revolt. the three persons in it compete to provide solutions in line with their expertise. When a car breaks down. This. disengaging the process that is caught in a loop. tend to follow their advice. They turn the key and the car restarts. The third person. and forcing the computer to reboot. This joke plays on tendency of IT persons to recommend a reboot in dealing with any computer problems. a mechanic. This is a reflection of my commitment both to an ethnographic prism on concerns as they emerge from people’s everyday pursuits of livelihoods and to a political focus. he says. I am a social anthropologist who has worked in the post-Yugoslav states for eighteen years. The second one. in Nancy Fraser’s terms. towards a <Ctrl-Alt-Del> for the Dayton Meantime An IT engineer friend once told me a joke that circulates in his industry. But first I must point out that this essay is itself a political exercise from a particular perspective. they obey. Instead it circumvents the problem. but fails to restart the car. but it doubles as a reflection on the question which emancipatory spark drove me to become part of it. my reaction would have been one of disbelief.” This is sanctioned by foreign supervision that contributes to the legitimisation 90 . they bemoaned their existential immobility on the household and societal scales: since the end of the war. left them to their own devices in the pursuit of their livelihoods. generically speaking. Firstly. For two decades different sections of the ruling caste have largely successfully demobilised any stirrings of political unrest amongst “their” respective “constitutive peoples” with calls for closing ranks in the face of outside threats to their “vital interests. They felt abandoned.” These shared concerns amounted to a sense of living in continuous suspension between a war that has not quite ended and a future—widely held to be related to EU accession—that has not quite been embarked upon. On the other hand. as the saying goes. is not a detached attempt to detect. its emancipatory potential. I refer to this temporalpolitical affliction with the term “Meantime. If you would have told me that this revolt would crystallise around demands for redistribution. I vaguely felt that something like this was bound to happen some day. where everything is organised “in three. poverty and a criminal ruling caste.” they argued. I soon felt that this revolt was a political event with more emancipatory promise for Bosnia and Herzegovina than any other since the war. This national-clientelistic machine feeds on the constitutional set-up of the country. then. I would have checked if it was the First of April. it contained as much fear as hope. This does not mean we were unaware of the existence of socioeconomic concerns. they also offer a degree of shelter in terms of livelihoods through partocratic clientelism. with regard to the political content of any such outburst. Yet this wasn’t any kind of prediction and.While I participated in several Sarajevo protests before. the absence of what they referred to as a “system” or “a normal state. that thousands would attend plenums. My 2008–2010 ethnographic research in a Sarajevo settlement found that people diagnosed Bosnian political predicament most prominently in terms of two interrelated symptoms. On the one hand. and particularly the allocation of public sector jobs and war-related allowances. if you would have told me at the start of the year that masses of people would take to the streets. [one] A paradox marked my own initial reactions to the revolt.” A key axis of reproduction of this Meantime revolves around an “endless loop” of depoliticisation. that four governments would fall. nothing in Bosnia and Herzegovina seemed to be “moving from the dead point. My essay. Secondly. Anyone who wants to know knows that most inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina are worried about unemployment.” Within their own fiefdoms. in Gramsci’s work. the foreign-sanctioned national-clientelistic machine in Bosnia and Herzegovina provides material channels to reproduce ruling caste domination and establishes the rules of the game. And this. understand and act upon unequal social configurations. never fully stable. To be recognised at all. Few seem to believe that politics can be anything else. at the expense of alternatives. In the Dayton Mean- 91 . In other words. of course. hegemony. but about the “rules of the game” themselves. In the absence of any ideological debate and with a national-clientelistic machine looming over them. I suggest.of the ruling caste and further entrenches the loop of depoliticisation with ritual evocations of ever-postponed Euro-Atlantic integration as an overall remedy. Gramsci makes clear that this is not simply about consciousness and consent—that is. The same endless loop also runs through some interventions that are in principle directed against ethnonationalism. is useful to conceptualise this endless loop of the Dayton Meantime. non-identitarian inequalities (socioeconomic. concerns a material and symbolic “framework” through which political struggles are waged. It is never complete. successful hegemony is less about who is winning in any particular game. procedures and types of arguments are established as legitimate at a given time.” which to them means party political machinations. One can speak of a successful hegemonic project to the “extent” that particular forms of struggle. To a large degree it sets the “register” through which politics can be waged. gender or other ones) are not considered legitimate parameters for political action. Only demands made in certain terms can be publicly articulated as “political” demands. such as those framed in liberal multiculturalism and human rights discourse as part of the “transitional justice” paradigm. Often misunderstood as just another word for domination or for ideological brainwashing. it is unsurprising then that most people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are disgusted with “politika. This framework shapes the way in which we experience. Instead. Who gets to set them? In whose favour do they work? Hegemonic projects thus include attempts to establish the central terms of the debate. non-political process that knows no alternative. about the degree to which people submit to ideological persuasion. In the endless loop of the Meantime. In this sense. this is presented as a necessary. [two] Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. in terms of claims for clientelistic allocation. In neoliberal fashion. again reinforces depoliticisation and a Meantime that is a mean time indeed. support for and contention of the ruling caste must be channelled in identitarian terms or. hegemony concerns the way in which one can both support and contest forms of domination. within the respective fiefdoms. they are postponed until the time of a Grand Solution in terms of statehood and Euro-Atlantic integration. support for freedom of expression. There was some such coverage before. blah blah. blah blah. disagreement on the answers is overshadowed by agreement on what the relevant questions are. it had this impact: it forced socio-economic issues on the agenda in a more prominent and more universalist manner than was even thinkable before. but small victories must be celebrated if we are taking to the long road. but the initial days also see damage to some government and party buildings. poverty and the privatisation process. Four cantonal governments resign. All roads. politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina must listen to ordinary citizens. try to channel and articulate this outburst of political energy. factory canteens and agencies for the unemployed. they are processed by the machine. they are ignored in favour of “vital” identitarian priorities. Plenums. In the Meantime. Even if the revolt and its reverberations would end here. but less frequently and usually as part of smear campaigns between sections of the ruling caste through the different media they control. Each in their own way. Most of it is non-violent. in this universe. hopefully interpreting the revolt as a 92 . Does this in itself solve anything? No. I don’t think I missed anything important. suddenly. Some try to co-opt the events but most simply intensify their identitarian/statehood rhetoric with regard to what they consider “their” constitutive people. [three] And. And a long road it will be. Often they are deflected through putting the blame on ethnonational others. spills onto the streets. For months on end now a good chunk of media content deals with unemployment. blah blah. private and public property inviolable. a novel political form. hitherto quarantined in kitchens. along with some handwringing support for the “justified demands of the citizens. Mostly. help on the road to Euro-Atlantic integration. violence unacceptable. Even some of the many sympathetic reactions from abroad fall inadvertently prey to the hegemonic logic.time. The rotating foreign members of Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ruling caste stick to their own mantra. If concerns with redistribution appear. patience is promoted as the greatest virtue. To summarise: blah blah. blah blah. At best.” they seek to incorporate the events into the loop. find compromise. blah blah. The reactions of the different sections of the ruling caste are predictable. lead to Dayton. we have a revolt: widespread discontent with social injustice. blah blah. A key implication of the dominance of this register for knowing Bosnia and Herzegovina and acting in it is that any contention is forced into the terms of the (identitarian) legitimacy of the state’s very existence and its setup as stipulated in the General Framework Agreement for Peace. criminality. None of us would deny that the obscenely ineffective Dayton set-up of the country is a serious obstacle for any overall improvement in Bosnia and Hrezegovina. perhaps. (b) The revolt energetically seeks to force a reconfiguration of the ranking of priorities in favour of redistribution. I believe that the question whether this revolt reproduces. we scream.sign of trans-ethnonational co-operation. when. inchoate rage against the section of the ruling caste in one’s “own” fiefdom is now made public in protests and plenums. at best. or. The revolt does not simply break up the existing rules to replace it with heterogeneous indeterminacy and the becoming of a new political subject—a multitude. We thus refuse to be drawn into identitarian projections of a Grand Solution on statehood. I contend. which remains within the Dayton Meantime loop. (b) a prioritisation of questions of redistribution and (c) mobilisation on the basis of indignation. postpone concerns with redistribution. Note that it is in the coming together of all three dimensions that I detect political promise. for once. incompetence and negligence. In the Dayton Meantime. it is a necessary means to take on the main goal: prioritisation of questions of redistribution. I now briefly address them in turn. We reject patience as the core virtue of the Meantime. feverishly pressing <Ctrl-Alt-Del>. is immanent in the combination of three dimensions: (a) a public “No!”. When. This spark. What existed only as submerged. Here I detect the grains of an alternative hegemonic project: in a field that is 93 . No constitutional complexity. non-work. In neo-Gramscian terms. Where then does the key emancipatory potential of the events lay for me? In my selective reading of a multi-layered set of processes (which I have no reason to believe is shared by all or even most participants). where the national-clientelist machine serves to ignore. In my reading. staying clear from the terrain of the ruling caste. we try to avoid being caught in the endless loop. I identify an emancipatory spark that can aid a reboot of politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. for once we see the contours of a road may not lead to Dayton. We show we are seriously sick of waiting. transcends or breaks ethnonationalism is a counterproductive reflex. but one that centres on social justice. let’s not reinterpret it in the very terms of the loop itself. This time. a key challenge here is to retain the insight that this public “No!” is not a goal in itself. (a) The revolt could not have occurred without a public display of refusal: a loud and clear “No!” to the rules of the game in the Dayton Meantime. Bosnia and Herzegovina is rocked by a political event that escapes the identitarian register. Much work is invested in working groups to explicitly and tirelessly insist on a better register of contention. But <CtrlAlt-Del> circumvents this question. no amount of obstruction by ethno-national others. Not just any reboot. We thereby dismiss their invocation of identitarian/statehood questions as a justification for keeping everything else in Bosnia and Herzegovina on stand-by. it does not merely create a discursive opening but also seeks to construct alternative discursive closures. exonerates you from your arrogance. deflect. even if antipolitics is rife in the revolt. while it is certainly not without contradictions.colonised by identitarian/statehood terms. unlimited mobile phone accounts and allowances that facilitate lives of luxury for politicians while many others struggle to make ends meet. perhaps a “politics of envy. More broadly. then. could usher in further depoliticisation. they play a central role in a potential reboot of politics focused on social justice. Moreover. rejecting yearnings for a welfare state would be cruel to those who are paying the greatest price of its dismantling. some of the demands formulated on the plenums call for transparency. this does not automatically constitute an attempt to reboot politics. We seek to redefine what can be counted as the terms of political struggle in the first place. the call for state provision is central to this revolt’s <CtrlAlt-Del>. we loudly claim a place for the register of redistribution. The revolt is a culmination of exasperation with a ruling caste that controls a vast government apparatus and uses public resources for private pleasure. All this. the revolt is permeated with a deep aversion to “politika. Another key theme is the role of politicians in privatisation and corruption. While this could be dismissed as unproductive nostalgia for paternalist statecraft.” Chants accuse the entire ruling political caste of being “thieves. What we witness here is not the constitution of an unprecedented subject for a new politics of becoming. solidarity and equality and contains a marked insistence on the responsibility of “the state” for redistribution. not politics. technocratic expertise and individual responsibility in ways that resonate with neoliberal recipes. compatibilities with neoliberalism are overshadowed by a focus on redistribution. Indeed.” Central symbols for mobilisation are limousines. Overall. the revolt includes very few pleas to the so-called “International Community.” These calls for (ideologically unspecified) “reforms” generally fall within neoliberal priorities encompassed by Euro-Atlantic integration. As to be expected. Here. Yet while <Ctrl-Alt-Del> is a public “No!” to the rules of the game of the Dayton Meantime.” I detect an emancipatory spark here too. when politics has such a bad name. saving it from the claws of “politika” but also from the mantras of neoliberalism. In these post-war and post-socialist circumstances. Interestingly. and unusually in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. in my view. some key challenges include the extension of the reach of this emancipatory potential to inequalities across the board—rather than just the privileges of “public” officials—and the development of a no- 94 . unsurprisingly. efficiency. While rarely serving as an explicit ideological resource. Here it should be noted that foreign representatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina have long deployed the rhetoric of “economy. the lived experience of Yugoslav socialist selfmanagement is tangibly present. This mainly emerges in the vocabulary of social justice.” The privatisations conducted on their insistence and under their auspices are now denounced on the streets and in the plenums. and. What are the “politics” of Euro-Atlantic integration. In this public “No!” and in the prioritisation of questions of redistribution. Yet even for them. I’m learning a lot from these innovative and risky forms of political engagement. how can this spark be maintained. and certainly for others. participatory democracy.” Moreover. including me. anywhere in the world. particularly in a context where politics is such a dirty word. unnecessary and even offensive to our political being. to me personally the political promise of this revolt is not best identified as “civic” activism or engagement.” a play on a well-known board game called “Man. of course. Despite all the difficulties. we arrive at a challenge for a reboot of any politics of social justice. don’t get angry!”]. particularly amongst liberal critics of ethnonationalism. this indignation primarily concerns the extreme contrasts between their own miserable circumstances and the privileges of the ruling caste. I believe. they appear in copious references to people’s entitlement to the use of public resources “they built” and “they paid for. in whose member-states inequalities have increased dramatically over the last few decades? What are the specific socioeconomic dynamics of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s incorporation into a global neoliberalising order? (c) Much work is being invested in plenums as platforms for direct. we fling them open wide and slam them shut with a bang. indeed. channelled and articulated into political projects? In Bosnia and Herzegovina. get angry!” [“Čovječe naljuti se. As a common placard reads: “Man. this is extremely valuable. It doesn’t just piss us off. in my view. the potential of this revolt’s attempted 95 . If many people feel indignation at glaring inequalities in the world. it includes indignation at a society (and a world) that allows and reproduces such inequality. and if most are capable of feeling it. Yet while the language of citizenship and of associated rights is present.tion of “commons” that is not identical to “the state. Even the plenums. Here. I believe. there is something profoundly hopeful in joining a thousand people who have pressed <Ctrl-AltDel> and gathered to set a political agenda. are first and foremost vehicles to carry an emancipatory spark that goes beyond them. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to take part in this. indignation is more important than civic duty and it carries a particular emancipatory edge. I believe.” Some ideals of selfmanagement might provide some inspiration here too and. And I believe there is real promise in the ad-hoc multiplication of the plenum form in a range of contexts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and elsewhere). the revolt invites us to finally prise open a great taboo. When we press <Ctrl-Alt-Del>. It’s also an attack on our dignity and that of all who live in that world. The core mobilising factor of the revolt. uncritically held up as a promise for all? To what extent can social justice be considered a priority of the EU or of NATO. I believe. For those who are most vulnerable to the cruelty of the Dayton Meantime. lies in “indignation. we do not gently open and close the doors of the rickety Bosnian car. for it is unjust.” To me. <Ctrl-Alt-Del> to reboot a politics of social justice relies on it remaining true to the indignation that caused it precisely because. 96 . this is global and universal in its potential. in principle. of course. Austrian diplomat Valentin Inzko. if the destruction. various EU officials. for example.” The snarky comment.Larisa Kurtović The Strange Life and Death of Democracy Promotion in Bosnia and Herzegovina The ongoing mass mobilization in Bosnia and Herzegovina happened not thanks to. In Bosnia and Herzegovina proper. of course. Take. one commentator on the Bosnian social media. just like he’s been doing so far. During a recent interview. have by and large resulted in public ridicule and scorn. who stopped short from threatening the protesters (and presumably the government against which they were protesting) with the use of EU military troops. I’d like to ask Inzko to continue not getting involved in our problems. burning and looting to which some protestors resorted did not stop. Much of international news coverage and commentary has tackled this question in one form or another. foreign emissaries. made by none other than the chief emissary of the International Community in Bosnia and the current High Representative. but he was trying to better understand whether the Bosnian public and protesters on the streets would welcome further involvement “on their behalf” by the International Community. however. the official statements and diagnoses made on behalf of the International Community by diplomats. but in spite of the internationally sponsored promotion of participatory democracy. In response to this unusually forceful reaction. the most infamous of the recent statements. Considering the unprecedented role that Bosnia and Herzegovina played in the consolidation of the International Community as a political force in the post-Cold War world—as well as the scope and duration of its involvement in the processes of postwar reconstruction and reform—continued media interest in these questions remains expected. the journalist seemed rather embarrassed to ask for my opinion on this specific matter. Truth be told. a journalist posed an unexpected question: What did I think of the idea of Richard Holbrooke’s widow that the US government should send Bill Clinton to Bosnia as a special emissary to help resolve the latest Bosnian crisis? The wife of a man who will be remembered for helping broker the General Framework Agreement for Peace was. for which I was recruited as an “expert” on postwar Bosnia. Adnan Beširović. made his own plea: “And finally. mediators and international experts. referring to the incredible new wave of protests that has been rolling through Bosnia for over two weeks. was also a 97 . which in 2006 adopted the policy of promoting “local ownership” of reform processes. they did not notice that the very same reforms introduced by the General Framework Agreement for Peace and postwar 98 . ublehaši—suspicious exhibitionists. services and opportunities to needy youth. which learned how to make convertible its expertise to earn coveted shortterm contracts. Among ordinary citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina. English-speaking middle class. created instead a sea of new non-governmental organizations. remove problematic political figures and put in place procedures deemed necessary for progress.” which this formerly socialist country was assumed to have been lacking due to its “totalitarian” legacies. The best among these organizations made themselves useful to their local communities. This calculated withdrawal of the OHR dovetailed with an enormous and widespread effort to promote democratization and participatory forms of citizenship among the country’s citizens. which dictated that many of the former state functions be passed onto the non-governmental sector. Yet.scathing criticism of the growing passivity. fuelled by foreign cash and designed by imported political experts and various holier-than-thou technocrats. deep-seated ideological commitments and “lack of democratic tradition. citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina continued to vote into power the same nationalist parties who helped stage the 1992–1995 carnage. by enjoying the occasional trip abroad or a training seminar at a more or less exotic location. The small minority of initiatives that did take off often became loyal soldiers of the international community’s neoliberal reform agenda. The doctrine of ownership was also conceived as a means of securing the OHR’s exit from the country over which it exercised control for nearly twenty years. What is more. Occasionally. The International Community hoped its new philosophy would remedy the effects of the so-called “Bonn Powers. at once predatory social entrepreneurs and nonsense speaking demagogues and fools. innumerable millions of dollars were spent in Bosnia and Herzegovina “building civil society. the international interventionists soon discovered that time after time (and despite brief and misleading interludes). disinterest and uselessness of the Office of the High Representative (OHR). this new sector also offered jobs to.” the executive orders which the OHR used in the early postwar years to override undesirable locally-made decisions. these new cosmopolitan elites were able to reap small financial rewards in this strange postwar political economy. Lead by their own ideological presuppositions and the disinterest in the world that existed before they came. these new NGO-types became known as “merchants of fog” (prodavači magle) or better yet. by offering support. Since 1995.” For some reason. returnees and women. This top down approach. despite their best efforts. many of which existed just long enough to pocket the cash their well-meaning donors had brought to Bosnia to help its people learn to get along. they presumed this phenomenon to be the result of the traumas of war. and consequently kept alive a professional. to empowerment. from constitutional reforms to the processes of EU accession. new keywords gained ground: from capacity-building. corrupt and criminal political elites whose cushy lifestyles they 99 . let alone willingness to admit that it exists in different guises all over the world. services. Faced with having to explain why the prolonged international engagement in Bosnia engendered so little concrete change. This included a myriad of workshops on conflict resolution. The citizens had to be taught to participate in politics in order to mobilized to take the destinies of their country into their own hands.” After enjoying a momentary glimpse of hope that the international funding agencies finally got down to the root of the problem. these “apathetic” citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Instead of addressing the injustices of this mass dispossession. to accountability to transparency. For a while. and institutions which provided livelihoods for people whose lives they so desperately wanted to improve. to the street. to local governance. On 6 February 2014. I discovered that what they really wanted to talk about are troubling “cultural” practices and tendencies that must be eradicated through new forms of political pedagogy. internationals looked on in disbelief as their efforts to wave the carrot of EU accession fell flat. Last summer. let alone affected the ways that privatization policies were implemented on the ground. including the mighty West. in a spontaneous yet simultaneous effort did just this by raising up against the incompetent. one can become oblivious to even the most obvious of potential outcomes. Those same people became hostages of these new clientelist networks run by the very same political parties. Such dynamics rarely entered the analyses of elections’ results. and so on. or janitors in the municipal headquarters. advocacy. the people had to rise up and “take ownership” of the processes of postwar reconstruction and reform. When one operates under the assumption that the political and economic domains are autonomous from one another. the international interventionists proceed to develop a whole range of new campaigns for the promotion of participatory citizenship. There was no effort to place “corruption” into context. lobbying and PR. unable to garnish any meaningful attention—let alone mobilizing power—among the Bosnian public.reconstruction enabled nationalist (and later also non-nationalist) political parties to grab hold of state-owned companies. Yet it was precisely this process of “accumulation by dispossession” that finally brought Bosnia’s workers to the brink. This apathy was an unfortunate legacy of socialism and a consequence of political inexperience. and then eventually. Year after year. and forced to bargain their political loyalties for a chance to become public school teachers. the newly fledged NGO elite came up with an explanation: political apathy among Bosnian citizens was to be blamed for the lack of progress in nearly everything. everyone in the nongovernmental sector was receiving funds for projects centered on the problem of “corruption. If there was to be any improvement. whose working era in Bosnia was (thankfully) done. from which it was violently jerked some twenty-five years ago. It instead took the form of an unrelenting popular revolt whose fury could not be contained within the moderate. unsure of whether this was the right move but convinced there was no going back. is that ordinary people live not in indifference. more compact groups of protesters fought off their fear of the local political oligarchies to publicly demand a livable future for their families and communities. The mobilization that started in the northeastern town of Tuzla. Those among them who fit the right demographic profile soon ended up in the lock-up. which could presumably replenish the drying streams of donation funds. chastised Bosnia-born intellectuals and analysts who dared utter in public that this could be the beginning of a new era. Even before the firefighters managed to curb the flames.” who rushed to make relevant again their hard-earned expertise on the Bosnian political crises and to advocate for more international intervention. Others. cowardly. lobbying and conflict resolution. was merely a (dis)quiet before the storm. In smaller. A day later. reindustrialized. one thing was clear. once one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s greatest industrial heartlands and today a site of gut-wren-ching mass dispossession. and others that described the political crisis as a physical weight sitting on their chest. For many. surviving this postwar impasse has become equal to a continuous bodily assault—I’ve met people who took valium just to watch the news. They then proceeded to remind everyone of just how complicated the Bosnian situation had gotten and how the populous is not to be trusted. status-quo preserving language of democracy promotion.have been subsidizing for two decades. where the newly reformed postwar police trained in “human rights” beat them senseless as retribution for what turned out to be a misguided and fleeting moment of political empowerment. provincial towns. mainly young men whom the postwar “transition” robbed of their futures. Others secretly dreamed of a world-transforming revolution that would set the entire society back on the right track. If there is one thing that my nearly decade long ethnographic trek through postwar Bosnia taught me. went as far to stone and burn down a series of government buildings in different parts of the country.” Nor did this mobilization make use of the strategies promoted by the engineers of postwar democracy. Hours later. Inzko. It even pleased some of the “internationals. The avalanche of the protests and their intensity surprised no one who knew even a fraction about this lived reality. including advocacy. who up to now lucratively enjoyed his 100 . but consumed by worry about their country’s future. Most were skeptical about the transformative capacity of all political engagement—a hard lesson they had learned in the past. did not emerge out of the internationally designed “civil society. some of the protesters reemerged from the smoke and ashes retraumatized. a portion of the protesters. The collective indignation of which we were made witness proved that what had been misunderstood as apathy. For better or worse. one other thing has become clear. self-interested and alienated center of power that never has been working in support of citizens’ own interests. those pesky experiments in direct democracy that allude to their communist past. it is no better than the political oligarchy that has been riding on the backs of citizens for two decades. The International Community. This is precisely what has been happening for the past couple of days across Bosnia and Herzegovina—us taking responsibility for our lives. and let alone demand a revision of privatization. with all due respect. advocating. keeping both Bill Clinton and the ghost of Richard Holbrooke at bay. We are not a mob that is out to destroy. whose patience with both national and international political structures has worn thin. We are inviting you to treat us as you treat those other protests. The truth is. which is stay out of the way.status of a cultural attaché. you have been inviting citizens of this country to act responsibly. the spotlight is now directed at the heterogeneous and imperfect. That includes. In that spirit. writing petitions and staging charming. and done according to the terms of its own design. but they are not anything that hasn’t been seen worldwide. For many in Bosnia and Herzegovina. let me conclude by relaying their message. made the aforementioned and most decisive statement of his uneventful career. pensions and anything that could be interpreted as socio-economic justice. all of the things they were not supposed to do. the lives of our parents and our children. social protections. including your countries. They were supposed to continue arguing for greater accountability and transparency of government—and ignore the fact this government consisted of war-profiteers. A Message to International Organisations and Institutions For years. Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina were supposed to continue lobbying. where you recognize and celebrate 101 . and ongoing extra-institutional meetings with the delegitimized political elites has been a part of their problem for a very long time. Now that they have done all of this. They certainly were not supposed to organize general assemblies. So to echo my aforementioned virtual interlocutor—it should continue to do exactly which it has been for a while. non-violent protests (preferably those that did not make the last summer’s error of making foreign visitors and potential investors collateral damage). The sights from some of the protests may not have been pleasant. with its backhand deals. second-generation political cronies and veritable criminals. but certainly righteously mobilized mass of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. democratic designs. the “democratic transition” which the International Community promoted was always supposed to be limited. The perfect storm of these diagnoses and statements reminded citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina of something they had learned long ago: that the International Community is a self-serving. We are asking international human rights organizations to support our cause. for the common good 102 .the spirit of freedom. justice. Plenum of the People of Sarajevo. irrespective of incidents. and equality. ” The Economist. Amidst all these debates. if new leaders emerge and if they focus on realistic demands.”1 Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are used to having their political situation qualified with numerous conditional clauses. such endorsement of protests almost always come with a few telling qualifications. something might really change. While the New York Times and National Public Radio scrambled to find reporters on the scene. However. we will possibly have to think about EU troops. Greece. Tuzla. But not right now. 18 February 2014. “On Fire: Protests in Bosnia. which are then endorsed for being “antinationalists” and even “extraordinary. thousands of protesters stormed government buildings and offices across Bosnia and Herzegovina. more commentary has appeared both praising the protest movement and predicting and lamenting its decline. concisely identifying the immediate factors leading to the Bosnian protests. Tim Judah’s assessment of the Bosnian demonstrations in The Economist presents a good example of this kind of commentary. or local citizens’ assemblies—quickly but briefly attracted worldwide attention. Available at: <www. the general consensus—especially in the mainstream media and official government offices in Europe and the United States of America—is a familiar one when it comes to protests in troubled countries (like Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mostar. or Tunisia): endorsement of citizens’ basic democratic rights coupled with a stirring condemnation of corrupt local politicians. “If [the international officials] don’t act now. 103 . Ukraine. I greatly fear that a situation where secessionism will 1 Tim Judah. The piece is overall well-informed. “If the situation escalates. editorials by intellectuals like Slavoj Žižek and open letters signed by thinkers like Tariq Ali and Naomi Klein expressed enthusiastic support for the Bosnian demonstrations and assemblies.” said Valentin Inzko—the High Representative of the international community in Bosnia—immediately after the 7 February protests. Since February. and other Bosnian cities—followed by the creation of plenums. the endorsement shifts to a series of conditional clauses: “If the plenums take root.” Yet by the end of the article.com>.economist.Edin Hajdarpašić Democracy in the Conditional Tense: On Protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina In early February 2014. The massive outpouring of anger in Sarajevo. Egypt. what is ultimately endorsed is not democracy as a difficult and broad struggle for social justice.”) In this kind of discourse. unrealistic demands. Available at: <www. naturalized voice of reason. but not if they have excessively unrealistic and idealistic demands. but also allows them to mask their disapproval—of leaderless structures. appearing as a set of purportedly self-evident syllogisms (“If the protests produce new leaders. It provides a way for commentators to preserve their democratic credentials by endorsing the idea of protest in principle.” said Štefan Füle—EU’s Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy—after last year’s protests in Sarajevo. political commentary in the conditional mood usually assumes a passive. endorsement of democracy in the conditional tense usually refers to and explicitly invokes outside observers and local leaders. .”) Finally. but also wider commentary on similar demonstrations and social justice efforts. the real political actors capable of channelling the protesters’ allegedly disjointed energy into more constructive uses (“If the political leaders do not listen to the protesters. other conditionals are there to stake their hope in Bosnia’s many “leaders.”) Having posited the voice of generic reason. but unclear if anything will change.” Taken altogether.”) but also the excess of political imagination (“protests are good. Such “if” clauses summon fears and threats of violence. no real change will happen. The headline of US News and Report summed up the situation with a familiar conditional clause: “Bosnians clean up rubble after violent protests.take hold could easily become unstoppable as we approach elections. or Ukraine.int>.”2 This political grammar pervades not only current reports on the Bosnian protests. In the first place. however. remained murky and saddled with more “ifs” in popular reporting. not only the excess of force (“protests are good.” added Paddy Ashdown (one of the previous High Representatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina) in an interview with CNN. and so on—behind the naturalised 2 104 Office of the High Representative. these reactions illustrate what one could call “democracy in the conditional tense”: general endorsement of protest. things might change”) rather than directives that prescribe desirable and undesirable behaviour (“Protesters need to name new leaders in order to change the situation. but rather—to quote the official letter of the High Representative in Bosnia after the protests—“A Reasonable and Constructive Response to Dissatisfaction of Citizens. but also a little lesson about what counts as proper “democracy development.” 18 February 2014.ohr. but not if they are violent. the conditional tense then cautions and inoculates against the dangers of excess. yes. The protests themselves. “Reasonable and Constructive Response to Dissatisfaction of Citizens. from the Occupy movements in the US to the many forces fighting for change in Turkey.” What does this peculiar political grammar reveal? A bit of structuralist analysis helps clarify its assumptions and appeal.” “The leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina should consider to take courageous and decisive steps if they want their country to catch up. and to block any attempts at changing this situation—all in less than 20 years after the General Framework Agreement for Peace—most experts would have dismissed such statements as “unrealistic” and “impossible. of course. the protests brought about the formation of the first plenum—a local citizens’ assembly—based on direct democratic participation. Immediately after the first demonstrations in the industrial town of Tuzla on February 7. dubious privatizations of state property. Since the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995. factories. This political class that emerged after the General Framework Agreement for Peace has carried out a sweeping array of policies that have made the ethno-nationalist elites impervious to pressure from both the citizens of Bosnia and the international community. corrupt dealings. If someone had said in 1995 that the politicians of this small war-torn and impoverished country heavily scrutinized by the international community would go on to make themselves the proportionately highest paid representatives in Europe. and Bosniak or Muslim organizations) has decisively capitalized on the postsocialist transition of this war-torn country into a free market economy. These developments seem selfevident today. one can both endorse the protests and at the same time pre-emptively qualify and disavow them as inevitable failures.” Yet that is precisely what happened with the formation of new political forces after GFAP. companies). but it is worth remembering just how astonishing they are in light of Bosnia’s post-war history. a set of ethnic parties (Serbian. enriching the ethnocratic elite while impoverishing the vast majority of the citizens. like the protests that accompany them. involving hundreds of people and defying notions of individual “leadership” and “reasonable” responses to an otherwise desperate situation. to expropriate the country’s key economic resources with impunity. emerged as popular responses to the many social ills that have plagued Bosnia in the last two decades. and Croatian votes. and skyrocketing national debt have combined to strip the country of its major economic resources (mines. Beyond Democracy in the Conditional Tense What is truly refreshing about the Bosnian protests so far is that they operate largely oblivious to the logic of democracy in the conditional tense. the fact that the power-sharing provisions of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP) allots positions along explicitly ethnic lines made these dynamics possible in the first place. 105 . to stay more or less in permanent power. In these ways. Croatian. The relatively small cadre of nationalist parties has mastered the art of playing the ethnic card and winning enough Bosnian Muslim. respectively.voice of reason and its seemingly logical conditions. Serbian. to take out staggering loans for unrealized projects. The plenums. In the twenty years that passed since the war. In these circumstances. there is no option to abstain. The first Tuzla Assembly on 9 February explained the plenum idea thus: A plenum [assembly] is a public space for discussion. at each session. At the end of each meeting. the demonstrations have continued in peace and without violence. desperate appeals on behalf of severely ill individuals are a constant feature of public life in Bosnia. and other towns. a new “leader” is the last thing that most Bosnian protesters want. As the Tuzla assembly reminded the international public in its 13 February discussion. Bihać.com>. without censorship and without hierarchy of participants. surviving companies have ceased paying their workers. You get two minutes. they have seen how quickly politicians promising reforms have become complicit with the existing rings of corruption and crime.” 13 February 2014. moderators are elected to facilitate discussion and allot [the same] measure of time for all speakers. These public meetings—often held every day in the larger cities—formulated new demands. pensions were slashed below subsistence levels. The health care system became so dysfunctional that it functioned only when greased with bribes. a space for making decisions. “FAQs about the Tuzla plenum. Brčko. These direct democracy procedures overtly turn the table on the familiar discourse of politics in the conditional tense. Available at: <bhprotestfiles. This is an important point often overlooked in the subsequent analyses of the Bosnian protests. . Mostar. Much of the energy of the initial uprising was funnelled not into further violent clashes against the police.3 This is currently kept to two minutes so that everyone gets a chance to speak. (…) The assembly has no leaders. complete with their own internal rules and demands. (…) Whoever wants to participate or feels the need to participate can do so without any restrictions. and invited more and more people to participate in the plenum movement. made new local connections. After the initial storming of government buildings on 6 and 7 February. they can freely join the citizens’ assembly. a list of common demands is drawn up and voted on. “If [the EU ministers and officials] Ashton and Füle arrive. places of employment have declined to the point of disappearance. Bugojno.As these processes unfolded.wordpress. but instead into the creation of local assemblies. but with the same rules as for us all: raising your hand. Each person gets one vote. asking to speak. Modelled after the initial gathering in Tuzla.” 3 106 Nedžad Ibrahimović. more assemblies have been formed in Sarajevo. Educational and cultural institutions like the National Museum and the National Library are shuttered due to “lack of funds” while hefty bank loans and multi-national investments continue to finance “market centres” headed by various party functionaries in both entities. when protesters clashed with the police and burned party offices. “Is Change Coming (Finally)? Thoughts on the Bosnian Protests.edu>. Moreover. Available at: <www. the other generic complaint—that direct democracy does not really accomplish anything—is wrong on numerous counts. These were not smooth parliamentary proceedings. pensioners. in Mostar. disruptive. “Silence was in power for over twenty years. Available at: <www. “Protests and plenums: The struggle for the commons. moms. now it is hard to say everything in two minutes. all waiting their turn” to speak while listening to each other. old union hacks. As one participant of the Sarajevo assembly commented.” Instead of calling for new elections and thus allowing the ruling parties to manipulate the electoral process—which will go on as scheduled in October 2014 anyway—the plenum assemblies modelled a new kind of political 4 5 Damir Arsenijević. external pressures on the assemblies are growing. One observer on the ground described the assembly participants as “old people.” Many have described the experience “as the largest psychotherapy in Bosnia and Herzegovina” and as a “way of achieving collective catharsis” for this post-war society. several men attacked and severely beat a local labour organizer who helped set up the assembly. for the first time. a chance for Bosnia and Herzegovina to move from melancholia to mourning: that is. an experienced observer of Balkan politics: “these protests have shown that leaders of political parties no longer have the right to speak in the name of all citizens.com>. The meetings of the Bosnian assemblies will not disappoint their critics on that count. speeches were short and reactions are sometimes conflicting and uproarious. In the first place.academia.balkaninsight. at least partially and temporarily.” 10 February 2014. 107 . to face the losses and start counting the gains from the war.”4 In this regard. the citizens’ assemblies have. demands covered a huge range of issues. Despite all this. business men and women. Anonymous threats are targeting the more prominent participants. new rumours seek to discredit the citizens’ gatherings as the insidious work of one political functionary or another. the protests “created. and excessively argumentative.” 28 April 2014. In the fray of things. from reprivatisation to schooling to pension funds to health care reform to struggles against nationalist divisions. the assembly meetings follow their rules and provide a structured and broadly inclusive space for citizens to debate and organize. In the words of Damir Arsenijević. a key organizer of the Tuzla plenums.”5 Banners at the Tuzla and Sarajevo protests summed up this popular rejection of the postDayton political class: “Nothing will ever be named after you.One of the generic complaints about direct democracy is that it is chaotic. some did not get to speak as there are often too many people lining up for their turn to address the gathered citizens. clerks. broken the ethnocratic hold that the current political parties have imposed on political organization. trades men and women. Every day. Florian Bieber. In the words of Florian Bieber. has largely ignored the political significance of the plenum assemblies despite endorsing the general idea of citizens’ protest in principle. alliances. fed-up seniors. which were then clearly communicated and immediately published. and other international officials have simply continued the usual practice of catering to the same ethno-national elites who engineered the current gridlock and refused to alter the status quo. and possibilities. the Office of the High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina. services. thus modelling a kind of behaviour previously unseen on the Bosnian political scene. For their part. backed by daily plenum meetings.conduct that stood in stark contrast with the established parliamentary practices in Bosnia. in its place. Secondly. Mostar. But in addition to these local achievements. The international community. unemployed women and men. The entire Tuzla Canton government resigned in the face of the protests. Many were eager to make the point that their troubles are not unique to Bosnia. The social character of these demands. the assemblies made more profound and less immediately tangible gains by opening up spaces for new political ideas. and underpaid workers made the practice of speaking and listening to each other the basis for their political relationships and interactions. The Tuzla plenum not only stripped politicians of their “white bread” (a set of laws that in effect provided luxurious severance packages after their removal from office). “We are here to sup- 108 . were asserted before cantonal governments in Sarajevo. the sessions of the plenum assemblies were well coordinated. activists from Greece addressed the assembly with the message. but it also made several moves that enabled laid-off workers to return to their factories and renew their claims to at least some of the privatized factories and enterprises. which tied specific local issues—naming individual officials. Thanks to the breakthroughs. For all the complaints about the inevitable chaos of direct democracy. Nonetheless. and other towns and continue to be debated. and institutions—to the larger processes of dispossession and misgovernment. and united in articulating their political agendas. the assemblies have already brought down several politicians and have articulated very specific legal and social demands. the carefully staged meetings with a few local participants of the plenum gatherings did little to change this picture. however. the establishment of alternative modes of political representation was a profoundly important development for the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. is telling of the long-standing problems that established politicians have consistently refused to address. Whereas the sessions of the countless cantonal and entity parliaments are dominated by rehearsed party bickering and dramatically exaggerated yet practically meaningless confrontations. the EU. At the third Sarajevo assembly. Similar demands. the assembly and a new government are now running the city. constructive. but are the constituent parts of wider developments across national borders. the plenum meetings were remarkably organized and efficient in establishing their rules and demands. countries that seem to have “ideal national institutions”: corruption. To speak of revolution in Bosnia is foolish and naïve. will not be given up easily and disappear. particularly amid the ebb and flow of changing circumstances in Bosnia. During the plenum meetings. Writing about such events is always challenging and risky. issued a similar message ahead of the first assembly meeting in Sarajevo: The situation in Bosnia is not a “special case” and it cannot be reduced only to “ethnic relations” (…) It concerns things that trouble our neighbours and many other countries in the world. Many are determined to protect these gains. these are nonetheless extraordinary achievements. no matter how small. we are in a way reassured that this time we are serious. because your struggle helps our struggle in Greece. said after the second Sarajevo assembly: A measure of freedom gained.port your struggle. at least on paper. but not for the usual reasons. This might seem self-evident. A Final Taboo In all this. As the anger and the protests are beginning to gain an institutional form. to formulate new agendas. One reason why it is simultaneously tempting and impossible to speak of revolution in Bosnia is that the practice of the citizen assemblies possessed a subversive daily quality. violent upheavals that topple regimes and install new forms of government—this has clearly not happened. and that a mechanism is set to control the work of future governments. As Asim Mujkić. Now we need more citizens to get involved. a political scientist in Sarajevo. but does not at all fit with the general image of revolution. and while the attendance of the plenum assemblies has certainly declined since February. something that has revolutionary potential. there is a taboo that is circled in the news reports and proliferating commentary: the taboo of revolution. New connections and tentative alliances are emerging on the fragile grounds of won by the protests and the citizens’ assemblies so far. a musician and activist. to call for more protests and radical changes even as the political structures remained much the same. While the outcome of the Bosnian protests remains uncertain. gambling with the citizens’ wellbeing for the sake of someone’s wealth. Roland Barthes once re109 . lock of workers’ rights. (…) Disenfranchisement is just as international as capital. but it does not really get at the issue of why revolution remains a taboo word in Bosnia today. of course.” Damir Imamović. To call the relatively calm situation in Bosnia a “revolution” strikes the wrong note because we associate revolutions with massive. and to spread lists of demands. and to supervise that the protestors’ demands be met. various citizens gathered across Bosnia to debate each other. or because.” The events in Bosnia are important precisely for raising these difficult questions of freedom and democracy without conditions or prefigured answers. more humane ways of life are possible and worth fighting for. The protests were certainly not revolutionary in the conventional sense since they have not achieved some extreme turn-around in the country’s political structures. political theory aims only at setting up the real freedom of the human question.marked. Instead.” This is not about creating any particular leader. 110 . either because this representation risks sweetening or trivializing the present struggle. more precisely. or institution. “Revolutionary writings have always scantily and poorly represented the daily finality of the revolution. without prefiguring any of its answers. they were simply subversive in proclaiming—as was stated at the first plenum in Tuzla—that “the citizens’ assembly is a protest for the production of possibility. party. the way it suggests we shall live tomorrow. it is about the fact that other. 2 as has the dubious impact of international engagement3. 111 .). Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (Oxford: Oxford University Press. Some of the characteristics of the protests derive from conditions specific to the Bosnian and Southeast European environment. Education and Democratization in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. 2002). Foreseeable as they may have been. “Legitimacy Matters: Managing the Democratization Paradox of Foreign State-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina. See Keith Brown (Ed. 2009). Inequality and Governance in the Public Sector (London: Palgrave. 2000).Eric Gordy From Antipolitics to Alterpolitics: Subverting Ethnokleptocracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina Post-1995 politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina is characterized by political structures generated by outside actors. while others point to directions for the development of ground-level political 1 2 3 See Paula Pickering. Postwar Bosnia: Ethnic Structure. ostensibly with the goal of assuring peace and the development of democracy. Empty Nation: Youth. 2006). the protests and the formulation of popular dissatisfaction into concrete demands took on some innovative forms that make them difficult to dismiss as (one more) angry but barely coherent display of outrage. pp. but in practice maintaining ethnifying monopolies in politics1 and providing cover for impoverishing neoliberal monopolies in economics. While the paradox of entrusting the construction of a democratic state to the very ethnocrats who have no interest in it has been noted by many scholars. 483–96. as they developed from February 2014 onward in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Transacting transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia (Bloomfield CT: Kumarian Press.” Südosteuropa. See also Andrew Gilber. 2001). Međunarodne politike podrške zemljama jugoistočne Evrope: Lekcije (ne)naučene lekcije u BiH (Sarajevo: Müller. more surprising is that the expansion of protest to a massive scale should have taken so long. Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View From the Ground Floor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. See also Žarko Papić et al. 2007).. Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (London: Pluto Press. PhD dissertation (Philadelphia: Department of Anthropology. See Florian Bieber. the toxic combination of politically-directed monopolisation and privatisation has received scant attention from researchers. 2006). That the systematic dispossession of the population should lead to large scale protests is in no way surprising. 60 (2012) 4. See also Azra Hromadžić. University of Pennsylvania. See also David Chandler. but also the highest paid in the region. This inattention persists despite a high and growing rate of unemployment in an environment where political officials are not only the most generously compensated employees in the country. See also Sumantra Bose. engagement in the contemporary European environment. 2012). from the articulation of grievances in the first instance to the creation of a citizen plenum. Ioannis Armakolas. together with a comparison of the “alterpolitics”6 developing through the protests (and especially through the plena) in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the expression of public dissatisfaction with entrenched elites through a series of “antipolitics” movements in Italy. A plausible claim could be put forward that every major development in the growth of this social movement. and after the war it remained a centre of social democratic politics and labour activism. it is probably sensible to look at some underlying factors that contribute to Tuzla being a likely place for a particular set of responses to develop. 2011). “Explaining Non-Nationalist Local Politics during the Bosnian War. Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press. 229–61. pp. it was an early-developing industrial centre. Capitalizing on Crisis: The political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Politics After Indignation: Possibilities and Limits of Direct Democracy in EUI Working Papers RSCA 2012/42 (Firenze: European University Institute. But probably the largest. most durable. 63 (2011) 2. Certainly one of the first among these is the city’s political history. where the first events leading to the larger wave of activity took place.” Europe-Asia Studies. although there was not a parallel development in the Republika Srpska. most innovative and best-organised movement developed in Tuzla. Where protests had the greatest impact Every larger urban centre in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina saw a protest movement of some size and duration develop. During the war it was singled out by nationalist forces seeking to replace Bosnia’s multiethnic traditions with new. 2004). While much of this can certainly be credited to the energy and creativity of the people who have been consistently engaged with the product in that city. The division of the territory of the 4 5 6 7 112 See Greta Kripner. and a centre of Partisan resistance during the Second World War. an early focal point of labour organisation and left politics. and after the war the political structures established by the Dayton Peace Agreement allowed the power of the city to be diluted. As Armakolas7 traces twentieth-century Tuzla. Both the leftist legacies in the city and its long multiethnic and multinational tradition (its economic life has long been oriented far more to the wider region than its immediate surroundings) provided adequate support for Tuzla to maintain a non-nationalist position during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1995. originates from the activists in Tuzla. Tuzla’s resistance to ethnifying politics made it a target. which has been described as a “post-prosperity”4 and “post-democratic”5 one. exclusive ones. Some of these dimensions will become clear through a close reading of prominent elements of the protests. See Colin Crouch. . however. Daniel Innerarity. The company’s periodic reports are available at <www. meant that activity in the socialdemocratic city was subject to the oversight of cantonal governments elected with support from the more conservative and ethnically exclusive countryside. but in greater measure by asset-stripping.izbori. Where protests were hijacked There were some localities in which it was difficult for the protest movement to achieve the same sort of resonance it achieved in Tuzla. partly because of the operation of a different set of political forces and partly because of a more strongly negative popular response to the rioting that (briefly) accompanied the protests. In Sarajevo one of the obstacles to achieving popular traction came in the form of riots on the first days of protests. by way of maintaining its position as a power broker in the broader politics of the Federation. both economic and political. its capacity hit in the first instance by the disappearance of the Yugoslav market for the products of its chemical industry. It would be possible to regard this shift as a massive transfer of power. At the same time the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina.solanatuzla. however.” Journal of the Geographic Insttutute “Jovan Cvijić”. which had since 1990 had its strongest base of support in Tuzla. pp. Among the consequences of this transfer could be counted a shrinking in the earned income and life chances of working people. It was not. only the city’s political tradition that was undermined. which at one time produced 80 per cent of the table salt consumed in Yugoslavia.8 showed an increasing inclination to compromise on issues of concern with the nationalist parties. In this environment it is not difficult to see why both the radical rejection of the dominant political structures and the clear articulation of social and economic demands developed and gained major resonance. The industrial infrastructure that provided the base for Tuzla’s labour activism was also gradually dismantled. its workforce by over 80 per cent. 113 . Although early provocations on the part of the police 8 9 The Central Electoral Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina maintain a listing of results of all elections since 1996 online at <www. budget-skimming and credit-bouncing privatizations. In other environments. however. in particular. the development of the movement was less certain. saw its production decrease by 90 per cent. from the working class to party and bureaucratic functionaries. and continuing decline after private owners sent it into receivership9 The rapid decline of local industry and the security and wages provided through labour and trade was matched by an expansion in both the size and profitability of the political sector.ba>.Federation into cantons. “Influence of salt production on development of industry in the Tuzla valley.com>. 60 (2010) 1. Also see Rahman Nurković. For example the former minerals giant Sodaso. 47–56. Empty nation: Youth. Education and Democratization in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. with its reach more limited to the supporters of the national parties. contrasting the gesture to the project of renovating the National and University Library destroyed during the war and portraying its perpetrators in disqualifying. Zoran Milanović.may well have goaded some protesters to a violent response. among other goals. University of Pennsylvania. In this instance the prime minister of neighbouring Croatia. As self-serving as this strategy was.net>. decivilising terms. when some rioting did take place.culturesutdown. the events that provoked the largest outrage. A city that was forcibly segregated during the war. travelling not to the capital of the country but to the institutional centre of HDZ.11 The protests sought. . was the headquarters of the largest ethnic Croat party HDZ. A related effort to devalue the protest movement was engaged in Mostar. responded: he paid a visit to Mostar and declared the support of his country for the currently ruling institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. to articulate shared interests of the larger population against the domination of entrenched ethnocratic parties. and for whom it recalled memories of the siege of the city between 1992 and 1995. But he made the gesture in a particularly demonstrative way. in particular the arson in the portion of the Presidency building that contained part of the state archives was more likely the work of professional thugs engaged for the purpose. PhD dissertation (Philadelphia: Department of Anthropology. the campaign to discredit the protests and to call forward fears of violence and disorder had a disabling effect. A similar effort by neighbouring Serbia (where officials of the Republika Srpska entity were invited to Belgrade to hear declarations of support) underlined that the effort of neighbouring states was oriented to dampening popular enthusiasm for protest by again raising the spectre of disorder and by highlighting the cross-border support enjoyed by ethnocrats. particularly with the power of major media harnessed to it. as if to underline that Croatia’s support was not to the population but to a portion of the post-1992 elite. Azra Hromadžić. 2009). and which for a time functioned as the capital of the “Herceg-Bosna” parastate. its public spaces and institutions remain subject to parcelled control by ethnically-based political parties. The principal mover behind the campaign is the artist and university professor Azra Akšamija of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regardless of the sitting authorities’ neglect of cultural institutions—an international campaign has been dedicated to familiarising cultural activists around the world to the closing and slow destruction of museums in Bosnia and Herzegovina10—city and cantonal authorities in Sarajevo were largely successful in highlighting the damage done to the archive. Among the buildings damaged on the first nights of protest. Consequently at the beginning. it apparently had some resonance with some portion of Sarajevo residents for whom the image of burning buildings was greeted with some horror. 10 11 114 The site for the campaign can be found at <www. Plenum as de-detournement The greatest risk. deploying at the same time arguments that the absence of protest in the smaller entity indicated that the parties in power there maintained better social conditions and enjoyed greater support. However. and where violence that occurred during the course of the protests called forth memories of the long-lasting and widescale violence that occurred as an integral part of the war. 115 . Available at: <www. either by way of using the familiar rhetoric of a threat to public security or by efforts to co-opt the protests’ demands and claim them as part of a party’ political programme.12 This is where the innovation of the protesters both lifted the profile and extended the longevity of the protests. “Propagandna mašinerija u službi vlasti: Stranke i mediji BiH ujedinjeni protiv demonstranata. This rhetoric was directed against the Federation and operated with an eye to undermining the legitimacy that RS and the Federation occupy jointly.kontrapress.com>.Indeed in Republika Srpska hardly any echoes of protest could be noted at all. especially in the period immediately following the violence of the night of 7 February. it was only in the Republika Srpska. Elsewhere. That it had the additional goal of rhetorically confining the protest movement to the Bosniak population is suggested by the fact that a similar construct was echoed by right-wing Croat media outlets. where dominant parties have had a greater degree of success in extending control over a larger segment of daily life and where efforts to associate the continued rule of the post-Dayton elite with the “national” interest of an ethnic community. but for the most part RS officials actively discouraged public manifestations. A small effort by veterans’ associations and mostly student activists attracted some limited support. Through the formation of citizens’ plenums generating and articulating demands by means of a direct democratic procedure. the plenum was conceived as a way of articulating citizen demands directly. that existing power structures appeared able to silence protest comprehensively. the protest movement ran into difficulty in places where the dominant political party had cultivated a meaningful and identifiable clientele. In fact dominant politicians and media outlets with one another raced to do both. Fundamentally. where partly successful ethnifying political projects had catalysed an atmosphere of surplus repression. was that the protests could be hijacked by political parties. bypassing official 12 Paulina Janusz.” Kontrapress. Drawing on an older twentieth century revolutionary tradition (the first citizens’ plenum was formed in St Petersburg in 1905). 9 February 2014. it appeared that high levels of sympathy for the demands of the protest movement competed with high levels of trepidation about the possible return of violence. and it took the production of the movement agenda out of the hands of the dominant political parties where they could be detourned and deprived of significance. the protest movement achieved two milestones: it moved protests away from the streets where they were vulnerable to being discredited. 22 February 2014.wordpress. 27 February 2014. a discourse developed celebrating the citizen plenums as a precursor of a new form of politics. there is considerable resistance among plenum par13 14 15 16 116 Damir Arsenijević.” in Pal Kolsto (Ed. direct and transparent democracy in practice. and citizen plenums quickly spread to other major cities in the Federation. Available at: <bhprotestfiles.political institutions that were perceived as corrupt and unresponsive. Strategies of Symbolic Nation-Building in South Eastern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate. “The Plenum is a Roar of Enraged People.16 Both in the country and abroad. One of the principal limitations involves time: the structure of direct democracy is difficult to sustain for more than a short period. At the same time it was seen as a way of allowing issues to arise in a more concrete and articulated form than symbolic street presence or slogans could achieve. 2014). Available at: <bhprotestfiles. “Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Practice of a Different Future.” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files. The Tuzla plenum developed the first framework. .” Bosnia-Herzegovina Protest Files.com>. and an elections approach in the latter part of 2014 the established parties have an opportunity to re-emerge with reinvigorated claims to legitimacy. free also of the potential controversy that could (and in a few instances did) arise from confrontations surrounding public protests.wordpress. “Jaws of the Nation and Weak Embraces of the State: The Lines of Division. the plenum vehicle both bypassed dysfunctional government structures and addressed the standard critique of protests that they represent an expression of dissatisfaction but offer no solutions.com>.com>.”13 while an anthropologist saw its function as people “reminding the political class that they exist and that they have problems they want solved. Citizens who gathered at the meetings produced lists of demands ranging from resignation of local governments and reviews of destructive privatization initiatives to limiting sources of corruption and protecting social welfare and education.wordpress.15 Through peaceful. Indifference and Loyalty in Bosnia-Herzegovina. a tradition frequently denigrated in the contemporary post-socialist environment but remembered throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina as a bright point in history.). Among the responses to plenums by political elites came resignations on the part of several cantonal governments. there may be reason to discuss some of its limitations. One prominent figure in the Tuzla plenum described the form as “open. At the same time. While some political parties have made an effort to adopt as their own some of the demands of the plenums. the practice of direct democracy recalled some of the more sympathetically remembered moments both of the Partisan struggle and of Yugoslav self-management. Stef Jansen. Ana Dević. A graphic representation of types and frequency of plenum demands prepared by Damir Mehmedović (2014) is available at: <bhprotestfiles. substantive and concrete discussion.”14 The plenums proved to be the vehicle that moved the protest from expression of outrage to articulation of social and political demands. As other contributors to the present volume address the plenum phenomenon and its innovative character. com>.securitycouncilreport. pp. and encompassing forms of activity ranging from intense engagement to disaffection and refusal.19 With limitations on the reach of the plenums deriving from both the domestic political establishment and influential international actors. whose role of oversight affords them enormous influence in the politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 18 April 2014. however. where he held an unproductive meeting with political party leaders but ignored the citizen assemblies. 117 . Representation. Clive Barnett. The article by Elvir Jukić. accurately.” Political Geography. Left variants have been concerned with redefinitions of the scope of the political21 as well as with (re)claiming and 17 18 19 20 21 The article by former ambassador is available at <www. It relies on interviews with established party politicians to make the point that social change can only be effected by established party politicians. and nonresponsive to genuine public needs.balkaninsight.18 While the UN Security Council placed the social and economic situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina on its agenda. 37–61. unrepresentative.transconflict.com>.” Balkan Insight. with antipolitical movements spanning both right and left orientations. The “exotic” scholar in question is Jasmin Mujanović. Available at: <www. Charles Crawford. and Being-With-Others. where a variety of antipolitical movements have attracted a meaningful level of popular support. “Why Bosnia’s Protest Movement Ran Out of Steam. High representative Valentin Inzko responded to events with a promise of the international community to intervene if necessary to preserve the existing power structures.20 Moving beyond that unifying point.org>.ticipants to allowing the movement to be colonised by political parties. its contribution could become meaningful over the long term. As a new movement addressing some of the difficulties faced by both protest and antipolitics movements over the past several years. Security Council Report.17 A premature post-mortem of the protests attributed its predicted failure to the inability of the plenums to produce a(nother) political party. “Reconstructing Radical Democracy: Articulation. monthly forecast for Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the same time international actors. “Four types of Antipolitics: Insights from the Italian Case. EU enlargement commissioner Štefan Füle paid a visit to Sarajevo as the plenums were getting under way. it might be possible to suggest that what unifies antipolitical movements is a rejection of mainstream politicians as corrupt. wrote an opinion column proposing a fantasy neoliberal agenda for Bosnia and Herzegovina and describing a Bosnian scholar who supported the protests as “exotic”. an observer agency predicted. pp. May 2014. Drawing on the Italian case. Vittorio Mete. 23 (2004) 5. the influence of the movement on policy in the short term might appear uncertain. one encounters a wide range of diversity.” Modern Italy. 503–528. however. 15 (2010) 1. have consistently failed to recognise the significance of the protest movement or to acknowledge its autonomy from the post-Dayton elite they are accustomed to treating as (junior) partners. “most likely the Council will hold the debate and take no action”. Available at: <www. A former UK ambassador. ” Contemporary Italian Politics. pp. 6 (2014) 1. For this reason.(re)appropriating public space. “The Occupy Movement in Žižek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and a Politics of Becoming. 370–380. . 238–258. resistant to disqualification. 30 (2011) 7. and upcoming elections may make the movement appear obsolete. and may have a lasting influence beyond the geographic place where it was developed. 4–15.” Political Geography. Ilvo Diamanti. pp. despite the fact that quiet periods may make the movement appear temporary. pp. Razsa Maple and Andrej Kurnik.23 Meanwhile right variants (as well as initiatives like the Italian “five star” movement that seeks to transcend ideological division through a more purely conceived populism) succumb repeatedly to the tendency to be transformed into leader-centred political parties incapable of resistance to the system into which they seek to intervene. The plenum alters the calculus by deriving the demands it articulates from a social base that is brought forward rather than created – in the Bosnian case. 39 (2012) 2.” American Ethnologist. a public that is systematically not represented through its official institutions. What distinguishes alterpolitics from antipolitics is the question of representation. “Interrogating Post-Democratization: Reclaiming Egalitarian pPolitical Spaces.22 and while they have been innovative in terms of procedure and forms of address have faced problems of sustainability and of not all environments proving equally hospitable. the plenums offer a model that is renewable. “The 5 Star Movement: A Political Laboratory.24 The challenge to sustainability of both left and right antipolitics movements appears to derive in part from their moving forces: they are idea. 22 23 24 118 Erik Swyngedouw.and situation-driven rather than deriving their base from a public and its needs. Asim Mujkić The Evolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Protests in Five Theses Context In June 2013 and February 2014, we witnessed a “malfunction” of a dominant ethno-nationalistic system in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its structure briefly went off the rails. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida warned that any system functions through a furious repetition of its rituals, phrases, in short—their habitual position, but that that very furious repetition of itself carries a risk to the system—a risk of derailment. Is not that what just happened in this series of protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina? If Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ethno-nationalistic elites did not value the life and parts of the body, property and dignity of individual members of their people in the past twenty years (not to mention the members of other peoples), if they disregarded the poverty and the deprivation, if they are characterized by the absence of any sensibility for social justice, if not even the new-borns were of any significance to the ethical corpus they represent, if, moreover, they were able to, so cynically, describe the expressed care for the new born babies as “oriental pathetic,” or, in February 2014 as s “version of Arab spring,” while, at the same time, they described their political mission as the unwavering defence of the vital interest of their ethno-nationalism, then only one conclusion could be drawn from this: The nation they represent by fighting for its vital interests is not a group of people made from flesh and blood, who have everyday concerns, problems, and interests. The nation that they represent is an abstract category, which they fill with content, as they deem appropriate, that is, with their individual content that consists of very personal concerns, problems, interests and frustration. The nation that they represent is all that they currently claim it to be. In this regard, the objectification of their nation is not only reflected in specific people “made from flesh and blood,” but in concrete material individual winnings of the “folk representatives” who are re-contextualized and re-interpreted within the narrative of the ideology of ethno-national survival and threat. Therefore, it is an ethno-national power which, thanks to the democratic vote of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, acquires legitimacy, so that they could, in the next four year term of protection of the vital national interest, continue with their self-alienation from the citizenry, in their own world, materially objectify their representative will of national interest in immense abundance. To expect from such people to “ma- 119 ke an agreement” means to expect them “to back down,” and backing down, in the ethno-nationalistic correlation, is equal to “capitulation” and equal to a “death sentence” in political life. This will never happen, and it is naive, although, in these early stages of the rebellion it is necessary, to hold this expectation from the demonstrators in 2013, and in 2014, that, under the pressure of civil protest, these people will suddenly become obliging and accommodate their more-than-justified, existential demands. The alienation of the ruling elite is so great that it has become a matter of an unbridgeable gap. They have been demonstrating their lack of concern for their citizens for the past twenty years. Civil resistance is slowly maturing for its new phase, which can be summed up by the following phrase: “If we are of no interest to you, then you are of no interest to us!” In order further to raise awareness concerning this phrase, it is necessary to analyse the protests in several theses. Five theses on protests: 1) This is an uprising—a rebellion and not a revolution: So, how to understand the JMBG and the “February uprising”? We could hear the phrase “bebolution” here and there, which was clearly a reference to the term “revolution.” In the media, in February 2014, we could often hear the word “revolution.” And really, if revolution, in terms of common sense, could be understood as some radical socio-political coup, we can say that here certainly was radicalism in the past events. What was radical about them? Maybe it was the radical attempt to terminate all bonds with the dominant model of politics, or of the political production of reality in Bosnia and Herzegovina as an ethno-politics, through creating opportunities for the birth of demos; the birth of the possibility for a radically different form of a political organization, which, in the broadest sense can be seen as direct democracy. In this context, the JMBG protests, and the “February uprising” in Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular and the short experience with participatory democracy could be understood as an attempt at a “calling-forth of citizenry” in the role of the self-defining subject, “body politick” (demos, or Locke’s “body politick”); An attempt to open up opportunities to exit from the sphere of the ideologically enslaved imagination which is dominated by the identity vocabulary by means of fear of the Other. The possibility emerged with the knowledge that things “can be different,” that there is an alternative This is why—precisely because it is merely “the emergence of possibilities”—the February uprising is not a “revolution.” The rebellion in the cities of Bosnia and Herzegovina can, therefore, be characterized as an “uprising,” a “rebellion,” a “protest,” but, by no means, as a revolution. What we now have is the possibility that the citizen’s rebellion could slowly spread to the 120 network institutions of direct democracy, with its primary orientation toward social justice issues, whose solutions are expected from the institutions at the local level.1 At the moment, the dominant system, with its network of political power, remains largely intact. However, what is implicitly “revolutionary” is the following—I do not see how it is possible to meet the terms of the citizens in an effective and long-term manner, without there being elements of revolutionary change to the entire system. Let us consider the request for the privatization process to be audited. This aims directly against the de-regulatory neo-liberal and capitalist logic, which gave rise to and keeps in positions of power the ruling political class that, according to Rastko Močnik “privatized the potentials of our states.” To be clear, Horvat continues: it is a class that is not typically capitalistic because it is not capable, and because that is not its goal either—to produce. It is a parasite class. It is a class, which Andre Gunder Frank called ‘Lumpenbourgeoisie’, and, which sociology refers to as comprador bourgeoisie. It actually provides services for transnational capital, and takes, not profit, but rent—an income which stems from its status (which is ensured by the total rule of the dominant ethno-nationalistic order— A.M.), and not from the productive use of capital.2 That very same un-productive, rent-seeking, politically cynical dimension of the ethno-capitalists was witnessed by the citizens and workers of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the most brutal way. A step toward facing that group and their ideology in February 2014 will not be made because it implies a crystallized “ideological fight,” i.e., a contra-ideology. A fight within the imaginary of a dominant neo-liberal matrix is important but limited and we will be happy if some of the requests from the citizenry to those elites get fulfilled. We should be ready for that at this stage. Direct democracy, which, today, can be understood as a tool of this, still-undifferentiated articulation of political subjectification, must, in order to survive—if it is not remain a Hyde Parktype’ Speakers’ Corner’—gain its ideological articulation, and subjectivity, through a process which is in constant construction, through an interface of different concepts, ideas, and visions that collide on the streets and at plena. This “rebellion process” is in fact a process of much needed politicization of the citizenry (if we ignore Election Day, the citizens spend the rest of their 1 2 Direct democratic action, at this moment, should be understood in the sense in which it was defined by Goran Marković in his book The perspectives of participative democracy where, referrencing J. Županov, he determines participation of citizens to be “an act of influence on the behavior of those who have power to make decisions.” In so doing, Marković continues, the action “does not lead to different distribution of power, since its concentration is, esentially, unquestionable. Only those who have power can be influenced.” See: Goran Marković, Perspektive participativne demokratije (New Delhi: Bookwell AB, 2007). See: Rastko Močnik and Srećko Horvat, “Bijeda ujedinila Bosnu i Hercegovinu,” Oslobođenje, Sarajevo, 4 March 2014, pp. 38–39. 121 at first instance. is his or her death as well. b) in this “ideological vacuum. I declare that we should understand them as extremely political. know that the individual life is fundamentally a political construct: from birth itself. we should. from initiating the new-born into a certain gender and ethnos. turning it into folk entertainment and carnival events. Croat.” in its interpretations of the “terrible events. the February 2014 protests opened up the possibility for civic bases. . therefore. cannot be non-political. The protests hit the very heart of the political in Bosnia and Herzegovina. we have the folk carnivals in Europe when people in funny costumes. its socialization. new delimitation line of the political has been drawn: The Bosnian “state-republican-patriotic-liberalnationalistic” narrative “suddenly. “naturally. as. Croats and Muslims but to none of them in particular. which makes the rebels vulnerable to any sort of manipulation. which are some of the things that could be heard from the protestors present at both protests). and.” etc. so the protests could have. for the 3 122 This is an ironic twist of ZAVNOBiH’s (Bosnian revolutionary convent during the Second World War) November 25 1943 Declaration that defined Bosnia and Herzegovina as a republic belonging equally to Serbs. from which they can make some money. after all. and Bosniak elites. When it comes to the February protests. although they are neither antiBosnian nor anti-Serbian or anti-Croatian. we are talking about the existential extreme—a barren life (the life of the babies without a JMBG number.” and which can be boiled down to emphasizing that the past protests took place outside any politics (“we do not represent any political party. Although.” in a “neutral” position is more dangerous for this form of direct democracy which was conceived in our country: a) the energy of the protests as a “threat” to the ruling parties is rapidly weakening. 2) These are political protests: In contrast to the mainly benevolent interpretations which were mainly aimed at soothing the ethno-nationalist “vampire. both by the ruling parties and by the media. takeover the power in their little towns and pretendrule). be an anti-Bosnian and anti-Serb and anti-Croatian.” but. a clear. away from the corrosive ethno-nationalistic acids. life of workers without salaries. which is a precondition of political subjectification. Remaining “outside of an ideology. and none of them in particular. social assistance or any benefits).” “we do not support any particular political party or policy. The June 2013 and.. simultaneously and equally. The protestors of February 2014.3 The state-patriotic intellectuals of all three constituent peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina have. at the same time. for just one day. the life of an individual is a good resource for political shaping and instrumentalisation. threatened equally the Serb. as such. spin doctors.” it can easily happen that neoliberal capitalism appropriates this democratic excess and brands it. (even today. particularly. perhaps.” coincided with the narrative of the Serb and Croat ethno-politicians.time in a systematic state of de-politicization). ” in essence. an answer to the question as to whether these were or were not political protests.” It thus. we do not condone the violent way they are being manifested. which means that the protests had the ultimate political character. the structures which were. through a refined network of discrimination.. when the ruling ethno-political elite says “the protests are justified. annuls the previous (through a “hooligan-like- 123 . in fact. spoken with a united voice. it seems. but immediately nips it in the bud. a product of the ultimate war time violence. which has organized them and steered them in a certain direction.. through different breaches of fundamental human freedoms and rights. and those who are the watch-dogs of that war-produced reality. because.” that is. the cynicism of the authorities is complete—so. which says: “Citizens’ protests are justified. The strategy of de-politicizing the protests. where there is public antagonism—which was so very evident in the recent protests—there has to be the political. The protests have. Therein lays the source of ethno-national elite’s biggest fear: unpredictability.. not only makes irrelevant their own acceptance of the justified rebellion. they were waving their interpretative constructions. in essence. instead of flags. which confirms its violence daily. However. that there is an existing party structure “behind” the protests. the political sphere is the sphere of social merger and separation. In other words. through the investment of their maximum efforts to developing a strategy to de-politicize them: the demonstrators were fiercely pushed outside the political by efforts to depict them as “terrorists” (“the hostage crisis” during the JMBG protests and charges of terrorism for the events that took place on 7 February 2014).” and utter the however–word. made it clear who the enemy is: the “government. That is. by de-civilizing and de-humanizing them. even deeper cynicism is at work in that construction. “hooligans” and “vandals. in fact. and it is no longer the ethnic other. can also be seen in their dominant form of interpretation. what follows after “However. HOWEVER. the opportunity of a new centrifugal force of mutual solidarity which threatens to exhaust and deprive of meaning the usual channels and sources of political power (the ethno-national mobilization). this time. through total subjection of its citizens in every respect (spiritual and material) are now the biggest pacifists. in the superficial manner that is usually ascribed to them: That is. this rhetorical strategy shifts focus to what follows after “however. only. The protests have—as much as it was possible—clearly set a delimitation line and offered new forms of mutual civic solidarity that transcends the twenty year old politically imposed form of “solidarity” that exists on an ethno-national basis. political.” in brief. which is jointly conducted by the political elites. which constantly lurks out there.” Here. Besides. It is a “friend-enemy” sphere. The protests are not. If we were to believe Carl Schmitt. was given by the politicians themselves. HOWEVER. when they do not put a full stop after “the protests are justified.first time since waving their flags in 1990.” has come into focus as the embodiment of an inhuman system. in turn. empty speech. During this long lasting “drill” of representational democracy—in our case. which may express its will and interest in all its diversity. substantive “non-acceptance. as its consequence. to mobilize a larger number of voters. especially the managing elites—of the citizens’ drive for self-determination. Whenever the ritual voting in elections approached. they squeeze it out of the legitimate political sphere). the most reasonable way out of that hopelessness is offered in the form of delegating one’s will to selfdetermine to the ethno-national sovereign. “cynicism. offers the survival of its collective for the next four years. a representational democracy based on “ethnic pluralism”—the citizens’ reflex of self-determination and articulation of their interests was numb. has. The gath- 124 . the shrinking of social plurality and its interests. And. which articulates its will. That is why our elections do not resemble political elections. but are merely de facto censuses on an ethno-confessional basis. of possible war of all against everyone. the strategy to depoliticize political protests. and was developed to conceal the following— that this is not about approval or disapproval of violent actions of the demonstrators.” that is. precisely because of its elitisation.” Therefore. the will to self-determine was delegated to the self-determination power of a faction of the (ethno-national) elite. Representative democracy is in crisis throughout the world.” that is. who. what comes into action in that strategy is the pushing of that entire problem into the sphere of private morality–of moral outrage over an act of destruction—It is exactly what it is: privatizing-individualization or fragmentation of a rebellion with the aim of pushing it out of the political sphere. However. so. without its “imagined consequences. through the spreading of existential fear. as philosophers of pragmatism would say. that is. Every election takes us back to Hobbes’s state of nature. Not accepting the consequences means not accepting something in general. which managed. The protests were an excellent opportunity for the citizens to recognize one another as political subjects and become aware of themselves as subjects and participants in a collective civil subject.vandalistic” re-description. The alleged acceptance of justification of some attitude or action. changes within the discourse of the privileged political elites. which are much more “dangerous” and far-reaching than an act of arson. 3) This is an act of self-determination: One of the most important features of both protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the confirmation of self-perception of the participants and the observers about their own subjectification in the form of a new collective. as burning. without accepting its consequences. but about accepting or not accepting the consequences of “justified or non-justified” dissatisfaction. or. what can be said about the rigid Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ethnic parliamentary democracy? The protests throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina have reminded us—and. or. an empty position on their justification. have. that the entire ethno-nationalistic system rested upon—that it was “representative”—this clear refusal simply says: “You do not represent me!” This message is frightening because it dismantles the dominant ideological framework within which the citizens have so far acted. just as has happened to all other ideological vocabularies in the past. 2012). or from the fragmentation of one’s own ethnos. the power-holder. disarmed before the political power which is ruling at the moment. To hold open and spread the crack in the legitimacy and persuasiveness of the dominant vocabulary of intimidation from the ethnic other. when it. we preserve our freedom. and argues that. a strategic twist takes place: We are becoming. contradictions.ered citizens . Ideology is a hegemonic narrative of alienation. In the context of a dominant ideology. determined—“freely” accepting the enslavement of our own imagination—which boils down to a subordinate position that things are such and such and that they cannot be any different. it could be said that the greatest asset of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s uprising and the awakening of the demos is the start of de-legitimizing the dominant ethno-political pattern of discourse. selfdeterminations and freedom. of letting him or her define his or her own selfhoods. in our case. in a self-determining way. which are in a mutual relation of greater or lesser coherence.on the square. 39. the street. to defend the freedom of our ethnos. then. It rests on a strategy of alienation—alienation from what? From the alienation arising from the realization that social reality is a result of our own actions. Deklaracija (Podgorica: Nova Knjiga. a network of hegemonic narratives of alienation. like a bubble. we are dealing with a strategy of ethno-nationalistic ideological disorientation and the disarmament of the individual—the submissive—citizen. in fact. as has just occurred. The consequences of such an outlook–which can be seen in the ethno-political practice of the last two decades—are that the citizen is. to be indifferent to that “story” could lead to it simply bursting. p. calls upon us.”4 which is quite contrary to the typical pattern of action of the ethno-nationalistic elites. because it seems that he or she is beginning to understand himself or herself as an actor within a much broader emancipatory effort. before a power. This opened up the possibility for a process of political subjectification which will begin with a clear refusal of the tacit consent. in panic. as Hardt and Negri would say “a force which joins in action. by doing so. which generates the power of the political elites through the submission of the citizenry to its own ethnos. i. within an ethnonationalistic ideology. by gathering in a public place.e. 125 . That free subordination first takes place in the acceptance the “language” of the usurper.. as agent of freedom. that does not consider the free 4 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The ruling ideological vocabulary—regardless of the kind of ideology—has always had the purpose of disarming its subordinates. summoned. the acceptance of the ethnonationalistic worldview. whose rule is based on the isolation and atomization of the citizen. the plenum—despite their differences. In that sense. So. to keep it from disunity. that is. A significant number of citizens are cast in the role of the state’s dependants.” etc. is the ideological concept. who lead a “good-enough” life from the legacy (institutional and private) of the ethno-nationalistic system. because it—that vocabulary of the permanent ethnic mobilization— carries within itself the forms to excuse the corruption. as any other vocabulary of a dominant ideology. that is. What the ethno-nationalistic oligarchs spent protecting for the past two decades are the ideological concepts of ethnos. that is the exact essence of the ideological alienation of citizens: What is protected. even insulting. in the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of the possible reasons for the failure of protests could be the following: It appears that there are too many people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is the ideology of the ethnonationalistic authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And. The success of the protest will depend on the depth and width of that gap. it can become an action of the expropriation of the expropriator. on the contrary. maintains and develops awareness of the oppressive character of the dominant production ideological (identity-culture) relations. political elites gain their rationalization and justification. between the dominant production of ideological relations and the oppressed production forces. through the revolt. (I am referring to all of its levels) is the biggest employer. has grown an awareness about the conflict of interests between the ruling and the oppressed class. which has lasted and which will continue to last as long as the vocabulary of fear of the ethnic other and the breakdown of one’s own ethnic community remains convincing. And. However. because its constant use makes it porous. which can no longer recognize themselves in the network of those relations. the enormous enrichment.ethnos to be a free member of that ethnos. increasingly unconvincing. which contained the very particular. Like most of the countries in the region. that is. within it. Within that gap of understanding that the insolence of the power-holders has sparked. and. it considers it as the freedom only of the members of the elites and of the political representatives of that ethnos. That is why the vocabulary of the rebels must remain bio-political. the vocabulary of “prosaic” and “banal” social justice (as Svjetlana Nedimović says: “They strike us with identity. therein lays the danger. as a state. either direct- 126 . which. The de-legitimation of such ideological patter in the series of protests in 2013 and 2014 is a strategy of counter–disarmament. of taking on an important part of the means of the production of political dominance. Bosnia and Herzegovina. its duration is time-limited. but.). and we strike them with bread”). today. which is a tool for the production of political power. individual interests of the authoritative class. it is argued that pointing to the thefts and crimes of the ethno-political representatives is an outer conspiracy forged with the aim of “breaking up the national unity.g. the trial of the corrupt ethno-entrepreneur is always the trial of an entire ethnos. the disarmament of the elites. (There is an entire string of these rationalizations—e. and. perhaps the most important one. In other words. The decades of systematic marginalisation of bare existence have led to a rupture.” which that class is so frantically defending. naked existence. That is to say. This class will conform to the spin of the power-holding oligarchs. but only in a very short-term sense. And then. began to articulate itself in terms of the bios. etc. its products are. thanks to the incomplete.” in which those who challenge the regime. To sum up. at the unemployment bureau. most likely after the October 2014 elections. from which they gain and accept direct benefit. the bios may well serve as a transition phase between ethnos and demos. from which has sprung the special political language of bare life—a language off which the already set ethno-political phrase simply bounces. and even with “moralizing” (the requests of the workers are ok. who will view the protests as an attack to the constitutional and legal order of the state.) is this clientelist Lumpen-Mittelklasse. but not the violence). in words referring to the problems of bare existence. And then. It can be presumed that the International Monetary Fund will no longer be able to jump to our aid with loans to fill our entire budget. Bosnia and Herzegovina has a “class of clients. 127 . they will find themselves in a situation of their own “pauperisation” and become a part of the “Lumpenproletariat. will be considered enemies. over time. a significant obstacle to the deepening of the gap and open conflict between the Lumpenbourgeoisie and Lumpenproletariat (a reserve army of workers which is either fired. showed its contradictions at the JMBG and February 2014 uprisings: precisely because they were systemically. or on stand-by. even today . mutually contradictory laws whose ambiguities and loopholes are used for their own gain. which was produced gradually and painfully–and. because it essentially is an attack on the ethno-nationalistic system which supports that “privileged clientelist” form of organisation. or through his/her status as a user of some of the benefits (no matter how low those benefits are) either indirectly. is pointing to an imminent collapse of its entire institutional network. the clientelistic class will no longer have anyone with whom to “extend their collective or individual contract”. the bios finally spoke politically in quite a different language. outside the polis). on relief. held in the sphere of the bare bios. Instead of a middle class.ly. in June 2013 and February 2014. using the ethnos ideology. the two decades of keeping the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a repressive ideological bio-sphere (that is. the outlook of that class of people. even the most superficial analysis of the state of the economy of that “constitutional and legal order. in a state of de-politization. The position of that quasi-class is understandable. as an integral part of the strategy of the ethno-politic oligarchs. In other words. through a contract with the state—a job position which is supported by he state budget.” A system that they could serve will simply no longer exist.something that the political class did not notice due to its cynicism and authoritarian arrogance. So. let us not forget. This “class of clients” will fight them with silence and ignorance. This new newly-opened dimension of civic solidarity. (that is. which so skilfully resists its naming? By tackling the “national” project. self-fertilizing flows fit for twenty-first century capitalism). as he explains. or. which in fact. cover the only true “fundamental” colour. Similar to the colours of the rainbow spectrum. Which colour is that. 1972). the white one. which ideology). such. It is not this or that politician.”5 It simply merges with the nation. as we have seen in February 2014. and that is–let us call upon the old Roland Barthes to help us– an operation of ex-nomination: Namely. So. their explicit naming would be something “abnormal”: that is why we do not have political parties that explicitly refer to themselves as bourgeois. and. 137. and particular ethno-bourgeoisie. Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press. and by a mastery of the parallel economic processes (financial. who then? It has already been stated that the enemy. p. the enemy of the rebelling citizens? The enemy is certainly not this or that political party. an ideology from which an entire colourful array of alleged political options originates from. In fact. the adversary. that is. that it can be assumed as normal that they are ruling in the system of such parliamentary democracy. and it alone is the nation. comes from the lack of clear naming of the adversary. from which all the other colours originate. In these processes of mastering. Power is a changeable category. it is certainly not this or that ethnos. are fighting for our attention. which is characteristic of this nationalist bourgeoisie layer. and its rituals are so “natural. simply anonymous and normal. that is. what at first glance. who. fundamental colour.4) Who is our Enemy? A lot of misunderstandings when it comes to the uprising. Strauss & Giroux. nationalist. which are taking place with the help of parliamentary democracy procedures. How is that possible? The opponent will be more clearly seen if we look away from. the opponent is “power. Farrar. in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. to adapt to our conditions. exists in order to hide its basic. nor are there plat5 128 Roland Barthes. which are proposing their candidates as representatives for governmental institutions. .” self-understandable. So. “(the) bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named. For a specific period of time it is made of those who can be replaced.” but what does that mean? Power as such? That is where we lose a clear reference. before our eyes. in fact. particularly the “February” uprising. can be seen as an ideologically colourful spectrum of political parties. That order rests on two parallel processes: a mastery of the practice of political production of the nation with all its institutions. Who is. is typical for all of the other bourgeoisies. It seems to me that that entire Bosnian blinding colourful political spectrum of political actors. that seemingly colourful political menagerie entered into the ideological horizon of a nationalist-bourgeoisie class project. how can we clearly present “it” or “what” the citizens are rebelling against? The problem is that our enemy is anonymous. 4 (1977) 3. which cannot be articulated in a dominant representative system. Perspectives of further resistance The dilemma we stand before is almost threatening: to organize in the form of a political party (to defer to any of the existing parties. from day to day. there is no more room in the dominant hierarchical construct of the mother state. Turkey. such as Bosnia and Herzegovina’s protests. for the political articulation of social plurality. 129 . as an ideological strategy. our films. the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina differs only a bit—the “party and the state apparatus or representative bodies of a bourgeois state machinery are no longer able to represent historical elementary interests of large parts of the population”.forms and programs that must name it in an explicit manner. which has already condemned itself as incapable of offering any alternative to the existing order of power. Latin America.” Marksizam u svetu. is far deeper and at the same time. gains more and more momentum. Mythologies. But this dilemma displays only the pitiful state of our political imagination. Barthes noted: The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press. Oscar Negt.6 5) The protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina are a part of a huge wave of rebellion throughout the world: For the success of a protest. more effective. nema socijalozma bez demokratije. each in its own local context. Spain. These “normalized” forms attract little attention. is dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and the world. not only is it legitimate to rebel.)—represent excesses of social plurality. our justice. p. which is searching for new models for the politicization of political unity. Points of resistance against the injustice—which are reported. Our protests should be viewed as part of a bigger story of resistance. our remarks about the weather … everything. pp. our pulp literature. just when—and. etc. Greece. which. our theatre. it is of vital importance to understand them in a wider context and in the context of a story. 139. The exnomination. This position an6 7 Barthes.7 So. our conversation. “Nema demokratije bez socijalizma. which is pushed to the margins of the dominant model of representational democracy. in everyday life. at irregular intervals (USA. our rituals. our diplomacy. for which. By observing that “anonymous” class rule in his own country. or establish a new one). but it is also legitimate to search for new forms of self-organization of the life of the citizens. or to disappear. 1–25. there is room for some different political forces is a plain lie. When speaking of the democratic change within the existing democratic system we should not forget about an important lesson Hardt and Negri teach us: the people is not a natural or empirical entity. are a representation that creates of the population a unity. Godina opasnog sanjanja (Zagreb: Fraktura. p. which has subtly been sending us a message this entire time—things are what they are and cannot be any different. organize yourselves and go to the polls—as if our political and public sphere is not already deeply consumed by a steel network of oligarchic interests and obscure financial flows. which has taken momentum to the extent that it is governing itself. Implicating Empire (New York: The Centre for the Study of Culture. (Eds). Within such a system one can only wish for what is already ordered. discriminatory practices and norms. in those who are considered as the ones who have to know for their existence and set the guidelines of action. predetermines and produces a specific political body in what should be its own will. and describe themselves as the representatives of the group and its interests. Voting in the elections is only an irrelevant ornament and a fig leaf of the ethnopolitic machinery. to which. then. pp. That is why “free elections” always carry a minimum aspect of kindness: Those in power kindly act as if they are not in power. 2013). have only confirmed the fact that it is impossible to exit the ethno-nationalist matrix of political rule. the political oligarchs call upon as the will of the people. . and Gautny H. according to which. therefore. once they stop having trust in their elites. The people. What we call the “crisis of democracy” does not arise once the people stop believing in their own power.nounces the full triumph of the ruling ethno-nationalistic ideology. 111. rather.9 8 9 130 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt “Globalization and Democracy” in Aronowitz S. where the working class is mobilized and directly exercise power). and carries the legitimacy of its own rule. It is a closed circle. which. passing initiative to the state apparatus (as opposed to the “soviets”. and that the decision is truly theirs. Slavoj Žižek. 189–190. Politicians cynically imply—if you want to achieve something in the political life. which delineates a specific design of our institutions and stories that. and ask us to freely decide if we want to give them power. one cannot arrive at the identity of the people by summing up or even averaging the entire population. Trotsky. within these institutions. makes the masses passive. 2003). the problem with representative democracy is not that it … gives too much power to the uneducated masses.8 The specific constellation of representational institutions. paradoxically so. but on the contrary. Technology and Work. once they experience the anxiety points to the fact that the (true) throne is empty’. and. for decades.. Žižek rightly refers to a critique of the representational democracy by L. towards a need for hierarchal action. True. has taught us that there is no sense in the classic notion of the class (which Marx operated with). and de-fragmented it into a vast majority of mutually conflicting groups (particularly when it comes to ethnic and religious groups). it is an institutionalized call to the citizenry for a way out from (as Kant would say “self-inculpated”) situation of an ideologically enslaved imagination through (at least for now) measures of corrections (sending the requests to the executive and legislative bodies to simply “do their job” in accordance with the existing laws). As opposed to the JMBG protests which remain only that—protests. that is.However. Ohio University Press. it could lead to co-opting them into a hierarchal network of power of the representational democracy. and. 1954). any departure from the “immediate” environment within which they appear. with the aim to emancipate the exploited classes. on a more profound level. pp. that is. more serious respect for the already existing laws and procedures. requests for a stricter. Let us also not forget that capitalism. The wrath of the demonstrators was transformed into an institution of direct democracy—a plenum. Such a party could become a part of. beyond representational farce? What if we understand democracy in the sense in which John Dewey understands it: “understood as an idea. a plenum. in the political life of the country. which were directed towards the authorities shows us a desire for such a serious approach. It is the very idea of life in the community itself”. that the protesting mass was not able to constitute itself into a convent. Of course. as the winner of the class war. at the same time. this model. would guide the plenum type of action towards elitisation. which would then continue to pressure and control the execution of the requests–the February uprising has already committed that next “evolutionary” step in the process of rebellion. Therefore. pressure (constant demonstrations and plenum meetings) and control (to which extent the requests are fulfilled) of the existing representational democracy. so. 131 . In other words. in the sea of others. and trying to solve a problem. The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press. what if we understand democracy seriously. and not only that. 148–149. would appear.10 The analysis of the requests of the rebels. the requests of the plenum reflect its serious understanding of democracy.” carries with it a series of dilemmas. The Plenum is an institution which calls upon the citizenry (civil society in its inception) in the role of a self-determining subject. essentially. but. As institutions of direct democracy. and not a possible solution to our initial problems. as that was their main flaw. in the meantime. Marxism teaches us that it is necessary to start the forming of a “revolutionary party” which would. is there anything left from the state that could be 10 John Dewey. claim the state apparatus and its power. in the sense that it must include (“truly” represent) their voices. one more political party. an assembly. especially because it is developing “on the go. that is. democracy is not some alternative to other principles of associated life. All requests are. taken and used for emancipation? The level of governance, as Sassen, Negri and Hardt warn us, has, for a long time now, been located in the floating supra-state bodies. What is actually left from the proletariat (as a class), is only a reserve army of labour, the lumpenproletariat, which, if we are to believe Marx, cannot carry change? Failed middle class? The vast majority? And, how is it possible to act in co-ordination, and much more strongly, than the current loose inter-plenum co-ordination?11 If we were to indulge in the development of that concept, it would have to be similar to our wellknown (but highly misused) “delegation system,” according to which the “delegates” should be elected through lottery for short mandatory periods in the home plena (but plena of what: of municipalities and cantons? What if the plenum organization starts—as I hope for–to include workplaces?). Therefore, as I understand it at least, the verticalisation, i.e. hierarchisation of power cannot be allowed–the power must firmly be kept horizontal and as comprehensive as possible, that is, it should reflect as great a social diversity as possible. In the end, the institution of direct democracy is legitimate in itself, although, not necessarily legal in the existing positive-legal frameworks. It is designed to pressure and control governmental institutions that are legal, but not legitimate, and in that, at least for now, I can see complementarities, regardless of the fact that the institutions of demonstrators and of the government are not equal counterparts. Direct democracy politicizes citizens in the sense in which they feel their own political subjectivity, which is a very useful type of politicization, because the dominant ethno-nationalistic order relies on the de-politicization of the citizenry, its pushing (of course, immediately after the elections) into a sphere beyond politics. The institutions of direct democracy, in fact, “invoke” the citizenry in terms of a selfdetermining subject, an invitation to exit from the sphere of an ideologically enslaved imagination. Simply put, they represent the “birth of a demos,” and demos, within the constellation of the rule of ethnos, must, therefore, remain outside the system, because, contrarily, if it were to enter the system, it would itself become ethnos. Epilogue What the protesters in Bosnia and Herzegovina rallied for, not only surpassed the usual ethno-nationalistic contextualisations, which persistently tried to cause another ethnic conflict from this social unrest. The protests surpassed the usual European liberal (“orange,” “purple,” “velvet,” etc.) contextualisations, according to which, the problem in Bosnia and Herzegovina is, in fact, a lack of tolerance between Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. The whoop of the 11 132 It is important to note that this text has been written in April 2014 while demonstrations and plena sessions were still on throughout the Federation entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. protest which was expressed, for example, in one of the Sarajevo plenary sessions, did not call for unity between Bosnians, Serbs and Croats, but was uttered in the manner of St. Paul: “I am a Serb and a Croat and a Bosniak!” What happened next could be described using Žižek’s own words: “Do not simply respect one another, but offer them a joint struggle”.12 That is exactly what happened: “An offer of a joint struggle” that refused the particular ethno-nationalistic vocabulary, as a possible output from the nationalist patposition. Something entirely different—a universal project of social justice which recognizes no Bosniaks, Croats or Serbs, and in which, all of us are Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs. This word play on the ZAVNOBIH vocabulary is not accidental but deliberate. However, what is the most important thing in all this is that the offer is still open. The offer will gain more traction as awareness increases, awareness about the limitations and inconclusiveness of the dominant ideology. There is no doubt that the process is inevitable. Ideology fails not because another, more powerful ideology defeats it, but because it does not, as Žižek says, fulfil its promises. The protesters in February 2014 and the majority of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are becoming more convinced that the ultimate goal of ethno-nationalism and its ideology is not to fulfil its promises—one of which is the promise to “finally solve the national question.” Contrary to that, in practice, the ultimate goal of ethnonationalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not to resolve, once and for all, the national question, but constantly to create and raise new national issues and problems, so that the reproduction of the ethno-nationalistic ideology is ensured. Let us not forget, as Louis Althusser says, that the goal of every ideological organization is to ensure their own reproduction. The same goes for the bureaucratic apparatus of that order. Žižek says that, generally speaking, “the function of state bureaucracy is its own reproduction, and not solving the problems of society—and even creating problems in order to justify their own existence”.13 With this in mind, then we must agree with Žižek, that “the biggest threat to bureaucracy, the most audacious conspiracy against its order, comes from those who are truly trying to solve problems that the bureaucracy should be solving”.14 Is it not the case that, during the course of the recent protests, what caused the biggest wrath of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political and bureaucratic oligarchs was the request of the plenum finally to resolve the problems, while respecting the laws, which the oligarchs themselves had passed? That notoriety of the “most audacious conspiracy” of the demonstrators, their sane claims, were understood in the only correct way possible: as leading to the destruction of the constitutional order, as a conspiracy (and terrorist action, of course) against that order and other such orders which are diligently reproduced by the ethno-nationalistic order. 12 13 14 Žižek, Godina opasnog sanjanja, p. 79. Op. cit., p. 148. Op. cit., p. 199. 133 Ferida Duraković. as shall become clear in a moment. and Zvonimir Radeljkov. 2013. Harun Buljina. I will then sketch out the principles of the actually existing political economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina as created by the baja class and conclude thereafter with a discussion of why the plena. because it is currently quite topical. “Bosnia Today: Despair. Nevertheless. Many of these orbit around questions of class and political agency and are therefore instructive for thinking about the experience of politics for ordinary citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina or rather the lack thereof. much has been made of the phenomenon of the concept of the raja in English-language scholarship1 but comparatively little has been written on the raja’s antithesis. It is the baja figure that represents the entire class of war profiteers. This chapter will begin with a brief vignette of one particular baja. my thanks to Marina Antić.” Dissent. kabadahija and guzonja and their sheer prevalence speaks to my point about the ubiquity of the concept of the criminal-political elite in the local popular imagination. and Anita Tavra for their linguistic insights into this terminology. in his natural element: a bombastic public performance of personal strength and authority. And it is they who the protests and plena seek to replace. as a 1 2 William Hunt. small-time hustlers and crooked political peddlers who we euphemistically refer to as the “elite” in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 135 . terms in the local language(s) include rumpalija. Hope. pp. Margareta Špišić. the terms “head honcho.2 The baja haunts not merely the popular imagination in Bosnia and Herzegovina but also. Yet even a cursory examination of the recurring themes in popular Bosnian parlance reveals a persistent spectre: the spectre of the baja. prevents the emergence of popular politics. though not identical.” “boss man. Dario Čepo. I opt for this term. thus. Milorad Dodik.” or the Spanish “caudillo” are somewhat approximate. importance to thinking about Bosnia and Herzegovina. and History.Jasmin Mujanović The Baja Class and the Politics of Participation The spoken language(s) of Bosnia and Herzegovina are replete with peculiar localisms. Bojan Bilić. it is to the baja that we refer. 23–26. in practice. Other. đilkoša. Finally. Indeed. Julian Saurin. When we say that the plena and protestors in Bosnia and Herzegovina are confronting and challenging political oligarchy and economic cleptocracy or that clientalism and cronyism are the prevailing norms.” “big man. A literal translation is difficult though I hope the following discussion will be able to explicate some of the term’s subtleties and. I also examine elite-mass relations in my above-cited 2013 article on the phenomenon of the raja. politics of practice, represent such a terrifying challenge to the baja establishment. The Glavni Baja in Banja Luka After having insulted and curtly dismissed a female reporter at a campaign stop in March of 2014, Milorad Dodik, the President of the Republika Srpska (RS) Entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, regaled his audience with the story of another one of his plainspoken encounters. He recalled how rebuffed the attempts of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) to bring him to heel, as he told it, by telling them to “go fuck [themselves],” adding the he was “the glavni baja in the RS.” The audience erupted in laughter and applause.3 Elsewhere, this might have been a gaffe but Dodik continued to pepper the remainder of his speech with similar vulgarities. Nor was this the first such incident either. Rather than a gaffe, his speech was part of a broader political strategy, one marked by personal bravado and machismo, on the one hand, and sensationalist nationalism on the other. In the same speech, Dodik declared that without his administration, the RS (and with it, presumably, the Serb people in Bosnia and Herzegovina) would “disappear in six months.” Dodik the baja is a character who exists for two purposes. The first is to reposition all political tensions and animosities in this polity along an ethnonational axis and, in the process, elevate himself not to the status of “President of the RS” but “President of the Serbs” as a homogenous whole. Questions of economic management and reform, corruption and accountability are thereby made to disappear and if they are still raised, they are raised only by those who can quickly be dismissed as enemies of the nation.4 The second purpose of this performance is the crystallisation, for the audience, that is, the voters and residents of the RS, of the intersection between the father and the godfather. The Europeans and Americans can do nothing to us, Dodik’s performance declares, and it is thanks to my strength, my courage, and our collective, celestial might5 of which I am, in any case, the truest incarnation. But the baja is an inherently sinister figure, almost explicitly criminal. In Dodik’s original statement he follows his comment by 3 4 5 136 Vijesti.ba, “Dodik: “Ja sam rekao OHR-u je..te se, sad sam ja glavni Baja u Srpskoj”,” Vijesti.ba, 27 March 2014. Available at: <www.vijesti.ba>. Gerard Toal’s article is arguably the best study of Dodik’s rhetoric and performance in the English-language and clearly documents his cynical transformation from communist reformer to war-time smuggler to post-war moderate to, finally, ultra-nationalist. Lily Lynch’s recent reporting on Dodik’s ties to Western lobbyists, cited later, is also noteworthy, however. See Gerard Toal, “Republika Srpska will have a referendum: the rhetorical politics of Milorad Dodik,” Nationalities Papers, 2013, pp. 166–204. See also Lily Lynch, “The Self-Destruction of Republika Srpska,” Balkanist, 7 March 2014. Available at: <balkanist.net >. See Gojko Berić, Letters to the Celestial Serbs (London: Saqi Books, 2002). adding that it is the (opposition) media who label him as a baja but this does little to negate his own self-identification with the title. His joviality is menacing, feigning bewilderment: “you’re not afraid of little old me, are you?” Yet the whole exercise clearly establishes that in this entity all roads lead through Dodik and he, in turn, decides who is granted safe passage. It is, in short, a pronouncement revealing the criminal paternalism at the heart of the Dayton regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Accumulation by Dispossession The baja phenomenon is not without parallels, however. In volume one of Capital Marx describes the origins of bourgeoisie capitalism via a process of what he refers to as primitive or original accumulation: [The] historical movement, which changes the producers into wageworkers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire…6 The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.7 To Marx the origins of capitalism are in a period of explicit and brutal violence, where “producers” (nominally free, that is non-wage labouring, peasants) are dispossessed of their land and thus ability to subsist without entering into the wage-labour force. The geographer David Harvey maintains that these practices continue to this day, a process he refers to as “accumulation by dispossession”:8 All the features of primitive accumulation that Marx mentions have remained powerfully present within capitalism’s historical geography up until now. Displacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless proletariat has accelerated…in the last three decades, many formerly common property resources, such as water, have been privatized (often at World 6 7 8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Marxist Internet Archive, 2010). Available at: <www.marxists.org>. Marx, Capital, pp. 501–527. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003). 137 Bank insistence) and brought within the capitalist logic of accumulation, alternative…forms of production and consumption have been suppressed. Nationalized industries have been privatized. Family farming has been taken over by agribusiness. And slavery has not disappeared (particularly in the sex trade).9 Surveying the literature on Balkan political economy, particularly events in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 1980s onwards, we see a similar pattern as the one described by Harvey following Marx. The central argument here is two-fold. First, that the primary component of the political economy of the polities of (the former) Yugoslavia (SFRY) for the better part of the last three decades is best described as a prolonged process of accumulation by dispossession and that this, above all, is the critical aspect of understanding the emergence of the plenum movement in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. Secondly, as I will go on to argue towards the end of this chapter, because contemporary Bosnian elites are a bandit class (that is, baje), a parasitic class, they have no potential to be democratic agents. Therefore, the only possibility for democratic reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina comes exclusively from the creation of popular, participatory civic and social movements.10 To begin with then, though a comprehensive review of the aforementioned accumulation practices cannot be provided in this chapter, vignettes are again instructive. In 1978, Slobodan Milošević’s first major political appointment was to become the head of one of the country’s new commercial banks, Beobanka, one of the largest financial institutions in Yugoslavia. By the time he was in the process of orchestrating the dismantling of the Yugoslav Federation in 1990, the then President of Serbia, used his contacts at the Belgrade bank to move approximately 1.5 billion USD to offshore accounts in the Republic of Cyprus.11 Radovan Karadžić, Milošević’s man in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was by contrast a petty criminal. He and his close associate Momčilo Krajišnik, then an economist working for the Sarajevo energy giant 9 10 11 138 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, pp. 145–146. To be clear, this is not to suggest electoral politics is completely meaningless. I take very seriously liberal rights theories and the democratic potential entailed by any democratic experiment, even contemporary neoliberal parliamentary democracy. However, my argument is that even truncated exercises in democratic administration are only possible when the aim is something more substantive. Therefore, at the heart of any democratic society must be a continuous process of conflict and contestation. In this respect, as David Chandler argues among others, one of the central failings of the GFAP regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been the fact that it is an “anti-political peace,” elevating supposedly immutable ethnic identities to unassailable supremacy, while completely marginalizing any other model of association. What one is left with, as I note below, is not “consociational democracy” but an “Ethnopolis.” See Asim Mujkić, “We, the Citizens of Ethnopolis,” Constellations, 2007, pp. 112–128. See also: David Chandler, Peace without Politics? Ten Years of International State-Building in Bosnia (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–13. Louis Sell, Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 187–189. p. pp.. ethnic cleansing as a kind of “accumulation by dispossession. and Michael Pugh. See Neven Andjelić. Peter Andreas. then Vice President of the SFRY. Marinko Škare and Dean Sinković. The Province/Republic was a Karadžić-backed para-state and as a result of his activities there. 1996). Gerard Toal and Carl T. See also: Boris Divjak. Fikret Abdić became a willing accomplice of the Karadžić regime once the fighting actually began. who lost is his post in the process). however. (e. Dahlman. with the aid of the Agrokomerc factories. 130– 145. p. Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (NY: Cornell University Press. Bosnia-Herzegovina: The End of a Legacy (London: Frank Cass Publishers. ours? We’re all in this together now!” (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe.rs>.Energoinvest. Agrokomerc.rosalux. Cohen “The Complicity of Serbian Intellectuals in Genocide of the 1990s. 55.”15 Post-war economics. including Abdić. In 1987 it was revealed that the management of Agrokomerc. privatization) and the adoption of predatory microfinance lending practices. he created the “Autonomous Province of Western Bosnian” (later referred to as the Republic). “The Politics of Privatization in Post-Dayton Bosnia. a wartime Bosniak collaborator of the Serb nationalist camp.” Post-Crisis Recovery in South Eastern Europe: Policy Challenges for Social and Economic Inclusion—conference at the LSEE. February 2014).17 The result has been that the one-time heartland of Yugoslav industry has been 12 13 14 15 16 17 Philip J. UK: Oxford University Press. 373–386. See also Meho Bašić.”13 While it has since been speculated that the “Agrokomerc Affair” was an early attempt to weaken the position of prominent Bosniak leaders by Serb nationalists. March 2014.” Ekonomski Pregled. 2006. “The Political Economy of Corruption in Bosnia.” in Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Meštrović (Eds).16 Especially problematic has been the dual turn towards de-industrialization and asset stripping (i. See also Timothy Donais. Abdić was later sentenced to 20 years in a Croatian prison for war crimes committed in the greater Bihać area. The widespread criminality of the war has also been documented more generally. pp.14 Astute observers have analysed the events in similar terms as those established here. 2003). 39–64. “Yours. using the money for bribes and posh residences and inflating the actual performance of the firm. pp. Available at: <www.e. Milford Bateman. Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal (Oxford. bureaucratic means. Fikret Abdić. mine. had been involved in an elaborate Ponzi scheme—borrowing in excess of a billion Yugoslav dinars from Yugoslav banks. have only continued wartime dispossession by other.” Southeast European Politics. 2002. 139 . made his fortune as the head of another flagship industrial enterprise.g.-95. godine. 2008). 2011).” International Peacekeeping. “Osnove ratne ekonomije: s osvrtom na rat u BiH 1992. “How to destroy an economy and community without really trying. namely. 117. 3–19. were in and out of prison throughout 1984 and 1985 for real estate fraud and embezzlement. 2008.12 For his part. This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York City: New York University Press. pp. See Emin Eminagić. From his fortress in Velika Kladuša. The scale of the corruption is difficult to understate: “The profit of the entire Bosnian economy for two and a half years was roughly equal to the money Agrokomerc owed when the scandal was discovered. Hamdija Pozderac. After 1996. 13 June 2012. reminiscent of production methods at the turn of the last century. 7 March 2014.net>. 15 April 2014. while approximately fifty per cent of the country’s GDP is owned by eighty-five individuals.22 As Gagnon notes: (…) The violence of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s was part of a broad strategy in which images of threatening enemies and violence were used by conservative elites in Serbia and Croatia: not in order to mobilize people. but rather as a way to demobilize those who were pushing for changes in the structures of economic and political power that would negatively affect the values and interests of those elites.” Constellations. p. market. 1999. “Bilješke Petera Lippmana: Što je drugima korupcija.ba>. the lasting political power of the same class of “elites” (if not literally the same individuals). See Lily Lynch. as the latter were only the most extreme version of the former and in most cases perpetrated by the same people. the Citizens of Ethnopolis. Available at: <wealthx. Gagnon.” The absurdly fractured divisions of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP) are today not merely an exercise in “apartheid cartography.” eKapija.”20 they are also a mask for a system wherein “[under] the cover of the legitimacy conferred by free and fair elections. Nevertheless. The goal of this strategy was to silence. economic criminality in the 1980s and war crimes in the 1990s should be understood along the same continuum. 2007. This in turn enabled conservatives to maintain control of the existing structures of power. Bakir Izetbegović). Available at: <www.P. Fahrudin Radončić) and general post-war looting (Dragan Čović). See also Dženana Karabegović. Available at: <balkanist.” Political Geography.”21 Electioneering in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina thus obscures the political economy of the Yugoslav dissolution and. marginalize. and demobilize challengers and their supporters in order to create political homogeneity at home.org>.” Radio Slobodna Evropa.19 In short.slobodnaevropa. . 2014. p.reduced to a smattering of cottage industries.S. banditry and smuggling (Milorad Dodik. indeed. Petter Lippman. “The Self-Destruction of Republika Srpska. V. to je Bosni politički system.org>.” Balkanist. as well as to reposition themselves by converting state-owned property into privately held wealth.23 18 19 20 21 22 23 140 Danijela Kozina.com>. “BiH iscprljena korupcijom.” Radio Slobodna Evropa. citizens as individuals are stripped of any political power. even a cursory survey of the roster of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political leaders reveals the origins of their positions and privileges to be a potent mixture of classical nepotism (Zlatko Lagumdžija. Available at: <ekapija. what little social property was not plundered or destroyed during the war was progressively dismantled through a series of neoliberal “reforms. “Apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia.18 massive and chronic unemployment. 395–435 See Asim Mujkić. “World Ultra Wealth Report 2012-2013. the basis of power in a new system of a liberal economy. 2 October 2012. 15.” Wealth X. pp. Available at: <www. “Products from BiH craftsmen conquer the U. See David Campbell. most of them elected officials or their close associates. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. “We. 2006).slobodnaevropa. a bourgeoning grey economy. 113. Wealth-X. See David B. the established political contests that take place. “Big Men. The Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia (New Haven & London: Yale University Press.In other words. to promote and implement decisions and policies that would foster meaningful democratic accountability of elites. political agency. in this respect. 141 . however. 2011).org>. however.26 Reclaiming Politics from the Baje In the process of economic dispossession are lost also political rights and.” European History Quarterly. we should understand the dissolution of the second Yugoslav state not as an eruption of “ancient ethnic hatreds” or any variation on this theme but rather as the decision(s) of a collection of provincial oligarchs to forestall their ouster from power by an emerging civic-democratic. nationalism in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina exists almost exclusively to obscure the process of economic dispossession by a class of criminal-political elites (i. Kanin. and P. we can conclude the following. Josip Glaurdić. indeed. per se. “Imagined Communities” and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans. Statism and violence are. continue to express themselves in the language of ethno-nationalism. As the heirs and progenies of these oligarchs are still in power in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. 8 May 2012. Instead. panYugoslav movement of ordinary citizens. participatory civic engagement and the creation of a robust minority rights regime rather than exclusionary ethno-chauvinism.” International Politics. I argue when we survey this political economy as a whole. this is the inherent reactionary inertia of the GFAP arrangements coming to the fore. 149–194. intrinsically linked phenomena. pp. 1989. as with Dodik’s performance. One. that this process cannot merely be understood as one of banal “corruption” as there is no functioning system that is being corrupted. nationalism in the Balkans has always been an anti-democratic. anti-political project championed by elites whose origins were almost exclusively bandit-like and who could thus only ever produce economies based on dispossession and plunder.25 And two. No other outcome can have been expected given i) the oligarchic origins of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and ii) the unwillingness of international actors (later the architects of the post-war settlement in Bosnia and Herzegovina). I would. Also see Karen Barkey. In reality.” International Institute for Middle-East and Balkan Studies.e. Kitromilides. By and large. still more importantly. Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. these seemingly intractable ethnic feuds are typically little more than “[inter]-mafia clashes”. 1994). Available at: <www.24 As a result. pp.ifimes. the baje). in essence. M. suggest that perhaps (though not entirely) with the exception of the workers’ self-management experiment in the second Yugoslav state. 2003. Any comprehensive democratic theo24 25 26 International Institute for Middle-East and Balkan Studies. 491–526. “BiH: Sejdić-Finci case in the shadow of (INTER) mafia clashes. the potential for other models of political association was physically destroyed during the war and is today constitutionally prohibited. from the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis. Corruption and Crime. But taking stock of not only the entirety of Wolin’s theoretical canon but also. . (. 2003).27 Because substantive democratization must also entail the democratization of the economy. over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity. 19–48. that political and economic concerns cannot be separated. the plenum movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina understandably began in Tuzla. possible because the process is one without end. that is. 1996). it is perhaps still more accurate to argue that the political is defined as a process of continuously striving to make momentary instances of the political permanent. ceaseless and endless. as well as the 27 28 142 Ellen Meiksins Wood. The political can thus only exist if it is and remains a politics of continuous practice. pp. Sheldon Wolin. the political is episodic. In contrast. Today we can reflect on the highly truncated experiment in workers’ self-management in the Yugoslav state. through public deliberations. 31–45. UK: Cambridge University Press. with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and modes of action for realizing them. Politics refers to the legitimized and public contestation. Politics is continuous. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge. This also means that the plenum experiment will never completely recede even if political and police pressures temporarily dismantle current organizing networks because what they represent is the only possible exit from the existing paradigm. in short. more importantly. In one respect. the relative decrease in the ferocity of the protests and attendance at plenum assemblies appear to bear out his point. democracy is a project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens. primarily by organized and unequal social powers. as defined by the theorist Sheldon Wolin. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. This reassertion of political agency is.28 Wolin’s conception of the political is focused on “moments” and he seems to resist the possibility of making such exercises permanent. Attempting therefore to decide whether a community or society has succeeded in this effort is to fundamentally misunderstand the proposition. the rise of new democratic movements across the globe over the past decade and a half. a process of reclaiming the political itself.” in Seyla Benhabib. and that the exercise in reclaiming political agency was intrinsically linked with returning socio-economic questions as the central element of public discourse. in this sense. In Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. pp. Neither success nor failure is. an overwhelmingly industrial and working class city. rare. collective power is used to promote or protect the well-being of the collectivity.. Wolin writes: I shall take the political to be an expression of the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when.) In my understanding..ry recognizes. “Fugitive Democracy. however. performative and rhetorical politics substitutes authentic politicisation.corresponding literature concerned with this subject. that we should recall that when democracy remains stunted in practice. 143 . 2012. They are unable to offer anything akin to even perfunctory.” It is instead an invitation for a new kind of intellectual and scholarly discourse about class as a socially constituted phenomenon. pp. their institutionalization post-1996. class dynamics are also internally constituted. at least. commitments to parliamentarianism as other neoliberal elites do. 2014). the baja phenomenon is one that holds more explanatory potential than generic references to “trans-Atlantic neoliberal capital(ists). VadimVolkov’s text (Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism) makes for an important parallel case study to the experiences of the postYugoslav region. finally. altogether. however.” in Deric Shannon. and arguably (the former) Yugoslavia as a whole. the ideals of self-management still permeate Bosnia and Herzegovina and post-Yugoslav society more broadly. “Democracy as Verb: New Mediations on the Yugoslav Praxis Philosophy. This is why I offer the concept of the baja as an analytical category. And in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. the exclusive means of their accumulation— 29 30 31 Žiga Vodovnik. not because they are new to liberal-democratic practices per se but because they are fundamentally a non-liberal class. the only rhetorical commitment they are capable of is to the ethnos and the nation. and has always been. because of two primary reasons I propose in this chapter. It is not merely an attempt to rewrite the global experience of neoliberalism or even the regional post-socialist31 experience with “Bosnian characteristics. at least from an ideological standpoint. and see that. means that ordinary citizens are excluded from participating in anything other than the most fleeting of experiences with decision-making and so become unable to contest the megalomaniacal schemes inevitably born of intra-oligarchic contests. This also means. pp. if ultimately performative. Resistance. despite the cleptocratic trends that began this experiment’s unravelling in the 1980s. While inevitably structured by global forces. One. then it was nevertheless the longest period in the region’s history of consistent mass exposure to even rhetorical commitments to democratic participation. their genocidal eruption during the 1990s and. Jasmin Mujanović.29 Unsurprisingly. In The End of the World as We Know It? Crisis. If Yugoslav socialism was indeed undone by authoritarianism and oligarchy. demonstrating that even fragmentary experiences with praxis politics are thus potent.30 insomuch as there remains an organic conception of democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina it is deeply coloured by the self-management experience. in turn. citizens are stripped of their political and economic agency but also their very lives in the case of (the former) Yugoslavia. accumulation by dispossession is not merely part but is indeed.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. “Institutionalizing Crisis: The Case of Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina. 433–452.” The baja is different. 147–164. Secondly. and the Age of Austerity (Oakland: AK Press. This. their objectives and systems of control are eminently local.   144 . If this politics proves difficult in the short term. indeed. explosion of socio-economic concerns. their perennial commitment to ethno-nationalist discourse exists precisely to obscure the process of accumulation by dispossession that is the raison d’être of their regime(s). any genuine political project in Bosnia and Herzegovina must base itself on the expansion. participatory association. While they are certainly embedded into broader circuits of dispossession (as Harvey describes them). Much as the plena have already done. this is then perhaps further suggestive of their ultimately parochial rather than truly neoliberal-global aspirations.beginning from the original moment of state formation in the Balkans in the nineteenth century. The only possible response to this radical reductionism and predatory chauvinism is a similarly dramatic assertion of agency and inclusive. it is nevertheless the only genuinely emancipatory project possible. Thus. identities and relations. Jasmina Husanović Traumatic Knowledge in Action: Scrapbooking Plenum Events. Back to the notebook page that I found: it is an undated red-penned sketch from last autumn (2013). a brainstorm for a possible argument and intervention in the form of a diagram of concepts and keywords: “bodies in disaster. by which I usually mean the everyday affective politics of bodies in the plenum space).” As things turned out. which will articulate the political truth of social antagonisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina. but rather something that was experienced in its political truth. for the future repoliticisation events ahead. We (that “plurality of political bodies” I feel a part of) all have an archive like that. through the events and bodies of the protests and plenums in Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina since February 2014—actions that were 145 .. Fermenting Revolt Proposition The Plenum process is a classroom we need to master. Bodies in Disaster: Governance and Public Good in Bosnia and Herzegovina. witnessing. in the form of digital. new pedagogies and new social practices. with and for. all wit(h)nessing a material community of people. hand-written images. printed. this brainstorm annotation did not become something that was written about.” It ends with a possible title for something: “Economies of Affect. economy–ecology. drawings and words. those numerous files and papers that make possible for us to re-member the past few years and decades. and our stories of it. violence and social transformation. Reflecting and Re-membering Reflecting on the “plenumatrix” (my shorthand for the plenum processes throughout the turbulent year of 2014. labour. nonetheless. I found a note in my scrapbooking archives. and live politically. governing labour in “transition…” through violence. of the means necessary to think. records and sounds. speak. Notwithstanding that my archives have kept piling up in these ruinous years. read. demanding social and economic change in line with universal principles of equality and freedom. and open space for the emerging political subject. and notes.. sketches. write. with no time for reflection: it is. ideas and actions in the spaces I/we inhabit and work in. economies of affect/exploitation. on the plenums and their political truth from various elements of the international and local apparatuses.catalysed by deepening economic and ecological disasters. mobilisation and commodification by ethno-nationalist and multiculturalist regimes. is our socially traumatic knowledge: what we learn from violence. for the political truth that people protesting in Tuzla. In other words. The truth of these legacies has been carefully masked or co-opted by the various hegemonic ideologemes and strategies of governance in the public space. injustice. oppression. And more than that. including state. Hence the offensive. and by the depoliticising death-dance of domestic and international elites. but seizing the moment of utmost emergency in the key five days of protests (between 5 and 9 February). the events of February 2014 were not about suddenly acquiring new knowledge/information of what was at stake. These demands recalled antifascist and socialist legacies and led to the enactment of methods of workers’ and people’s political solidarity such as plenums/plena. police. Some of us even have talked about it together—prior. and how we follow the political consequences of this knowledge. However. There has been an extreme accumula- 146 . during and after the February events. embodied and articulated by the plenums. we create public classrooms for such discussions in various formats. the space for the possibility for political truth to emerge was occupied by the plenum processes and populated with new collective subjects springing from the state of emergency. subjugation and repression. Observation Writing as personally now as I did in my 2013 scrapbook archive. through the usual aculturated practices of codification. Precisely in the moment when violence and arson were about to slide to the retrogressive right and repression. media and education. in the last several months. through the demand for and the enacting of social and political change. I see no revelation or new critical insight—I see what many of us “always-already” knew. exploitation. their ideological apparatuses and regimes of governance. Postulate The very political truth. “alwaysalready” knew: this was evidenced in their slogans which proclaimed death to nationalism and demanded an end to economic devastation and exploitation. and elsewhere. and somehow finding the space to articulate the political truth of social antagonisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and universally). the crowd declared itself as opting for the progressive left. The challenge for the event and its process is to grasp what lessons are there to be learnt about the newly opened fronts and by those who have formed those fronts.in-principle postDayton experiments in statecraft. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Marxist Internet Archive 2010). cynicism and hopelessness. Most importantly.tion of this kind of knowledge in the last three decades. in two consecutive Octobers – the 2013 Census and the 2014 General Elections—there is the fracture of the protests and plenums in early 2014. Available at: <www. They spoke and embodied the political truth of capitalist misery in a society where the “transitional” primitive accumulation (from socialism to a so-called liberal democracy/market economy) was conducted through the logic of extreme political violence (from genocide.org>. 147 .”1 Fascism breeds in this misery. corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Corollaries and Challenges Between two seminal performances or spectacles of the identity politics of terror in Bosnia and Herzegovina. misery and hatred. multiculturalist and neoliberal paraphernalia. and its accompanying geopolitical “security” arrangements of ghettoisation and impoverishment. the learning available from the inabil1 Karl Marx. and in the public domain where. economic and ecological disaster for the others. and the spiralling poverty. The increasing wealth for some. through it. These civic actions were attempting to formulate an anti-identitarian and internationalist form of political belonging and class solidarity. The lives of citizens and workers have been depoliticised. universalising the predicaments of social and economic injustice. all forms of radicalisation and fascisation. we engage critically with the fundamental law of capitalism that Marx postulated: “the accumulation of misery in all its form and shapes is a necessary condition of capitalism. It is possible to say no to the fascism and capitalist exploitation that is raging in everyday life. with all its deadening ethno-nationalist. through identitarian matrices. through the 1990s war and its post-Dayton aftermath. The protests and the plenums are were an affirmation of its subjects as political beings—the opposite to the mere “victims” of the war and “transitional” turmoil in the post-SFRY region that was brewed and served both at home and abroad.marxists. culturalisation and depoliticisation abound. victimized and commodified over and over again. unemployment. privatisation and reforms of economy and governance). is creating unprecedented levels of misery amongst people in their everyday lives. The ethico-political demand subjectivising a plenum collective has been that of equality and freedom. This knowledge is traumatic because. sold into impoverishment. ethnic cleansing and ghettoisation. to various similar. in a society where unemployment is over fifty per cent. ethnic conflict. the terror of separation and exclusion between victims and mon- 148 . through further securitisation and culturalisation of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina (conflating the questions of terrorism. “terror as usual” or fear. In the past few decades. traitors. have been devoured by the terrorising experience of precarious life. The symptoms of alienation. cynicism and malicious banalisation. their capacities to think and act together. and for those younger than thirty-five. The same old road is taken—new depoliticisations and appropriations of the vocabulary of social and economic justice. and nurture political solidarity and bonds of hope. over seventy-five per cent. horizontal hostility. Corruption. are plentiful—resulting in an affective landscape contaminated by mistrust.ity of “local” and “international” elites to face the political crisis and the possibility of social and political conflict once again. as well as creating possible economic futures for its people. including making sense of and producing political truths of today’s key social antagonisms. stifling its potential to be or become politically conscious of its utter subjugation and dependency. This is an imperative for collaborative work in the “bloodstream” of the socialist-leaning plenums at the moment. What is this community in need of. impoverishment and banalisation are contaminating all spheres of production. The people are worn out. The enemies. traverses the ideological pitfalls and which knows how to employ the means necessary to bring together bare survival. and protest against exploitation in newly produced states of emergency around identity and terror through the security-justice-development triad). There are those who see through the ideological phantasms of war and genocide. The capacities of social bodies to maintain their collective effort on a daily basis have been approaching neardestruction. Propositions There is a community. congealed by the illusions of post-Dayton order. in the clutches of sovereign politics and its weapons. some knowledge production and authentically political action. its intellectual life and social action. a collective subject here. in its potentiality to speak in a manner that. as well as that of the public good in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is exactly the coming together of this experience—of bodies learning in the affect of becoming social abject/human waste—which brings forth the collective revolt. There is a brutal destruction of human life and rights going on. politically. in all public spaces affecting collective action on the grassroots level. sycophants and manipulators encircle the remnants of the working class. in terms of knowledge as social praxis? The road we are only beginning to tread needs a critical understanding of the political economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina. regression. This work is a matter requiring the material and affective endurance and sustainability of all means of production and the actual producers committed to social change and self-transformation it implies. To produce direct democracy is a matter of freedom. both on the local and international scene. the paranoiac structure is competing with the hysterical. civil society. and more. all citizens—have a capacity to build politics. often obscene. with their own.sters. students. as they are doing. this requires a new form of collective work. 149 . There is precious little capacity for self-criticism. They have not proved themselves up to the task of materialising an affective commons and being-in-common capable of opposing the all-surrounding misery and sadness: an affective commons which refuses to reproduce the conditions of its own enslavement and the all too typical symptoms of alienation in everyday life and work. an authentic political gesture in the quasi-democratic political and social fabric in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They know the rules don’t apply universally. such as is produced by the governing ideological regimes and their affectivity of mortification. Question marks and the “Unknowns” Current actors in local and international civil society cannot muster this form of collective work unless they revolutionise their approach to matters of justice and development. They are blind to the political meaning of the historical events of 2014 and of the years before. which hegemonises the space of fundamental human rights—equality. stuck in the current ideological institutional frames and antagonisms operative in their (non)transparent public life and work. impoverishment and/or banalisation in everyday life. It implies readiness to face the illusions and the hard-core realities of poverty. humiliation and shame. as it has. for acting less as individuals and more as a collective. who might collide and stand in for the universal. reconciliation” paradigms and implementing practices called “projects. the unemployed. To produce solidarity politically is traumatic knowledge. On this front. Sticking. The same diagnosis goes for much of the alternative civil sector – failing. teachers. but have thoroughly repressed or masked their own knowledge of this fact. to counter the hopelessness produced through corruption. political economies and interests at play behind the scene. because their own politics has foregone and given up the universal demands for justice. to the same old “democratisation. However. activists. that is. The politicallyengaged people in Bosnia and Herzegovina—workers. freedom and social justice.” they remain caught in the rules of the sovereign order. and affirmation of its universality. In June 2014. speaking about the public good.. but which met with no adequate “political” response. And yet still the Bosnian public revolts. Across the board. in the face of a catastrophic “natural” disaster. and their local princes. a commonality of political action. their old and new resentments. but they take it further—towards matters of equality and 150 . mythologies. that is. In Bosnia and Herzegovina. comparable to the war damage. fascistic. so much money has been obscenely. are normalised as the hegemonic form of political life through various culturalisations and depoliticisations. Added to this. Thus.Observation The year of 2014 is a much more significant one for Bosnia and Herzegovina than the macabre grounds of the 100th commemoration year concerning the Great War. Bosnia and Herzegovina shows the obverse side of politics everywhere. civil society at international. What might be unleashed. and the threat of violence and radical insecurity. both incompetent local and international authorities. it faced the humiliating spectacle afforded to it by New Europe. In this sense. the promenade of the Great Powers in their new millennia outfits. Indeed. Indeed. they ask themselves. Its grassroots political fabric focuses its ferocious attention on some emancipatory spaces. whether they be imperialist. maliciously and cynically wasted by so many agencies and organisations that it is impossible to single any one specific perpetrator out. It started only two weeks after the May 2014 floods and landslides had caused catastrophic economic damage in Bosnia and Herzegovina. we were confronted with a series of “distractions” in the Bosnian public’s attempt to make sense of social reality The public was faced with yet another disaster that galvanised the citizens’ solidarity with one other. demanding some radical changes? They might even endanger the plundered assets that have been accumulated and shared out by the elites! The plenums are repoliticising democracy per se. European and local level. totally failed to make sense of what was/is going on. and their coordinates of intelligibility or reasoning. and ideological phantasms produced a travesty of symptomatic events in June 2014 throughout Sarajevo. still playing the colonial game. Until they catch up. abandoned Bosnian citizens to manage the devastating state of affairs mostly by themselves. played out in front of the eyes of those beset by the literal and metaphorical floods and landslides both of the history of oppression and of the torrential rains. etc. and. economic or concerning the security interests of the elites of today’s world. failing to tackle the situation in any of its manifestations: Bosnia and Herzegovina is a microcosm of all the new crises and upheavals globally and regionally. and the Sarajevo Assassination. disgraced itself. a continual state of emergency and exception. There is a reason for the alarm being shown by the Old Continent and the big boys in Bosnia and Herzegovina. which within which it eludes the clutches of the dominant regimes. once the events in its less metropolitan areas possibly take up the old socialist ideals. when trying to put the brakes on the spiralling economic devastation in the country. Documenta. “Truth and Reconciliation Are Not What We Really Need. co-opted or appropriated here is the demos and the agora which the plenums embodied through their radical demands for justice and economic redistribution. from the zero-point of their experience. and to respond to the challenge of freedom to make what we want of and for ourselves. This is deemed dangerous by many – for them. Problem Despite. to give political meaning to this experience. The political truth is that they are able to act to change the status quo. through an exquisite gesture of sovereign self and subjective autonomy. over and beyond the mass graves and ruins. in its own actual work. bringing their own subjective politics and their own understanding of the events around them to the plenum space.economic redistribution. 151 . to enact solidarity through a clear and firm political actualisation of emancipatory matters and horizons. without fears of facing the new and the unknown. Corollaries and dangers This praxis echoes Boris Buden’s insights: to take over the repressed freedom of radical change of your own miserable everyday reality and to create new forms of political solidarity.” Experiments with Truth. their palpable wounds of war and post-war violence and exploitation and “tuning” their speech. their insistence on universal ethico-political principles and their enactment of direct democracy. the very work of the plenum embodies the truths of the social antagonisms. Particularly bewildering to many is the call to go beyond the obsolete and incapacitated institutional representative frame. which continually threaten to implode it. The plenum in Tuzla started once one part of protesters repoliticised their past and current experiences of nationalism and capitalism. what must be repressed. Thus. the Plenum processes have unmasked embedded opportunism as the strongest ideological mechanism of imposed identification and governance. 11 (2001) 2. with no external causal factors or sources of authority but themselves.2 2 Boris Buden. Such collectives emerge as grounded in themselves. their work and their bodies in step with that repoliticisation—making space with all other protestors. embodying all imaginable antagonisms that direct democracy is likely to throw up. Boris. to organize a big ball for the elites and a carnival for the masses. The people engaged in the plenums are complex political subjects. Much easier for the institutions in both state and civil society sectors. in-common. and to recall Buden once again. rights and responsibilities. neo-colonial and neofascist practices and forces so uncompromisingly and ruthlessly engulfing the social. and pretending not to know how much of it evidences the growing underside of capitalist exploitation. That imaginary is there to articulate. Reckoning with fascism means fighting it—it requires the cold courage of engagement. On the other hand. The seduction of profit and power. miserable farce of authority. There are always safe-havens for the weakhearted to avoid revolutionising matters of social and economic justice. better tomorrow. we have to turn these into political facts. only when the one and only thing that keeps them living is the vision of a radically different. as Marx postulated. only when things in life get unbearable for them. understandable only if there is an alternative social imaginary as a referential coordinate system of values. seeds the partisanship of particular interests and the brethren of neoliberal. outcasts and “hooligans” have been ready to recognise and stand up to the real dangers of its actual social reality—the power of the capital and its logic of profit breeding on misery. The historical trauma of socialism and Europe as a whole has been in misrecognising fascism. the impunity of the criminal.” at the Vienna-based Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. a collective learns that things in their life can get worse. The petit bourgeois norms and mechanisms leave “maps” and “footprints” that are much easier for the opportunist to follow and tread. but to the contrary. its scum. not when life is going well. Fascism 3 152 Boris Buden presented this at a lecture titled “Recognising Fascism. It will rupture there.3 The dispossessed of Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina. is pervading us all with utmost speed and devastation. do we articulate this experience? The question is a critical one because it is that new language that undermines the overly successful ideological and repressive multi-state apparatuses operative in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally. through ethno/multinational/corporate channels. consume it from within. where its constitutive cowardice. idiocy. and its cronies from top to bottom. 1997. Misery as the underside of capitalism.The question is how. through the new language of political truths. Challenge Do we have enough conceptual strength and human resources to respond collectively and individually to the economic and political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina. . flirting with nationalism. it is woven with the socialist and antifascist coordinates of its origin. and fascination with power. as a universal fractal of the global one? To be able to interpret the present critically and understand the information we are saturated with concerning the miserable future that awaits us. to avoid taking up the political consequences of collective political labour. Indeed. Materialising solidarity presumes new forms of action. enables one to see that revolt is streaming and fermenting in Bosnia and Herzegovina. their activist circulatory system and ca are all political foreshadowings of what is to come. economies of protest and their affective and affirmative resistances to the dominant economy of mortification. the situation might be radically different in six months time. materialised by the plenum process. in the midst of the in-security madhouse that local and international elites are preparing for the months ahead. The protests. This presumes shared work on concrete experiences of material and affective labour. The new state of affairs or crisis must be read through a proper materialist dialectic.breeds on misery. and articulated through political education and interventions. Knowledge from the reflection of those messages and emergences of collectivity. the torched buildings.” This is the affective state of affairs—many of the protesters know that there is an antifascist as anticapitalist battle in the heart. which resists misery and violence. It will be necessary to strike at fascism and speak the authentic political truths of social justice in the very demanding times ahead. 153 . articulating the traumatic knowledge necessary for a new form of collaborative work. Looking geopolitically and in terms of the internal political situation. Our horizons of hope are the experiences and the lessons of such battles that bring us into a commons—in the past. alienation and exploitation. necessary for future “martial moves” that will be necessary to make in practice to re-politicise the political agenda and to embed the possibility of emancipatory horizons. with a common task: to continue forging (however slowly. Lemma or what we must learn Navigating protest. to materialise this political creed is to undertake a courageous and sacrificing road to the future. But. is like the theory of a martial art. What will these new forms of action take? How are we to share and preserve all the necessary capacities for this task—a task. pushing us into the future. the plenums. and a collective subject bonded by an imaginary and experience of life and work. Of a new antifascist and anticapitalist struggle to come. Europe and the world. the fronts to which the fight must be taken will be multiplying. fracturing and saturating the protest potential. exodus and resurrection of bodies in daily political motion. freedom to people. in the present. in the future to come. The new collectives must forge materialist dialectic readings of social antagonisms and its everyday experience. but steadily) a collective life and labour ready to bring about an end to human misery of violence and poverty. in Bosnia and Herzegovina. which is already sending us fearless voices of solidarity from the future? As some of the protest banners in Tuzla and Bosnia and Herzegovina called for: “Death to capitalism. . Like the uncanny. a boy. he urgently needs as a remedy for scabies. In one hour. It’s not going to last forever. 2008). Rani jadi (Podgorica: Nova knjiga. recounts a childhood event—taking a walk to the doctor’s villa in order to buy sulphur sticks. you should think of what comes after. the lie and the shame—it will all be behind me. on that day. doubled figure of the vampire – at once alive and dead. But. 155 . not only from internal wounds and bleeding but from “balkanization. called Andreas Sam in the story. just like a dog’s tail. The doctor surely can’t need more than half an hour to deal with me. I had never before understood the difference between those two tenses. Walking along the river bank. through the meadow. Andreas plays the whole event in his head before it actually takes place. It is like a meadow on the way back. let alone cover the cost of this desperately needed treatment. in other words. I will be walking back along the Kerka’s riverbank. in half an hour even. is not enough to buy a single egg. and the doctor. everything his single-motherdeported-father family has been able to scrape together. fearing to the point of nausea the upcoming humiliation: the conversation with the doctor and the soon to become evident fact that the sum of money he is carrying. 47–8 (translated by the author of the article). I learned: when you’re in a sickening situation. Blood: A Critique of Christianity In Danilo Kiš’s collection of short stories Early Sorrows: For Children and Sensitive Readers from 1969 there is a story entitled “The Meadow. Melancholia suffers. then there’s the walk back.” Gil Anidjar. the pretence.Selma Tobudić Protests and Plenums—A Remembering Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. pp. Aleksandar Hemon.” The first person narrator. The Lazarus Project Melancholia is a wound. I thought to myself. so this whole uncomfortable business will be over in an hour at most. the day of the visit to the doctor’s.melancholia is ambivalently divided. It will all be in the past. at once internally and externally.1 1 Danilo Kiš. as void depends on memory to think it. that “this” is not what we were fighting for. “being” has come to be thought of only within the parameters of belonging to either/or one of three “nationalities. inscribed itself in the city’s history in flames as well.” These “nationalities” are then (un)represented by the major avatar-like political parties. buildings would burn. for months—what made so many people join the protests on that particular day? The numbers taking to the streets in solidarity with the workers were unlike anything experienced in the last couple of decades. . it was unimaginable that. Remembering draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward into a void. no rioting. the first day of war in Tuzla. connects what is lost to what is here. for years. Kindle edition location 380.2 What the official regimes of memory and ways of remembering in Bosnia and Herzegovina masterly teach is that to remember is to honour the victims—to commemorate “our” victims. the dominant way of existence framed in accordance with the General Framework Agreement for Peace—the past forever in the present—has shape-shifted and encoded itself into every area of daily living. is encompassed and encapsulated within an ethnic identity. Black smoke rising across the city’s horizon as the cantonal building burnt was a sort of déjà-vu. In every aspect of life. After the cantonal government resigned on Friday 7 February. no shots fired would have been unthinkable. including how one is to remember. as opposed to all the others. 15 May 1992. Economy of The Unlost. just a matter of days later. During the protests. 1999). Once memory is thought it can be commodified. Memory depends on void.” From different ethnic perspectives which share the same approach.The most common question posed in relation to February events—one that is still not fully answered—is this: when the workers of five privatized Tuzla factories had already been protesting over the course of years. and then regularly. That there would be no looting of surrounding shops. It was as if everyone on the street subconsciously remembered the possibility of a different future from the one that the ongoing present—of living in “transition”— has. From the perspective one might have had preceding the events. been heading towards – that is. an uncertainty set in. of an order similar to the paralyzing wait in 1992 as to what would come next. The imposed and imposing 2 156 Anne Carson. which are “not ours. What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into present. the words circulating among the people indicated that “this” cannot go on any longer. an endless perpetuation of the promise of “what is to come”. Once void is thought it can be cancelled. every Wednesday. that “this” is not the future our children need. what one is and can be. a void disguised by the mere fact of constant repetition. Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan (Princeton: Princeton University Press. There was a sense of void in the air. And similar voids have a long history of repeating themselves in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A gathering of so many was unprecedented. In this country. this knowledge is also not nothing. the poem conveys that what the war taught us is worthless— other than knowing how far the limits of our endurance will stretch. Balčak / The Hilt. Can you reconstruct an ancient jug from the lonely handle that made it to our time? We should lock it all up in the soul and forget.3 Seemingly.” as the proverbial post-war Bosnian wisdom goes. the management of remembering involving 3 Marko Vešović. endless like the handkerchief a magician pulls out of his hat. enabling the continuity of the positioning of political elites in power . from now on have a touch more self-respect. I hope. like the fighter who takes a billion blows but stays on his feet and his mangled face in the mirror tells him who he really is. because the reality lived since confirms how. For to know who you are.spiritofbosnia. Living and dying for four years under impossible conditions left an impact in the way it extended our human capacity to adapt—to adjust—to almost anything. and above all. 7 (2012) 4. without exploding—that is the only property that you shall. if you survive. which will gain us nothing: (…) We who passed through the siege of Sarajevo shall. <www. particularly since they serve as a tool to overwrite any other remembering out of the general code of belonging. It is this patriarchal collective which has repetitively ensured. that we do not want to come face to face with them again.more or less unchanged. On the other hand. An experience that will serve no purpose: as if you lost your arms and won a violin. for the past twenty years. This knowledge—a saber which we shall not draw very often from the scabbard. of course.org>. But at least we shall. the (re) production and (re) mobilization of the electorate. has always been the victim’s privilege. But at least I will keep my hand on its hilt. gain nothing. bring from this war. We experienced our own limits. In “The Hilt. You can’t even tell others about it. This enactment of “belonging” confines it to a clearly delineated and patriarchal collective. To know how much you can bear. 157 .” Marko Vešović writes the knowledge of war as knowledge. “All is good as long as there is no shooting. as Rasko would say. among other solidifications that are actually serving to support the perpetuation of the “ancient warring/victimized ethnicities” trope.regimes of remembering have proved to be crucial. Much like any other segment of Bosnian society. as any other. of the creative making act. “ours” and “theirs.” the roles are strictly defined and the role of the victim—what Vešović termed as its privilege—has ultimately been absorbed into a spectacle—a rigid “who.knowledge of war taken as such is a priority for the elites. mutually mirroring social relations and standpoints. years after the war’s end. adaptability to whatever may come has become one of the most prized individual and social characteristics. mirror armour was a type of armour used up to the seventeenth century in Europe and Asia. also carry within it a blind spot. this ensures an on-going deepening of the existing separations and their invariable multiplications. permeated by the fact that being a member of an appropriate political option and/or ethnicity has become the dominant mode of existence. like some mirror armour. 4 158 The precursor to flack-jackets. nor held accountable. but also. of everything that is conveyed by and in language.” “when” and “how” the mourning is performed. for their doings and non-doings. . To follow the poem and delve further into the mirror . sustained and screened by the existing. what is invisible in the reflection and to the reflected—that which is created. following the overarching ethnic key and guaranteeing an expected outcome. If the poem inhabits the realm of poiesis.” even if a knowledge of nothing.4 powerlessness to people—the impossibility of changing the established positions which are fragmenting still further across/into/over individuals—does not that mirror. In this approach to “memory management. Over the years and across innumerable lines of divisions.” “these” and “those” and three ethnic identities.can a mirror ever reflect back completely what one really is? Or to phrase it along the lines of identities and identifications so important for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s inhabitants—is one ever identical to one’s mirror image? If the divisions produced and upheld in the Bosnian society constantly project back. the remembering also is an activity not only the manner of which. The victim’s image and its generalized and manipulated meaning have been absorbed by the gluttonous transitional state. mostly rectangle-shaped and usually serving not only as a shield but was believed to protect from being given an evil eye. collective and de-individualizing interpretations turning. fixed and unchangeable distinctions between this and that side. in a country where flexibility unto living death. returning and playing into an economy particularly profitable for those politicians enjoying the financial benefits. Survival (mis)taken for life is still in place. but its content too are pre/proscribed in advance. which is unseen and can perhaps be only assumed? Vešović’s figure of knowledge as a “sabre. upholding the status quo and the positions of those continuing to profit from the clear cut. from all four sides. simultaneously. points towards what is yet unseen and unknown. These “beneficiaries” also enjoy the security of not being accountable. This “management” relies upon firm official. a “beyond” to the image. and the mourning can never take place. to not being and to meanings. Yet. and to stop there. it also becomes indistinguishable from not-forgetting. never be) seen—also something that might only be visible from another. a connection in between the non-lessons of war and the protests and plenums.as some parts of some other. is not only represented as completely reconstructed. From a point where a poet saw the impossibility of reconstructing an ancient vase from a remaining fragment to the present extends a time and space in which the jug. retroactively. Remembering as connecting again. leaves no room for a reminder that remembering already contains the knowledge of this severing. In the narration. this also entails a brief moment of “thinking forward” into the future. a re-gathering of members—elements. with certainty. something not (or that will. to face that “nothing. There is always already something missed and missing. to what was. particles. perhaps. In this way. p. and unambiguously so. a thin thread. aim to ascribe totality to being. situating himself. Multiple Arts: The Muses II (Stanford: Stanford University Press. via holding the “going to” and the “going back” together in the same thought. Remembering. that to remember means to reminisce. (and it always does). When the past holds numerous voids.. the acts that continue to void it of meaning. When the remembering becomes fixed and fixated. What is evident is that the established and instituted practices of living.” the “unknown” and the “unidentified” —some of which. 2006). fragments—different 5 Jean-Luc Nancy. In the story that opens this article. to pay homage and commemorate. to remember. an additional layer is inscribed into this particular notion of remembering—making it a glimpse into what is to be/come. constantly (re) activates and retroactively (re)inscribes the events as traumatic and therefore (re)traumatises. something (dis) placed. Knowing. 4 159 .conveys an “outside” to what is said—“the sense of “poetry” as a sense that is always still to be made”5 then perhaps a parallel can be drawn via this poem with the situation arising during the February 2014 events in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The present tense as split three-ways into what was. The boy takes his present walk in order. conceptualized and practiced exclusively as evoking the painful experiences of the past as such. literally still remain to be excavated—is almost unbearable. to make it already past. into the remembrance of a childhood event. what is and a future state that— although still to come—is already imagined to be (over). not yet discernible knowing—which might broaden the existing self-enclosed/ing view. itself. in his imagination. but generally taken and consumed as precisely equal. and of remembering. future (retro) perspective. Remembering. Kiš the narrator performs a paradoxical (and parallactic) move. and the knowledge.. can never exactly and fully remember the past—it is always within the Nachträglichkeit that one introspects and then follows its traces. also inherently involves thinking-into-being the threads that connect the nothings . the memory that is voided. standing in the streets. underlying Bosnian political discourse through. at times more or less visible. the mere fact of speech—persons addressing others and themselves—was novel enough.” has been degraded simply to occupying an empty form. Both because the protests were denounced as acts of hooliganism and nothing more—indicating. Filled with frustration. refilling the vacuum installed after the government’s resignation to be emptied into an exchange and circulation. in the infinitive form. in a practice emptied of any meaningful substance. such as unions and associations (in addition to a complicated post-Dayton state organization and administration) and additionally separated from “those in power”—might also shed some light on why the protests’ participants turned up in such numbers and why so many took part in the plenums. in which everyone merely tolerates and 160 . the participants speaking revealed not so much how the absence of opportunity to voice dissatisfactions shapes and subtracts deteriorating social bonds. symbolising the lack of any excuse left to justify that the political and the meaning of “politician. To retake Vešović’s image in the mirror. The violence that the protests involved. The worth—if worth is regarded as how Vešović values it—worth nothing—and if only to be attributed in retrospect—the worth of the protests and plenums lies in the cominginto-awareness that the feeling of powerlessness is at once imposed. Out of plenums. the politicians” dichotomy and that it is not all. the destruction of the buildings. the parents. manipulation by fear of the other. concealed beneath the usual discourse of multiculturalism and tolerance. and ourselves. too divided. It is through bodies. Remembering which is again. simply to state one’s name and start speaking was not considered enough. is really as presented. the speaking brought relief. the protests and plenums movement introduced and gave rise to the notion that nothing. Tolerance. not even “this” manner of accepting everyday living. the meetings held in more or less crowded spaces. the members of various associations. lacking too much. Initially. a creation. and anew. as unchangeable and always lacking something. the participants spoke about their daily limitations. too ignorant. Beyond complicity with how the people are produced and producing themselves within this “us” versus “them” mechanism. as always too few to change anything.and to be re-pieced in a different way. a repetition. to remember. the unemployed. cannot be disregarded. the teachers. During the assemblies. but also that the role usually attributed to “the people”—most often by themselves—as those divided in between different categories through formal institutions. if nothing else the obvious illusion of a “free media” that some still held onto—and because it is an ever present motif. created and supported by both sides of “the people vs. mostly identifying themselves as belonging to a group—the workers. reflected and perceived. And also. as parts of some other collective—an as-yet unformed one—that reconnectings began. sjećati se—a (self) reflexive verb in the local languages. which she describes as “impossible. 161 . but without crossing the wall. and paid by the very people standing in protest...)Existence is not a transparent and inoffensive grammatical or logical category. So Malabou: “Plasticity designates the form of a world without any exteriority. unrepresentable6 surplus. a harmless property of persons. Five years later. after the war. in protest to the fact that there is no candidate for the tri-partite presidency from the category of “the others. from within or without—while the “others. one can become the victim of a highly rigid framework whose temporal solidification produces the appearance of an unmaleable substance. This mourning.) When identity tends towards reification. which is the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1995. Being the stuff of things. In History and the process of mourning in Hegel and Freud. Plasticity situates itself in the middle of these two excesses. Recently. as marble in the material of sculpture. 2010).is tolerated.(. animals and things.. during the Bosnian general elections. as the very material of presence. the police is— lines of command following the interests of parties in power.” those not declaring themselves as belonging to either of the three nationalities. Malabou’s “impossible mourning” is an alternative “to the extent that it renounces at the same time the appropriation of the idea of the other as well as pure grief and lamentation. pp. the interests of those few within the parties in power making self-serving decisions. since Dervo Sejdić and Jakob Finci. as employees of the state. Plasticity At the Dusk Of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press. which in most cases ultimately means.” Drawing on the notion of plastic in Hegel and Nietzsche. a world in which the other appears as utterly other precisely because she is not someone else. a sort of war continued—as business. perceived as non-violent precisely because being nothing like the war everyone remembers. as a mass.7 Catherine Malabou applies her concept of plasticity8 to the work of mourning. but it also has the power to give form to itself. as members of Roma and Jewish minorities won their case at the European Court for Human Rights in 2009. and between “standard” mourning and that which is not.” but also demonstrating that the two men have at least successfully merged into the vast corpus of Bosnian jokes. distinguished only across all the existing borders—shrouded in silence. disputing the provisions of the General Framework Agreement for Peace. 15–20. as trade in people as the electorate body. The protests also revealed how deeply divided.. as the consumers of ready-made solutions never put into action.” Catherine Malabou. Malabou defines the “impossible mourning” as a third option to the standard differentiation between mourning and melancholia. In Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy. in 6 7 8 The word “unrepresentable” is here used literally—as not being able to have an elected representative in the government. It is capable of receiving any kind of form. Existence reveals itself as plasticity. remain the invisible. as well as on recent neuroscientific research. many added Mr. So the protests also inserted a cut into what could have been conceived as violence. no changes have been made to the constitution. Sejdić Finci to their ballots. Not to make such a distinction entails denying how. it has the power to both shape and to dissolve a particular facet of individuality. (2001) 106. and connecting it to Freud. though not at all unequipped. having gone through the experience of a war such as it was in Bosnia and Herzegovina. (. Between the right proportion of “idealization” and Aufhebung. the congealing of form. again.” Everything surely could have taken place otherwise. of everything that the present excludes as unaccomplished (.. or copy. Many events in the recent past—from a group of “strollers” in Banja Luka organizing a park occupation in 2012. could have been completely other chance. Yet.. p. and at most times unknowingly so—allows 9 10 11 12 162 Catherine Malabou. 19. valuable knowledge in order to repeat. Malabou draws upon this trace in Freud as “a trace of the “non-event” (nonadvenu) or of not having happened (non-arrivé)”11—even if what it traces. within the very lack of what is to be mourned.” in Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy. . it is evident that this could not have been so. it is neither appropriable not idealisable by the psyche. However. across various initiatives undertaken to reconnect individuals and resist amidst general disillusionment. Op. retroactively.the manner of a merely apparent paradox. since it is nothing.org/babylution-bih-battle-for-the-elementary-rights-of-new-born-childrenidentity-and-healthcare>. and could be linked to remembering a knowledge of nothing. or considered unimportant. it is exactly due to this perceived failure that a connection can be made to what came after. It would mean that there was a structure before one had even begun to be constructed—that there was some point of reference from which to draw. cit. could have been other.jmbg. the mourning precisely of the possible. This vertigo of the completely other origin is neither a shadow nor a phantom.. is an affirmation”. it doubles up the present with a mourning. linking the protests and plenums to what is yet to show itself out of the past. <www.desired change would mean that the protests and plenums had had a fixed and expected function and meaning – and that they had had it in advance. 20.. which moves in-between.10 To grieve (and/or cling to) the fact that the protests and plenums failed to bring such a much. not only in attempt to search for continuity at all costs—though that is sometimes not unwelcome when partitions are in abundance—but to (re) create. Acknowledging these connections—that people engaged in creating them during these cut-up events. to affect and set forth discontinuous and discontinuing connections where they were not. is a sabre-knowledge of nothing. p. an incomplete sentence. allows for the acceptance that there is a trace – and. But. to the “Babylution” protests in 2013 occurring all over Bosnia and Herzegovina12—have perhaps been forgotten.).. Ibidem. a pre-set form and content. “History and the process of mourning in Hegel and Freud. or no thing yet—it so redoubles into “the mourning of mourning itself. To trace a trajectory of potentiality.9 It is perhaps in this sense that the “forgetting” that Vešović mentions. since nothing visibly changed. (2001) 106. the forgetting that is disabled by the remembering that is managed as a remembering of always the same. an inconclusive. As the impossible mourning. what is being traced is nothing. And this too is not all that can be written of the protests and plenums. especially in its redoubling of the conjugation of the verb “to be.for a possibility in.” it constantly calls for something to take its place but leaves a salvaging absence at all times—some space to breathe. the second future tense as it is referred to in local languages.” It is interesting note perhaps that futur drugi. Or just for knowing that nothing. in the after effects of the Bosnian Spring—given that the general elections are already bringing a sort of 1992 flashback. again—is this lesson about nothing. the possibility to start thinking to/from the “future-in the-past. a measure of distance which allows for the sudden. not even this “nothing” is everything there is. yet again. the unexpected. the impossible to happen. We always already saw and yet (will) have to see. not less to the learners of Balkan languages. is notorious for bringing confusion to the speakers. which was and is always already there? The fact of this “nothing” is what drives the “moving towards. 163 . the impossibly hopeless situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind. . incompleteness and impos1 2 3 4 Vanja Sutlić. We must thus view the continued processes of genocide through the category of work. simply. violent. students. Available at: <www.org>. As put by Gajo Petrović. localised forms of imperialism and colonisation were strategies that served merely as the means of delivery.3 Moreover. they have initiated a process of repoliticising. as well as all other as yet unrecognised. recalling the commonality buried in mass graves. see the “working” human. U čemu se sastoji ta granica? [… positing work high will let us see its limit. Genocide.slobodnaevropa. totalising and excluding form of neo-classical capitalism.” as the “most internal point of sovereign power. Contradictions. initiated the creation of a new politics. Praksa rada kao znanstvena povijest (Zagreb: Globus. of political self-subjectivation by those who have. This term includes women engaged in reproductive labour. simple purpose: to replace the Yugoslav system of self-governance and societal ownership. pensioners and the unemployed. p. and with all its breaks and irruptions) of selforganisation and revolutionary essence of being. In the plenums. in this case. the distant memory of the subjectivating status of work.Vanessa Vasić Janeković Remembering Work as Political Sovereignty … treba visoko staviti rad da bismo mogli vidjeti njegovu granicu. In what does that limit consist?] Vanja Sutlić1 The people who took to the streets of Bosnia and Herzegovina have. The extreme violence that dismembered this subject had had a clear.” The Bosnian protests and plenums have washed off the ethnic “formaldehyde” that had threatened to turn the body of the working human into an eternally ethnic “mummy”. Emir Hodžić pointed to the exit of the ethnic and the arrival of the socio-economic. drawing on the continuity (however faint. by demanding the return of the right to life that was stolen from them. 165 . 1987).4 decided to demand more democracy and more politics of their making. 272. We saw living. but excluded groups. protesting bodies putting together (metaphorically speaking) the scattered parts of the murdered Yugoslav self-governing worker.2 not “homo sacer. with the current. the workers and citizens (rather than ethnic bodies) of Bosnia and Herzegovina are reclaiming a common destiny. Thinking new politics requires unearthing that which is most represssed. During the protests in Sarajevo. most subjugated and most invisible. places. This demand for sovereignty in work was as much the result of anticolonial struggle. forms of organising. arises within the notion of state as the site of power. a feature of emancipatory politics par exellence or of politics as invention. the rule of the working people persisted until the break up of the SFRY. as it demands rule over objects whose work produces value for the sovereign. with the first strike.” This was “… political subjectivation within the regime of “resistance by logic” or the logic of rebellion.9 this movement achieved its most authentic form in the WWII. From about 1950 to 1968. State sovereignty is. slogans. Branimir Stojanović. as the People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB) by the Yugoslav revolutionary Partisan movement. socialist and communist activity preceded WWII. a lack of revolutionary process. reflecting the transformations and elucidations of its constitutive politics. but also the planned post-war division of Yugoslav territory between Britain and the USSR. to.”10 Stojanović dates the end of this sequence of political subjectivation as May 1943.sibility reside within remembering work as political sovereignty. Therefore. whilst placing them within the regime of revolutionary politics. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia6 (SFRY) was such a leap: constitutionally defined as the state of the working people. This is part of the definition of communism. to conceive of work as political sovereignty may demand somewhat of a leap. and communism is what this period of relative socialist authenticity claimed to wish to achieve. however. in 1963 become the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.7 pointing. newspapers and their own logic of functioning that. Branimir Stojanović identifies the NOB as a historical sequence of a “collective thinking of politics .5 Establishing state sovereignty was the means of liberation from colonial exploitation.. and later. transcended each of them individually.. “Partizanska histerija – istina jugoslovenskog socijalizma” (Belgrade: Up-underground. First declared in 1943 as the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia. through which they [the Partisan fighters] constructed radical conclusions: their own words. when the People’s Liberation Struggle. however. political declarations.8 as it grew out of a strong. this was only true in the short period of balance between internal state supremacy and upward distribution of governance. Though very active in prewar days.com>. for it becomes obsolete under self-rule by all. her sovereignty thus lay in her being ruled by the working people. Not just the Austro-Hungarian and the Turkish. the colonialism of the fascist occupation. in the coal mine in Trbovlje. as an ontological category. . was renamed the People’s Liberation Army. On paper. though it can be argued that this period stopped in 1958. Impossibility.up-underground. above all to the incompleteness. broad socialist and communist movement. as the essence of being. In reality. Where do we locate their sources? Sovereignty resonates (causing some discomfort) within the anticolonial mobilisation. theatre. Two decades of mainly illegal anti-colonial. 2010). then in 1945 Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. dating back to the nineteenth century. Slovenia. turning its horizontal structure into a hierar5 6 7 8 9 10 166 The need for which has not yet waned. inherently oppressive. Available at: <www. and in mutuality that this work creates. It is to this sequence that we must trace back the rooting of the dominant identity in the figure of the oppressed. Of food. later referred to as Soviet “imperialist expansionism. the Partisan leader and the President of the SFRY.”11 participating in and supporting the struggle. in the occupied. between 1945 and 1948. taking into account the state-forming aspirations of the recently colonised. but as a far more universalising figure. The working human does not stand in for the proletariat here. anti-fascist and anti-colonial impetus became the only new socialist state to break away from what Tito. 2012). working. as well as of self-organisation in the anarchist free territories. the Yugoslav Communist Party leadership began developing self-governance and societal ownership over the means of production and capital: this revolutionary turn was initiated in the period between 1948 and 1951. founded on a revolutionary. this state. Residues of this important sequence of “collective thinking of politics” have persisted to this day.. the ethnic or the religious. Bosnia and Herzegovina finds itself in a similar flux. Those who returned brought with them the experience of guerrilla warfare. etc. cultural and economic self-organisation within free territories. that the new state of the working people was first declared. of the Spanish Civil War. The turn was implemented downwards. it was in WWII in Bosnia.500 Yugoslavs fought against the fascists. the crucial members of this oligarchy had retained the memory of the truly subjectivating sequence that was the NOB. the working human. the new state had already created a political oligarchy. However. p. Though the new state was founded as a federation. Wolfgang Streeck. Gal Kirn describes the “dialectical sharpening and encounter between the “oppressed nations” and “revolutionary people” [that has] emerged in the NOB as the “crucial political ground. p. Representation.12 Work thus took the form of an associative practice of self-creation. cultural production. (PhD diss. on its own subjectivation.”15 The move was equally emancipatory in its rejection of the Soviet style state socialism. where the masses were mobilized. as Kirn puts it. 167 . manifesting in various forms. including forms of self-governance within production. and its seamless absorption by the international humanitarian politics. 72.16 In a stroke of visionary self-reflexivity. And. Following the implementation of it. “Conceptualisation Of Politics And Reproduction In The Work Of Louis Althusser: Case Of Socialist Yugoslavia”. And yet.14 Importantly. as a state with internal borders. even gender and sexual orientation were relegated to the margins of broad antifascist solidarity. as Tadej Kurepa pointed out. most obviously in the “free territories” carved out by the protests and plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina.13 In this “encounter”. Darko Suvin.17 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Gal Kirn. brokered along the logic of war profiteering and the exploitation of the fetish of the ethnic. In 1949. in 1943 in Jajce. Works Councils: Consultation. broken country. this was taking place in a sort of a stateless flux (to paraphrase Kirn). 214. Samo jednom se ljubi (Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. ammunition. in fact.chical one. as. Today. in which around 1. The Partisans’ self-organisation translated into political. See also: Joel Rogers. by then. 2014). Nova Gorica. wordpress. mainly by Boris Kidrič. p. the expected or desired upgrade of self-governance into an upward spread into the very centre of authority. Suvin. but also to the origins of Italian communist party in Torino and to the Spanish Civil War.org/francais/dunois/works/1922/03/varlin. Veka”. including the SFRY. The common view of the end of the Cold War. . 11 (1922) 3. This concept can be traced back to Paris Commune. This view is blind. Available at: <pavlusko.22 18 19 20 21 22 168 and Cooperation in Industrial Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. cit. Yugoslavia and its form of socialism. creating income and retaining its accumulation.marxists. of course. a figure most countries would be envious of today. two conditions must be met. and access to extremely affordable housing.. Available at: <www. as well as childcare. see Amédée Dunois. did not take hold.” Bulletin communiste. free health services. Nor does the notion of what is truly democratic have anything to do with the type of partocratic liberal parliamentary democracy ruling Europe today. The distribution of power initially attained an upward motion: from the basic “working collective” towards the state apparatus. No country could claim this in 1989. in particular. but a “subject”. the desired democratisation of socialism. p. though operating within a regulated market. The benefits of self-governance were obvious and are still impressive today: full employment. is that socialism failed. means of production. To paraphrase Pavluško Imširović: in order for socialism to fail. The growth rate of the gross national product was between 6 and 10 per cent20 in that period. Op. Income gap was kept strictly at the ratio no higher than around 1:5. a system of direct governance over production. p.132. however benevolent the gaze. “Juriš na nebo treće generacije 20. Samo jednom se ljubi. Various initial documents. income and surplus value created by work. including. 2009). What we name as Yugoslav socialism never became truly democratic.pdf>. testify to strong political commitment. And yet.18 a strong source of inspiration for this turn to horizontality. Pavluško Imširović. The second condition for failure is lack of democracy. “Eugène Varlin: militant complet. and thus never truly socialism. Such a collective or enterprise was not the “object” of state administration or the state accumulation of capital. To the revolutionary workers collectivism of Eugène Varlin. free education.com>.5.19 The economy was planned. 154. 241.21 The first one is that it has to be socialism. This key problem holds crucial insights into how to think about the creation of new politics today.Their vision of socialist democracy and self-rule by the working people was implemented primarily through the establishment of Workers’ Councils. for socialism can only survive as democratic socialism. income for work instead of wage labour. as well as participating in political processes (to a degree). the highest employment benefits in Europe. for this oligarchy to take so much power? The answer lies in a neglected area of research: the residues of colonial rule. 274 For an extended. between 1945 and 1951. produced three strong state capital23 24 25 Suvin. p. this phase. 1988). both economic and political.25 In the Yugoslav case. truly brilliant analysis of the various issues and impacts of centralisation and decentralisation. in fact. p. Early critics of this model have referred to it as “state capitalism”. just after WWII. Just as the ethnic discourse now masks the economic dynamo behind genocide. but this was rebuked through describing it as “the initial post-revolution phase of building the state and economy”. Thus. it was not spontaneous. a phase of consolidation and creation of the initial accumulation of capital. it was anything but. when a new constitution further decentralised the federation. How was it possible. a necessary phase of transition to socialism. p.24 This they did by refusing to allow the full implementation of self-governance: by refusing democracy. in the context of an authentic social revolution. And whilst this devolution of power may appear constructive and democratic. 172. see Suvin.) The Yugoslav “escape” from regulation took place long before the late eighties: at the beginning of the sixties. Vilim Ribić. Ibidem. from a market regulated by the party state to a free market. Furthermore. Samo jednom se ljubi. Boris Buden wrote: “the Yugoslav experiment did not move according to the prophecies of liberal capitalist ideology. To stage the frames within which these residues operated. and Suvin’s analysis of Boris Kidrič warning against state capitalism back in 1950. but the result of deliberate policy. the beginning of the dismemberment of the body of the Yugoslav self-governing worker. it was precisely because of the Yugoslav turn to capitalisation and the deregulated market that the crisis took place. Pregled ekonomske literature na osnovi teoretskih. in Suvin. set up as far back as 1974. 169 . Samo jednom se ljubi. The break up of the SFRY was. we arrive back at the scene of the crime. but from a market regulated by the party state to a market that escaped any democratic control and that was ruled by the centres of international financial capital. in fact. so did the discourse of tensions within the Yugoslav ruling elite. Contrary to the all too widely accepted fallacy that the Yugoslav economic crisis and rampant inflation were the result of insufficient reliance on market mechanisms and capitalisation. mask the simple interest shared by both positions: to preserve their power through the continued control over the surplus value of work. koncepcijskih i konkretizacijskih problema (Zagreb: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta Hrvatske. between “centralisers” and “decentralisers”. without which it is impossible to plan and implement industrial development.”23 (Herein we also find the true causes of the various economic crises we are all suffering under today. 215. we need to return to the period of the so-called Soviet model state socialism.The second delusion about the end of Yugoslav attempt at creating socialism combines the errors of identifying when it began and when it ended with its perceived lack of reliance on the so-called free market. and it took 15 years for the wave to spread southwards. perhaps. in the first place. very humanistic. . and it still lurks there. at present. Frantz.36. coupled with strong patriarchality. 214. first of all. more control over their income. thou26 27 28 29 30 170 The English language does not. Very importantly. the colonial administration also left behind a fetishisation of the ethnic. to follow Aimé Césaire “and to reveal to the very distinguished. by cataloguing it.28 Resistance to democratisation found a natural ally in this set up of deep repression and affectability. categorising and appropriating it. the contemporaneous Italian Autonomia movement. demanding. largely unproblematised. Their understanding of the potential of work to be the site of their political subjectivation. (London: Penguin Classics. the working people of Yugoslavia took to striking and protesting with comforting regularity.29 as Neca Jovanov observed. It has left a bureaucratic apparatus and a culture. Fanon. echoing. a strain of submissive reverence towards societal status. 2000). perhaps. Slovenia. in Discourse on Colonialism (New York. Wretched of the Earth. “a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been.30 With the gradual move towards capitalist-type exploitation.26 Frantz Fanon very clearly describes the processes of post-colonial organisation and the involution they enforce as. p. but also more democracy. following the defeat of the German revolution and the consequent rise of fascism. p. Dijagnoza samoupravljanja (Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada Liber. This turn to capitalism was not executed with ease: from about 1958. Significantly. the decentralised power structures (state capitalisms) were able to develop into the current ethno-national oligarchies. p. the number of strikes increased. …”. For a start. The colonisation has left behind a deeply subservient culture of behaviour within power relations. toward the less developed areas of the country. to assist in the extraction of value. set up. more self-rule and more freedom. Croatia and Serbia. marginalising the female. as well as the site of their subjugation was reflected in their refusal of work. ruling through the structural violence imposed by genocide. Especially in the view of the agonising rupture. following the rates of development under colonial rule. the memory of (rather recent) colonisation has been pushed back into the deepest recesses.isms (the critics were right): in the republics of Slovenia.”27 The elites (established by colonial rule) of the formerly colonised do little more than emulate the exploitative ways of the coloniser. that Hitler inhabits him. accommodate for the necessary precision: patriarchality is used here to denote the basic structure of society that favours the male experience. By the time self-governance was fully dismantled. In the SFRY. Neca Jovanov. NY: Monthly Review Press. the strikes started in the most developed area of the country. that Hitler is his demon. 2001). and as articulated in György Lukács’s view that the impossibility of revolution grows proportionally with the pervasiveness of exchange value relations. 119. as experienced by the left. Their rule is presided over by a transnational set-up that can only be described as a continuation of colonial rule by other means. very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it. By exploiting this continuity over the decades. 1983). he has a Hitler inside him. the Frankfurt School (this was pointed out by Peter Osborne) in particular. perhaps. Jason Smith. pp. and yet. however stunted it has become. it will become clear in what its limit lies.” What is to be done? In elaborating the necessity of the “high” category of work. by those who decide to partake in the creation of politics (through the protests and the plenums). Jacques.” Rancière. Dijagnoza samoupravljanja. as subjectivation. 19. and that could also be said to have barely even started yet. but also a demand. The Soul at Work (New York: Semiotext(e). the plenums have initiated the process of re-membering.”32 The protests. still holds the potential for liberation of work and from work.34 are part of the same durational and yet still emergent revolutionary process that could. p. Dissensus (London: Continuum Books. For work “has become the site of libidinal investment. Praksa rada kao znanstvena povijest. When we liberate work to that extent. for subsuming work in the category of life and imagination.” its very agency extended to assist in the utter colonisation of all of the human being by capital: what Franco Berardi refers to as: “soul put to work. a state of being. of bodies in politics. against all societal logic. 174–184. Dissensus as in “The essense of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one. “conflicts of class character” had taken place. 37. of politics. rather than the other way around.”35 To find this limit is to reclaim life. Bosnian plenums were thus a space full of work. Within this subjugation began the process of re-politicisation. that. producing pathologies and depression.33 and the plenums. Dissensus then denotes the rift constitutive of this surplus of absences. due to having resorted to the majority principle. The literal meaning of plenum is full space. The result is a devastated life in which work has become the site of utter contradiction: work has been imposed. 2009). the subjugation thus having been extended to the very access to the right to life. of remembering work as a form of political sovereignty. only be interrupted by genocide. its fullest movements oscillating in registers of absence as found outside this space: absence of commons. of work as political sovereignty. in preface to Franco Berardi. 2010).sands of strikes or. as the fire of dissensus. as Jovanov refers to them. In registering these (and other) absences. Sutlić. 171 . the rift between those who can and those who cannot partake in power.31 This continued resistance to a return to capitalism could. ultimately. even the right to work has been privatised. p. as a model for consensus. the condition of life itself. be said to have started in the Paris Commune. as the only means of survival. Sutlić states a constitutive demand for “re-philosophising the implication of … liberating production forces from the shackles … [of] production relations. However incomplete. of putting life back together as a “collective thinking of politics. of collectivity. 31 32 33 34 35 Jovanov. . Bosnian society rediscovered its authentic voice and its capacity to take its fate into its own hands. At the time of writing the plenum movement is in the first trough following the first peak of its waveform. The plenums are a remarkable phenomenon that evolved spontaneously almost fully-formed. a genetic line that seems to lead almost directly 173 . This essay explores the physiognomy of the phenomenon through a physiological metaphor—the idea of the “plenum brain. but it is clear from both its amplitude and frequency that the energy is unstoppable and the next peak will arrive soon. There is also. like the human brain is built by its own genetic code.the putative “leaderless” structures of early South Slav society. Although genetics provides both a general blueprint for the brain and a number of “hard-wired” systems. interestingly.” The genetics of the plenum brain The plenum brain. It is tempting to look for “romantic” origins for the Bosnian plenums deep in social history . So what is the basic genetic code of the plenum brain? Is it hard-wired? To what extent is it an open book? What are its capacities? Which impulses form it? What does the map of its jungle look like so far? The common definition of a plenum is a meeting of a deliberative assembly in which all members are present. But more realistically there is within living memory the experience of socialist “collectivity” in former Yugoslavia and most recently the experiences of student movements in Croatia in 1971 and 2009. or citizens’ assemblies.Nigel Osborne The Plenum Brain The Bosnian plenums. as opposed to a quorum. A popular but nevertheless useful characterisation of the brain is as a dense jungle through which experience and impulse clear neural pathways and open up complex geographies of intersecting tracks. the apparent absence of hierarchy in the Bosnian church. were formed in early February 2014 after factory closures resulting from corrupt privatisation led to workers’ protests in Tuzla. much of the brain is an “open book”—a set of general capacities and potentialities formed into functioning structures by external stimulus and internal neural impulses. where only an agreed number need attend. For the first time in a quarter of a century of genocide and stagnation imposed from outside. enjoyed the same cuisine.8 per cent of marriages in Bosnia were of mixed religion. Serb. oppressed at the time of the Inquisition. primarily Balkan and Slav. Equally the quality of growth of the brain will depend on the nature of internal neural impulse. Croat and Muslim—all reduced by nationalist rhetoric to meaninglessness) to support and justify the division. The quality and usefulness of these maps will of course depend on the nature of external stimulus and internal neural impulse. lived largely secular lives. Reward is an important factor in building brain capacity—so for example.16. Bosnia’s life was overwhelmingly secular. For better or for worse. The fact that ultra-nationalists and the international community conspired to create the illusion of difference and to generate a vocabulary of malapropisms (nation. a single language. including wooden mosques and a number of aspects of ritual. some palpable success for the movement will be a crucial for its healthy development. listened to the same music. race. ethnicity. in the simplest terms. people. entity.from Athenian democracy. of direct rather than representative democracy. in which minor linguistic differences were defined by region rather than by community. It is misleading to speak of different “ethnicities” in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ideas of power being invested in the assembly or ekklesia (ἐκκλησία). and by the early 1990s in some cities the figure had reached close to fifty per cent. fell in love with one another and spoke the same language—Bosnian dialects of Serbo-Croat. of “officials” elected by the assembly and of the crucial “citizen-initiator” all figure in the Bosnian plenum process. By 1981. but also through a process of conversion from the independent Bosnian Christian church. A crucial aspect of the plenum brain is the recovery of the genetics of oneness and solidarity. went to the same schools. But all of this is linked to another. dressed the same. more complex source of genetic material. To this extent. Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism (with a significant representation of Judaism). awareness and the id—all discussed below. Bosnia has traditionally had three principal religions: Islam.” What is fascinating for the movement is that the creation of a new “assembly” brain offers the prospect of forming entirely new maps in plastic neural space. Its people shared the same genetic code. and through these pathways innovatory democratic process. aspects of the plenum brain appear close to being socially and historically “hard-wired. is one of the great intellectual disasters of the era. It is a gentle and liberal faith whose members survived for centuries in relative harmony with their Christian relatives and neighbours. 174 . Bosnian Islam arose in part through the Ottoman occupation. by most anthropological definitions it is a single ethnicity. and the restoration of a meaningful democratic language based on inclusiveness and citizenship. and a common profile of genetic haplotypes. in particular impulses from the lowest parts of the brain related to consciousness. Bosnian Islam retained many features of the Christian Bosnian church. of motions voted on by show of hands and carried by simple majorities. Even when a peace was negotiated in the General Framework Agreement for Peace of 1995. The process of implementing the Karađorđevo agreement.000 and 200.2 million people driven out of their homes and up to 50.there were as many serious woundings as deaths.000 embraces the differing estimates. misinformation and at times connivance among the international community. and of breaking apart a society so closely integrated. it was also a cultural suicide—the wanton destruction of the “common life” identity of the Balkan heartland. The strong social genes of the plenums have proved themselves to be resistant to the ravages of epigenetics. is it an illusion to believe that the common life of Bosnia could be restored? Is this simply Yugo-nostalgia? Are Bosnians still able and prepared to work together as citizens. RibbentropMolotov style agreement to go to war and to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina between them along “ethnic” lines. permanently changed the genetic code? After all the suffering.The epigenetics of the plenum brain Epigenetics is the science of how environmental and experiential factors may change genetic codes. was horrendously cruel beyond the imaginations of the Belgrade academicians. The major question is has this epigenetic assault on identity significantly. All people of Bosnia suffered . but a figure of between 120. very little has changed in the basic code. The outcome was a Hitler-Stalin. There is still debate about the number of people killed. Vojvodina. rather than as members of externally determined factions? The evidence so far is that. between Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and Croatian President Franjo Tuđman on 25 March 1991. The extent of the power of epigenetics to transform is a crucial question for the plenums. apathy. It is in essence an extension of the spine. It was a genocide. The fate of Bosnia was decided at a meeting at Karađorđevo. The division would be implemented by an “ethnic cleansing” policy first hatched in the corridors of the Serbian Academy of Sciences in the mid-1980s and in some ways reflected publicly and politically in the SANU Memorandum of 1986. a structure of governance was imposed that implemented the policies of Karađorđevo. 2. remarkably. but for the perpetrators.000 cases of rape—but the largest group of victims were Bosniaks (Muslim. and empowered nationalists in so-called-ethnic partitions—a system that proceeded to generate oligarchies and corruption and paralyse all democratic political process. The situation was compounded by weakness. and is responsible for processing elemental consciousness 175 . The subcortical plenum brain The most ancient part of the brain is the brainstem. even within the lifetime of an individual. many of whom were not Bosnian. or of secular Muslim heritage). expression of mood. as well as a descending. fear) is part of the limbic system. These impulses are either anoetic (unthinking). and activate autonomic and endocrine systems for stress. Brains which have been subjected to excessive trauma and shock tend to develop exaggerated startle responses. a key centre for both negative and positive emotional processing. This is likely to be a vulnerable part of plenum hard-wired neural systems. It is the location of coherent self-representation of the organism. where more noetic consciousness is processed and emotions are generated and felt. stress). and generates powerful neuronal responses to significant changes in intensity of sensory information.and primitive. Lower brain affective phenomenal experiences provide the energy for the construction of higher consciousness. parahippocampal gyrus (recognition. including the hippocampus (memory. including the need in evolution to process sensory danger signals efficiently. reflex responses. regulation of HPA axis. whence there are descending projections to spinal and limb motor neurons. In the neurology of nameless essential energy negative and destructive experience can become positive and creative forces and neural impulses. and heightened negative emotional reactions to what is unwelcome and unexpected. There are pathways ascending to emotional systems. affection. where receptors potentiate the effect of acoustic startle. For example the acoustic startle reflex (the human physical reaction to sudden unexpected sound) involves a pathway directly from the cochlea of the ear along cranial (auditory) nerve VIII to the caudate reticular nucleus. The limbic plenum brain The amygdala (arousal. All of this takes place in the core emotional areas of the brain described above. The inferior collicus of the midbrain roof above the periaqueductal grey appears to be an important collecting point for such information. and the building of a shared resilience capable of absorbing and attenuating dangerous startle responses and negative reflexes and emotions. memory retrieval). emotional “feedback” pathway from the amygdala. But these small potential dysfunctions count for little against the richness of subcortical impulse which appears to be a feature of the plenum brain. or noetic and linked to perception and cognition. There is also an ascending pathway to the amygdala. the most likely location for Freud’s Id. thus provoking the “jump” or “blink” effect. There are therapeutic processes that can help. There are a number of related limbic and paralimbic structures. and interestingly the plenums have begun to develop a collective self-therapy process: in their fair-minded and empathetic reception of individual expressions of pain. insula (va- 176 . and. by all appearances a powerful segment of the plenum brain. and may be intense without necessarily being understood. distressing dreams. inability to recall important aspects of the trauma.bursts of anger. acting or feeling as if the event were recurring. survivor guilt.” Significantly. 4th ed. At other times it had dangerous physiological consequences. Most Bosnians “swallowed” their trauma. including guilt over acts of commission or omission. psychological distress at exposure to cues or physiological reactivity at exposure to cues (one symptom needed for diagnosis). The subsequent recall and re-experiencing of the event. reduction in awareness of surroundings. there are clear physiological and neurophysiological indicators associated with PTSD 1 See: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Avoidance and numbing symptoms. ventral striatum (expectation and experience of reward). including intrusive recollections. as well as much emotion-related neurotransmission—the biochemical agents that communicate the electrical firing of cells—are related to limbic processing. cancers and perinatal mortality. horror and helplessness. detachment or estrangement. It is in the limbic system that damage from psychological trauma is evident. There was a major psychosocial industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war directed towards addressing symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). avoidance of activities. Most endocrine functions. orbifrontal cortex (valence) and cingulate cortex. For diagnosis. difficulty concentrating. Sometimes this produced resilience. but in other ways it lacked an appropriate social understanding and relativity. In some ways this was useful. 1994). including avoidance of thoughts or feelings. these symptoms must persist for more than one month and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social or occupational functioning. 177 . which controls a number of functions of the body ranging from heart rate to pupil dilation. text rev. places or people. The limbic system is an important driver of the autonomic nervous system. including sensations of terror. temporal poles (connectivity). including the hormones that travel through the bloodstream to “emotional” receptor sites. hypervigilance and exaggerated startle response (two symptoms needed).irritability or out. including difficulty falling or staying asleep. sweat and sexual responses. With these caveats in mind.lence). diminished interest in activities. restricted range of affect and a sense of a foreshortened future (three symptoms needed). The Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders 4th edition identifies four diagnostic criteria:1 Exposure to a profoundly traumatic event. There may be associated features. including significant increases in the incidence of acute coronary syndrome. “derealisation” and “depersonalisation.. (American Psychiatric Association. Hyperarousal symptoms. it is important to consider the potential individual and collective effects of trauma on the population that created the plenums. A particularly unfortunate aspect of limbic activity associated with trauma is increased paranoia and suspicion. For people who may be individually or collectively traumatised. of avoiding emotionally demanding situations. dysregulation of hormonal and neurotransmitter systems related to stress and relaxation. of lacking the biochemical energy to support this reactivity. Stress signals from the amygdala also activate endocrine systems for stress. and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. of lacking optimism for the future and of being unnecessarily suspicious and mistrusting of others and of 178 . including accelerated heart rate. But excess of cortisol also leads to biochemical attrition (through glucocorticoid activity) of the hippocampus. But it also harbours dangers. of chronic lethargy. puts the autonomic nervous system on permanent alert. with its capacity to generate and regulate emotion. respiratory irregularities. and thus reduces HPA activity. and thirty-eight per cent of girls and thirty-four per cent of boys under thirteen had PTSD. Recent research suggests that a functional disconnection in autonomic and central systems for threat-related signals. which leads to the secretion of cortisol into the bloodstream to reach receptor sites which inhibit the immune and digestive systems and open capillaries in hands and feet for “fight or flight” reaction. of lacking concentration. innocent accidents as conspiracies. and altered movement repertoires. of impatience. including major depression. The limbic system. without the biochemical resources to support them—like being confronted by a heavily armed aggressor. In a survey of 364 internally displaced children in Central Bosnia conducted by the Department of Social Medicine. Chronic trauma. Harvard. People with PTSD have to deal with uncomfortable. heightened neural responses.505 children in Sarajevo in 1994 found that forty-eight per cent of girls and thirty-eight per cent of boys over the age of thirteen. reduced heart-rate variability. may lead to cognitive misattribution of these signals (imagining danger where it does not exist) and the dysregulation of the system as a whole.in both adults and children. PTSD may also either overlap or be comorbid with other difficulties. marginal increase in systolic and diastolic blood pressure. People with good intentions may be seen as bad. is potentially one of the most creative parts of the plenum brain. A study of 1. associated with both memory and stress. ninety-four per cent of children from the Sarajevo region met the criteria of DSM-IV for PTSD. delayed heart-rate recovery from shock. and so on. accumulated by persistent neural flow of stress signals from the amygdala. of depression. which among other things permanently raises heart rate by six or seven beats a minute. associated biologically with amygdala-prefrontal systems. A longitudinal study carried out between 1993 and 1997 revealed that seventy-eight per cent of children had experienced traumatic events. unarmed and naked. there are dangers of being hypervigilant and hyper-reactive in nonproductive ways. including the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis. and in particular Sevda. although in the Turkish tradition the word has cognates in Persian. and be aware of the nature of sub-cortical and limbic impulses. the “youngest” part of the human brain. The origins of the term Sevda are as profoundly intercultural as the music itself. posterior superior parietal system. to self-diagnose avoidance and paranoia.” first introduced from Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian thought by Thales (640-546 BC) and adopted by Hippocrates (460-370 BC) as one of the four bodily liquids or temperaments responsible for human attributes and dispositions. “bile” (the English “melancholy”) one of the four Ancient Greek medical “humours. which implies significant capacities in the Broca and Wernincke areas. in order to modulate them. and to turn negative responses to positive action. For the plenum brain. emotion and reflective thought in a single system. It is related to the temporal-spatial systems that make Bosnians good chess players and strategists .” The plenum neo-cortex The most powerful defence against these dangers is the neo-cortex: in evolutionary terms. meaning “black. and denotes more specifically “love” or “lovesickness. these are perhaps the most significant and dangerous “enemies within. who associated the humours with music. or the capacity for reflection on awareness and consciousness of consciousness. In more specific terms mathematical intelligence is associated with the horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus.” and khole (χολή). In other words it is possible to change the sensation of an emotion by being aware of it and thinking about it. The underlying concept of Sevda derives from the Ancient Greek melas (µέλας). Important in this process are feedback systems between the neo-cortex and limbic system. or Sevda in Turkish. The musical traditions of Bosnia. This is popularly known as “emotional intelligence. It is where the plenum brain may understand itself. with acute cognitive processing and powerful feedback pathways to the limbic system—in other words the capacity to process deep impulse.” Anyone who knows Bosnian culture knows that this intelligence exists in abundance. It is the centre for autonoetic consciousness. suggest strong connections between basic brainstem impulses.attributes that will become increasingly important for the plenum brain as the movement progresses to re-wire the political brain of Bosnia and Herzegovina. rich limbic activity and a highly tuned Heschl’s gyrus.one another. The “black bile” came to be described popularly as Sawdah (from sawaad meaning “black”) in Arabic. The idea passed into early Islamic medical theory and practice through the works of Al-Kindi (801-873 AD) and Avicenna (980-1037 AD). Bosnian culture has also always been strong in processing language and number.” From Turkey the word spread 179 . supported by a left angular gyrus area and a bilateral. a historical synthesis of many diverse social and cultural identities. embracing Slav. integrate them in rich limbic. The plenum brain also shares with the Sevda brain an indestructible genetic code stretching from Ancient Greece and the origins of European brain science and thought to a single nested identity combining a Slav-Balkan genetic code with a benign epigenetics of Eastern knowledge and influence.through the Ottoman Empire to the Balkans (fourteenth-nineteenth centuries) to describe a music of lost or unfulfilled love. the music of “the love that remains when someone has gone. autonomic and endocrine systems as meaningful feeling. process them in the cognitive and reflective neocortex and return them to limbic. four religions. The capacity to receive deep. and indeed perhaps for Europe as a whole. pain. for the region. and onwards to an all-embracing common life and a neural “open book” ready to define new ways of thinking and living. and—if the plenum movement is ready for the challenge—to assume leadership in the next phase of European cultural and political evolution.” Sevda is one of the most intercultural musical forms of Europe. emotional activity. the Dalmatian melos. regret. experience and action is the real strength of the plenum brain. primal impulses of consciousness.Turkish and Sephardic Jewish social traditions. Italian bel canto and Viennese romanticism. Balkan. longing and deep emotion. coherent musical and poetic language. which expresses a collective cultural identity with profound implications for the “common life” of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In some ways the plenum brain resembles the Sevda brain. 180 . On the other hand this diversity of identities is entirely integrated and “nested” in a unique. characteristic. and a diversity of musical cultures ranging from the Makams (musical scales and melodic patterns) of the Near and Middle East to Slav folk music. It also arrived with the Berbers and Arabs in Portugal (711-1249) and is probably the origin of Saudade. sorrow. The author of The Lazarus Project.An artist and human rights activist from Prijedor. She is a lifelong trade unionist and the leader of the Dita strike board and. who participated in the mass protests and plenums in 2014. UK. He is the author of several scientific papers on Constitutional Law which have been published in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally. Bosnia and Herzegovina. and an MA in nationalism studies from CEU in Budapest.A. He has been writing a column in Bosnian for the past 20 years.K. U. Bosnia and Herzegovina. academic and a psychoanalyst in training. and is currently working on his Master’s thesis.Contributors Emina Busuladžić . He is an activist. he was deeply involved in the reforming project Proposed Recommendations for Amendments to the Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. His second novel Elijah’s Chair has been translated into a dozen European languages. as well as an activist of the Stop Genocide Denial. working in Bosnia and Herzegovina.An activist and translator. He gained his degree in journalism from the Faculty of Philosophy in Tuzla. the University of Edinburgh. Emina has been a worker in the Dita factory. based between Tuzla and Tešanj. he is also a founding member of Lijevi. His novel A Castle in Romagna received the Award Slavic for Best First Book. Bosnia and Herzegovina. 181 . Bosnia and Herzegovina. and organised the public protests against corrupt privatisation in Tuzla in the early 2000s. Damir Arsenijević . for 38 years. Emin Eminagić . He is angry in both languages. from 2009 onwards. Adis Sadiković . which deals with the February 2014 events in Tuzla.A Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art. Miralem Ibrišimović . Tuzla. His monograph Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States: One Hundred Years of Citizenship is forthcoming by Bloomsbury (Summer 2015). The Book of My Lives and several other books in English. He has been involved in social movements internationally.An activist from Tuzla. His book Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina was published by Nomos in 2010. the Czech Republic. from 1975 until its enforced closure.A journalist from Tuzla.Trained as a chemical technician. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Zlatan Begić . in Tuzla. He was one of the members and initiators of the Students’ Movement/Students’ Plenum Tuzla. in Economics and is currently unemployed. He is also part of the Psychoanalytic Seminar Tuzla. He has a B.A Leverhulme Trust Fellow at De Montfort University. He continued his education in the field of sociology at the Faculty for Social Sciences at Masaryk University in Brno. Emir Hodžić . Igor Štiks . who led the strike committee in this factory. Aleksandar Hemon . a small political organisation.. leading the project Love after Genocide. Haris Husarić . As the secretary to the project and a member of its expert group. Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is also a shop steward of many years standing.A worker in the former Polihem factory in Tuzla. and is one of the founders of the initiative Jer Me Se Tiče (Because it Concerns Me) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Leicester.Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law of Tuzla University. In February 2014. led the protest for the continuation of production in her factory. he holds a BA from the University of Tuzla in English language and literature. he played a crucial role as a moderator of plenum sessions. 182 . see: http://eastethnia. She completed undergraduate studies in English and French Language and Literature at the Faculty of Letters and Arts in Ljubljana. USA. University of Sarajevo. She is an activist engaged in various local and international networks and initiatives.she works in the intersections of art. and imperial legacies in southeastern Europe. with a broader interest in the role protests and social movements play in post-authoritarian democratic consolidation. UK. 2014) with Slavoj Žižek. Stef Jansen . Responsibility and Denial: The Past at Stake in Post-Milošević Serbia (University of Pennsylvania Press. His research focuses on the democratization of post-war Bosnia. UK. the Middle East and Africa.A political anthropologist and Adjunct Professor of International Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. ethno-national politics. culture of trauma and emancipatory politics.ac. He is Emeritus Professor of Music and Human Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Political Science. and Consultant to Peking University.Senior lecturer in Southeast European Politics at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy. Bosnia and Herzegovina.wordpress. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Slovenia.A PhD candidate in Political Science at York University. She has published widely on these themes in the post-Yugoslav region and internationally. USA. Vanessa has covered all of the major 1990s conflicts. 2013). reporting on the existence of the camps in Bosnia and covering the war crimes trials for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. London. visiting Professor at the University of Rijeka.Dr Stef Jansen. He spends much of his time in Sarajevo. is forthcoming in 2015. Previously a journalist.A philosopher and the author of What does Europe want? (Columbia University Press. Kratka povijest pragmatizma (A Brief History of Pragmatism). Whose Bosnia? Political Imagination and Nation-Formation in the Modern Balkans.An independent researcher from Tuzla. Nigel Osborne . Her interests are in cultural and political theory and praxis dealing with the politics of witnessing. has conducted a series of long-term ethnographic studies in the post-Yugoslav states since 1996. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. UK.manchester.jansen Larisa Kurtović . Eric Gordy . University College. Jasmin Mujanović . She is currently writing a book about grassroots politics and the prelude to the ongoing protests in post-war Bosnia.Srećko Horvat . where he has also taught a range of courses at the University. Sarajevo. 1999) and Guilt. entitled Future as Predicament. China. His book. governance of life. For details. Pravda i etnonacionalizam (Justice and ethnonationalism).Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. Vanessa Vasić-Janeković . For details. Edin Hajdarpašić . Jasmina Husanović . see: http://personalpages. and Radicality of Love (Polity Press.uk/staff/stef. His research explores conflict and memory. the Caucasus. Selma Tobudić . He is the author of The Culture of Power in Serbia (Pennsylvania State University Press. University of Tuzla. UK. researching and articulating registers and distribution of tensions inherent to knowledge production hierarchies and their economic underpinnings. 2015). Author of We. Croatia. theory and activism. Her research interests focus primarily on the intersection of teaching and translation. the Citizens of Ethnopolis.A composer and pioneer in using the creative arts to support children who are victims of conflict in the Balkans.com/ Asim Mujkić .