The legacy of ethnic cleansing: The international community and the returns process in post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina

Abstract

This paper examines the international community's post-war effort to promote the return of persons displaced by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia–Herzegovina. The war itself began as an extreme ethnonationalist project, seeking security through territorial separation. This created a massive displacement with more than half the country's population driven from their homes largely as a result of the terrorism of ethnic cleansing. The peace settlement at Dayton guaranteed the right to return for displaced persons but also effectively divided the country into ethnonationalist homelands. Thus, while the initial security dilemma for the international community was to separate the warring factions and keep the peace, they soon faced an added security dilemma created by the displaced exercising their right to return to homes in what had become hostile ethnonationalist territories. Faced with obstructions to returns put in place by local ethnonationalists who continued to run day-to-day government operations in places of return, the implementation of the right to return forced the international community to overcome its apolitical and accommodating stance. Changes in the international governance of Bosnia enabled a series of policies designed to promote returns—recognized as key to reconstruction—that employed localized spatial strategies of intervention in support of returnees. After a decade of displacement, the legacy of ethnic cleansing endures, forming limits to returns and persistent insecurity for returning communities, thus permanently altering Bosnia's human geography and political future.

Introduction

The Bosnian war ended with the Dayton Peace Accords (DPA), signed in December 1995, but the conflict did not. Though sublimated into mostly non-violent confrontation and struggle, the on-going conflict in post-war Bosnia has occasionally erupted into overt violence. One typical example was a confrontation and brief firefight in April 1996 near the historically Bosniak (Muslim) village of Jusići in northeast Bosnia. Located in what the DPA had determined was the territory of the Bosnian Serb entity, Republika Srpska, Jusići was one of many Bosniak communities ethnically cleansed by Serb forces in the summer of 1992. With the cessation of open warfare, however, displaced survivors from settlements like Jusići were anxious to return to their homes to rebuild their lives. Jusići was unusual because, though it was on the Republika Srpska side of the inter-entity boundary line (IEBL) delimited at Dayton, it was close to the boundary and within the official demilitarized zone dividing Bosnia's entities (Fig. 1). Organized in exile as a displaced community and encouraged by the Bosniak political party, the SDA (Stranka Demokratske Akcije or Party of Democratic Action), Jusići's people decided to return to their destroyed and empty houses.²

They were not welcome back. Their attempt to restore the security of home in their lives was the trigger for an exaggerated bout of insecurity among the Bosnian Serbs in the area. Returnees were harassed by local Bosnian Serb ‘police’ who declared them ‘Muslim extremists’ who were trying to restart the war. The local Bosnian Serb media portrayed them as ‘war criminals’ who were ‘occupying’ part of Republika Srpska in an effort to undermine it. Local Bosnian Serb authorities accused the international community of permitting an attack on ‘Serb territory’ in an effort to ‘erode the borders of the Serb Republic.’³

With tensions mounting over spontaneous returns to Jusići and several other villages nearby, the international community faced a crisis emerging out of the very framework and annexes of the Dayton Peace Accords it had worked so hard to forge. Annexes I and II of the DPA established the IEBL, ended the military confrontation in Bosnia and created an international military Implementation Force (IFOR) to separate the warring armies in Bosnia and keep the peace. But securing a military border amplified the insecurity of the displaced, even though Annex VII of the DPA guaranteed the right of displaced persons to return to their homes. To the American and Russian forces serving in IFOR near Jusići, the simple action of the displaced Bosniak villagers returning home created a security dilemma. A stand off between returnees rebuilding their houses and local Bosnian Serbs developed and grew tense through the summer of 1996 as police threatened to remove the villagers or arrest them for ‘suspected war crimes.’ Police opened fire on returnees on at least one occasion and local thugs harassed them. Responding to mounting pressure from local Bosnian Serb politicians and hysterical media coverage, IFOR troops and local Bosnian Serb police raided the village in October in an ostensible search for weapons, during which the local police raised the flag of Republika Srpska (Tadic, 1996). Though some of the villagers were armed, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) verified the returnees as former village residents who had the right to return to their former residences. The firearms were to protect themselves against the local Bosnian Serb police, some of whom had murdered family and neighbors during the ethnic cleansing of the village in 1992.

To resolve the crisis, the international community in early 1997 brokered an agreement with the Serb authorities to permit the return of non-Serbs to their homes on the Serb side of the zone of separation provided they signed declarations to be law-abiding ‘citizens’ of Republika Srpska. Though Jusići's Muslim residents had been part of the local majority in Zvornik opština (county) before they were ethnically cleansed in 1992, their return home was conditional on their submission as a minority in the Bosnian Serb homeland legitimated at Dayton. Returning ‘home’ was only possible by acknowledging the political authority of the Serb ethnonationalist entity, rendering it, for the residents, not quite home anymore. Instead, the villagers of Jusići returned to a space dominated by the IEBL, Serb police, flags and an exclusively Cyrillic ‘Serb’ language.⁵ It had taken more than a year for the international community to establish the rights of returnees in the one area where it had exclusive military control—the zone of separation—even though the right to return was already included in the DPA and applied to all areas in Bosnia.

The story of the displaced residents of Jusići was not an unusual one in post-war Bosnia. More than half of the pre-war population of Bosnia was displaced by ethnic cleansing and warfare. Living much of the last 10 years in uncertain and unsettled circumstances, their condition has been marked by an insecurity of displacement. Severed from their houses and livelihoods, with family and kinship networks disrupted, most of the displaced had their world turned upside down in an instant, the comfort of home replaced by the uncertainty of exile, the discomfort of refugee centers and the precariousness of temporary housing. This widespread production of insecurity was undertaken in the name of producing ‘national security’ for each of the constituent peoples of Bosnia through their forced separation during the war. In this way, Bosnia's residents share a situation in common with others across the contemporary world political map. Displacement is a reality for more than 20 million people today, whose lives have been unsettled by conflict.⁶ In many instances, the forced displacement of large population groups is not a byproduct of war but its very object. In this way, Bosnia is one in a long list of destroyed places including Angola, Abkhazia (Georgia), Cyprus, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sri Lanka, and the Darfur region of Sudan. Yet Bosnia is also an exemplar among the conflicts in these places, providing the master metaphor now used to conceptualize and describe the process of their destruction: ethnic cleansing.

Ethnic cleansing is a distinctive politico-geographic problematic that has not received the attention it deserves from Anglo-American political geographers.⁷ Naimark (2001) is one of the few attempts at a systematic study but uses case study narratives with thin generalization. He argues that ethnic cleansing is not equivalent to genocide though both can and are found together. Genocide, in his usage (not that of the Genocide Convention), is an exterminist activity aimed at the destruction of part or the whole of a population whereas ethnic cleansing is “to remove a people and often all traces of them from a concrete territory” (Naimark, 2001: 3). Besides their removal, ethnic cleansing also targets the cultural and material landscape of the victims, what Porteous and Smith (2001) term ‘domicide’ or the destruction of homes, communities, and sites meaningful to the former residents. Studies on the erasure of Palestine by Israel have relevance for underscoring how ethnic cleansing is a politico-geographic problematic involving place and community destruction, the erasure of ‘other’ cultural landscapes, the renaming of locales and the repopulation of the land by a new group (Benvenisti, 2000, Falah, 1996, Slyomovics, 1998). Ethnic cleansing relies on an extremist discourse of political geography, defined by an aspirant power structure, that maps an exclusionary and idealized political identity onto a particular territory. Put into practice, elements of this aspirant power structure use terror and violence to clear all ‘others’ from the territory in order to realize an idealized convergence of identity and space. For its perpetrators, ethnic cleansing is a means to realize a political geography of security through separation and distinct borders.

How the various institutions of the so-called ‘international community’ respond to the challenge of forced displacement has been the subject of considerable debate over the last decade (Crocker et al., 2001, Newman and Van Selm, 2003, Power, 2002). Part of what is today a larger discussion on ‘global governance’ and so-called ‘nation-building,’ the sporadic and haphazard efforts by coalitions of heterogeneous institutions to reconstitute ‘failed states’ and manage ‘war-to-peace transitions,’ can be characterized as repair work on dysfunctional sectors of the world political map. Guiding these efforts are what Larner and Walters (2004) term ‘global governmentality’, the drive to create standards and conventions for managing our increasingly globalized and interconnected political space. In post-war states, global governmentality is characterized by demographic governance and population management, interventions in support of the displaced and their possible return home (Dahlman & Ó Tuathail, 2005; Hyndman, 2000). This finds expression in the work of the UNHCR, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Refugees International, and a broad array of intergovernmental and ‘non-governmental’ ‘humanitarian’ organizations that get the bulk of their funding from large states and international aid agencies. Furthermore, these efforts are contingent on the reconstruction of the built environment and the reconstitution of place; difficult tasks made more so by the conflict that continues after the war.

This paper examines how this global governmentality of demographic governance and ‘place repair’ unfolds in a localized context by investigating how the international community addressed the legacy of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia–Herzegovina after Dayton. Drawing upon interviews with various actors in Bosnian localities, it provides an account of the evolution of the international community's role in Bosnia, which shifted from pragmatic acceptance of ethnic cleansing during the war to a post-war effort to reverse it through a sponsored returns process. Throughout our account we foreground the struggle between the international community's effort to promote returns and the ethnonationalist local authorities who opposed the return of those ethnically cleansed from their homes. This struggle for control over the post-war demographic governance highlights the competing political geographies of security in which ethnonationalists used ethnic cleansing as a means of acquiring national security through separation and the international community encouraged returns to promote security for the displaced. As a result, the effort to put Annex VII of the DPA into effect was a long struggle for the international community requiring a series of military, legal, political, institutional and social interventions sufficient to open up ethnonationalist localities to returns. As an expression of global governmentality, the international community's returns policy in Bosnia has required considerable investment and effective localized capacity building, yet it cannot be said to have undone the legacy of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.