used without permission, for "fair use" only

Respect Our Primitivism

by Davor Glavas

Feral Tribune, Split, Croatia, September 23 1996

Tens of millions of Dollars in direct economic aid were approved for the use of Federal partners in Bosnia based on a simple post-Dayton equation which says that the number of rebuilt houses is equal to the number of repatriated refugees; however, these funds have disappeared without a trace, in the books of the local Croat and Muslim authorities. Even worse: the money which was earmarked for "the renewal of ethnic tolerance and coexistence" and all other prescribed words with multi prefixes, was used as efficient means for the completion of ethnic homogenisation. Because of that, this case is far more than a simple financial scandal.

Shocked Americans

This financial project started at the end of January, 1996, when a group of the World Bank experts concluded that it was "necessary to invest approximately 2.5 thousands of millions of Dollars to rebuild damaged and destroyed houses, bring back displaced persons and refugees and reestablish ethnic coexistence in Bosnia Based on these decisions and the necessity to strengthen the Federation, Croat and Bosniak partners were given initial funds necessary to build the first 2,500 destroyed houses in central Bosnia. The only condition was that the houses should be rebuilt for previously identified families in the town where the family lived prior to the war. In their naiveté and the illusory belief in the possibility of a Bosnian melting pot, the World Bank experts demanded that priority be given to the houses of Muslim expelled from regions with pre-war Croat majority and of Croats expelled from regions with pre-war Muslim majority. The sum of the initial investment hasn't been revealed, but even rough calculations indicate that it ranges in the tens of millions of Dollars.

"After that," reveals for Feral Tribune one of the American experts who recently returned from a fact finding mission in Bosnia, "we transferred initial sums to the accounts of the local authorities of several municipalities in central Bosnia and waited for the beginning of reconstruction. Several months later, we sent our people to check why the reconstruction hadn't started yet. They were only able to establish that the funds had disappeared, that none of the houses in predetermined locations had been repaired nor rebuilt, but that the equipment and armament of the local police forces had significantly improved. We are convinced that this was the result of embezzlement, typical of situations where local party and military bosses enjoy absolute power. We decided to write off those funds and to avoid future abuse by directly allocating funds for reconstruction." Still viewing the project from the point of view of bad or good management foreign investors chose reliable local contractors (as their contribution to development of the local economy, another one of classic Bildtean myths), chose to pay in instalments (after each completed phase of reconstruction) and located the pilot program in Gornji Vakuf.

Efficient Dynamite

A town with hardly 10,000 inhabitants, with two names (Uskoplje [new name used by Croats]), two mayors, two police stations, and a street which divides the two communities: cafés on one side play nostalgic Sarajevo rock from the early eighties, while those on the other play loud contemporary Croatian dance music. Of course, the town is full of ruins whose facades have been mindlessly polished with bullets from infantry weapons. The result of the new strategy in the reconstruction of houses for displaced persons (pay for specific work only at the end of each phase of reconstruction) is almost ironic. The houses have been rebuilt and repaired all the way to the roof and the local contractors paid for the completed work. Then, there was a spate of night time explosions which at first damaged the rebuilt houses and then completely destroyed them. On both sides of the street.

"After a while we realised what was going on," continues Feral's source. "Local authorities on both sides simply do not want to go back to the pre-war population mix; obviously they had instructions from above and chose to let us know about that. It is another problem that we took to long to realize that. Finally, we were left with the choice of waiting that all the houses be again demolished to the ground or to accept the proposals from the local authorities and allow them to put their refugees in already finished houses. The houses are now guarded by both police forces, to make sure that someone doesn't by mistake destroy our house."

Hard Realism

The result of this noble project whose goal was reconstruction of multi-ethnicity is the following: first half of the money was used to re-equip police forces in neighboring ethnically cleansed municipalities; one can realistically expect that the new equipment will be used to achieve even higher degree of national homogeneity; the other half was used to rebuild houses which were either razed to the ground or will be used by refugees who in their misery are used to cement the war gains and losses.

The whole case illustrates the current clash of good intentions and hard realism. The Dayton Agreement will continue to be officially treated as holly gospel, while in the field it has long time ago dissolved into a string of half measures, as was confirmed by the latest modification of the implicit decision from Dayton about the rotation of the members of the Bosnian presidency into an arbitrary decision about the extension of Izetbegovic's mandate, made after the elections. The American government will support, until the last day of the [American] election campaign, the idea of integral Bosnia, while American secret services in their latest report do not leave room for doubt when stating that Bosnia is on a way to dissolution into three entities with "porous" international borders.

Franjo Tudman, after a fifteen minute long meeting in the White House dedicated to the abolishment of "Herceg-Bosna", openly said to the journalists that he "[had] no messages for the Croats in Hercegovina," despite Dayton and Clinton (and not only because of his disappointment because of Clinton's refusal to sell US fighter aircraft F-16 to Croatia as "the key ally in the region"). In spite of officially proclaimed policy of military support for the establishment of the joint [Croat-Muslim] Federal forces, only a small amount of obsolete armaments from American stockpiles has arrived so far to Bosnia, and there are rumors about the imminent withdrawal of American military advisers. Even Richard Holbrooke in spite of invested (although somewhat spent) energy and force, in his latest Balkan adventure carries more resemblance to the builders of Vakuf/Uskoplje houses than to the demon from Dayton. (...)

translated on 11/19/96