Healing and Peacebuilding after War

Transforming Trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Julianne Funk, Nancy Good, Marie E. Berry, Julianne Funk, Nancy Good, Marie E. Berry

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429674020
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Peace & Global Development

This book brings together multiple perspectives to examine the strengths and limitations of efforts to promote healing and peacebuilding after war, focusing on the aftermath of the traumatic armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This book begins with a simple premise: trauma that is not transformed is transferred. Drawing on multidisciplinary insights from academics, peace practitioners and trauma experts, this book examines the limitations of our current strategies for promoting healing and peacebuilding after war while offering inroads into best practices to prevent future violence through psychosocial trauma recovery and the healing of memories. The contributions create a conversation that allows readers to critically rethink the deeper roots and mechanisms of trauma created by the war.

Collectively, the authors provide strategic recommendations to policymakers, peace practitioners, donors and international organizations engaged in work in Bosnia and Herzegovina – strategies that can be applied to other countries rebuilding after war.

This volume will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, social psychology, Balkan politics and International Relations in general.

1 Introduction

Julianne Funk and Marie E. Berry

It is our conviction that there can be no sustainable peace without working to heal trauma resulting from violence. Furthermore, trauma that is not transformed gets trapped and is often transferred into more violence. Trauma can become “stuck,” held within our societies through cultural memory, in institutions through structural violence and even kept within our very bodies (see Mansfield in this volume; van der Kolk 2015). As such, like any other energy, it does not just evaporate but finds paths of release. These claims ground this book and the conference from which it arose: Trauma, Memory and Healing in the Balkans and Beyond, “organized by TPO Foundation” and held in Sarajevo in 2016. The international and local constituency of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners considered seriously the nature and role of trauma as an obstacle to and opportunity for building peace in a variety of contexts, including postwar former Yugoslav states. This book seeks to do the same, with a particular focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina.

There is much to learn from the Bosnian case. Between 1992 and 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina survived a three-and-a-half year war that produced no winners but many losers. As the first war to unfold on European soil since World War II, Bosnia and Herzegovina captured the attention of people across the globe. Rather than dismissing the violence as far away, out of sight from Western institutions and political elites, people across the world watched as massive civilian atrocities and bloodshed were captured as part of the 24-hour news cycle. Military, peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions led by the United Nations and NATO helped protect civilians and eventually led to the Dayton Peace Agreement, which formally ended the war. In the years since, international actors, in coordination with domestic organizations, have worked to establish security, promote justice and build peace in the devastated country.

Despite these efforts, however, peace remains fragile. The country remains divided into two semiautonomous political entities ensconced in the Dayton Accords, and political elites frequently elevate the victimhood of their own group to rally political support. Bosnia and Herzegovina is still a way from joining the European Union due to the need for significant political reforms, which remain inaccessible due to the postwar political structure and power sharing of the national groups. Elections in 2018 reflected much of the same ethno-national discourse that characterized the war years. While there are many examples of communities – and youth in particular – carving out spaces for cross-ethnic community building,¹ social distrust and ethnic segregation remain from the war 25 years ago. Recently, as Bosnia and Herzegovina has become a new route for migrants fleeing to Western Europe, new questions about state capacity and national identity are emerging alongside vivid wartime memories of displacement and flight. Unhealed trauma, combined with this political dysfunction and evolving pressures, leave the country vulnerable to future instability and insecurity.

How does the legacy of war trauma underscore these dynamics? How might we design more effective interventions to address the still unhealed individual and collective trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina? And what does the Bosnian case teach us about how to successfully conduct trauma-informed peacebuilding in the aftermath of other cases of violence? The chapters in this book present some of the international and locally-led successes in addressing these legacies of war, while also underscoring the profound limitations to these responses. The peacebuilding interventions deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina – which ranged from political and security reforms to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to local youth camps – helped to develop a peacebuilding “toolkit” that has been used in various contexts from East Timor to Nepal and Colombia. Yet as the authors in this book illustrate, examining the Bosnian case more than two decades after the war helps reveal the limitations of these interventions and calls for us to reexamine how we work to create positive, inclusive and durable peace after war. Throughout the book, the authors champion the importance of centering trauma healing in the process of working toward peace. They also offer some concrete ideas for innovations in peacebuilding, which will be useful to scholars and practitioners working in other postwar and insecure contexts.

Background to the Bosnian war

Before the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina was Yugoslavia’s most ethnically “mixed” republic. During Tito’s three-decade reign, ethnicity (or religion, its key determinant), was suppressed in favor of a unified Yugoslav identity. The three dominant religious groups – Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Muslims – spoke the same language (with minor differences) and regularly intermarried (Ramet 2002). In the cities, people lived as next-door neighbors with those of other ethnic heritages, whereas in villages and towns, it was common for different ethno-religious communities to live side by side in separate neighborhoods (Bringa 1995). After Tito’s death in 1980, a rising tide of ethno-nationalism swept the country, as political elites began to mobilize support by appealing to their ethnic constituencies (Ramet 2002).

Amid the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia experienced its own collapse. In the context of economic decline and rising of ethno-nationalism, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. War in Croatia broke out between its newly independent government and “rebel” or autonomous Serb regions that did not wish to succeed from Yugoslavia and that received support from the Yugoslavia National Army (JNA). Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb leaders similarly established Serb autonomous regions throughout the country, upholding their alliance with Yugoslavia (then consisting of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, as well as Kosovo within Serbia; Mojzes 1994). Like the Serb regions, Bosnian Croats also sought autonomous “communities” on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina conducted its own independence referendum, which passed with overwhelming support. However, most Bosnian Serbs, who comprised about a third of the population, boycotted the referendum (Ibid.). Bosnian Croat and Serb political leaders increasingly refused to participate in the Bosnian assembly and simultaneously made their own national claims against a united and independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina until, in April 1992, the country’s independence was welcomed by the European Community and the United States. This was a final straw and a trigger for war. Serb political elites of Bosnia and Herzegovina established Republika Srpska, which quickly captured the majority of the country’s territory with support from the massive JNA and affiliated paramilitary groups. The Bosnian government was also engaged with the (Bosnian) Croatian defense forces (HDZ), supported by Croatia, over territory mostly in Herzegovina. Eventually, the Croatian defense and Bosnian government army were convinced to join forces to drive the Bosnian Serb army back to half of the territory (49 percent, to be exact; Silber and Little 1997).

The type, severity and duration of violence varied substantially across the country during the war. Sarajevo, the capital city, was subjected to a deadly siege for over three years, during which more than 11,000 city dwellers were killed. In other parts of the country, paramilitary forces, often with support from the JNA, conducted military campaigns aimed to force the non-Serb population into flight. This led to the term “ethnic cleansing,” coined to refer to attempts to “cleanse” Serb parts of the country of any non-Serb residents (Toal and Dahlman 2011). Massive war crimes (e.g., the torture of prisoners, including civilians), crimes against humanity (e.g., slavery, deportations, mass rapes, the killing of civilians, ethnic and political persecution) and genocide also characterized the violence (see work by Woodward 1995; Burg and Shoup 1999; Stiglmayer 1994; Becirevic 2014).

The international community increasingly turned its attention to Bosnia and Herzegovina as reports of atrocities against civilians continued. In July 1995, the massacre of 8,000 boys and men around the UN “safe zone” of Srebrenica led NATO and UN officials to commence a new, more aggressive military intervention. After Bosnian Serb forces shelled a busy marketplace the following month, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, an aggressive campaign to harness air and ground power to defeat the Bosnian Serb forces. This campaign forced the various warring parties to the negotiating table in November 1995, where they reached the Dayton Agreement, a cease-fire bringing the war to a formal close. According to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and The Bosnian Book of the Dead (Tokača 2013), the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina resulted in approximately 100,000 people killed (of which 40 percent were civilians), thousands missing, and over two million refugees and internally displaced persons. In addition, an estimated 20,000 women, girls and men were victims of rape or other forms of sexual violence and sexual torture (Delić and Avdibegović 2015).

Legacies of war

The Dayton Peace Agreement was made possible by securing concessions from each of the warring parties. As a result, the Agreement divided the country into two semiautonomous entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which comprises 51 percent of the country’s territory, and the Republika Srpska, comprising 49 percent. The agreement also provides for consociational power sharing, including a rotating tripartite presidency and national veto power in the case that any of the three constituent groups perceive their national interests to be threatened. Additionally, an all-powerful High Representative, appointed by the European Community, was charged with overseeing the implementation of the Agreement rather than wait for the necessary internal collaboration of the recently warring groups (Merdzanovic 2015).

This political arrangement has been tremendously dysfunctional. Moreover, the postwar dynamics have rewarded many of the same political elites responsible for the war with continued political (and economic) power. Shadow and gray economics became the driving forces of the economy, as political elites and previously marginal economic actors made fortunes in weapons trafficking and other illicit transactions (Andreas 2011). A massive international aid response – estimated to have brought approximately 100,000 international actors to Bosnia and Herzegovina as the war came to a close – inflated local economics and created new power imbalances while bringing essential aid to the population (see Belloni 2001; Pugh 2005; Andreas 2009).

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina caused tremendous devastation to the social fabric. Ethnic cleansing destroyed lives and livelihoods for the majority of residents. Homogenization and segregation have also meant the loss of the previously regular and usually friendly social interaction across what are now clear lines of ethno-national difference. Today it is rare to find close relationships across ethnic lines except in urban centers such as Sarajevo or Tuzla. Families also suffered division into “sides” (particularly ones with mixed marriages). The death of both soldiers and ordinary people who were simply living “in the wrong place” according to the wartime goal of homogenous ethnic areas contributed to the devastation of the community. During the war, trust for neighbors deteriorated due to experiences of “betrayal” through the indirect violence of silently fleeing (rather than notifying or defending one another) or direct violation. The dynamics of wartime provided a “soldier” mentality even to civilians under siege, where blaming the other group was a survival mechanism for many (Maček 2009).

The war also devastated general social trust, irrespective of ethnic belonging. A 2009 UNDP study showed that only 10 percent of all residents thought most people could be trusted, although a Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018 Country Report claims that social trust has increased in the last years. Mooren and Kleber (2001) define trust as the confidence one has in the predictability of other people, the future and life in general. Trust is an important and common loss due to violence and trauma. However, another sign of general distrust – in this case distrust of the system – is the mass evacuation and brain drain of Bosnia’s young to the West, where more opportunity awaits. This migration is a clear reflection of the heavy and widespread pessimism about the country’s current and future prospects. Such pessimism is not unwarranted; youth unemployment (among 15–24-year-olds) is the highest in Europe, at about 55 percent in 2017 according to the World Bank.

The legacy of the war is also profoundly felt in overall health and well-being. General well-being is seriously reduced by widespread...