Demonstrations in Banja Luka: Message to Ivanic

After the riots in Banja Luka and Trebinje, only one question arises: will Ivanic have the strength to uncompromisingly sweep away everything that happens to be on his way or will he himself be swept away by the foreigners who are, while driving behind him, slowly accelerating

AIM Banja Luka, May 8, 2001

Had somebody wished to do play a trick on Mladen Ivanic he could have, for instance, thrown a bomb on the presidential palace or shot at him. But had he wished to harm Ivanic so badly that he would not have a chance in the world any more, he would have done exactly what happened at the site where Ferhad Pasha's mosque used to be. Unfortunately, behind the leaflet that was circling Banja Luka on Monday calling "Serb brethren" whose town would be "attacked by Islamic hordes" to resist laying of the corner stone for reconstruction of the mosque destroyed exactly eight years ago, stood not the CIA, the Vatican, or the Commintern, or any of the traditional enemies of the Serbs. The good old Cyrillic alphabet the leaflet was written in betrayed the even more traditional enemy - the Serbs themselves. Everything that was happening later on, all that steaming savagery accompanied by the inevitable folklore, all that conviction that "their" God smells of tallow, all that crushing "decontamination" of their tallow God by the disgusting stroll of pigs around the lot where Ferhad Pasha's mosque used to stand and where every Serb who is aware that above him there is something more than just SFOR helicopters should feel at least silent uneasiness - all that should be the last event that precedes the question "God, what has happened to us".

IVANIC's TIME: But the Serbs, as a rule, have more urgent matters to attend to. For example, how they will survive this very profound national shame due to which they will be punished by something else before they are punished by their conscience. Or how will they defend themselves from the fact that together with majority of their sleeping politicians and lying policemen they offered arguments on a silver platter to those who advocate that Republika Srpska is an enclosure of about a million genetic nationalists and that as such it should disappear. Although majority of influential opinions on this topic will end with an affirmative answer - yes, the Serbs are fascists, but not all and not all to the same extent - the issue, unfortunately, is much more complex.

While Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic, and many others, believed that RS was safe thanks to its economy which is somehow coping with the situation, its good relations with the dangerous foreigners and thanks to indifferent cooperation with the federal politicians, he was caught unprepared by a challenge coming from the direction he least expected. "Let's see how powerful you really are?" - is the message to Ivanic from the demonstrations in Banja Luka and Trebinje. He might have given up the idea to fight if it had not been for all the foreigners who were in Banja Luka on Monday and who pricked up their ears in expectation of his answer before they themselves started to talk.

Indeed, the time Serb Prime Minister has at his disposal, which is measured in hours, not days, to expose the organisers of the demonstrations, to arrest all the ruffians who measure their patriotism by the number of Bosniacs they have beaten up and the rocks they have thrown, and to urgently and profoundly reconstruct the police and the administration. That is the only way he will be able to justify the thesis he certainly advocates that the demonstrators from Banja Luka cannot control RS, but that it controls them. Indeed, this will not be easy for him to do with the minister of police who sends the same number of policemen to such a highly-risky gathering as to a football game in Hrvacani; God knows how he will do that with his colleagues in power who have never loudly uttered that it is quite natural and God-pleasing to reconstruct what has been torn down even if it may be a mosque; heaven alone knows what he should do with all these foreigners who are getting nowhere believing that the people fed up of nationalism should first be deluded and then turned into something else.

FEAR WITHIN LIMITS OF DAYTON ACCORDS: With the exception of a few ten most extremist demonstrators who are the inevitable chauvinist percentage even of the nations which waged their latest national war two hundred years ago, the question that remains open is what made such a large number of the citizens of Banja Luka come out in the streets on Monday, larger than any politician could gather at some rally or Ceca (a popular folk-music singer) by a solo concert, even if a free bottle of beer had been given to every person present. The answer is: fear. Of course, in communities made up of three ethnic groups that have just come out of war fought according to the principle everybody against everybody else, fear is the chief producer of nationalism and claustrophobia. In other words, according to the laws in the society, the Serbs are no greater nationalists than the Bosniacs and the Croats, nor are they ethnically prejudiced more because they have got some land that sometimes seems to them as if it existed only for them. The problem is that the Serbs, like the others for that matter, do not quite rightfully believe that the war is really over. Because three ethnic policies in B&H - self-satisfied foreigners do not think about it much – differ from each other more than the extreme right from the extreme left within any national group. And they are all still moving "within limits permitted by the Dayton accords". These limits, however, are so ambiguous that they include everything from Haris Silajdzic who advocates definite eradication of RS, to Serb Democratic Party (SDS) which considers B&H a waiting-room where one should stay on the alert until the foreigners get tired, until Russia wakes up and Kostunica wins in Serbia. In other words, the message that the foreigners as the only interpreters of the Dayton Accords are conveying to the peoples in B&H is: it is in accordance with the Dayton accords both to lose RS and to annex it to Serbia, as well as to have three entities in B&H and to have none, to rebuild the Ferhad Pasha's mosque and to destroy even the faintest idea that it can and should be rebuilt. The message of the Dayton Accords is, therefore: grab for yourself as much as you can, it is all in the Dayton Accords, which is abundantly used by political parties and the peoples in their preparations for the final squaring of accounts, completely deprived of even the faintest doubt that they have waged war in vain, convinced that the mistake is that they have not waged war better and more viciously. In such Bosnia in which no people and no citizen have found the place they would believe they are entitled to, fear of rebuilding of Ferhad Pasha's mosque as something that testifies that the others have grabbed slightly more, is not illogical and one should not be surprised by it.

But one should have no doubt either that the foreigners will use the opportunity they were given to show that they have always been right. Instead to finally define the state and social identity of B&H along with local politicians, they will rather resort to exerting pressure. They will first cause problems for Ivanic who they will tell that nothing would have happened had he formed a coalition with Milorad Dodik and Zlatko Lagumdzija. On the other hand, pressure, perhaps even its ban, awaits SDS, the party which best represents how the Serbs are torn between fear (nationalism) and cooperation (foreigners). When Dragan Cavic as the strongest personage in the city of Banja Luka, tried to pacify the people and was hissed off, it was a sign that the time has passed in which SDS was a party whose bosses were convincing Petritsch that, if necessary, they would even come voluntarily to build Ferhad Pasha's mosque, while telling their voters that there would be no mosque and that it was just an illusion. After this SDS will either be dissolved or finally divided into those in favour of Ferhad Pasha's mosque and those in favour of Radovan (Karadzic), or it will become an illegal organisation. The only thing that they cannot rely on is that, regardless of what new shift they may make, they will become likeable to the foreigners no matter how big an effort they invested in building the mosque.

That is how a peaceful half-season ended in RS slightly earlier than planned. Mladen Ivanic will have to prove that he really meant it when he said that RS was a more stable Bosnian entity, SDS will have to convince the foreigners that there were no members of this party in the demonstrations, and the foreigners will have to start true pacification of RS. After all that has happened only one question remains without an answer: will Ivanic really have the strength to uncompromisingly sweep away everything that turned out to be an obstacle on his way on Monday, or will he himself be swept away by the foreigners who, while driving behind him, are slowly accelerating.

Zeljko Cvijanovic

(AIM)