Sarajevo Leaders’ Acts Demonstrate Enduring Bigotry

When the Serb-controlled Sarajevo suburb of Ilidza reverted to Muslim-Croat government control several weeks ago, a hardy group of Bosnian Serb doctors and health workers vowed to remain behind. Resisting pressure from their own hard-line leaders, they pledged to work with the new government and help rebuild Bosnia.

International mediators promised they’d be safe and praised them as a model of inter-ethnic cooperation in peacetime Bosnia.

And then, the Muslim-led government in effect fired them.

In addition, the government dismissed 12 of Ilidza’s 15 schoolteachers, according to the office of the international community’s high representative, who is in charge of implementing civilian aspects of the Dayton, Ohio, peace accord that ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The 12 were Serbs; the three who were spared were a Muslim and two Croats.

The Sarajevo government’s actions are part of what diplomats say is a disturbing trend toward the same kind of radical nationalism that has characterized Serbian and Croatian regimes for some time and fueled ethnic-based warfare.

It raises serious questions about the Bosnian government’s oft-stated commitment to ethnic diversity and tolerance--its stock in trade through the last four years of war. And it has disillusioned many of the government’s longtime supporters, as well as more recent partners in peace such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“Despite what they went through, it is not easy to tell them to play by the rules,” said Michael Steiner, a German diplomat who is the No. 2 official in the high representative’s office. “But it is absolutely necessary that Sarajevo become a model for a multiethnic society. That is the only thing that holds the country together.”

The signs are discouraging.

International officials who have long complained of the obstructionism they encounter from hard-line Bosnian Serb leaders, such as indicted war crimes suspects Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, are increasingly objecting to the attitudes and actions of the Muslim nationalists attempting to dominate the Sarajevo government.

This cadre from President Alija Izetbegovic’s Party of Democratic Action (SDA), diplomats say, has little real interest in the ideals of multiethnic tolerance publicly proclaimed by leaders such as Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic. (Muratovic declined repeated requests for an interview for this story.)

Under SDA direction, a regional parliament devised for the Sarajevo area gave 35 of 37 seats to Muslims. The scheme so outraged the Muslim mayor of Sarajevo, Tarik Kupusovic, that he resigned in protest.

SDA hard-liners are also thought to be responsible for the government’s continued violation of the Dayton accord’s requirement that all foreign fighters be removed from Bosnia. A number of Iranians remain, and a secretive Iranian-trained intelligence agency is still active despite U.S. demands that it be reined in.

And the SDA has complicated negotiations over upcoming elections, objecting to plans to allow refugees to vote where they currently live and accusing international election monitors of sanctioning “ethnic cleansing,” sources say.

But it was in the handling of the Sarajevo suburbs, like Ilidza, that the government’s motives and intentions were first challenged.

The Bosnian Serb leadership put a disastrous chain of events in motion by whipping up residents’ fears about the incoming leaders and triggering an exodus. But the Sarajevo government exacerbated the situation by failing to offer adequate guarantees, such as an amnesty law that would benefit the Serbs of Sarajevo.

The day after Ilidza was put under Muslim-Croat federation control, scores of Muslim refugees barged into Serb-owned homes, then claimed them, illegally, as their own. Six weeks later, the refugees remain, despite a government promise to evict them. And an internationally brokered agreement to include Serbs in the interim Ilidza government has been ignored.

Steiner complained bitterly about the treatment given the Ilidza doctors, who in a way were a personal project of his. During the hand-over of Ilidza in March, when thousands of Serbs were mounting their violent exodus, Steiner personally and publicly assured the doctors that they and their jobs would be safe if they had the courage to remain. Bosnian Ministry of Health officials offered similar promises.

The doctors remained. Then the government told them there was no work for them.

“The Serbs rejected us because we stayed,” said pediatrician Zorica Vujisic, 65, “and now the federation won’t accept us. So what do we do now? Pack our things?

“I could go to India and be a missionary and be accepted, but I can’t be a missionary in my own country,” she continued. “There is a general judgment that all those who were living and working in Ilidza were Chetniks [Serbian extremists]. No one says they were health workers just doing their job. I was healing children all my life and never interested in politics.”

The group consists of eight doctors and 14 others, including nurses, pharmacists and an ambulance driver. Not all are Serbs; one of the doctors is a Muslim woman married to a Serb. But all stayed in Ilidza during the war.

“The Serbs wouldn’t let me work because I am Muslim, and now the Muslims don’t want me because I stayed here in Ilidza with the Serbs,” Dr. Jasminka Sabrihafizovic said. “I am very angry. I expected something better.”

While waiting for the jobs they were promised, they have organized their own storefront clinic in Ilidza, with help from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The clinic provides the only medical care for miles around and receives patients--Serbs and non-Serbs alike--from all over the formerly Serb-held suburbs.

“We are firmly determined to stay and work until someone physically removes us,” said Vujisic, who has been a doctor for nearly 40 years.

“All of us had 100 reasons to leave. We only needed one reason to stay: security, a place to live and to work. One day I may decide I made a mistake, that there is no multiethnic Bosnia anymore, and then I will be gone.”

The government’s regional health officials denied they were discriminating against the Ilidza group, saying the doctors and other personnel could apply for jobs like anybody else. Dr. Mahir Tokic, head of Sarajevo’s outpatient clinic system, said there currently is no place for them to work because departing Serbs looted and burned Ilidza’s main clinic.

“Where were those people when that clinic was burning?” he said. “Where did they think they were going to be able to work?”

Tokic added that the Ilidza doctors should not expect to be given priority over those who maintained their loyalty to and fought on behalf of Sarajevo.

Steiner, in an interview, said Sarajevo officials appear to be taking a page from their Croatian and Serbian rivals.

“It does not bode well for the peace process,” he said.

Dusan Sehovac, a senior official with the Bosnian Serb Democratic Initiative, which represents the estimated 10,000 Serbs who remained in Ilidza and other suburbs, said the federation government’s actions are designed to discourage Serbs who left from returning.

The dismissal of the teachers, Sehovac said, has left about 100 children without a school to attend. Serbian parents had received assurances that their children could at least finish out the school year with their original teachers and curriculum, which differs substantially from the material taught in federation schools.