[ Bosnien | Bosnia ]

The Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES), in collaboration with other University of Michigan units, presents a series of activities to mark the tenth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995).

Part of these activities is the international conference "Reintegrating Bosnia: Ten Years after the Dayton Agreement" on Saturday, October 29, 2005 from 9 am to 5.30 pm at 1636 School of Social Work Building/International Institute, 1080 S. University Ave. The program covers the most important aspects of Human Rights, the Experience of the War, the State-building Project, Economy, and Ethnic Diversity, and the speakers are well-known notabilities.

In addition to the conference, I'd like to point out the article by Paul Treanor, a radical thinker of/against neo-liberalism, globalism, capitalism, etc. From different distinct perspectives and very detailed he explores the logic of Western intervention in the Balkans and the creation of Bosnia as a model territory/state for multiculturalism - far from any historical considerations. The implications of multiculturalism contextualized with the idea of nation states and ethnic communities has to collapse, as is shown there. Thus, the somehow disturbing news from Ian Sethre's last newsletter that Bosnian Croats demand Own Republic is not as absurd as it seems on first sight.

This demand has its history, of course, it is not new. The crucial and often dispraised Dayton Agreement has already in former years motivated the Croat demand for their own mini-republic. The development of mono-ethnic communities within BiH has been enfostered by the politics of refugee's return, as it is discussed by Sumantra Bose:

What is happening as a result of some of the refugees' returns is that there are now some minority enclaves within these homogeneous zones of control, these national and nationalist statelets. [...] Each part of the country is not exclusively but largely homogeneous, and although returning minorities are present in each of these zones, they are barely tolerated. So things have changed radically.

Bose states that in opposition to the official division into the two parts of Bosnia, the Serb and the Bosnian-Croat parts, the state is divided into three parts. Moreover, there is a tendency to the establishment of city-states, almost perfectly excluding the ethnically Other.

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See also the articles by Džemal Sokolović on the the question of national security, and the intelligentsia and the destruction of Bosnia.