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Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo
Primary Researchers:
Hariz Halilovich and Paul James
Global-Local Database for Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo
In Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, NATO finally responded to a situation
of violent conflict with Operation Deliberate Force. Years later,
the International Crisis Group report for March 2002 summarized the
legal situation in Bosnia as still chaotic: 'The law does not yet
rule in Bosnia & Herzegovina. What prevail instead are nationally
defined politics, inconsistency in the application of law, corrupt
and incompetent courts, a fragmented judicial space, half-baked or
half-implemented reforms, and sheer negligence. Bosnia in short is
a land where respect for and confidence in the law and its defenders
is weak.' Life for ordinary people is difficult.
In Kosovo, things are not any better. Kosovo's entire aid reconstruction
budget for 2000 was the equivalent of the cost of half-a-day's bombing
during the Kosovo intervention. The total USAID budget for Bosnia
& Herzegovina for 2003 was US$30.1 million of which 34 per cent
goes to economic restructuring. By comparison, NATO's eleven-week
bombing of the former Yugoslavia, which killed between 500 and 1,800
civilians, also inflicted an estimated $4 billion damage on public
infrastructure such as bridges, factories and electrical plants. Put
this figure alongside the budget has sought by George Bush to continue
the War on Terror: $87 billion. The War on Terror thus has had consequences
other than the obvious-namely, it has set up a hierarchy of aid priorities
which means that some places are no longer seen as strategically important
enough to support more than minimally, while money continues to pour
into Iraq.
In Bosnia & Herzegovina, economic and political life is gradually
being regularized under the custodial control of the Office of the
Higher Representative (OHR), however the country is caught between
this outside authority with adjudicating power to veto any parliamentary
decision and a series of parliaments with divided interests. The need
for reconciling with the past, including the recent history of concentration
camps, genocidal rape and mass killings, is being left to the private
memories and intense discussions of individuals and families. Meanwhile,
far away in The Hague, at the International Criminal Tribunal for
the Former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Miloševic (though not Karadic or Mladic
who are both at large) is being judged for crimes against humanity.
The effect on the ground is still very qualified.
The present project is intended to track the present processes of
reconstruction and reconciliation, and to analyze the alternative
pathways to sustainable community and political life. Reconstruction
and reconciliation clearly needs to be a long-term and comprehensive
process: cultural, political, legal and economic. The evidence suggests
that after the upheaval of war, reconstruction cannot successfully
happen in one country in itself operating without support, but neither
should external support take the form that economic 'humanitarian
intervention' now tends to take.
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2004 |
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