In Bosnia, a Street Divided Sums Up Woes

Nowhere is the line that divides the two halves of Bosnia narrower than here, in the scarred and depressing housing complex of Sarajevo’s Dobrinja suburb.

Serbs can stand on one side of a 20-foot-wide street and look at, even talk to, Muslims standing on the other side. And they did that, until an incident six weeks ago left a couple of people beaten up and shot.

Today, more than a week after national elections designed to bring the country together, the Bosnia-Herzegovina that one sees in Dobrinja seems as divided as ever.

Jelena, 12, in a green L.A. Lakers jacket, scurries down the Bosnian Serb side of the street of separation in Dobrinja. “They [Muslims] hang out here, but we just pass and don’t look at them,” she says. “My parents told me not to go on the other side. I was told not to talk to them.”

A short distance away, on the Muslim-Croat side, Alen, also 12, is playing in a new playground built with American donations. “Sometimes Serbian kids come over here and we play,” he says. “But I don’t go over there. It’s a little scary.”

Dobrinja may be Bosnia’s best example of Muslims and Serbs who insist on separation, even when across the street from one another. And as the elections showed, the same ethnic-based nationalist parties that waged war and advocated segregation have received resounding votes of confidence from a beleaguered population.

But even as Bosnia seems doomed to a cycle of conflict, international mediators and some Bosnians try to salvage positive signs.

New, joint governmental institutions will be formed, although no one really knows how they’ll work. A legitimized opposition has its foot in the door, although the door could slam fast. Very tentative ties between Sarajevo and Belgrade, the capitals of Bosnia and the rump Yugoslavia respectively, are being created.

Still, the united, multiethnic Bosnia envisioned in the U.S.-brokered Dayton, Ohio, peace accord may be dead.

Moreover, the presence of international, and especially U.S., military and civilian forces seems more likely, perhaps more essential, than ever to prevent a fragile shell from falling apart.

Can Bosnia’s postwar government, elected Sept. 14, really function?

“Over time, with major problems, and with sustained involvement and pressure by the international community, yes,” answered Carl Bildt, the senior civilian in charge of executing the Dayton accord. “Immediately, if we leave, no. . . . If power-sharing does not work this time in Bosnia, peace and the unity of the country [are] at risk.”

By holding elections when the country was generally not ready and bloodshed was so fresh in people’s minds, the international custodians of Bosnia took a huge gamble. They sacrificed freedom of movement, which did not exist on election day, and their own credibility on a bet that the institutions will somehow begin to bring the fractions of the country together.

Under a new constitution framed within the Dayton accord, voters chose a three-person presidency composed of a Muslim, a Serb and a Croat, and a 42-member national assembly evenly divided among the three groups. Each “entity”-- the Muslim-Croat federation and the Bosnian Serb republic (Republika Srpska)--chose its separate parliament.

Republika Srpska, in addition, elected its own president and vice president, while the federation will have a Muslim president and a Croatian vice president appointed by a “House of Peoples” that in turn will be selected by 10 cantonal assemblies also chosen in the Sept. 14 vote.

In all, there will be 18 national or entity legislative bodies, plus 109 municipal governments.

The 42-member national assembly will also name a six-member “Council of Ministers.” This is, in effect, the government, but the Serbs refused to accept that label.

Already, serious differences have emerged that threaten the working of this system. The Bosnian Serb member of the presidency, Momcilo Krajisnik, refuses to go to Sarajevo to meet with his counterparts, as required by the accord. And he is demanding that the chairmanship of the presidency, which went to his Muslim counterpart, be rotated.

“It’s going to be pulling teeth and pushing a mule” to make this work, a senior diplomat said.

In fact, as difficult as harnessing the armies and holding elections were, the next two years of nation-building and the search for consensus and cooperation will prove even more daunting, say those charged with the mission.

“We are at the stage where what we are asking them to do really goes to the heart of democracy and reconciliation,” said William Montgomery, the Clinton administration’s special envoy for implementation of the Dayton pact.

Svetislav Stanojevic--president of Republika Srpska’s self-declared Supreme Court, who also oversaw the elections there--said war led to polarization that caused people to hide within their ethnic communities. Repairing that, if possible at all, will take time, he said.

“Bosnia fell apart, and these elections are one more attempt to knit it back together,” Stanojevic said in an interview in Pale. “I am dubious.”

The heavily nationalist vote seemed to confirm a desire for the division of Bosnia into independent states. Especially in Republika Srpska, political leaders preached secession from the rest of the country. On the other side, many Muslim leaders, at least publicly and despite other undemocratic tendencies, promoted a united Bosnia but pledged to defend their people’s interests.

That nationalists emerged victorious should have come as no surprise, analysts say, because psychologically, Bosnia is still at war. Voters were thinking not of education and tax reform but of ethnic struggle.

“There was a tendency to vote for the devil you know,” Bildt said. “In these elections, people looked back when they voted. I would hope in two years, when they vote in the next elections, people can look forward to the future.”

Opposition parties generally fared poorly and faced intimidation and limited access in their campaigns. But some felt they had driven the first cracks in nationalism.

“I always remember how it was in Sarajevo a year ago, how difficult it was to get out our political message,” said Sejfudin Tokic, an eternally optimistic Muslim politician whose party took slightly less than 10% of the vote cast in the Muslim-Croat federation for the national parliament. “Every day it gets easier and easier.”

Only the predominantly Muslim parties ran candidates on both sides of the ethnic line--a sign, they claim, of their commitment to seeing the country reunited.

“We are not a North and South Korea,” said Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim elected to the chairmanship of the three-person presidency.

As it stands now, each of the three factions uses its own currency, its own license plates, its own flag. Telephone service between the Serbian and the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia has still not been reconnected.

In Dobrinja, women from the Muslim-Croat side venture across the street to Republika Srpska to use the public telephones for calls to old friends and relatives on the Serbian side they cannot visit.

Dobrila Telebak, a 24-year-old Serb who sells clothes imported from Turkey in a little shop across from the public phones, watches the women who come. One day, she saw a Muslim friend from her days as a high school student in her native Sarajevo.

“I was surprised to see her. She was surprised to see me,” Telebak says. “We each thought the other had gone far away.”

In fact, they had been living just a couple of miles apart. “I think she’ll come and stay with me for a while, and I think I’ll probably cross over to visit her. . . . I think a lot of young people want things to be united again.”

Snezana Kristic, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb waitress at a nearby cafe overlooking the street that divides Dobrinja, seems to agree.

“So close,” she says, peering through a window at apartment buildings a few yards distant on the Muslim side, “and so far away.”