Pun mi je p… isanija

In the last two weeks I read my fair share of writings about the Bosnian protests both in Bosnian and English. These writings included analyses published on web portals, opinion pieces in newspapers, eyewitness accounts, blogs, even forum posts. I missed Facebook exchanges simply because I don't have an account, but I should think that I did not miss much. Basically, I read everything that I came across, including a few purely accidental finds. Some of these writings were by well-known authors, others by those not so well-known. There is also a third category of ordinary people like you and I who wanted their voice on the protests to be heard too. I read them attentively too.

This exposure gives me full right, I think, to say that most of it is plain boring. There are a few notable exceptions like a consistently relevant Aleksandar Hemon. Or another consistently sharp guy, Kurt Bassuener, among the internationals. And a precious few others. Mind you, I am not saying that protests, uprising, riots, outburst of discontent, revolution, Bosnian Spring, you name it, are uninteresting. On the contrary, this is the first time that there is at least some space for change in Bosnia. It may be limited and there is room for a debate on how it can be best exploited, but space it is. It is just that writings about them are predominantly boring. I am talking about the kind of writing that becomes tedious after the initial two or three sentences. You labor through the maze of paragraphs making the body of the text, only to come to an equally unperceptive conclusion. The only good thing is that they will inevitably wind down as protests become channeled in ways other than setting fire to the government buildings.

It was these flames that fanned them in the first place. Had it not been for the fires yet another protest in Bosnia would not have made international news, in which case any self-respecting analyst would have refrained from writing about something that is not even reported on by the major international news agencies. Locally, it would have been news for three days max and things would go back to their usual (ab)normal. Talking about these fires, it is interesting to note that had it not been for the unexpected retreat of the police in the capital and their even more unexpected failure to come back for the next couple of hours, there would have been no fires to talk about. I am mentioning the capital here because the international media care only about what goes on in the capital, neglecting the nuances of protests in other parts of the country. No fires would also mean no questions from our worried diaspora about what is brewing behind the scenes, as if we would know anything about it.

Another important thing to note about fires as opposed to peaceful protests is that the government only feigns to allow peaceful protests. The way they see it is that there is no reason to protest, which reveals an ultimate alienation between the people and those supposed to represent them.  

Why do I find these writings plain boring? I should say for a number of reasons, of which I will focus on three, or maybe four, that are the most annoying to me personally. The list is not exhaustive and you may freely add annoyances of your own choice. They are in this particular order: the use of ethnic determiners in writings that, at least nominally, show solidarity with the protesters, any mention of Dayton, the use of Bosnian protests as yet another platform for regurgitation of theories about a failed state, and the dismissal of any left-wing commentary on the conspiracy theory grounds or by employing other means of diversion. Now, when I come to think of it, all of them are equally annoying and you should just forget my remark about the particular order.

After reading a couple of articles and recognizing some recurrent themes, I started to really enjoy the prologues to these writings giving the reader a background context in which these protests were taking place. Slavoj Zizek, for instance, uses ethnic determiners such as ‘Muslim majority’, ‘large segment of the Croat population’, ‘capital of the Serb part of Bosnia’ to distinguish between the Bosnian cities of Sarajevo, Mostar and Banja Luka. His article bears the following title “Anger in Bosnia, but this time people can read their leaders’ ethnic lies”. Mr Zizek, aren't the above determiners that label these cities as no more than homes to one or the other ethnia a kind of ‘ethnic lie’ too, especially in light of recent history that even Bosnians in their thirties are not too old not to remember?

In the Economist, in the article entitled “On Fire” furnished with the map of Bosnia and all, the author writes about ‘Bosniak-Croat zone’ and ‘the other, mainly Serb, part of the country’. For lack of space, I will not list other examples here. Suffice it so say that though I understand that this is intended for Western audience, I am still amazed how resistant some of these authors are to the idea that now, almost full twenty years after the conflict, a Western reader reading this type of article can easily make his way through what is Bosnia today without this kind of assistance. If running the risk of patronizing their readership is not a good enough reason to drop it, they should see it from the word limit perspective and the limitless possibilities that arise from getting rid of a paragraph or two.

It is too often forgotten that writing should stimulate brain activity and preferably be fun. Even a passing reference to Dayton bears no chance of doing either of the two. It can only make us even more brain-dead than we already are and certainly it has zero potential to be fun. For the taste of it, Eric Gordy writes: “At the root of every political problem in BH is the way that the state was established through an agreement that was brokered between large-scale killers and international power wielders in Dayton in 1995”, in response to which Florian Bieber writes: “I have been generally skeptical about scapegoating Dayton… Many cities in Bosnia are badly governed, including Sarajevo, but Dayton has nothing to do with the functioning of the cities.” So, here you have two smart, one perhaps more insightful than the other, individuals disagreeing on the extent to which Dayton should be blamed for all the ills that plague the Bosnian society, which is really a no-brainer. Can't we just agree that the initial glitches with Dayton could have been easily fixed and that when these opportunities were missed, it freely metastasized with the wholehearted support of the elites sapping all energy of the political and economic life of the country, and leave it at that?

Turning to another even less interesting exchange with the Dayton overtones, namely one on the extent to which citizens and the NGO sector should be involved in changing the current political environment in Bosnia, as opposed to outside intervention, Edward Joseph writes: “Before the crisis spreads, Brussels and Washington must step forward with a bold, customized approach… What is needed, finally, is a concerted EU-US effort to launch a new concept designed to specifically address Bosnia's unique challenges”, to which Valery Perry retorts: “Most strikingly, his [Joseph’s] proposal does not include any plans for meaningful engagement of citizens – real, normal BiH citizens – in the process… He also disparages the civic activism that does exist, through both organized NGOs and other manifestations of solidarity.” Joseph then chips in the rejoinder: “If Bosnians want reform, they should look to the EU-led Kosovo-Serbia process – in which citizens and NGOs have played little or no part.”

What Joseph, and quite a few other commentators making forced analogies between Kosovo and Bosnia, forget is that there was no Dayton for Kosovo and no ‘guarantors’ of Dayton. Few other things are overlooked too like timing, but it is of no relevance to the present discussion. What we see at play here is again the talents, with the scales tilted in favor of one of them, of these two individuals wasted on whether the change should be mainly generated internally or externally. What really matters, as Hemon suggests, is the maturing of the political consciousness and formation of the critical mass of people ready to effect the change and venture into the unknown at this or some other point in the future. I personally do not have much trust either in the power of NGOs or the interest of the outside factor. That leaves me only with the people.

While I waited for the 2013 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader honoree, also known as a seasoned proponent of the theory of Bosnia as a failed state to have his say on the Bosnian protests, straight out of retirement came Steven Meyer with the article “Failure in Bosnia”. I stopped reading at the third sentence: “This [the protests] is the most serious blow to the viability of Bosnia – and its entities – since the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995.” When I came back to it, I found another ‘gem’ in the second paragraph of the text: “Western policymakers never understood the ethnic bases of political community in the Balkans and, therefore, found ethnicity to be an unacceptable foundation for modern society.” No wonder Mr Meyer resurfaced in the Serbian daily Politika, which has been very much into ‘the ethnic bases of political community in the Balkans’ ever since late 80s.

To come up with a quote of my own, unlike some commentators who have peppered their writings with quotes from famous philosophers, political figures, sociologists, novelists, you name it, to spice them up, the state can be failed only inasmuch as the individuals comprising it are failed. Bottom line, Bosnians have tried in the past, maybe not hard enough, and failed and this time again they are taking a shot at bettering their lot and they mail fail again, but it is not like they have not tried.

One may add to this camp of failed-state theorists strong proponents of the current status quo who tend to criticize right and left, but basically they are nothing more than a pseudo-academic protracted hand of the political establishment. One of them writes: “[D]espite the fact that many have tried to present the demonstrations as purely socio-economic in nature, the truth is that they are very much ethnically marked, and many have rightly pointed to both the political and ethnic aspects of the demonstrators’ agenda.” He then goes on to say, or rather shout: “Everyone… knows that Bosnia-Herzegovina is in a deep crisis. Everyone also knows that this crisis is not only a crisis of the state structures or institutions, but also one of morality, legality, education, public media efficiency, and a sign of both economic malaise and social alienation and atomization in general.” Phew. Besides blaming it all on the OHR and the ‘Bosniak-Muslim political elite’, the author seems to suggest that the ‘deep’ crisis can only be solved by not protesting since the protests are ‘very much ethnically marked’ and since they may contribute to ‘the spread of fear and insecurity amongst ordinary citizens’. Yeah right, in status quo lies the salvation of us all! And by the way, who is this ‘everyone’?

‘Everyone’ is also employed by these individuals who always no better to dismiss any left wing commentary. One such commentator, obviously schooled in the same type of rhetoric as the one in the preceding paragraph, writes: “I should think that now it is abundantly clear to everyone that this was no social revolution, but an attempt of a politically staged coup and the attack on the country’s constitutional and legal order with very dangerous consequences. Authentic social revolutions, in fact, do not exist, except among hotheaded and politically naive left-wingers.” In the same text he also ridicules the fact that a young female protester who invited the police to come over to their side and whose photo was widely distributed for its obvious media appeal happens to be the wife of the president of one of the opposition parties. So, the argument goes that since authentic social revolutions do not exist and since we have a member of the privileged class among the protesters, we should dismiss these protests outright as purely politically motivated and nothing but an ephemeral airing of frustrations. If ‘everyone’ is not convinced by now of the futility and sheer absurdity of protesting the status quo, then I really do not know what is wrong with, to use the author’s exact words, ‘the emotional make-up of their personality’.

Leaving the ‘everyone’ wannabe universalists aside, it is true that left-wing commentary, especially by authors with strong literary and philosophical leanings, may suffer at times from a certain degree of absentmindedness, but it is equally true that more often than not they can be very astute. For the taste of it, I invite you to compare the following two passages: “… Bosnia is offering an image of what Europe must become in order not to sleepwalk again into a disaster as it did a century ago, when the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo marked the beginning of the first world war.” The other one is: “The collapse of Yugoslavia was triggered by nationalist (former communist) elites, from which the future ‘winners of transition’ were to emerge. The process began when the first fighting broke out, and it was still going strong when the wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo ended. It transformed itself into a fourth Yugoslav war, which, although undeclared, was no more humane than the others – a total war against the poor. Now the poor are saying: enough.” Importantly, the middle class impoverished by years of fighting and decimated by migration was an all too easy prey to the winners of transition.

Finally, there is no need for intellectualizing about issues such as ethnic fundamentalism, violent anti-capitalism, EU skepticism, classism, and any other –isms for that matter, in the context of the Bosnian protests. All these issues exceed by far their scope and reach. I tend to think that instead of intellectualization, the Bosnian protests are in need of operationalization.      

Having read all these writings I am all too aware how much their authors labored over catchy titles and conclusions that stay in the reader’s mind for more than a couple of seconds. That too is annoying.