1.1 Varieties of Post-Conflict Recognition and Redress in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Amir is one of the estimated 200,000 survivors of torture that occurred during the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.1 As a leader of a victim association in Sarajevo, he has been at the forefront of the struggle for formal recognition of victims of torture who suffered in brutal detention camps as prisoners of war. In the Bosnian system of war-related victim redress the vast majority of these survivors remain without any formal rights enacted in law. While the smaller Bosnian entity, Republika Srpska (RS), recently recognized some victims of torture, the larger entity where Amir lives, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH), has never done so. Pressing the state into legally recognizing them as victims has been the declared objective of Amir’s association, as well as hundreds similar other associations across the country. Formal legal recognition, encapsulated in the so-called ‘victim status’, would provide victims of torture (also called ex-detainees) with free social and medical services, preferential job opportunities and monthly payments, among other benefits. More importantly, it would also give them the moral satisfaction of having their suffering acknowledged. ‘We need a systemic change’, Amir sighs. ‘We need a law. Even if you now gave us one million marks,2 this would not help us. When I try to get free medical care, my certificate of camp imprisonment is just a meaningless piece of paper. It is humiliating,’ he adds. To Amir, ex-detainees not only suffered during the war, but especially after the war’s end, from discriminatory policies that have left them ‘on the margins of society’.3
Elma was brutally raped and repeatedly sexually abused in a prison camp between 1992 and 1993. Not only a rape survivor but also an internally displaced person from her hometown in northeastern Bosnia, she moved to the capital Sarajevo. Uprooted and underprivileged, Elma joined the Women-Victims of War association that was formed in 2003 as the first of its kind in Bosnia. It started to fight for the redress of women as war victims, for marking places of their suffering and persecuting the perpetrators. After years of activism and awareness-raising, she and other survivors of sexual violence were at last successful in June 2006 when a legal amendment was passed in FBiH that granted rape survivors a victim status without the need to provide medical certificates or testifying at a court. Survivors of sexual violence became entitled to a monthly benefit in the equivalent of 250 Euro and free healthcare.4 ‘It was a great achievement that brought many benefits to women who were struggling’, Sabiha Husić from a humanitarian NGO Medica Zenica explained.5 ‘I witnessed how women were losing jobs when employers found out that they were raped. I witnessed their poverty and constant suffering’, she added. The law was to her only the beginning of the tortuous struggle for victims’ redress. Fewer than a thousand women and men became beneficiaries of the new legal arrangement by 2019, leaving many without formal recognition and redress. How can we explain the differences in which victim groups are recognized and redressed in a post-war state such as Bosnia?
The complex varieties of recognition, redress, justice and victimhood that these two cases illustrate are at the heart of this book. Recognition of suffering and redress are interwoven through the stories of Bosnian survivors-victims who have challenged our understandings of passivity in victimhood and transitional justice.6 Rather than submissive sufferers without any agency, many Bosnian survivors have stood at the forefront of the fight for what they see as their rights. Their struggle has lasted for over two decades. While to some degree empowering women and disadvantaged groups, this struggle has also had its polarizing effects on the divided political landscape of Bosnia, a phenomenon well-known from other contexts such as Northern Ireland and Lebanon where victimhood inevitably assumed a political character (Jankowitz, 2018; Lynch & Joyce, 2018). It has created hierarchies and competition that at times further marginalized peripheral communities and individuals. As a consequence, while some victims have achieved a special treatment granted through the revered ‘victim status’, others have remained legally invisible. Survivors of sexual violence, camp prisoners, families of the missing and killed persons, paraplegics and sufferers from other injuries—all discussed in this book—have been appreciated and recognized differently in law. Consequently, they were granted varied types of redress benefits across the country. The ‘piecemeal nature’ of the existing system of various victim-centric payments and support packages in Bosnia ‘targeting some but not all victims’ (Van der Auweraert, 2013) offers benefits to a small set of select groups rather than representing true redress for all victims. This approach to redress and recognition seems haphazard and inconsistent with victims’ needs and rights. However, as this book argues, this at first glance inexplicable complexity of the victim-centric redress in Bosnia can be traced to the intricate developments in post-war Bosnia and the differing patterns in what I call ‘victim capital’7 of each of the studied groups.
Victim capital as used here represents the social, political and economic power for leverage and influence of the studied victim groups. As this book shows, the different components of victim capital and how it is used and presented provide answers to the present puzzle. Unlike most of the literature studying post-conflict ways of dealing with the past that has focused on war-crimes prosecution, truth-seeking and memorialization efforts, this book studies the dynamics of redress among and between victim groups within a post-conflict state. Such a bottom-up enquiry invites questions that are central to transitional justice, such as questions about how post-conflict societies deal with their violent past and how groups and individuals victimized by conflicts pursue justice. As I demonstrate throughout this book on the example of redress, victims’ organizations and their leaders are able to utilize both thought-through and serendipitous strategies to achieve their goals at the domestic and international level. However, although they are able to choose different strategies and tactics, their pursuits are restricted by the limits and problems posed by the dysfunctional Bosnian state, characterized by its convoluted and fragmented administration. Relying on interviews and other sources collected during fieldwork in Bosnia, media sources and secondary literature, but also practical professional experience in the civil sector, this book presents a new analytical framework to explain the different pathways to recognition and redress outcomes using the case of Bosnia.
Recognition and redress are at the heart of the study here. Recognition in the form of collective victim status after conflict belongs among the arsenal of transitional justice. It can serve as a starting point for socio-economic redistribution and social justice (Fraser, 2003). Naturally, recognition as the formal action of acknowledging the belonging of individuals to a victim group is only the first step towards satisfying victims’ rights and needs. Related policies—that range from public apologies, judicial justice, truth culture, acknowledgment of harm in ceremonies and material benefits—underpin recognition’s importance. However, recognition is a critical step that leads to empowerment and giving voice to those who are otherwise treated as court witnesses only and ‘subjects’ of justice measures such as war crimes prosecution. Recognition provides a sense of societal ‘solidarity’ (De Greiff, 2006b). Redress as understood in its narrow sense in this book generally follows recognition through a set of material benefits (e.g. payments, services, preferential treatment) that are able to transform lives of victims living in deprived countries. For example, the controversial ‘Report of the Consultative Group on the Past in Northern Ireland’ suggested ‘recognition payments’ (amounting to 12,000 GBP) for the nearest relative of those killed during the Troubles (Jankowitz, 2018, p. 13) as a valid ‘redress’ mechanism. The report stressed the symbolic and moral aspect of the payments, rather than the material benefits only. Recognition and redress serve as a key aspect of domestic reckoning outside the courtroom. They are political acts where power interests of political authorities clash with victims’ ideas of justice and international human rights regimes. Such clashes are traced and explained in the following chapters.
1.2 Victims, Recognition and Redress
As Michael Rothberg recently noted (2019), we lack a precise vocabulary to describe the multifaceted roles and identities that individuals emerging from violence and wars assume. Among others, there are perpetrators, victims, bystanders, beneficiaries but also ‘implicated subjects’ as those who might not have willingly participated and benefitted from injustice but whose ‘actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 1). His insights speak to the ‘messy’ war situations when individuals assume different roles—some victims might have been directly involved in the conflict as soldiers while others had simply found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. In some cases the line between a victim and a perpetrator may be blurred as multiple roles are possible (Drumbl, 2012; Moffett, 2016). Victims may also prefer to use different terminology for different audiences—they may privately resist the term victim but understand the need for its outward projection in order to be acknowledged (cf. Fernandes, 2017; Močnik, 2019). This also results in the frequent debates among victims about who is a ‘true’ victim and what the different victim roles are.
In law, victim definitions are seemingly clearer, though just as problematic. Victims of conflict and war are defined as people who have suffered from gross violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. According to the standard United Nations (UN) definition from 1985, victims are ‘persons who, individually or collectively, suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights’ through acts breaching international human rights (UN General A...