7 June 2013
by Marko Prelec
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I.D. Politics: Sarajevo Protest Shows a Weakened State

A man being protected by police from protesters outside Bosnia’s parliament. PHOTO: Crisis Group

By Marko Prelec, Director, Balkans Project (@mprelec)

Sarajevo saw its biggest demonstration in years on the evening of Thursday, 6 June, and into the Friday morning as thousands of citizens surrounded the Bosnian capital’s parliament building and refused to allow those trapped inside to leave. They were angered by the government’s failure to amend the laws needed to keep issuing ID numbers after the Constitutional Court struck down an ID law. In a legal limbo, newborns have been deprived of numbers, passports and other services. Police finally evacuated the building at 4 am today.

What is this all about? The Constitutional Court rejected the law on citizens’ identification numbers in May 2011 because it used names of municipalities in Republika Srpska (RS), the smaller of Bosnia’s two entities (the other being the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or FBiH). The municipality names had been changed, in response to another court case, so the Constitutional Court maintained that a law based on inaccurate place names could not be upheld. (You can find the May 2011 ruling, in case number U-3/11, here in English.) In January 2013, when parliament missed deadlines to amend the law, the court erased it, leaving no legal basis on which to issue new numbers. The Council of Ministers submitted a draft law featuring registration areas aligned with the entity boundaries, as RS leaders preferred. However, delegates from FBiH, the larger entity, wanted to keep the old registration areas, which crossed entity lines, and to change only the now-outdated municipal names. On this dispute, all attempts to amend the law foundered. Children born in recent months are unregistered and unable to get passports and access other services. One such child, Belmina Ibrišević, needed surgery available only abroad; her plight galvanised public opinion.

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7 May 2013
by Marko Prelec
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The Kosovo-Serbia Agreement: Why Less Is More

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton (C) poses with Serbia’s Prime Minister Ivica Dacic (L) and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, at NATO headquarters in Brussels April 19, 2013. PHOTO: Reuters

By Marko Prelec, Balkans Project Director, @mprelec

The 19 April agreement between Kosovo and Serbia is an earthquake in Balkan politics: the ground lurched, familiar landmarks toppled, the aftershocks are still rumbling and the new contours are only slowly emerging.

The two prime ministers initialed a “First Agreement of Principles Governing the Normalisation of Relations” in Brussels. The brief, fifteen-point text is the first bilateral agreement between Serbia and its former province; as the title suggests, it’s unlikely to be the last. Curiously neither government has published it, though a reportedly authentic version leaked quickly in the Pristina press.

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1 February 2013
by Marko Prelec
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Preševo’s grievances and the Kosovo-Serbia talks

Albanians protest in Preševo on January 21, 2013, a day after Serbian authorities removed a monument erected in Preševo. PHOTO: AFP/ Sasa Djordjevic

Over the past few weeks, tensions have been growing in southern Serbia’s Albanian-majority Preševo Valley, spilling over the border into Serb majority communities in Kosovo and putting at risk the EU mediated Kosovo-Serbia dialogue, which looks poised to make a historical breakthrough. Urgent action is needed.

In the aftermath of the Kosovo war of 1999, some Serbian forces relocated from Kosovo to southern Serbia, increasing repression against the local Albanian population. A new group, the “Liberation Army of Preševo, Medvedja and Bujanovac” (UÇPMB), formed and attacked Serbian forces in the Valley until a NATO-brokered ceasefire in May 2001. Life over the past two decades largely returned to normal, and the Valley became a rare conflict resolution success story in the former Yugoslavia, though dissatisfaction remained over security, jobs and services. More recently, Albanian leaders have been watching the high-level dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia, worrying about how it might affect them.

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11 July 2012
by Marko Prelec
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The Duty to Remember Crimes in Srebrenica

Burial of 465 identified Bosniaks in 2007. Photo: Almir Dzanovic

Seventeen years ago Serbian forces took control of the United Nations safe area of Srebrenica and over the course of the following week killed about eight thousand men and boys while expelling its entire Bosniak population. Some of the victims died trying to escape (a column fought its way out through Serb lines). Most perished in mass executions of up to one thousand at a time. The corpses were then buried and months later, re-buried to hide the evidence, so that even today they are still being found in the hills and forests of eastern Bosnia. All this is being retold these days at the trial of Ratko Mladić, at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.

So I was shocked yesterday to open my Facebook page to a nauseating photograph, posted by a northern Kosovo Serb group, of a man waving a huge flag with Mladić’s photo and announcing “Happy 11 July, day of liberation of Srebrenica”.

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13 February 2012
by Marko Prelec
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Update on Northern Kosovo Barricades

The “barricade”, on the main Pristina-Belgrade highway at Dudin Krs. The footprints over the barricade are animal tracks.

My Crisis Group colleagues and I drove up to Serb-held northern Kosovo on Thursday, and crossed into Serbia (briefly). In short, everything has changed, though no one has announced any change at all. The worst winter in living memory, which many hoped would drive the locals to use the official border posts, is in full sway and the border posts are open as are the roads leading to them, but not a single vehicle passes. However understandable Kosovo’s interest in controlling its borders, there are important lessons here about trying to use issues like freedom of movement to pressure a reluctant people to accept a sovereignty they view as foreign.

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30 November 2011
by Marko Prelec
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Balkans: No “Plan B”?

I recently made the mistake of questioning the Western Balkans’ European Perspective — well, not really.

I was at a conference on Bosnia and I made this comment: The EU’s main tool — its “Plan A” for the Balkans — is the transformative power of the accession process; yet countries like Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania are all temporarily or persistently blocked by “sovereignty issues” or domestic troubles; and not only is the EU’s appetite for enlargement shrivelling, the Eurozone crisis has us doubting the Union’s own future.

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24 November 2011
by Sabine Freizer
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Back on the Barricades in Kosovo

Last night, northern Kosovo saw public protests take another dark turn, with a potent mix of tear gas, rocks and batons, earth-moving equipment and armed soldiers, leaving scores injured, counting twenty-one NATO (KFOR) troops, now added to recent casualties that include two dead, one Serb and one Kosovo Albanian. Without concerted effort and political courage this situation is only set to get worse.

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14 October 2011
by Srecko Latal
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What Do People of BiH Really Want?

Bosnia and Herzegovina has been in a slow-motion crisis for so long that it has become part of the normal daily routine. A year has passed without any sign of a state-level government and on the surface life continues, but deep down, people are increasingly divided over the question of where BiH should be going.

Ethnic and social tensions are on the rise. Over the past few weeks there have been four violent clashes between football hooligans in different towns, the last one on 6 October in Sarajevo when supporters of the local team Zeljeznicar and Hajduk from Split (Croatia) clashed in the city centre. Scores of people and police were injured and numerous cars burned and upturned in one of the worst such incidents in many years.

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14 October 2011
by Srecko Latal
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Šta Građani BiH Stvarno Hoće?

Bosna i Hercegovina je već toliko dugo u sporo krećućoj krizi da je to već postalo dio svakodnevne rutine. Prošla je godina dana bez državne vlade i život se naizgled nastavlja, no u dubini duše ljudi su podijeljeni oko toga u kom pravcu BiH treba ići.

Etničke i socijalne tenzije rastu. U proteklih par sedmica desila su se četiri nasilna sukoba između fudbalskih huligana u različitim gradovima. Zadnji se desio 6. oktobra u Sarajevu kada su se u centru grada sukobili navijači domaćeg Željezničara i Hajduka iz Splita. Veći broj navijača i policajaca je bio povrijeđen, dok su brojna vozila zapaljena i prevrnuta u najgorem incidentu te vrste u proteklih nekoliko godina.

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19 September 2011
by Marko Prelec
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What Country Are You in, and How Do You Know?

What country are you in, and how do you know? Until recently, the answer to that question in North Kosovo was a matter of personal choice.

Serbs thought they were in Serbia. They could cross what they called the “administrative boundary line” into Serbia proper without fuss and many did on a daily basis, for work, school, shopping and seeing friends. They drive cars with Serbian license plates (or no plates) which they get, along with driver licenses, ID cards and passports in local Serbian government offices and courts. They marry and divorce in local Serbian courts. Shops take Serbian dinars which Serbian banks dispense. All signs are in Serbian.

The Albanian minority in the North thought it was in Kosovo. There was no fixed line between them and the rest of Kosovo. They drive cars with Kosovo license plates (or no plates) and get documents from Kosovo police, who are the only uniformed police allowed in the North. Shops also take Euros, the official currency of Kosovo, and European banks dispense them. In Albanian or mixed areas, shops catering to both communities featured bilingual signs and staff.

This bizarre idyll is over.

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