A few brief thoughts on yesterday’s municipal elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
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1. The results are more or less in line with what was expected: Dodik’s unconstitutional referendum gambit paid off, as the SNSD utterly routed the SDS-led opposition bloc in the RS; the SDA, while actually losing a number of key municipalities, nevertheless remained the biggest vote-getter in the Federation; the left-civic vote, fractured along at least four parties, failed to compete in a meaningful sense against the dominant nationalist blocs.
   
   
2. More alarmingly, these were the most irregular elections in nearly a decade, and possibly since 1996—the first post-war polls. A brawl in Stolac completely suspended voting in the town, while similarly ugly scenes played out in Bihać, Livno, and a handful of other locations both yesterday and in days leading up to the election. Independent observers noted over a hundred “critical incidents,” which is to say, voter fraud. Tellingly, the key architects of the violence and fraud were the main nationalist blocs. This is a reflection of the increasing dissolution of law and order and parliamentary procedure in BiH, and the willingness of the SDA, SNSD, and HDZ to use all means at their disposal to remain in power.
   
   
3. Srebrenica has its first Serb mayor in more than a decade. Yesterday evening’s scenes—drunken youths waving flags, hurling insults and slurs, and the town divided by cordons of police—suggests that we’re in for renewed tensions in BiH’s “open wound.” Expect Dodik and the SNSD to increasingly make the town more and more inhospitable to the large returnee population, as I have previously projected.
   
   
4. Once again, there was no voting in Mostar, one of the largest municipalities in the country. Taken together with the events in Stolac, it’s becoming ever clearer that the SDA and HDZ remain patently authoritarian movements, willing to outright suspend democratic processes, with a preference for resolving debates with fists and explosives rather than ballots.
   
   
5. Speaking of which, the post-election press conferences by Bakir Izetbegović and Milorad Dodik were ominous, indeed. Both men attacked the assembled journalists, spoke venomously of analysts and observers, and dismissed municipalities where they fared poorly as irrelevant backwaters. They spoke more as leaders of militias than democratic blocs.
   
   
6. On the whole, last night did nothing to improve the worsening political climate in the country and the utter chaos of the whole event is another indictment of the international community’s complete abandonment of meaningful democratization projects and processes in BiH, but also the region.
   
   
7. Looking ahead to 2018:
   
   a. It is imperative that the SDP, Democratic Front, Naša Stranka, and Citizen Alliance form a single left bloc. They can delay formal (re)unification but continuing to split the crucial civic vote in BiH is irresponsible and self-sabotaging.
   
   b. The RS opposition has to articulate a meaningful alternative program to the SNSD. Their soft nationalist, “anyone but Dodik” approach has failed. Mladen Bosić and Mladen Ivanić both need to clear the way for young, new leaders in Banja Luka. If they don’t, the SNSD will destroy what little remains of the “Alliance for Change” in 2018—even if Dodik’s party (like the SDA) is hardly the machine “the Baja” would like to have us believe. Still, the nationalists have the more disciplined base, and control the public apparatus after decades of rule, and thus will continue to win any “toss up” vote; challengers need landslides in BiH, and landslides require real campaigns and real programs.   
   
   ​c. After the referendum and these botched polls, alarm bells should be blaring in Brussels and Washington. The country turned a key corner yesterday—not towards the EU, but towards outright illiberal, managed democracy. Democratic processes and norms were always weak in BiH but yesterday was a dark day, even by these standards. At the very least, a statement should be released indicating the conduct of yesterday’s vote was disconcerting and not at all becoming of a (supposedly) soon to be EU candidate state. If Brussels et al cannot manage even this, BiH is in truly dire straits.     

Over the past two years, a collection of photographs of WWII memorials from (the former) Yugoslavia has made the rounds on social media. Popular sci-fi and fantasy blog io9 reported on it and this post from Crack Two appears to have been "liked" over 173,000 times on Facebook alone.  And here is the same article, with more or less the same perspective, on a blog from BiH. This process of "re-discovery," however is to me the truly fascinating aspect of this phenomenon. 

The authors of these articles, as well as those leaving comments, repeatedly refer to the monuments as "bizarre," "haunting" or, at best, as "modernist," which one can safely interpret to mean "weird." This commentary is essentially an inversion of the Stalinist insistence on "socialist realism." We are now surprised that a society once existed, some long ago civilization which we relate to as though it were an artifact of Tolkien lore, which was capable of producing abstract representations of real events. What does it say of our societies that in the second decade of the 21st century, we consider symbolic representations to be "strange?" 

As it concerns the Balkans, this fascination is emblematic of the virtually wholesale dissolution of culture and art in the post-Yugoslav space. It reminds us, I argue, of the anti-political nature of the post-Yugoslav, neoliberal-nationalist political order. 

On the one hand, the eternal specter of "joining the EU" has been revealed as illusory not only because of the global financial crisis but also because former socialist states and now EU members like Romania and Bulgaria, as well as former Yugoslav republics like Slovenia and Croatia, appear no closer to resolving their internal political contradictions in 2014 than they were in, say, in 1984. Oligarchy still defines these political systems and kleptocracy their economies, as I continually stress. Whereas they previously felt themselves marginalized by Moscow and Belgrade, they are now marginalized by Brussels. Incidentally, was this not also the central motif of  David Černý's brilliant EU installation from a few years ago? The rage comes precisely from the realization that this abstraction reveals much more of our sordid reality than the neoliberal insistence on no possible alternative to the EU project. 

On the other hand, the nationalist dream of ethnically pure "nation-states" constitutive of the Yugoslav dissolution but also of the anti-migrant and anti-Roma policies of most of Europe is likewise a bankrupt one. As we are asked to engage in successive rounds of purges of [insert preferred current national enemy here], we seem to come no closer to resolving the underlying problems of our societies. And as "new" terrors emerge, with new grievances (e.g. the LGBT movement), the true intent of the national dream reveals itself. It is to fundamentally deny popular participation in politics, to crush dissent and debate. 

Yes, we are invited into the streets to defend our communities from the enemy but we are presented with a finished program. We are asked merely to become grave diggers and executioners not citizens. And when the Muslims are gone, we'll turn on the Roma, and when the Roma are gone we'll turn on the homosexuals...and then? Then it's the turn of the domestic critics, the liberals and the communists and perhaps our own selves because by this time the "purging" seems never ending and the factories are still shuttered. Wasn't it the fault of the Muslims and aren't they gone now? The Roma too, and homosexuals and liberals and communists. They're all gone, the factories remain shuttered and yet there's still shining BMWs among the wreckage. And to ask to whom these belong is to find our own selves declared national enemies, in turn. 

So perhaps those photographs reveal all this in of themselves, but what is that we see? I am particularly interested in the "local gaze," that is of the (former) Yugoslavs themselves.

The sight of these monuments is a moment of dislocated recognition. As we are still unable to really talk about the horrors of the war, nor the horrors of the post-war period, to accept and acknowledge the suffering of our former friends and neighbors, we remain largely frozen in place. In this frozen space, trauma is dealt with differently; anger, suspicion and paranoia fester but the the freeze remains. And yet when presented with these photographs we are haunted by a suspicion. The suspicion that what was necessary to create these monuments was a complex society, one we have forgotten and were forced to forget. A complex society which had memorialized the past, however problematically, and devoted most of its energy on imagining a future. A "self-managed society," where we were political agents and if we felt frustrated by the actually existing imperfections of this system, the solution(s) were self-evident; it was not to dissolve the system but rather to insist on the actualization of its ideological principles. 

The mere recognition of these monuments' complexity, however, allows for a kind of mourning that has otherwise been denied to us. Their now crumbling edifices allow us to mourn for the future that was taken away from us, to mourn all that which we individually and collectively lost, without having the process interrupted by emotionally charged questions of who did what to whom, when and how. 

Beside the overt chauvinist implications of many contemporary monuments in the Balkans, their primary failure is that they are essentially ahistorical constructs or, at least, this has been their intent. They memorialize a kind of ethereal suffering that serves not to turn us toward reconciliation but rather to keep us frozen in trauma. Whereas the Yugoslav monuments were massive, abstract, leaping out of the earth with little to hide precisely because this was a society with a future that allowed for participation and interpretation (a truncated kind, granted), the contemporary monuments are small and literal. They are our tombstones not memorials in the true sense. 

The Western fascination with these installations is by comparison much simpler: a long-standing Oriental fixation on the East, their odd customs and spectacularly horrific political systems. If they are beautiful, they are either beautiful in a vacuum or in the way the Ryugyong Hotel might be deemed spectacular. This is not to accuse individual viewers of these photographs of racism. The monuments are beautiful. But it is to point to a generally banal conception of Yugoslavia in the Western imagination, which naturally places all "socialist experiments" on a spectrum between Stalin and the Kim dynasty. Hence, the likening of these structures to UFOs as though the whole of the Yugoslav period was not merely one of fiction but of spectacular science fiction. 

Yugoslavia was real, once. And it once had a future. It was a society capable of producing complex structures and systems: political, economic, cultural. These structures and their remnants ought to be taken seriously on their own terms precisely because they point to the absence of all these phenomena in our present. A fact worth mourning, indeed.   

Čekamo uzalud već godinama neki dogovor ili kompromis između vladajućih elita u BiH koji bi definitivno poveo ovo društvo na put prema Evropi. Evropa nama znači prosperitet, vladavinu prava i nadu u zajedničku budućnost. Ali dogovora nema i Evropa nikako da nam se približi. Zašto? Koja nam to karika u lancu  nedostaje?

Politička elita u BiH davno je shvatila da im vječna i prividna kandidatura za članstvo u Evropskoj uniji donosi mnogo više profita i mnogo više slobode nego stvarno članstvo. Takvo članstvo nosi sa sobom očekivanja iz Brisela da će ovdje doći do stvarnih reformi i promjena. U ovoj kvazi-kandidaturi nema ni očekivanja ni odgovornosti, što nam najbolje dokazuje rasprava među tom istom političkom elitom  oko slučaja Sejdić-Finci. Borba se ovdje isključivo vodi za podjelu fotelja, ne za prava građana. A ta prava ne zanimaju ni same EU predstavnike, pogotovo ako ta podjela fotelja može zadovoljiti sve ključne lokalne aktere.

Ali to je već stara priča i u svakom slučaju, što bi popularni bh. reper Frenkie rekao, “ako im i danas vjeruješ, onda si glup.” Nije pitanje više šta se dešava nego šta građani BiH očekivaju da će se dogoditi? Ako vam je dobro, onda ništa. Ali svaka anketa, svaki internet komentar, svaki članak potcrtava  katastrofalno stanje u ovoj zajednici.

Moguće je da to nije apatija već međugeneracijska trauma. Iskustvo raspada SFRJ i rata apsolutno je razbilo u ljudima ideju politike (ustvari, ideju političkog, the political, das Politische) kao društvenog, kolektivnog i zajedničkog projekta. Sa kulturno-socijalne strane, raspad bivše države ostavio je iza sebe samo kosti. A mi još uvijek preživljavamo od trulog mesa, dok gradimo luksuzne hotele i tržnice za turiste po tim istim polomljenim kostima.

Ipak to što nedostaje BiH nije ni odgovorna elita niti neki dogovor između njih. Ono što nam fali je izgubljeno i uništeno u procesu raspada SFRJ. To su građani. Ali građani koji trebaju ne samo da se pojave kao neka društvena jedinica na popisu, ili čak kao neki četvrti konstitutivni narod. Potrebno je baš ono što nedavna anketa UN-a tvrdi da mi nemamo: volja da se borimo sami za sebe i budućnost naše zajednice i naših mladih ljudi.

Dok se građani ne pojave na ulicama, oni i ne postoje. Dok se političari ne boje mase na ulici, i znaju da nije spremna da se pojavi po trgovima i ispred zgradama vlade, onda ni demokratski izbori ne znače ništa. Izbori u kojima elita ne strahuje od naroda samo su rotacija oligarhije. A to je stvarna slika sadašnje BiH.

Slobodno društvo je ono u kojem su građani autonomna, nezavisna sila. Ona sama sebe organizuje i spremna je da insistira i da se bori za svoja prava. Elita koja će vladati odgorovrno mora računati s time da će biti svrgnuta s vlasti ne samo na izborima, već i protestima.

BiH u kojoj građani nisu politički factor neće doživjeti ikakve značajne promjene u skorijoj budućnosti. A zato smo sami mi krivi. Naravno da eliti ovo stanje odgovara i naravno da EU, u kojoj nezadovoljstvo također gori, neće nas ohrabriti da se okupimo i krenemo rušiti njihove “lokalne partnere”. Ali za građane je ovo jedini izlaz iz zamke kleptokratije i oligarhije koja nam uzima dane i godine života.

Momenat kad su se roditelji, djeca, studenti i radnici pojavili ispred zgradama vlade i počeli proteste za JMBG bio je možda i najvažniji posljeratni događaj u historiji ovog društva. Tog dana su političari plakali i bježali kroz prozore. A kad se dokazalo da su se protesti definitivno završili, došli su do sada već klasičnog dogovora. A to je samo još jedan pokušaj da u temelju aparthejd u BiH.

Ova nas budućnost čeka ako ne budemo spremni da sami krojimo svoju sudbinu. Apatija ili trauma, u svakom slučaju ovo stanje je zasluženo ako radije biramo biti kmetovi i etnički subjekti, a ne građani.

Zahvalan sam Nedadu Memiću za pomoć sa ovim tekstom. 

The concept of "Yugonostaliga" is by now well-worn terrain in Balkan and post-Soviet [sic] studies. A less discussed sub-genre (?) of the field, however, is the collection of photographs, postcards and videos contributed by current and former residents of (the former) Yugoslavia, in this case BiH, to a growing , informal archive of audio-visual artifacts of eras gone by.

There is an added significance to this phenomenon in BiH, where during the recent war, the destruction of cultural monuments, religious institutions, archives, libraries and graveyards was an important dimension of broader campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The burning of the the National and University Library of BiH in Sarajevo in 1992 and the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar in 1993 were only the most famous instances of these practices. What has survived the war is today jeopardized by the ongoing cultural crisis in the country, with museums and archives now targeted by a different kind of malice, one inescapably linked to the wider structural flaws of the Dayton constitutional order, as I recently argued at the Woodrow Wilson Center. 

In the face of such tremendous violence and, today, neglect, the efforts of ordinary citizens to document and preserve segments of their own historic memories offers a hopeful alternative to absent official responses. This is not to say that a Facebook page can substitute for a museum or an archive but it is to suggest that popular interest in documentation of this sort may not always readily manifest itself in traditional ways. I believe this is a tremendous opportunity for those of us interested in preserving cultures and memories to harness this energy for such projects. 

Moreover, from a socio-political standpoint, it bears making this (perhaps) obvious point: for a society still recovering from war and genocide, especially given the current political climate in BiH, to so openly and consistently engage in acts of pre-war and pre-genocide remembering is tremendously important. It speaks to a fundamental disconnect that, I think, the majority of ex-Yugoslavs feel. Typically, we recognize only the first two features of this disconnect: the overwhelmingly positive inter-communal experiences of most ordinary Yugoslavs, on the one hand, and the incredible level of violence many experienced during the 1990s, on the other. However, there is today, a third layer: the utter economic destitution and moral bankruptcy of the post-Yugoslav social order. 

This third dimension is experienced by both the overwhelming majority of the population who were victimized by the architects of the dissolution of Yugoslavia but also the small constituency of ordinary "true believers" who now live in the hollowed out skeleton of a society that once had a future and now barely has a past. What is a young man to think, for instance, growing up in contemporary Prijedor, whose parents insist that nothing happened here during the 90s, when he stumbles upon this album and this story? And he will stumble upon on it, as many already have. To be sure, the reaction(s) may range from denial to disbelief to silence. But no society where there is even relative freedom of information can long bury the events of the past. 

However, it likely won't be the immediate perpetrators and the immediate victims of these crimes against humanity that will have to make amends. It will be their children and their grandchildren. And despite the ability of interested parties to manufacture hate and engage in wholesale historical revisionism, the disconnect will persist until something akin to a catharsis occurs. Something that acknowledges that terrible things happened, that they were done in our name, that women, men and children were murdered, tortured and brutalized who were once our neighbors, co-workers, countrymen and friends. We may or may not have had a hand in their deaths or expulsions but we do have a hand in remembering them, inviting them back and, in seeing them safely returned even for a moment, restoring a segment of our own humanity.

Then, we might begin to recognize in the past all that was, all that might have been and all that might still be.