A Muslim Ombudsman Takes On His ‘Own People’

For Esad Muhibic, the jabs thrown his way were especially hurtful. Seated before a session of parliament in Bosnia, the Muslim judge and veteran Sarajevo attorney was branded a traitor, an opportunist who had failed to protect his “own people.”

And it was Muhibic’s “own people” doing the attacking: legislators from the ruling Muslim political party, using a very public forum to rake Muhibic over the coals.

It was the sort of treatment that Muhibic has grown accustomed to ever since becoming one of the Muslim-Croat Federation’s three ombudsmen, its ultimate arbiters on human rights and justice.

With a rare independence that has earned them international accolades but pits the ombudsmen against top political leaders, Muhibic and his colleagues, a Croat and a Serb, pass judgment on cases that go straight to the heart of what’s wrong with Bosnia today, from hate crimes and illegal detentions to recovery of stolen apartments.

As a Muslim taking on the Muslim officials who dominate Sarajevo’s power establishment, Muhibic finds this a particularly perilous battle. His family is threatened, his friends abandon him. His motives are questioned, and he is constantly beating his head against bureaucratic walls.

If successful, however, the ombudsmen’s work could give birth to an independent judiciary, restore property to rightful occupants and help rebuild the ethnically diverse character of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Those three goals alone make the ombudsmen a threat to governing nationalists and the control they exercise over Bosnian society. Unfortunately, the three judges have no enforcement powers and are often ignored, or scorned, by those they rule against.

“I am sure everything I have, from my car to my briefcase, is bugged,” Muhibic said, with only a touch of hyperbole.

Muhibic, a young-looking 63-year-old who is quick to show his emotions, is a former district court judge, Justice Ministry official and prominent lawyer who could operate quite successfully within the system here.

Instead, he has chosen to challenge it, despite the costs and risks.

“No one sees the future,” he said at the end of a long, frustrating day that included advising refugees and rebuking a police chief. “[But] in 10 years, they will see we were on the right track. The sooner we leave the hell and darkness, the sooner we will live in a normal world.”

The ombudsmen’s office was created by Western mediators in the 1994 Washington agreement that ended fighting between Muslim and Croatian armies and established the Muslim-Croat Federation, which today controls roughly half the national territory. The office does not have jurisdiction in the Bosnian Serb half of the country.

Muslim Ombudsman Challenges System

The ombudsmen’s work is considered fundamental to the transformation of the nation from a Communist state wrecked by war into a stable, legitimate country where peace and the rule of law reign.

“The most important thing we can achieve is to build trust,” Muhibic said at his central Sarajevo office, where stacks of citizen complaints formed a line atop his otherwise uncluttered desk. “It is moving very, very slowly.”

In today’s Bosnia, the ombudsmen constitute a nearly unique institution, one in which people from the three principal ethnic groups cooperate and share power equally.

Muhibic and his two colleagues--Croat Branka Raguz and Serb Vera Jovanovic--find moral strength in their insistence on working as a pan-ethnic team, a policy that gives them credibility but also makes them a lightning rod for attacks.

And so they were last year when they presented a highly critical annual human rights report to the federation’s House of Representatives.

For several torturous hours, Muhibic and his colleagues were heckled by members of the ruling Muslim party--the Party of Democratic Action, or SDA--and lambasted in speech after speech. The attackers zeroed in on Muhibic, attempting, he believes, to berate him into toning down his criticism of the Muslim-dominated government.

“The ombudsmen were asked to represent their own people,” SDA legislator Seada Palavric declared during the session. “I want Muhibic, as ombudsman, to represent the Bosniak [Muslim] people.”

Muhibic sat in a front-row chair, mouth dry from the tension and struggling to control his anger. “I did not want to enter into a polemic,” he recalled. “I wanted to keep my dignity.”

In the weeks that followed, attorneys and judges whom Muhibic had known for years shunned him in public. He was called ugly names. Crank callers threatened to kill his daughter and granddaughter. Politicians and party newspapers branded him a foreign spy or a stooge of the Americans.

“I don’t pay attention,” Muhibic said. “You are not supposed to show you are the least bit fearful.”

Difficult Search for a Strong Personality

In fact, the Muslim ombudsman chair was the hardest to fill. Long after Raguz and Jovanovic were selected, Western officials who helped create the institution continued to search for a Muslim of political independence, strong personality and solid legal background. Finally, they found Muhibic.

“Although he identifies himself as a Bosniak, he is willing to be bluntly critical of the Bosniak authorities,” said Charles B. Smith Jr., a retired American diplomat involved in selecting the ombudsmen.

“He knew where a lot of skeletons were buried. Once he was assured he would have the platform from which he could go after them . . . with enough outside support that he wouldn’t be bumped off . . . he was more than willing to do the job.”

Because Muslims were overwhelmingly the victims in Bosnia’s war, many people consider it politically incorrect--treacherous, even--to criticize Muslim authorities. Only recently have Western officials and Bosnian Muslims been more willing to speak against SDA nationalists, thanks in large part to the ground broken by Muhibic.

Muhibic and his fellow ombudsmen appear to get along well. Each has different strengths, all are passionate and dogged, and their styles complement one another.

Muhibic is often the “bad cop” when the team confronts misbehaving functionaries. He displays a short temper and will readily scold officials.

“Not a single part of me is diplomatic,” Muhibic said.

A thin, energetic man who talks with his hands and whose eyes widen when he gets excited, Muhibic worked as a district court judge for 12 years under Bosnia’s Communist regime, then opened a private civil law practice.

Born in Sarajevo in 1934, he has lived through at least five versions of his country: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; the Independent Republic of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state that annexed Bosnia; Marshal Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia; the wartime Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina; and today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina, a two-part state.

The prevailing principle throughout was might makes right.

Muhibic got an early glimpse of the harsh cruelty of Balkan justice. As a child at the end of World War II, he watched seven-minute show trials in which victorious Communist partisans sentenced to death Roman Catholic and Muslim clerics accused of collaborating with Nazi forces.

He managed to avoid joining the Communist Party, but his lack of membership cost him his judgeship after he visited the local mosque for his father’s funeral. Atheism, not religion, was the rule in those days.

Home Shelled, Burned by Bosnian Serbs

When war returned to Sarajevo in April 1992, Muhibic was recruited to form part of the “war government,” an ad hoc administration meant to keep the state afloat and functioning. He was the deputy justice minister until the regime was replaced in 1994.

Like most able-bodied men, he was dragooned in the streets of Sarajevo for the digging of military trenches. His ancestral home, a two-story Turkish-style residence that had been in his family for five generations, was shelled and burned by Bosnian Serb gunmen in the first few weeks of the war--on the same night that Sarajevo’s treasured National Library, a symbol of the very culture and identity of the city, was similarly shelled and gutted.

Clients who have crossed the ombudsmen’s threshold lately have included a prewar mayor and his son, kicked out of a newly restored apartment and beaten up by Bosnian Muslim army soldiers; a young judge taken to a cemetery in the middle of the night and roughed up by police officers she ruled against; and dozens of teachers fired because they did not belong to the governing party.

But efforts by people who left Bosnia during the war to regain their houses and apartments dominate the caseload.

The focus these days is on Sarajevo. About a third of the once-cosmopolitan city’s population fled during the war, including large numbers of minorities--Serbs, Croats and Jews. Many of the refugees now want to return to their homes.

These houses and apartments are often occupied by other refugees. But, in the most notorious cases, SDA nationalists have taken the best homes for themselves or their political cronies. They refuse to cooperate in restoring these properties to their rightful owners or occupants.

The result, critics say, is a kind of de facto “ethnic cleansing”--perpetrated by the very Muslims who were the primary victims during the war. Muhibic believes that the top Sarajevo leadership, starting with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, simply does not want non-Muslims to return.

“These politicians see returns as defeat,” Muhibic said.

Property Ownership a Murky Concept

Property ownership is a particularly murky concept in post-Communist Bosnia. Few people actually own their homes, but they are granted lifelong occupancy rights by the government. This gives a sitting regime inordinate power over its citizens: You cross the government, you lose your home.

War further perverted the idea of ownership and entitlement. In Sarajevo, many refugees believe that those who left the city when it was surrounded and shelled by Bosnian Serb militias are traitors who saved their own skins, or even supported the enemy, and have no right to come back. Many squatters feel that they deserve the homes they occupy illegally.

Muhibic and the other ombudsmen fight day and night, with only limited success, to have new property laws enacted and enforced. Far from helping, many authorities turn their backs, Muhibic says, and a lot of time is wasted with officials who are powerless to act independently of their political godfathers. Whether the ombudsmen win will determine if the vaunted multiethnic character of Sarajevo can ever be recovered.

City officials, under pressure from Western mediators, agreed in February to create the conditions for 20,000 non-Muslim refugees to return to Sarajevo by the end of the year. By summertime, however, only 876 Serbs, Croats and Jews had been able to return to homes they fled, and mediators are threatening to halt international aid to the government if the pace does not improve.

Muslim authorities are especially incensed at criticism leveled by Muhibic because the human rights record in the areas they control is generally superior to that in areas controlled by Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb nationalists. Despite Sarajevo’s dismal record on returns, freedom of movement is greater in Muslim areas, and there is less political violence.

“But that is no reason for Sarajevo to stagnate,” Muhibic said. “Sarajevo should be the example for the rest of the country.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Nation Still Divided

Nationalism and ethnic prejudice were used to stoke 3 1/2 years of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Millions of lives were ruined. Long after the shooting stopped under a Western-imposed peace settlement, much of Bosnia remains separated along ethnic lines. But a small number of Bosnians fights the system and resists the status quo in uphill battles to make a difference and give Bosnia hope for genuine change. This series introduces a few of these men and women:

* SUNDAY: A Serb mayor’s quest to go back to a hometown now controlled by Croats reveals the complexities of refugee returns, the single greatest problem in postwar Bosnia.

* MONDAY: A Muslim reporter who remained in Serb-held territory grapples with how to live alongside the very men who abused him for his faith.

* TODAY: A Muslim judge endures threats and condemnation from fellow Muslims for standing up for what he feels is just, even if it runs counter to nationalist wishes.

* WEDNESDAY: A Serb woman in the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia ignores ethnic prejudices to help women assert their rights and rebuild their lives.

* THURSDAY: A Croat priest working in a Muslim city challenges hard-liners from both groups to preserve a Catholic community in unfriendly territory.