https://www.rt.com/op-ed/440974-zizek-bosnia-balkan-croatia/
The violent deaths of two
young men have united Bosnians, crossing rigid ethnic lines. Could something
finally be stirring in the divided Balkan country?
When we think of miracles and
Bosnia, the first association that pops up is the appearance of the Virgin Mary
a couple of decades ago in Medjugorje – an event that brought millions of
pilgrims to the area.
However, a week ago, a much
greater and more important miracle took place in Banja Luka, the capital of the
Serb part of Bosnia ("Republika Srpska"), and then also in other
Bosnian cities across the ethnic divide.
The miracle is not the
elections which took place this Sunday. As usual, Bosnian elections (with all
the accompanying irregularities) were marked by apathy and indifference, and
just confirmed the tripartite division of the state along ethnic lines.
Today, the Serb part is more
and more acting as a sovereign state, while in the Muslim Sarajevo,
Islamization progresses, evidenced by how it's more and more difficult to get a
beer in a restaurant or bar, among other things.
Meanwhile, a specific form of
the much-publicized PPP (public-private partnership) is flourishing in all of
Bosnia: local political elites intertwined with half-legal private businesses,
their rule legitimized as protectors of ethnic entities (Bosnians, Serbs etc.)
against the "enemy." In such a situation where poverty is everywhere
and young people are migrating to Western Europe in search of jobs, nationalism
thrives and defense of ethnic identity easily prevails over economic
issues.
Lessons from past
The problem facing Bosnia is
best exemplified by what took place a couple of years ago in Croatia. There,
two public protest gatherings were announced: trade unions called for a protest
against exploding unemployment and poverty (felt very much by ordinary people).
At the same time, rightist nationalists announced a gathering in order to
protest the re-introduction of the official status of Cyrillic writing in
Vukovar (because of the Serb minority there).
Of course, at the first
gathering, a couple of hundred people came, and to the second gathering, over
100,000 people came. Poverty was experienced as a daily life problem much more
than the Cyrillic threat by ordinary people, but nonetheless trade unions
failed to mobilize the masses.
Wise commentators like to
evoke such stories to cynically mock leftist claims that our goal should be to
defeat local nationalism and to bring about a transnational coalition of those
who are manipulated and exploited by the ruling ethnic elites. They patiently
explain how, especially in an area like the Balkans, "irrational"
ethnic hatred runs all too deep to be overcome by "rational" economic
concerns – meaning the transnational coalition of the exploited is a miracle
that will never happen.
Well, suddenly this miracle is
happening now. And it makes Medjugorje pale by comparison.
Human toll
David Dragicevic, a young
Serb-Bosnian hacker, disappeared in the night from March 17 to March 18 this
year, and his body was found in the vicinity of Banja Luka on March 24; it was
clear from his heavily disfigured body that he was killed by protracted brutal
torture.
From March 26, daily protests
have taken place in the main square of Banja Luka, organized by his father
Davor under the title "Justice for David." Police first declared
David's death a suicide, and only after strong public pressure began to
investigate it as a case of murder, but with no results yet.
Eventually, it became clear
that David had discovered traces of corruption and other criminal activities of
the ruling clique. So he had to disappear.
A week ago, the continuous
protests erupted into a large mass gathering, with tens of thousands
participating, and dozens of buses bringing people from all of Republika Srpska
into Banja Luka. The ruling clique reacted with panic: thousands of policemen
controlled the streets and blocked entry to the city.
Now comes the true miracle.
Unexpectedly, in a wonderful display of trans-ethnic solidarity, similar gatherings
took place in other Bosnian cities where Muslims are a majority. In Sarajevo,
the capital of Bosnia, hundreds demanded justice for a similar case that
happened in their midst: the death of Dzenan Memic, who disappeared in the
night of February 8 to February 9, 2016, which was never seriously
investigated, although his body was also disfigured by traces of torture.
Alone together
Protesters in Banja Luka,
Sarajevo, and other Bosnian cities exchanged messages and emphasized their
solidarity across ethnic divides, since they all share the same fate of being
controlled by corrupted PPP elites.
So, finally, they became fully
aware that the true threat does not come from other ethnic groups but from the
corruption in their own group, and that they can get rid of this malignant
tumor only by acting together. And then the impossible and
"unimaginable" (for cynical realists) happened.
Of course, one should not
expect too much from such explosions. A similar trans-ethnic movement against
economic poverty already took place a couple of years ago, in an echo of the
Arab Spring, and gradually dwindled.
However, the fire continues to
burn beneath the surface, and this fire is the only beacon of hope in Bosnia.
In this, it reconfirms the truth of Abraham Lincoln's old saying: You can
deceive some people all the time, you can deceive all the people for some time,
but you cannot deceive all the people all the time.
Slavoj Žižek is a cultural
philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and
Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of
German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities of the University of London.
No comments:
Post a Comment