World Watch Mar-Apr 2004

WORLD WATCH
•
Vision for a Sustainable World
THE WAR ON
•
B O S N I A•
In the ethnic war of a decade ago,
people and communities suffered and died.
Now, it’s the environment’s turn.
by Tim Clancy
Excerpted from the March/April 2004 WORLD WATCH magazine
© 2004 Worldwatch Institute
For more information about Worldwatch Institute and its programs
and publications, please visit our website at www.worldwatch.org
THE WAR ON
• B O S N I A•
In the ethnic war of a decade ago,
people and communities suffered and died.
Now, it’s the environment’s turn.
by Tim Clancy
I
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12
n war, the silences are sometimes more terrifying
than the noises. It was one such silence, in the
cratered streets of Mostar, that made me pause in
mid-stride and duck behind a bombed-out van—
moments before a mortar round crashed to earth and
exploded a few feet from where I had been standing.
Stinging clods of dirt peppered my face, but the metal
hulk absorbed the shrapnel.
Another falling shell, another inexplicable escape.
They happened all the time during the recent
(1992–1995) war in Bosnia and Hercegovina (BiH). But
thousands of people were not so lucky, as I saw in
Mostar while helping to evacuate wounded children
from the besieged eastern half of the city. Few areas there
could be called safe, and even the makeshift hospital
where the children awaited my ambulance had been hit
nine times in the previous week by the artillery and mortar fire that rained down on the sector east of the river.
Yet horrific as it was, this was just a small corner of
a complex and vicious war (see sidebar, “A Brief History of the Bosnian War,” page 14) that wreaked widespread devastation on people, communities, and the
countryside. Whole villages were destroyed—families
driven out, the men sometimes executed, and houses
put to the torch. Sarajevo (the capital), ringed closely
on three sides by mountains, endured a four-year reign
of terror that exposed its residents to indiscriminate
death from artillery and sniper fire delivered by Serb
gunners on the heights above. Over 10,000 died dur-
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March/April 2004
ing the city’s ordeal, including more than a thousand
children. The pockmarked sidewalks and shattered
buildings can still be seen. Casualty figures have been
heavily manipulated by all sides for political purposes
and thus vary widely, but there is little doubt that the
war cost hundreds of thousands of Croats, Serbs, and
Bosnian Muslims their lives.
Of course the tragedy did not end merely because
the shooting stopped. Much of the lasting legacy of the
Bosnian war can be read in the landscape itself. Apart
from the “cleansed” villages, where the walls of roofless cottages rear up like tombstones, the physical scars
are nowhere more apparent than in the huge clearcuts
of ancient forest growth—emblems of the desperation
and opportunism spawned by a war-ravaged economy.
For in addition to the immediate toll of death, dislocation, and ancient enmities revived, the Bosnian war
inevitably disrupted economic life and crippled the
physical, social, and political infrastructure necessary for
a functional economy. Unemployment remains as high
as 40 percent, the lack of economic opportunities has
driven many to the edge of despair—and the country’s
rich natural resources have been laid wide open to
predatory exploitation.
• CONTESTED RICHES •
Those “rich natural resources” may be a surprise. Few
people think of Bosnia and Hercegovina as a land of
pristine wilderness in the heart of the Dinaric Alps, but
AUSTRIA
HUNGARY
SLOVENIA
ROMANIA
CROATIA
BOSNIAHERCEGOVINA
Sarajevo
SERBIA
Adriatic
Sea
ITALY
Rome
MONTENEGRO
MACEDONIA
ALBANIA
Tyrrhenian Sea
GREECE
the clash
of Mediterranean
Sicily
and alpine climates has created one the most magnificent ecosystems
in all of Europe. Mountain rivers from the high peaks
of the Dinaric range have carved deep canyons on their
way west to the Adriatic Sea or east to the Black Sea
basin. Bosnia is abundantly watered by its rivers, streams,
and springs (the name derives from bosana, Indo-European for water), and though it is smaller than the U.S.
state of West Virginia, the country hosts a staggering
diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna. Over 400 types
of rare and endemic plant, and 200 animal species,
can be found in this middle Balkan state.
BiH’s resources have helped make it a battleground
for centuries. The Romans fought the native Illyrian
tribes for over 150 years to conquer the region, not only
to expand their empire but also to secure access to the
gold, silver, salt, and other resources found there. The
Ottomans followed suit more than a millennium later,
seeking less to convert the mainly Christian population
to Islam than to claim those resources in their push
toward Vienna. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire
assumed control in 1878, its engineers immediately
began sinking mineshafts and building railroads to
extract the vast wealth of hardwoods, salt, and coal. The
old communist state of Yugoslavia in effect used BiH
as an energy base for its six republics, tapping its
hydropower resources and siting coal-fired generating
plants there. BiH accounted for 32 percent of total air
pollution in the former Yugoslavia—but only 20 percent of the territory and 17 percent of the population,
according to the Sarajevo-based Center for the Promotion of Civil Society (CPCS).
Today a similar pattern can be seen, as some European Union members exploit the weakness within the
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present government (see sidebar, “The Most Complicated Government in the World,” page 16) and the lack
of effective regulation. Very little is being done to urge
Bosnia and Hercegovina toward reform of its environmental laws and adoption of European standards,
and a number of local policymakers seem more than
willing to sell the country’s natural bounty to the highest bidder. This ecological colonization and thievery is
evident in the treatment of Bosnia’s forests, water and
energy resources, and vulnerable “protected” areas.
• F O R E S TS •
With the unemployment rate sky-high and per-capita
gross domestic product about one-twentieth that of the
United States, few people in BiH have the time or
inclination to address what amounts to a forestry cri-
A B r i e f H i s t o r y o f t h e B o s n i a n Wa r
In the minds of some Serbs, the war in Bosnia began in 1389.
That’s when a Serbian army lost a decisive battle at Kosovo
Field to invading Ottoman Turks, suffering the martyrdom of
Prince Lazar and the occupation of Serbia as a result. The ensuing 400 years of Turkish rule sorely wounded Serbian pride (as
well as that of many other conquered Balkan peoples). Some
authorities argue that the Turkish forces included Christian vassals, but the battle has nevertheless been simplified in myth as
one between Christianity and Islam, and many Serbs have nurtured a sense of grievance against Muslims ever since. Where
this lingering bitterness sought targets, they were easy to find:
About 40 percent of the Bosnian population are Bosniacs (Muslims), descended from a largely heretic Christian population
whose relative openness to Islam allowed it to take root in BiH.
(In Serbia and Croatia the Orthodox and Catholic church organizations remained more influential.) In Kosovo, now a semiautonomous province of Serbia, much of the population are
Muslim ethnic Albanians.
The more immediate origins lie in the resurgence of ethnic
nationalisms in Yugoslavia following the death of Marshall Tito
in 1981. Tito’s passing, and the period of sharp economic
decline it marked, encouraged dormant nationalist sentiments
to re-emerge onto the political scene. One of the most powerful
signals of this was the parading of Prince Lazar’s remains
through Serbia to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the
great Serbian defeat. Serbian leader Slobodan Milos̆ević aggravated the tensions between Serbs and their Yugoslav neighbors
in his 1989 political campaign by ending Lazar’s tour at Kosovo
Field. There Milos̆ević signaled his ultimate intent: “We cannot
rule out the use of violence to reclaim Serbian lands.”
The rise of Milos̆ević and Serbian nationalism set the stage
in 1991 for independence referendums in Slovenia and Croatia.
Voters in both republics overwhelmingly supported secession
from Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Hercegovina, worried about being
swallowed up or partitioned by Serbia, also held a referendum
(boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs); 65 percent of resident Bosniacs and Croats voted for independence.
These actions threatened Milos̆ević’s plan to unite all Serboccupied lands into one Greater Serbia, including large swaths
of Croatia and all of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Milos̆ević worked
to turn Bosnian Serbs against their Croat and Muslim neighbors by convincing them that they were under threat, despite
(in most cases) decades of peaceful co-existence. Television
reports warned Serbs of Croatian fascists and an impending
Muslim jihad. The fighting in Croatia was often portrayed by
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March/April 2004
Belgrade media as a reprise of the slaughter carried out by the
Croatian fascist Ustasi, who had killed so many Serbs in World
War II. It was easy to demagogue the largely peasant Serb population of eastern Bosnia. Noel Malcolm, in his Bosnia: A Short
History, relates an interview with a Serbian woman from Foc̆a:
“Do you see that field?” she asked. “The jihad was supposed to
begin there. Foc̆a was going to be the new Mecca. There was a
list of Serbs who were marked for death.”
Reports of Serb-run concentration camps began to surface
in mid-1992, and reports of mass rapes and killings were later
confirmed. By the end of 1992 over 70 percent of BiH was occupied by Serbian forces and over a million Bosnian Muslims and
Croats had fled the country. The Serbs had linked with their
brothers in arms in the Croatian Krajina and the Slavonia
region in eastern Croatia, and the realization of a Greater Serbia
was in sight.
Meanwhile, intervention by the United Nations was proving
generally ineffectual. The United Nations Protection Force
(UNPROFOR) was mandated to uphold fundamental elements
of international law and to abide by the principle of neutrality,
which it often seemed to interpret as moral indifference
between aggressor and victim. In 1992 the UN peacekeepers
were welcomed as saviors by the Bosnians, but they soon realized that the UN force was unlikely to measure up to its
assigned role. In the Security Council-established “safe zones”
at Srebrenica and Z̆epa, UNPROFOR disarmed the Bosnian
defense forces, at Serb insistence, yet failed to protect them.
Over 7,000 people were eventually massacred at Srebrenica in
1995 while under the “protection” of UN forces. At Omarska,
Trnoplje, Manjac̆a, and other concentration camps in Serb-held
territory, through which over a million civilians were processed
in a systematic plan of ethnic cleansing, UNPROFOR simply
never arrived.
The Vance-Owen plan peace proposal offered in early 1993
was rejected as unjust and unworkable, and in fact set the stage
for armed conflict between the formerly allied Croat and Muslim forces. The Croats, firmly under the control of Franjo
Tud¯man in Zagreb, drew up plans to carve out a chunk of
Bosnia and Hercegovina for Croatia. This would have meant
forcibly moving large numbers of Bosnian Croats to the areas
planned to come under Croatia’s rule, mainly in western Hercegovina, as well as turning on their former allies, the Bosnian
Muslims. In a secret meeting, Tud¯man and Milos̆ević apparently
agreed on splitting the Bosnian state between them, town by
town, region by region. These plans, however, did not include
sis. Over 50 percent of the
country was covered by forest
before the war, but the harvesting of old forests and the
changing land-use tendencies
after clearcutting put that figure at less than 35 percent
today. (The Economist has
Danilo Krstanovic/REUTERS ©2002
the Bosnian Muslims, who were to
be expelled, killed, or left to live as
minorities in Greater Serbia or
Greater Croatia.
When the Washington Agreement ended the Croat-Muslim conflict in March 1994, aid routes were
opened into central and northeast
Bosnia and many encircled and
starving populations finally
received help. Sarajevo, however,
remained in its valley prison, still
under siege by the Serbs. Foodstuffs, ammunition, and supplies
were brought to Sarajevo by its
only secure lifeline, a 700-yard tunnel that ran under the UN-controlled airport. Sarajevo’s
population lived without adequate
water, food, and electricity, and
under constant sniper and artillery
fire, for over 1,200 days. By some
estimates 10,000 civilians, including
1,500 children, were killed in Sarajevo alone, despite UN protection.
The fate of populations in the other
safe zones was little better. UN conTaken six years after the war ended, this photograph of Sarajevo from
voys—manned by blue-helmeted
the surrounding heights reveals the lingering damage inflicted on both
troops increasingly targeted by the
the human and natural landscapes.
defiant Serbs and given little means
In this tale of diplomatic irresolution lies the root of
or mandate to protect themselves—reached those
Bosnia’s current political dilemma. The bitter divisions
enclaves only at Serbian whim.
within Europe over the proper response to the war, and
After years of failed diplomatic attempts by the
the UN decision to play the role of a neutral observer in
Europeans, the United States began to assert more
a land where brutality became the norm, helped pave
pressure to end the conflict. Pinpoint NATO air strikes
the way for criminals, thugs, and madmen to drag
severely damaged Serbian communication networks
Bosnia and Hercegovina into chaos and gave courage
and supply routes, and the Bosnian and Croat armies
and legitimacy to the political party mafias that still
were able to retake large swaths of land in the Bosnian
dominate the country. The depth of the absurdity is
Krajina. They marched almost to the entrance of Banja
reflected in a friend’s grim joke. Referring to Bosnian
Luka, the largest Serb-held city, before U.S. officials
Serb leader Radovan Karadz̆ic, he said, “A man murders
called all three parties to Wright-Patterson Air Force
another man and is sentenced to life in prison. A man
Base in Dayton, Ohio. On November 21, 1995, after
murders 20 men and is sent to an insane asylum. A man
weeks of exhausting negotiations, a peace deal was
murders 200,000 men—and is invited by the United
struck, and the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in
Nations to negotiate peace.”
Paris three weeks later.
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WORLD•WATCH
15
pegged it at around 30 percent). The institutions legally
responsible for regulating the logging industry have an
appalling record, and most environmentalists believe few
or no exact statistics exist because exposing the truth
would mean the forced resignation of many government
officials and the drying up of the river of cash from sales
of high-quality hardwood. Around Pale, the former capital of the Republika Srpska entity of BiH and a region
of staunch nationalist support for war criminal Radovan
Karadzic, there are over 240 timber companies.
Fondeko, a Sarajevo-based environmental group, estimates that at least 60 percent are not registered.
This year alone, more than 3,000,000 seed trees
from a tree farm in Olovo will be destroyed because
S̆umarstvo, the state forestry service, has failed to manage their cultivation properly. The norm for annual
seedling plantings is 20 million, but this year S̆umarstvo
planted only 500,000. Eighty percent of the forested
land in Bosnia and Hercegovina is state-owned, and the
responsibility to ensure replanting lies ultimately with
the state. The current law spells out the replanting
requirement in very specific terms, but Nesad Bojadzic,
the former head forestry inspector for BiH when it was
part of Yugoslavia, says the requirement is blatantly
ignored at every level. He can cite some telling figures.
For example, according to Bojadzic, in the valley of the
Vrbas River in central Bosnia, 2,900 hectares of hardwood have been totally clearcut without any replanting. Clearcutting of black pines on Ozren Mountain
in the northeast has devastated 3,400 hectares of forest, again with no replanting. The lumber company
Voljice Pidris brutalized an old hardwood forest to such
an extent that the entire town of Gornji Vakuf had no
potable water all last summer. This type of clearcutting
is not a criminal offense in Bosnia and Hercegovina
(i.e., offenders can be fined but not imprisoned).
Bojadzic has done his best to fight this corruption, by
lobbying for the criminalization of clearcutting and the
prosecution of complicit forestry officials, recommending that the replanting requirement be increased
to compensate for almost a decade of completely
unregulated logging, and calling for a moratorium on
logging until local inspectors can make accurate assessments of the situation. He was once one of the most
respected men in local forestry, but his expert advice
has fallen on deaf ears.
T h e M o s t C o m p l i c a t e d G o v e r n m e n t i n t h e Wo r l d ?
If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then the government of Bosnia and Hercegovina is a camel and a musk
ox designed by a committee of horses, then yoked together.
In short: ungainly and possibly dysfunctional. But it may be
the best that could be hoped for under the circumstances.
BiH’s governmental structure is an outcome of the
November 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the
war. The Accords established two entities within BiH’s recognized borders. The Republika Srpska (RS), now largely
populated by Bosnian Serbs, was given 49 percent of the
total territory of BiH. The Federation of Bosniacs [Bosnian
Muslims] and Croats got the remaining 51 percent. Both
entities are mandated to abide by the constitution drawn up
in Dayton and jointly govern the sovereign state of BiH. At
the top of this structure is a presidency, which is shared by
three persons representing the three major ethnic groups
(Bosniac, Serb, Croat). The co-presidents share a rotating
administration in which there is one main spokesman,
although all three have equal decision-making powers.
The RS has its own parliament, premier, and ministries
of defense, trade, education, health, etc. The Federation has
a similar structure, except that it is further carved up into 10
cantons to accommodate its ethnic diversity of Croatian
Catholics and Bosniac Muslims. These cantons practice
regional self-management by means of an administrative
structure similar to the Federation’s. The cantons have their
own ministries of health, trade, and education, as well as
their own equivalent of a house of representatives. They
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possess significant self-rule authority, which has complicated the reform process in the Federation.
Within both the Republika Srpska and the Federation
are municipalities which, although considerably less powerful, play a role like that of mayors and town councils in
the United States. The municipalities render health services, collect taxes, and handle various registrations. Unfortunately, the cantons and entities do the same, effectively
burying people in bureaucracy and discouraging local and
foreign investment.
To help implement the Dayton Accords and work with
local governments on reforms, the United Nations sponsors the Office of the High Representative (OHR). Its foci
have become a new economic platform, an anti-corruption
campaign, and the standardization of laws and regulations
to European norms.
The Accords called for the formation of state-level ministries, such as defense and education, but to date few of
these have begun to function with any real central authority. However, there are some bright spots. The Council of
Ministers (heads of state-level ministries) and the new
national parliament have greatly increased their influence
in recent years, due to reform pressure from the OHR. A
national Ministry of Defense was recently formed as a prerequisite to BiH’s membership in NATO’s “Partners for
Peace” program. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
Ministry of Foreign Trade have functioned for some time
according to their mandate.
Ironically, the law may not protect Bosnian forests,
but landmines sometimes do. The war left as much as
20 percent of the forests littered with mines—one of the
few protections they enjoy. But some illegal loggers have
managed to twist even this circumstance to their advantage in the intense competition over BiH’s rich hardwood forests. Several clearcutting locations—marked
with landmine tape and warning signs to keep inspectors and forest rangers away—aren’t mined at all. A few
dozen meters behind the tape is a hardwood graveyard.
Although not commonplace, this tactic shows the
lengths to which illegal loggers will go in order to
clearcut the forests without being regulated and taxed.
• WAT E R A N D E N E R G Y •
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
predicts that the world’s water use will increase 31
percent over 1995 levels by 2020. Bosnia is better
positioned than many countries to handle rising
demand, but it desperately needs to take better care of
its pure water sources.
Evidence of opportunism and abuse is plentiful.
Consider, as a case study, the unique and ruggedly
scenic Neretva River Canyon, one of the deepest in
Europe and home to at least 32 endemic types of animals and plant. The canyon lies within the area of the
proposed new Prenj-C̆vrsnica-C̆abulja national park,
but BiH’s state-run electric company, Elektroprivreda,
and an Italian corporate partner have secretly developed
plans to construct five high dams, two of them on the
Neretva. BiH law requires the utility to inform the
public of any intent to build a dam, and to secure the
proper permits even before developing a plan. Elektroprivreda did neither; it simply announced the plans’
completion as a fait accompli.
One dam would drown the Neretva Canyon under
an artificial lake that would forever change the face of
the town of Konjic. The people of Konjic voted overwhelmingly against it, but their wishes counted for little. The dam would also flood the ancient villages of
Spiljani and Dzajici and forcibly relocate people whose
roots in these places are centuries deep. At a news conference to announce the project, former Yugoslav premiere Ante Markovic, representing the Italian company
involved (the name of which is closely guarded), praised
the economic development projects under way in BiH
as the country makes its way toward membership in the
European Union. But he neglected to mention the
purpose of the dams: to generate electricity for export
to Italy, because Italian public sentiment—and its
tourism and agricultural interests—would never permit
construction of such energy facilities on Italian territory.
Journalist Nijaz Abadzic, BiH’s best known environmental crusader and a member of the UNEP Global
500 Roll of Honour, has roundly condemned the plan:
“We will spend $17 million to repair the Old Bridge that
spans the Neretva River. A bridge that took years to
build was destroyed in seconds by our crude and brutal technology. Now everyone turns a blind eye on a
canyon that took millions of years for nature to build
and if we destroy it no sum of money can repair the irreversible damage we will create by building a high dam
on the Neretva.”
Building new dams to export electricity makes no
sense anyway, because the existing dams are underutilized. Current demand uses only about 18 percent of
existing hydropower generating capacity, according to
Zelenih Konjic, a grassroots environmental group
opposed to the high dam. The Neretva River already
has four large dams in a 40-kilometer corridor from
Jablanica to Mostar. Before his recent appointment as
executive director of Elektroprivreda, Enver Kreso
opposed the Konjic dam, and told ecologists that the
four existing dams were functioning at only 17–20
percent of their potential.
The truth is that repairs and technological improvements would be a much more efficient and practical
method of increasing BiH’s energy output. Three years
ago the World Bank estimated that only 25 percent of
BiH’s energy potential was being realized due to old
technology, yet little or no effort has been put into modernization. As Sadi Cemalovic, a former director of
Elektroprivreda for BiH, put it, “People within Elektroprivreda always lived twice as good as anyone in
BiH. When we build a hydroelectric dam, however, we
live four times better.”
Cemalovic’s view of the Konjic high dam is simple:
if it is built, the people from Konjic may as well pack
their bags and leave. Construction of the earlier dam in
Jablanica caused marked changes in temperatures and
biodiversity, and failures of certain crops. Many fear that
the changes in microclimate, as well as other problems, caused by another dam would be so drastic that
Konjic in many ways would be destroyed.
The tragedy is compounded because the canyon
offers alternative, more sustainable, means of economic
development. Demand for whitewater rafting trips is rising rapidly and more than a dozen rafting operations
have sprung up to meet it. Eco-tourism, in the forms
of village tourism, hiking, climbing, camping, fishing,
and biking, have all proven viable. Organic farming and
organic honey production could help a much larger portion of the population than the construction of a high
dam. These types of small and medium enterprise
afford a real chance for Bosnia and Hercegovina to
move from a poor transitional economy to a stable
developed economy. Eco-tourism is a labor-intensive
(i.e., job-rich) industry and the World Tourism Organization estimates that eco-tourism investments typically
enjoy tenfold returns. As for honey, the market is there;
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• “ P R OT E C T E D ” A R E A S •
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Bosnia and Hercegovina protects only 0.5 percent of
its lands, one-tenth of the European norm. Scientists
cited in a 2002 report from the Center for the Promotion of Civil Society believe that 16 percent of BiH
lands would need to be protected in order to maintain
the country’s biodiversity. BiH could approach this
goal by granting national park status to the Bjelasnica/Igman region to the south of Sarajevo, which
naturally connects Rakitnica Canyon and Visoc̆ica
Mountain to the east and the Prenj-C̆vrsnica-C̆abulja
region to the south. With Blidinje Nature Park on the
north side of C̆vrsnica Mountain, this would complete
the logical chain and establish the heart of the Dinaric
Alps as a protected zone. Protected status would allow
for the development of scientific research, eco-tourism,
and organic and other types of agriculture, and would
in turn support the many cross-sector economies that
revolve around these activities. This initiative would not
only validate the priceless value of this area but would
also help stiffen enforcement efforts to stop the illegal
cutting and dumping.
However, this goal seems remote. The Neretva valley has been ravaged by illegal logging, dumping, and
quarrying despite—or perhaps because of—having
been earmarked as a national park since pre-war times
and studied extensively to that end. The logging problems on Prenj and C̆vrsnica have reached epidemic
proportions. In the Jablanica and Konjic municipalities,
illegal cutting has destroyed the last remaining examples of the endangered Munika black pine and Tise, trees
that were heavily exploited at the turn of the twentieth
century by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and were
placed on the protection list during Yugoslavian times.
Although the cutting of the endemic Munika black
pine was made illegal by the Federation parliament,
Sipad Wood Processing Company, the largest wood
exporter in the country, has illegally constructed a road
into the heart of Prenj Mountain to cut the remaining
Munika. When environmentalists objected, S̆ipad
claimed they were “sanitary” cuts meant to curb the
threat of spreading disease, but there was never any confirmation of this by the Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture. An independent assessment directed by
ecologists with the Mostar City Council confirmed
that the cuts were in no way sanitary. S̆ipad has also been
illegally logging in the strictly protected zone of Diva
Grabovica on C̆vrnsica Mountain. Ancient beech tree
forests have been butchered off the mountainside,
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March/April 2004
accelerating erosion and
the siltation of the reservoir behind the Neretva
River hydroelectric dam.
Another company,
Prominvest of Konjic,
gouged out a sand quarry
in Diva Grabovica in 1996
without securing the
required permits. Legal
challenges from the
Mostar city council led to
a long court battle with
the company and to a
Supreme Court ruling
against Prominvest in June
2000. The company
ignored the decision and
continued operations.
Then the Mostar city
council ecology department petitioned the Federation Ministr y of
Physical Planning and the
Environment. The ministr y accepted the case
with reluctance but eventually issued a “final”
warning: shut down the
quarr y or the ministr y
would have the complex
dismantled. That ruling
was also ignored, and the
threat proved idle. Further complaints from environmental
groups
prompted the ministry to
issue another “final” warning, this time backed by a
threat to cut off the electricity. This deadline
(October 21, 2003) also
passed without result.
Meanwhile, Prominvest management fought back
with a media barrage claiming victimhood at the hands
of an “ecological mafia.” The company also purchased
so-called ecological certificates—unofficial and irrelevant affidavits from independent ecologists—claiming
that the quarry was not a danger to the environment.
Enver Becirovic, the company’s director, was seen physically threatening and intimidating environmentalists
and public officials. (He once screamed at me, “Who
gives a damn about nature? Do you mean to tell me the
life of a wild goat is more important than feeding my
workers? It’s just a bunch of trees and mountains in the
Damir Sagolj/REUTERS ©2002
every year Hungary exports eight times more honey
than BiH produces, and the conditions for honey production in BiH, particularly in the Konjic area, are significantly better than in Hungary due to climate,
altitude, hours of sunlight, and biodiversity.
middle of nowhere!”) To gain Muslim support for his
schemes, Becirovic tried to portray his company as the
victim of “Christian crusaders” from within the Office
of the High Representative (see “The Most Complicated Government…” sidebar) and the European bodies working in BiH—neglecting to mention that the suit
against Prominvest was filed by Sead Pintul (a Mostar
city council official) and supported by Nijaz Abadzic,
both Bosnian Muslims. Prominvest has signed a
$500,000 deal with Elektroprivreda to produce concrete
poles for electrical installations, impossible without the
sand quarried from Diva Grabovica. Anonymous sources
in the Federation ministry say that intense pressure
Natural beauty, ugly war: Muslims returning to their
“cleansed” homes often found only rubble. This woman
lived near Srebrenica, where thousands died despite a
UN-created safe zone; she lost most of her family.
from parliament members close to Elektroprivreda has
forced them to abandon their own orders. But legally,
they say, Prominvest doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
• COMPLICITY •
After the war, came the deluge—of outsiders. They
arrived with various motives: to heal and offer solace,
to help rebuild, to teach the ways of capitalism. Some
came to make a little money. In the wake of a nasty war
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Tim Clancy
Bosnian Highlanders: A Threatened Species?
Lukomir: a shepherd leads her flock out for a day’s grazing.
Lukomir, and other villages like it in the Bosnian highlands,
are a window on the ancient past. The old stone houses,
roofed with cherry-tree shingles, preserve a type of
medieval construction rarely seen now and shelter the remnants of one of the last remaining pre-industrial cultures in
Europe. The British Royal Historical Architecture Society
has said Lukomir is one of the few remaining functional villages of its kind.
But it is also a dying village. Life in the highlands was
never easy, but the recent war simply compounded the difficulty of making a living in a place that is one of the most
isolated in the country: by mountainous geography, elevation (nearly 1,500 meters above sea level), and weather
(Lukomir is snowed-in five months a year).
Modernity in general is also a threat. Life in the highland villages remains largely traditional (herding) and has
long suffered from the departure of young people. When
the war came, mountain meadows were scored by
trenches, deep canyons became front lines, and peaks
became artillery positions. The highlanders were simply in
the way and fell victim to systematic destruction. Many
were driven out by the conflict, and upon their return found
that they had lost their flocks and herds, the ancient eco-
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March/April 2004
nomic backbone of the highlands. Reconstruction and
return efforts have largely focused on highly populated
areas, leaving many of the mountain villages to wither.
Many rural schools and health clinics never reopened.
Those villages that have been able to recover are mainly
populated by the elderly and face the inevitable fate of
becoming ghost towns, as the lack of social services and
sustainable economic activities has forced the younger
generations to the cities. Even with micro-credit programs
offering loans to buy farm animals, the obstacles of poor
transport and access to markets, and the lack of young
workers, often make returning a very dubious option. On
top of everything else, in many of these places, particularly
on Bjelas̆nica Mountain near Sarajevo, the exploitation of
the forests has caused grave damage to the land. Lukomir
recently lost two of its three main water sources when they
were diverted by the Konjic Municipality to supply other
areas. The loss now jeopardizes villagers’ ability to supply
drinking water to their flocks.
Environmentalists have lobbied to have Lukomir protected as a Cultural and Historical Monument, which may
allow it to survive. Otherwise, Bosnia and Hercegovina may
lose one of its most precious assets and key links to its past.
fueled by ancient suspicions, perhaps it is only natural
that Bosnians are wary of the new ways on offer.
For example, I met an old man who was skeptical
of the intent of the international community’s presence
in BiH, and where it would lead. Capitalism, he argued,
changes the mind-frame and soul of communities. “Just
down there in Bas̆c̆ars̆ija is a shoemaker who has a wife
and two children,” he told me. “One morning a customer walks into his shop and wants to buy a pair of
shoes. The shopowner says, ‘Thank you for your business, sir, but my neighbor also makes good shoes and
he too has a wife and two children. I have already sold
a pair of shoes this morning. Please buy from him so that
he may take care of his family.’” The old man paused.
“That, son, you don’t know in the West. That is the way
we grew up and that is how things need to be.”
This little story echoes many Bosnians’ caution
about the motives and goals of the foreign interests that
are active in the country. For while the Bosnians are
responsible, in the end, for the heedless exploitation of
their country’s natural wealth, they have had a lot of
outside help.
Some of BiH’s closest neighbors have been involved
in what might be called the ecological colonization of
the country, and many feel this is an especially dangerous
example to set before a government that is already
corruption-prone. The international community portrays itself as walking the high moral ground and its program of reforms as being tied to European
standards—but when it comes to exploiting BiH’s natural resources, there always seem to be exceptions. For
instance, the massive reconstruction plan in Kosovo to
rebuild homes destroyed by Serbian forces and NATO
bombing, however well intended, came at a heavy cost
to BiH’s forests. Hundreds of unregistered lumber
companies sold high-grade hardwood to NGOs for
the reconstruction efforts after the NATO bombing in
Serbia and Kosovo in 1999. Slovenian private contractors intend to build hundreds of small dams—each
producing only 1 megawatt each of electrical energy—
on Bosnia’s most precious and unspoiled natural
resource, its crystal-clear mountain rivers. (In contrast
to Slovenia, where the environmental lobby is so strong
that plans for hydroelectric dams on that country’s
own Suca River were abandoned after public outcries,
the Bosnian public remains largely uninformed and
silent.) Austria has continually imported Bosnian hardwood at well under the market price, and has shown no
interest in seeing forestry laws or regulations being
implemented by their local partners.
The Office of the High Representative (OHR),
created under the Dayton Accords, embodies the international community’s presence in BiH. It has come
under increased pressure to show real results after more
than a decade of assistance, although the current push
for reform is viewed by some local politicians as heavyhanded and undemocratic. Lord Paddy Ashdown, a former British Member of Parliament appointed as the
High Representative, has taken a strong-arm stance in
implementing reform. His administration, often criticized as a colonizing or imperialist power, has aggressively embarked on an anti-corruption campaign that
has resulted in numerous public officials being removed
from office (including the Bosnian Serb president,
Mirko Sarovic, who was removed in 2003 on charges
that he was involved with illegal sales of weapons to Iraq
via an arms manufacturer in Serbia). Deeply in debt to
the World Bank, BiH badly needs to revamp its public
spending, and a “bulldozer” committee has been established to force laws through parliament that are intended
to eliminate obstacles and reduce administrative spending in the overwhelmingly bureaucratic public sector.
These measures have brought about marked results in
easing certain taxes and eliminating costly and time-consuming administrative procedures that discourage foreign investment.
That’s valuable, as far as it goes. The trouble is
that the private sector in Bosnia and Hercegovina is just
as corrupt as the public sector. In many instances the
major private firms and organizations are run by the
same circle of people who dominate the political scene.
The animating formula of the international community’s
efforts—all growth is good, regardless of its costs to the
environment—often tacitly abets large corporations
that flagrantly evade taxes, exploit natural resources, and
support the nationalist movements. Joanna Walshe, an
anthropologist with the Sarajevo-based environmental
firm Green Visions (disclaimer: I helped found Green
Visions), concludes that “despite continued criticism of
the often draconian measures which the debtor nations
must implement in order to keep receiving aid and
loans from the North, the World Bank and the IMF
[International Monetary Fund] continue to push their
neo-liberal medicine on the developing world, forcing
already impoverished nations further into debt. The
model on which these reform measures are based is no
longer justifiable. The market-driven approach to alleviating poverty has failed and should be cast out in favor
of a more culturally appropriate, self-reliant and human
centered idea of growth.”
Many Bosnians feel that, by dangling the carrot of
European Union admission over their heads, the
international community has had a free hand to push
its agenda, democratically or not. In some respects this
is true. However, the attitudes and actions of the
OHR in Bosnia are deeply enabled by—indeed, possible only because of—the atrocious local management
of this country at every level. Corruption is such an
integral part of everyday life here that weeding it
out will take a mighty effort. Public servants have
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The summer heat wave of 2003 triggered many forest
fires. Minefields, which still extend through roughly 20
percent of Bosnian forests, hindered firefighters’ efforts
to extinguish the blazes.
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rarely shown the will or competence for country
building and compromise, and intellectuals and scientists have consistently been marginalized in the
decision-making process by incompetent officials.
Officials’ brutal attitudes toward the environment
clearly echo the attitudes many of them displayed
when humans were being brutalized only a
few years ago.
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March/April 2004
• S U S TA I N A B L E A LT E R N AT I V E S •
If current plans are carried out, the flooding of the
Neretva and Rakitnica Canyons by the proposed hydroelectric dam in Konjic will lead to the final exodus of
the local population from Spiljani and Dzajici villages
and seriously threaten the lifestyles of the villages of
Dubocani and Lukomir (see sidebar, “Bosnian Highlanders: A Threatened Species?”). The population there
is already declining, mainly because of the lack of
schools, clinics, and other social services, according to
a study of Lukomir carried out by Green Visions and
Danilo Krstanovic/REUTERS ©2000
Chad Staddon of the University of the West of
England. But the study
also found that the villagers want to preserve
their way of life as highland shepherds, while also
being open to alternative
means of livelihood.
Such alternatives—
ecotourism and organic
farming, for example—
could provide better
prospects for long-term,
eco-friendly development
to a much larger portion
of the population than
logging or the construction of high dams. These
labor-intensive sectors are
growing at a global rate of
15–20 percent per year,
according to the World
Tourism Association. In
a 2003 report, the Stanford Research Institute
placed Bosnia and Hercegovina in the top five
countries in the world for
potential ecotourism
growth—provided the
natural landscapes it
depends on are not
destroyed.
Or consider the
energy picture. The
ancient, polluting thermoelectric plants at Tuzla
and Kakanj have a generating capacity of 32
megawatts. Yet experiments conducted by the
University of Mostar engineering faculty on the nearby Podvelezje plateau suggest that 230 megawatts could be produced by wind
farms sited there. There is no energy problem in Bosnia
and Hercegovina; only the methods of energy production are a problem. Even as many countries turn
towards more advanced forms of energy, such as wind,
Bosnia and Hercegovina wants to construct five high
dams and dozens of mini-dams that will compromise
its precious, free-flowing mountain rivers and streams.
If there is reason for hope that BiH can capitalize on these possibilities and steer itself toward a
more environmentally sound future, it lies in the
country’s history. Bosnians have been here before.
BiH was an industrial mainstay of the former
Yugoslavia, a federation of some 25 million people,
and Bosnia’s natural resources were heavily exploited
during the socialist era. Most socialist countries after
World War II gravely miscalculated the ecological
consequences of crude industry, and Yugoslavia was
no exception. But strict regulations imposed during
the second half of Marshall Josip Tito’s regime
brought about significant change in industrial regulation and in the protection of Yugoslavia’s pristine
nature. These environmental laws were very much in
line with international standards of the time, and the
voices of science and reason were effective in some
environmental reforms.
When the Dayton Accords were signed, these laws
were brought forward into the new constitution of
Bosnia and Hercegovina until more modern, European laws could be adopted. But this budding sympathy for progressive environmentalism went dormant
with the collapse, along with the former Yugoslavia, of
the rule of law and viable mechanisms of enforcement.
Even though the regulations and laws remained on
the books, the region descended into a kind of chaos
that has allowed an unseen war to be waged on forests
and waterways throughout the country.
But Bosnians’ history has given them recent experience of a time when the environment that supports
their economic life was afforded something like due
respect. And while the cries of scientists, environmentalists, and the affected communities have often
gone unheard by BiH’s ecologically illiterate political
elite, it is increasingly difficult for that elite to utterly
disregard pro-environment sentiment—which, while
long quiet, has never disappeared altogether and is now
beginning to bubble and simmer with renewed energy.
Economic circumstances continue to absorb the time
and efforts of many Bosnians, but others are coming
to understand exactly what is being done to their
country, and who is doing it—and they are beginning
to raise their voices in protest against the clearcutting, the defilement of rivers and streams, and the
fouling of the air. Bosnia and Hercegovina is ripening
toward an ecological reawakening. When it comes,
it’s bound to create quite a stir.
Former international aid worker Tim Clancy has
lived and worked in Bosnia and Hercegovina since the
end of 1992, and also coordinated aid projects in Montenegro, Albania, and Kosovo during the crisis in
1999. A U.S. native, he is a partner in the Sarajevobased eco-tourism/environmental protection firm
Green Visions. He has started a new NGO, Earth in
Mind, that is dedicated to community development,
environment, and education.
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