THE CASE OF SLAVINOVICI

IZETBEGOVIC AGAINST THE LAW AND THE CONSTITUTION

AIM, TUZLA, February 11, 1995 "On February 7, at 15.30, I arrived in front of the house with my tractor. I was back from work. There was nobody in my part of the house that afternoon. I was astonished to find the entrance door busted. I found four persons in the house dressed in uniforms of the Army of B&H. I started to protest, to scream, curse. Housebreakers left the house for a moment, and after five to ten minutes about fifteen of them returned. They tried to force their way into the house again. I resisted. They had stakes and sticks in their hands and they beat me with them. I defended myself holding a knife in one hand, and I told them that I was armed and that they could force their way into my house only over my dead body. One of them had a bomb at his waist, one reached out for his gun, and a third held an axe which I snatched away from him. They were hitting me with sticks, wounded me and blood was spilt over my house threshold..." - this is the story of Petar Peranovic, one of the owners of seven privately-owned forcibly usurped houses in Slavinovici, a city district of Tuzla. Namely. that day, members of the Podrinje Muslim Brigade of the Army of B&H, threatening the legal owners with arms and physical maltreatment, broke into the houses of four Croats, two Serbs and one Boshniak by force and moved in, under the pretext that they have nowhere to live and that Alija Izetbegovic himself stood behind them!

After that citizens protested in the streets of Slavinovici and Tuzla, and the mayor of Tuzla, Selim Beslagic, put an ultimatum to the command of the Second Corps to remove the housebreakers from other people's houses. But, since nothing happened even after a couple of days, and the name of Alija Izetbgovic as the "patron" of this act was mentioned more and more often, Beslagic addressed an open letter to Izetbegovic, telling him, among other, the following: "We are lately more and more frequently exposed to incidents of anarchic behavior of some members of the Army of B&H such as assaults on stores, apartments and private property in general... In the latest such incident whose perpetrators were members of the Muslim Podrinje Brigade, the law was brutally violated by soldiers who forcibly moved into privately-owned houses. Legal owners were thrown out into the street by force. When police intervened, perpetrators of such anarchic behavior declared that you had told them that they could do what they were doing!"

After this letter addressed to Izetbegovic by Beslagic, and after it was publicly stated that housebreakers as a rule refer to the name of the President of the Presidency, a new scandal in Bosnia&Herzegovina began, directed again towards revealing instances of usurpation of power by the ruling Party of Democraric Action (SDA). Meetings of the inter-party council of Tuzla were convened, at which all the parties, with the exception of the SDA and HDZ coalition, of course, condemned such an act and characerized it as "arbitrariness of a group of combatants", talks with the Command of the Second Corps were held since its police was responsible for eviction of the housebreakers, Citizens' Forum of Tuzla publicized its protest, and Bakir Alispahic, a Minister in the Government of the Republic/Federation B&H, and Ejup Ganic, Vice-President of the Federation B&H came to Tuzla. But, before the case of Slavinovici could be resolved, like a bolt from the blue, came Izetbegovic's answer to Selim Beslagic. Although he denied that he had given his "blessing" to the soldiers and their breaking into other people's homes, Izetbegovic actually supported their their act, explaining that "empty or half-empty apartments are kept by some persons, while refugee families with six or eight members live in small rooms or in collective centres". Disregarding completely the fact that this specific case concerned private property, and that in several cases owners lived in their houses all the time and were evicted from them by physical assault, Izetbegovic also wrote the following to Beslagic: " I am aware that in Tuzla there is a large number of apartments whose tenants are absent for quite some time, gone in an unknown direction, some of them even to enemy's territory, having left their apartments to someone else to take care of them".

Thanks primarily to a coalition government of civic parties and its mayor Beslagic, who is at the same time the leader of the Union of B&H Social Democrats (UBSD), throughout the war Tuzla was know as the city where (uniquely for B&H) the rule of law was preserved despite the war, and this prevented forcible evictions, even by numerous refugees banished from Eastern Bosnia. But, due to this, Tuzla constantly evaded Izetbegovic' control, which primarily consists of obeying the unwritten laws introduced by the leaders of the SDA instead of the rule of law. Therefore, Alija Izetbegovic finished his letter to Beslagic literally with a call for anarchy and violation of law. "I need not remind you that the people will establish justice in its own way, should the authorities fail to do it", Izetbegovic claimed, adding that "everything else might be the law and its articles, but it does not necessarily mean that it stands for justice".

After this open call for establishing "justice of the people" of Izetbegovic, fear became the master of Tuzla. Since the Second Corps did not wish to evict its combatants from the houses they had taken by force, with some of the housebreakers not even rating as priority for allocation of apartments in the official demand of their brigade, citizens organized themselves, especially those of Croatian nationality in the neighbouring settlements of Grabovica, Dokanj and Brijeska, who started posting night guards in front of their houses! Of course, the fact that insecurity and the rule of anarchy in Tuzla would suit Izetbegovicvery well in his final attempt to overthrow Beslagic and the civic city authorities, which he failed to accomplish in several previous attempts, clearly points out to the reason why Tuzla is the city where "justice of force" is especially insisted on and why, apart from the SDA only the HDZ had not opposed breaking into houses, although majority of the house owners are Croats. But, city authorities of Tuzla have especially insisted on appealing to the citizens to restrain themselves in expressing dissatisfaction with Izetbegovic's letter, and they are doing everything to prevent demonstrations of larger proportions than those of just several hundred citizens of Slavinovici who protested in the streets of Tuzla. At a tumultous discussion of the Municipality Council of Tuzla, Selim Beslagic sent word to the ruling parties, the SDA and the HDZ, which had a joint sore spot - Tuzla, that if he was in their way and if they wished to overthrow him they would have to do it pursuant to the law. "Let the gentlemen call early elections, and the citizens will elect whom they wish, but legally elected authorities in the city will not be overthrown by illegal means", Beslagic declared. His party, the UBSD, issued a statement on the occasion of Izetbegovic's letter saying that it "unfortunately is not in line with what the President of the Presidency often only declaratively supports", and that Izetbegovic's highly valuing certain justice more than the Constitution and the laws "is nothing but a call for overthrowing legal authorities in Tuzla and call for general anarchy".

The whole case culminated with public association of citizens of Tuzla who stated that it was not the matter of ethnic divisions, but an attempt at another form of pressure on the political option in Tuzla, and also with a declaration that the Army of B&H had for the first time been threatened to go against its own people who had created it. After tension was lifted to such an extent, something happened overnight that was assessed as impossible only a couple of days before that both by the Second Corps and the authorities in Sarajevo - 54 persons, the "new tenants" who had focibly moved into the seven privately-owned houses, peacefully moved out of these houses with no force or eviction?! It seems that after all, they had not made up that they had had somebody's blessing for doing it. Obviously, having first given them the signal to move in, the same person now gave them the signal to move out, probably having realized that this fight for Tuzla was lost too. Unfortunately, according to the wind blowing from the SDA, further attempts will follow.

RUSMIR SPAHIC