TRNOPOLJE, Bosnia and Herzegovina – Encouraged by a peace agreement between Bosnia’s warring tribes brokered by the United States 25 years ago, Jusuf Arifagic, a Bosnian refugee home in Norway, returned home to help rebuild his traumatized country. He took 100 Norwegian cows with him.
Mr Arifagic brought the cows to his home village – right next to the concentration camp where he and thousands of other local Muslims were rounded up in the summer of 1992 – and built the largest dairy in Bosnia.
The farm in Trnopolje now has 800 cows and 41 workers, a mix of Muslims, Orthodox Christian Serbs and other Christians. Mr Arifagic, 59, said he didn’t know the exact number from every ethnic group because, “I don’t care.”
His refusal to put tribal identity at the center of his business, however, has brought him severely at odds with a system created by the 1995 peace settlement, which revolves around ethnicity and loyalty to one or the other ethnonationalist authority. It has also crippled one of the few success stories in a country that was marred by reports to the United Nations Security Council in April and May labeled “chronic dysfunction” and a “pandemic called corruption”.
Mr Arifagic, under pressure from withdrawal requests and other pressures from nationalist politicians advocating their own interests, has decided to sell his cattle, lay off workers and close the farm.
“Bosnia is now a large psychiatric unit and we are all of its patients,” said Arifagic, lamenting the stubborn grip of hatred unleashed more than a quarter of a century ago when multi-ethnic Yugoslavia fell apart and the neighbor in a frenzy on neighbor gave way to fear-driven violence and nationalistic passion.
The war engulfed the Balkans for four years, triggered by the end of the socialist dictatorship in Yugoslavia and the fragmentation of a peaceful federal state. When nationalism took hold, the Croats, Serbs and Muslims living in Bosnia – the most ethnically mixed and therefore most flammable part of the imploding Yugoslav state – took up arms and claimed their own states.
The bloodshed in Bosnia, which killed around 100,000 people and displaced more than two million from their homes, ended with the Dayton Accords reached on November 21, 1995 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.
However, the terms of the deal anchored the ethno-religious divisions that had fueled the war, leaving Bosnia as an amalgamation of mini-states dominated by political parties that still gain support by stirring up fear and vowing to protect their own.
When the International Monetary Fund offered Bosnia $ 386 million to fight the coronavirus in April, the leaders of the three dominant parties, each representing a different ethnic group, spent weeks discussing how the money should be divided.
They eventually reached an agreement, but when the money arrived it stayed idle for weeks at the central bank and became even more argued there instead of buying much-needed ventilators and other equipment for the country’s ramshackle public health system.
“This is the very essence of the Dayton Model,” said Christopher Bennett, former international official in Bosnia and author of “Bosnia’s Paralyzed Peace”. He added, “It just doesn’t work. It stopped a war but did not create the conditions for a life. “
That many ordinary Bosnians, regardless of their tribal identity, are fed up was evident in the local elections on Sunday, when Muslim and Serbian nationalist parties lost their respective strongholds in the city: Sarajevo and Banja Luka. Three ethnic parties – representatives of Croats, Muslims and Serbs – still control the majority of Bosnian cities, but their recent setbacks in the elections have raised some hope that Dayton’s frozen politics and minds may one day thaw.
Instead of creating a single state with equal citizens, Dayton divided Bosnia into two self-governing “units” – the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska and an association of 10 cantons controlled by Muslims and Croats.
Above this plethora of fiefs stands a weak and feuding federal government led by three presidents representing Croats, Muslims and Serbs. They all speak the same language and there is nothing that physically distinguishes one group from another, but they are divided by religion (though few actually worship), by politics, and by rival war narratives, and they are seldom in agreement on much.
For a while, the area in northwestern Bosnia where Mr Arifagic set up his farm raised hopes that wartime divisions could be overcome. Excluded Muslims returned in the years following the Dayton Accords, first in a nervous trickle, then in a joyous tide.
The village district of Kozarac, to which the hamlet of Mr. Arifagic also belongs, was liberated from Muslim residents through ethnic cleansing in the early 1990s and turned into burned-out rubble in the early 1990s. The school reopened, destroyed houses rebuilt and the local soccer team re-formed, although it never regained its previously multiethnic roster and became an almost exclusively Muslim team. The population grew to around 10,000.
But most of the new houses, many lavish mansions built with funds from outposts of the Bosnian diaspora across Europe, are mostly closed. Their owners visit us for a few weeks in the summer but have given up their dreams of permanent relocation to Bosnia.
Among those who returned and stayed was Fikret Alic, who played a role in bringing the world to the horrors of the Bosnian War in 1992 when a British television station filmed images of his emaciated body behind barbed wire in the Trnopolje concentration camp and broadcasted Mr Arifagic, who was also interned .
Mr Alic returned to Kozarac in 2009 with his wife and three children after 15 years in Denmark in a meat packaging plant.
“I made a big mistake bringing the kids with me,” he said.
Concerned that “a small spark could start a new war”, he is now trying to find a way for his two sons and daughter to return to Denmark “because they have no future here”.
Many Serbs, who often see themselves as victims and not as perpetrators of past crimes, see it the same way and want to leave.
“I’m not proud of what we Serbs have done, but terrible things have happened to the Serbs too,” said Zvadka Karlica, whose husband was killed during the fighting in Prijedor, a town near Kozarac, which took place before The war was mostly Muslim, but now 95 percent is Serb.
Ms. Karlica plans to stay, but her 12-year-old granddaughter, like many young people, wants to get out: “I love this place, but I really want to go,” she said.
The area is part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the superordinate state created by Dayton, but the only flag that flies in local government buildings is that of the Republika Srpska, which also includes the Serbian entity. Local Serbian leaders have worked tirelessly to undermine the state and have even threatened to leave.
On the site of the former camp in Trnopolje, the Serbian authorities erected a brooding concrete monument just for the Serbian fighters, “whose lives are built into the foundations of the Republika Srpska”.
Milenko Djakovic, the relatively moderate Serb mayor of Prijedor, the administrative center of the region, said he saw no reason to erect a memorial for Muslim victims as he believed the site was only “a place to protect civilians”.
For many Muslims, the existence of the Republika Srpska is the greatest injustice and the greatest mistake of the Dayton Accords: it legitimized a political project that was bloody born with the war rule of Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, and Ratko Mladic. the former Serbian general convicted of genocide in the massacre of around 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the city of Srebrenica in 1995.
Mr Arifagic, the dairy farmer, said he returned to Bosnia to build a future, not to deal with the past, but to quickly face the reality of a country ruled by ethno-national political parties that are thriving by keeping communities apart and promising to protect their own.
“It’s all very tragic,” said Sebina Sivac, an anthropologist from the region who wrote a book about her post-war struggles.
“Bosnia needs people like Arifagic to go beyond Dayton, which always reminds everyone that ethnicity matters,” she said. “All sides wanted him to show that he was on one side or the other. But he wanted to change that attitude. “
When Mr Arifagic opened his farm, the local Republika Srpska electricity company refused to provide a transformer box to power his cow stalls. He installed his own, but then spent three years litigating before he could connect it to the network.
Then, last year, the Republika Srpska abruptly rewritten the rules on milk subsidies, cutting Mr Arifagic’s income, but leaving the money received by smaller Serbian dairy farms intact. “If your name is Yusuf,” he said, referring to his name, which immediately identifies him as a Muslim, “nothing is easy here.”
Mr Djakovic, the Serbian mayor of Prijedor, said he spoke out against the subsidy change and he believed that Mr Arifagic’s difficulties were more due to his frequent clashes with the dominant Serbian party led by the nationalist Milorad Dodik than on his ethnicity.
“You can either fight uphill or go downhill with ease,” said Mr Djakovic. “If you criticize politicians, you will have problems.”
Hoping to do better outside the Republika Srpska, Mr Arifagic set up a satellite farm of 400 cows on the territory of the Muslim-Croatian-led unit.
But there, too, he ran into problems after refusing to support the dominant Muslim party, led by the son of war leader Alija Izetbegovic. Instead, he joined a rival party, which he felt was less oriented towards inciting ethnic ills. A mysterious fire later burned down part of his property.
Mr Arifagic said he intends to keep feeding his cows until his supplies run out and then close the shop, although he said he will stay in Bosnia for the time being: “I want to finish and close everything. Then Dodik and Izetbegovic can milk cows themselves. “
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