Abstract
Milenko Radovic's small law office in the Bosnian town of Foca is a flight of stairs below the town's main street. Through the office's sliding glass doors I could see the Drina River and bursts of fall color on its far bank. On the chilly afternoon we met, however, Radovic had no time for the view. Harried and flushed, he arrived late, muttering apologies. He had just returned from a trial in a nearby city, he said, and was not feeling well. Radovic defends Serb war crimes suspects, and he is a very busy man.
Foca is an ugly town surrounded by stunning terrain. Steep, wooded hills surround it on all sides, and the Drina, which has an incongruously Caribbean hue, flows quietly by. The town acquired an evil reputation for atrocities during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war and has been a redoubt for hardliners during the fragile peace. A decade into an ambitious international project designed to reintegrate the country's Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, Foca is one of the areas that has most stubbornly resisted integration. But even in the gloom of one of Bosnia's darkest corners, there are glimmers of progress.
Nation-building in Bosnia means cajoling and coaxing nearly 11 million citizens into a functioning multiethnic state. Ethnic Serbs and Croats, in particular, are deeply skeptical of the prospect. Most of them would like to join up with neighboring Serbia and Croatia. Bosnia's Muslims–about 50 percent of the population–are more committed to a unified state, but their politicians are not inclined to make conciliatory gestures to the Serbs and Croats who brutalized them during the war. And so 10 years after the Dayton Peace Accords, Bosnia has fragile national institutions and a tenuous peace. International supervisors have to nudge–and sometimes push–Bosnian politicians every step of the way toward integration. Last October, for example, the international overseer finally forced the Bosnian Serbs to accept a unified, national police force–something they had resisted for years. The big decisions are taken in Sarajevo, but the slow, hard work of reintegrating the country often happens in hard-bitten and resentful towns like Foca.
On the October day that I visited, however, Foca seemed almost cosmopolitan. The smoky café above Radovic's law office was bustling. A squadron of Italian peacekeepers descended on it in search of cappuccino; a lone hiker from Detroit wandered through the establishment, seeking directions to a nearby national park. Across the street, a British bobby cheerfully manned a small European Union police station. On her office window was a photocopied wanted list with grainy images of suspected war criminals. Passersby seemed not to notice.
The client who is consuming most of attorney Radovic's time no longer appears on the wanted list: 36-year-old Radovan Stankovic has been in custody for several years, charged with running a rape house in a nearby village. The indictment alleges that Stankovic managed the house–which held about 10 Muslim women–for the pleasure of a local Serb paramilitary leader and his men. The rape house was just a small part of a campaign of terror and abuse that effectively cleansed eastern Bosnia of its Muslims in 1992 and 1993.
NATO troops seized Stankovic in July 2002. The operation provoked anger among local ethnic Serbs, and a villager became a minor celebrity when she tried to warn Stankovic about the approaching troops (according to press accounts, the soldiers bundled off the shouting woman to a nearby potato field while they made the arrest). From Foca, Stankovic was dispatched to The Hague, seat of an international war crimes tribunal. When asked to enter a plea, he refused. “I'm here because I am a Serb, and I've defended my people,” he told the judges. Now he will have a chance to make that case in Bosnia. In what is being touted as a step toward self-sufficiency, the Hague tribunal has returned Stankovic and several others for trial in the capital of Sarajevo.
Stankovic's trial is scheduled to begin this summer, and Radovic worries that it won't be fair. As the lawyer launched into his peroration on the justice system's defects, I braced myself for one of the ethnic diatribes one still regularly hears in post-war Bosnia. Surely, he would allege that a Serb couldn't get a fair trial in Muslim-dominated Sarajevo or that war crimes trials were a plot to marginalize Serbs. He didn't. Instead, Radovic complained bitterly about the limited budget given to defense lawyers and the confusing new web of Bosnian laws. “The prosecutors have all the resources available,” he complained. “It's impossible for me to read all the documents and try to get witnesses.” Under these conditions, he said, Stankovic's trial would violate European standards for the protection of defendants.
Moving back: Muslims return to their pre-war homes in Foca in November 2000.
A dozen miles from Foca, Dragoljub Zivanovic, Jovo Radicic, and Larko Mitrovic were less restrained. The middle-aged men were gathered behind a dilapidated community center, sipping early afternoon beers. No Bosnian Serb could get a fair hearing in a Sarajevo court, they assured me. “There just hasn't been enough time,” said Mitrovic, who alleged that the court was already showing its bias. The three have a lot of time to contemplate current events these days. Their village used to host hikers and campers, but tourists are rare today. The lumber mill in Foca shut down shortly after the war, removing the major source of employment.
I asked the men about the handful of Muslim refugees who have returned to the Foca area. “This is Bosnia and Herzegovina. All three peoples live here, and we all suffer the same problems,” Radicic said. I had heard the same sentiment from the British police officer in town. She spread out a map and highlighted a handful of villages where Muslims had returned. Ethnic relations, she assured me, had been quite calm. And now the Serb villagers appeared to corroborate her account.
But a few minutes and several swills of beer later, the optimism abruptly vanished. Mitrovic's thick arms gesticulated and his torso leaned forward as he revealed to me the “real” story about the Muslim returnees. They still vote in Sarajevo, he told me, suggesting that their true loyalties remained there. And the returnees were, he insisted darkly, behind a recent spate of robberies in the area. They had been kicked out of Sarajevo because they had criminal records.
Mitrovic's account was hard to square with what international monitors reported. And the polite, beanpole thin Serbian policeman just down the road from the community center didn't seem to know anything about the purported Muslim crime wave. Standing in a spare office, he reported that security in the area was good. Muslims and Serbs were even attending school together.
Progress at this stage and in places like Foca is mainly a matter of negatives: It's about arguments not made and action not taken. Stankovic's lawyer could use the trial to drive a wedge between already suspicious groups, but he doesn't appear so inclined; he's relying on human rights treaties, not nationalist tracts. Resentful Serbs in the area could actively impede the return of Muslims; in recent years, after all, returnees throughout Bosnia have faced intimidation, discrimination, and occasional violence. Instead, the men seem content to mutter to themselves. It's multiethnicity, Foca-style.