By Edward P. Joseph

The 19 April ‘Agreement of Principles’ between Kosovo and Serbia has spawned confusion and consternation in some circles, and euphoria in others. While Pristina and Belgrade continue to tussle over ever more detailed points, there is a risk of losing the big picture. Historical context can help restore perspective and make plain the choices and risks — principally for the Serbs living in the north of Kosovo.

In late 1992, international envoys Cyrus Vance, the former Secretary of State and David Owen, the former British Foreign Secretary paid a visit to the Serb leadership of the ‘Republika Srpska Krajina’ in Knin.  Vance had already brokered a ceasefire in Croatia which had grown into the more ambitious Vance Plan to de-escalate the conflict. During the meeting, the Serb leadership voiced strident defiance, insisting that they would never live in Croatia. Fed up, Owen addressed his Serb interlocutors in his elite British accent, stating flatly, “Well, gentlemen, this territory IS Croatia.” The comment enraged the Serbs and the meeting ended shortly thereafter. UN officials in Knin also lamented Owen’s remark: “Why did Owen have to be so blunt? This will only set us back!”

Alas, the truth was that there was little progress to set back. Implementation of the Vance Plan had already ground to a halt in the face of determined Serb intransigence. Kindness to the Serb leadership in Knin had brought the UN no serious cooperation. The tone of defiance was impressive. At one point, struggling with lack of fuel to harvest crops, the ‘RSK’ leaders vowed, “we will eat stones before we will live in Croatia!” In 1995, the Knin Serbs rejected further international mediation, including a Russian-backed peace plan known as ‘Z-4’ that would have given them broad rights and privileges in Croatia. By August of that year, the breakaway ‘RSK’ mini state in Western Slavonija and Krajina was no more. Two Croatian military operations had vanquished the Western portions of the breakaway republic, sending thousands of Serbs into exile from their homes, most never to return.

In retrospect, Owen’s impolitic words look not only prophetic but refreshingly honest. Instead of indulging the Knin Serbs in the fantasy that they lived in a real, breakaway state, he spoke the truth. Had others perhaps sent similarly bracing signals, perhaps some Serbs in Krajina might have given some consideration to the Z-4 plan, sparing them their sad fate.

While no two situations are identical the Serb experience in Krajina, and in Croatia’s Eastern Slavonija as well as Sarajevo, are still instructive for the Serbs in the north of Kosovo. One can parse the differences – and one crucial one is that an Albanian ‘Operation Storm’ in the north is utterly out of the question: unlike in Croatia, NATO is, and for some time to come will remain in charge of security in Kosovo; and unlike in Croatia, there is no Army in Kosovo. (And Kosovo’s special police units, however much they are feared, have proven they are no match for local Serbs even when the special police have the element of surprise.)

While other differences stand out, undeniably the similarities among all these cases are more prominent. Each one involves a Serb population deeply anxious about the prospects of losing its nexus to Serbia, and desperate to avoid living as a minority in a state controlled by ‘the other.’ Yet the choices the Serbs made and the outcomes they experienced were quite different:

• Krajina: The Knin Serbs dig in their heels on implementing the Vance Plan and later reject the Z-4 plan accepted by Zagreb.  They end up expelled from their homes. Croatian forces advance and even the term ‘Krajina’ is banished.

• Sarajevo:  Under direction from Pale, Sarajevo Serbs refuse to live under Federation control as per the Dayton Agreement territorial transfer of Serb municipalities in Sarajevo from the Republika Srpska.  In early1996, as the transfer takes place, the Serbs exile themselves en masse, mostly to rural parts of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, or for some, to locations in Serbia.  Many regret the move, which costs them their homes in a cosmopolitan capital for an uncertain future in a rural setting.

• Eastern Slavonija. By contrast, Serbs grudgingly accept Croatian rule and work with the international community (the UN in this case) to implement the 1995 Erdut Agreement. A UN mission, originally given only a one-year mandate, jumps into action in no nonsense fashion, neither coddling the anxious Serbs nor kowtowing to the demands of Croats. The enduring result?  According to a recent census, Serbs today remain roughly in the same proportion of the population in Vukovar as they did before the war. Vukovar, a town devastated by Serb military might, has recently seen the reappearance of street signs in Cyrillic — a clear example of the ability of Serbs to assert their minority rights in Croatia.  Recently, when Croats vocally protested such a visible symbol of Serb control in a town that is synonymous with Serb brutality and Croat victimization, the government in Zagreb sided with the Serbs.

The question for Serbs in the north of Kosovo is obvious: which of the three examples do they want to draw from?  And do we help them reach the appropriate conclusion with blunt candor or by soft-pedaling the inevitable?

It’s true that the relationship between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo has been the most bitter in the Balkans, with mutual bloodletting stretching back a full century, far longer than in either Bosnia or Croatia. It’s also true that the recent history makes anxiety in the north understandable. The displaced Serbs living in the north did not get there by accident; many fled out of well-founded fear of violent persecution from Albanians in the south. The mixed areas of north Mitrovica remain volatile, while south Mitrovica is bereft of Serbs and mostly hostile to their presence.

But the south of Kosovo at large is not similarly bereft of Serbs. Indeed, a bare majority of the Serb population in Kosovo lives south of the Ibar River.  And while the memory of the violent pogroms meted out by Albanians in March, 2004 is not forgotten, it is undeniable that the situation of Serbs in the south of Kosovo has improved. Serbs in Gracanica or Istok or Strpce may not jump for joy about living in an Albanian majority country, but by any objective measure their prospects are better. This has especially been the case since the elections of 2010, when some Serbs stood for election to the Kosovo Assembly and then joined the government.

Like the Serbs of Eastern Slavonija, these Serbs have largely accepted the reality that they are living in another country. Many have deemed it in their interests to accept the Ahtisaari Plan, which provides for an array of special rights and protections. No less a champion of Serb rights than the Serbian Orthodox Church has, likewise, embraced a fundamentally cooperative posture towards the government in Pristina. (And with good reason. The magnificent sites of Serbian Orthodox patrimony in Kosovo, like Decani and Gracanica, are located in the south.) The Church has worked closely and effectively with international organizations in Kosovo and in Republic of Kosovo institutions to realize the rights promised it under the Ahtisaari Plan.

It may not be widely known in Belgrade, but the leadership Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo generally cringes at the violence and obduracy seen in the north, recognizing that confrontation there only complicates life for the majority of Serbs who live in the south. And Church leaders also cringe at Belgrade’s infatuation with partition as a solution to the Kosovo stand-off, knowing that it will put Serb patrimony at risk. By accepting this risk, the pro-partitionist undermine Serbia’s central claim to Kosovo: that it is the cradle of Serbian nationhood.

In other words, the Serbs of the north now have not one, but two positive examples to draw from in making their choice about the way forward — one from Kosovo and one from Eastern Slavonija. Making the choice (between intransigence and cooperation) even more stark is the fact that the terms of the Ahtisaari Agreement, as amplified by the recent 19 April Agreement, are arguably the most favorable to the Serbs of any such deal in the Balkans. The Ahtisaari Agreement and 19 April may not provide for an ‘entity’, as in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, but they do provide for a more highly elaborated nexus to Serbia, with wide local control on the issues that matter the most to the Serb population.

As they – and we – ponder their choice, it is worth remembering how counterproductive the path of intransigence and violence has been. Indeed, the turning point in Serb fortunes in Kosovo (following Kosovo’s declaration of independence in February, 2008) came in July-August, 2011 when Albanian-led special police launched a failed operation to put customs and border police at the two main crossing points in north Kosovo. (The operation followed months of foot dragging by Belgrade in EU-mediated ‘technical talks’ over a number of issues including easing customs restrictions, in part through use of a ‘customs stamp’ recommended by the UN.)  A shoot-out ensued, killing an Albanian member of the special police.

Easily overlooked is that the initial reaction of Brussels, and even Washington, to the failed special police operation was to criticize the Albanian-led government in Pristina, not the Serbs.  It wasn’t until the Serbs rioted a few days later, burning down the ‘Gate 1’ crossing point north of Leposavic that international opinion changed.  In the wake of the violence, in August, 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with then President Boris Tadic and publicly demanded that Belgrade end support for the ‘parallel structures’ in the north.  The subsequent wounding of German troops by north Serbs postponed Serbia’s initial opportunity for candidacy in December, 2011, paving the way for heightened scrutiny and conditionality of its EU bid.  The recent ‘normalization’ talks mediated by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton continued the approach of strict conditionality on Belgrade, inducing the Serbian government to make far-reaching concessions.

The lesson here for the north Serbs is that intransigence and violent resistance has not paid off. The north can slow implementation, for example, as it did on the IBM (Integrated Border Management) with months of check points in the north, but in the end it can neither defeat the EU nor KFOR, nor surely the Serbian government. Serbia’s EU aspirations have led both moderate and nationalist governments to make fundamental concessions – all in the direction of loosening Serbia’s role in Kosovo and, simultaneously in the direction of implicitly accepting Pristina’s writ over the whole of its territory. (In the wake of the NATO air campaign and UN Security Council Resolution 1244 which put the UN and NATO completely in charge of Kosovo, Belgrade long ago acknowledged that it no longer controlled Kosovo.)  What happened on 19 April is the near-culmination of a process where Belgrade has gone far beyond simply accepting that it no longer controls its erstwhile province. Indeed, Serbia has tacitly recognized an international border with Kosovo, replete with customs controls – an arrangement essentially incompatible with retaining sovereignty.

To be sure, Serbia can cling to the position that it has not recognized the Republic of Kosovo, but third-countries that have hesitated to recognize Pristina surely have less reason to hesitate now. And as the international recognitions of Kosovo continue to mount, the Serbian position on Kosovo will continue to become less plausible, while the reality of Kosovo’s independence will become more so. Should friends of the Serbs living in the north shield them from these truths, out of fear that being irrational and volatile, they will explode in violence or lead an exodus of Serbs from the north into Serbia? Or, to the contrary, is ‘tough love’ and candor, in fact, the more respectful and productive approach? The best interests of the Serbs living in the north lie in reminding them of the painful choices that other Serbs – equally tethered to their homes and equally loathe to submit to the rule of the ‘other’ – have made. ‘Fair’ or not, history clearly is on the side that cooperates. (Those who rue the ‘unfairness’ of these settlements might consider the situation of other minorities in the region who find themselves on the ‘wrong’ side forced to make accommodation with a government that doesn’t fully represent their interests, or perhaps reflect on the hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks rousted from their homes in the Drina River valley and elsewhere in Bosnia at the hands of Serbs.)

Yes, there is substantial disappointment, apprehension and confusion in the north of Kosovo with impending changes.But that is no reason to slow down the pace of implementation of agreements reached so far, nor of the implementation plan still being hammered out.  To the contrary, as we have seen both in the north and elsewhere in the region, stability is generally achieved by rapid, vigorous implementation of peace agreements, not tepid delay, which only invites intransigence, unstable stalemate and, sometimes, disaster.

The way forward is as daunting as it is clear:

First, the consistent message to the north Serbs must be firm: ‘You are living in a fundamentally new situation. If you choose to cooperate, you will have the full support of the still-substantial international presence in Kosovo. And there are plenty of opportunities to make this situation work for you.  Among all actors, you alone retain the single most important advantage: your sizeable demographic dominance in the north.  As long as you don’t give that up, the way that the Sarajevo Serbs needlessly and foolishly did, you retain a huge asset that should provide substantial reassurance. The terms of agreements provide enormous opportunities for you to shape your destiny in Kosovo, keeping substantial control over your lives free from excessive interference from Pristina. On the other hand, if you choose to resist and reject, well, history suggests that your odds are not good.’

Second, after years of demonizing the Ahtisaari Agreement, the Serbian government now has the obligation of explaining its advantages. The EU must also do far more than it has to date – in partnership with the Serbian government – to explain the details of the agreement to the population of the north, and as well, to its partners in the international community, particularly in Mitrovica.

Consulting leaders in the north is fine (indeed, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic’s recent meetings seem to have achieved progress.) But slowing down implementation or deferring to spoilers would contravene some of the hardest won lessons in the region, and simply invite destabilizing grid lock. It is imperative to agree on a timetable and begin working on implementation without delay. All conditionality with respect to achieving EU aspirations – for both Belgrade and Pristina – must remain in place.

Even if the Serbs living in the north express no willingness to cooperate, the EU and its international partners, most notably KFOR, nonetheless have the responsibility to provide assurances to the population. And diplomats must continue to press Pristina to avoid the unseemly triumphalism seen after the 19 April deal was struck.

For its part, Pristina must send its own consistent signals that the north Serbs are welcome in the Republic of Kosovo, while Serbia (and the EU) take the lead in explaining the terms of the agreement. (Note that it was Alija Izetbegovic’s glaring failure to send a welcoming message to the Sarajevo Serbs during the transfer of Sarajevo municipalities in 1996 that contributed to the disastrous Serb exodus which followed. Bosniaks themselves continue to pay the price for this short-sighted policy, as the departure of the Serbs from the capital solidified Bosnia’s territorial division. Albanians in Kosovo, too, can learn from the mistakes seen in Bosnia; as unforeseen negative consequences will flow to Pristina if it abandons its commitments to the Serb community, in particular, if it even begins to take seriously calls for unity with Albania.)

Finally, for those concerned about avoiding more conflict in Kosovo, the key is to remember the core point: the status quo in the north is neither stable nor productive. Whatever responsibility that Albanians have, Serb figures in the north bear enormous, continuing responsibility for the situation. Serbs must accept their own responsibility for the parlous condition and lack of perspective in the north. Indeed, if ever there were a piece of territory and a people who could benefit from the sweeping change of a landmark compromise, it is the Serbs living in the north of Kosovo. The duty of interested outsiders is to help the population see that its interests lie in embracing this change, not fleeing from it. Implementation won’t be easy by any means; but failing to confront the bracing truth, or learning from the mistakes of the past, won’t make it any easier.

Edward P. Joseph is  a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations. He brings extensive field and conflict experience in key foreign policy theatres to his writing and speaking. Edward served on the ground in the Balkans throughout the conflict period, from 1992 to 2003, including as the Deputy Head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo until autumn 2012.

To learn more about both Serbia and Kosovo, please check out TransConflict’s reading lists series by clicking here.

What are the principles of conflict transformation?

The post Kosovo – the truth will set the Serbs in the north free appeared first on TransConflict.

By Mirjana Kosić

“Multiculturalism in Tuzla survived the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and it has weathered all the challenges of post-war reconstruction solely owing to its citizens, rather than its political elites or non-governmental sector” – Miralem Tursinovic

Over fifteen years on from the end of violent conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the consequences of war still exert a heavy influence over society. In the absence of a civic conception of state, the ethnicisation of society continues apace; leading many to describe today’s divisions as being as wide as at any point since 1995. Tuzla – from the Turkish word for ‘salt mine’, a reference to its extensive deposits of this once valuable commodity – is home to some 180,000 citizens, including many displaced by the conflict of the early-nineties. In spite of the demographic turbulence that BiH has endured, Tuzla has remained largely multi-ethnic in composition, with Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Croats and Serbs residing side-by-side. The town is part of Tuzla Canton; one of the ten cantons that make-up the Federation of BiH, one of the two entities which form part of BiH’s complicated governance structure.

In the immediate post-war period, a significant number of NGOs in BiH were established and supported almost entirely by the international community. However, given the turbulent political dynamics afflicting the country, the focus of attention has largely shifted onto political parties and processes, leaving a large number of these organisations to rely upon their own resources. At the same time, by focusing its agenda on BiH’s European integration, the international community now insists on regional initiatives and cross-border cooperation, completely underestimating the fact that the key elements for such cooperation are still underdeveloped or often completely lacking.

Having perceived the need for support and technical assistance to youth organisations throughout BiH, the Youth Resource Center (YRC) was established in Tuzla in 2004. Since then, YRC has developed an impressive portfolio of activities and has become a member of a number of international and regional initiatives and networks.

As Miralem Tursinovic, YRC’s director, asserts,

“[the] non-governmental sector in BiH is in many ways the mirror-image of its social picture: on the one end, there are a few well-established organisations which dominate the scene and absorb the bulk of international support, and on the other end, there is a number of small grass-root organisations scattered around BiH whose functioning is enabled thanks to small grants. As a result, in the past 3-4 years almost 30-40% organisations either closed down or are now dormant.”

Tursinovic goes on to emphasize that:

“[the NGO sector in BiH] has no common vision nor perceived common interest; it is therefore extremely difficult to achieve consensus on pertinent issues and simply work for the benefit of all citizens, regardless of their ethnic, religious or national background.”

With respect to the legacies of the conflict of the nineties, Tursinovic notes how:

“The major consequence of ethnic division of the country are generations of young people who do not know anything about the ‘other’, and whose antagonism towards that ‘other’ is not based on fear or inherent hatred, but rather on a complete lack of understanding the other – namely, sheer ignorance and absence of opportunities to get to know each other.”

Tursinovic cites as an example his experience from the Podrinje region, bordering the river Drina, where a few years ago YRC organised a camp for young people. When asked to complete evaluation sheets and to make recommendations regarding potential future activities, quite a few of them said that in the future they would like “to meet some Croats”.

However, further ethnic separation continues to manifest itself in various aspects of life. As Tursinovic points out,

“Until several years ago in Tuzla, the language taught at schools – both elementary and high schools – was referred to as Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, whereby all three variants were equally represented (in terms of alphabet, grammar, orthography and lexicon, etc.), as well as three distinct literatures…[whilst] there was also a department for Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy. However, a couple of years ago, the Cantonal authorities made a questionnaire for parents, asking them to choose which language they wanted their children to learn and in which language their certificates (with final grades) would be written – by doing that, they simply ‘forced’ people to declare themselves as belonging to or representing one of the groups.”

Due to a lack of progress over these past fifteen years, Tursinovic explains how, the “segregation of society, compounded by the grim economic situation and future prospects, has shaped an often prevalent passivity amongst young people and an attitude of blaming others – for example, politicians, other ethnic groups, the international community – for their individual situation.”

Tursinovic’s criticism of the international community also extends to its insistence upon the idea of ‘reconciliation’ between ethnic groups and individuals. For Tursinovic:

“Reconciliation is a somewhat ‘problematic’ term, since one cannot reconcile those who have never fell apart – as a matter of fact, a majority of ‘ordinary’ people – and an insistence on it has slowed down the process of normalisation of mutual relations. Instead, reconciliation necessitates the truth – and that is what all actors engaged in this process in BiH have to work on, even if the truth is unpleasant and difficult to accept.”

Tursinovic also describes ‘tolerance’ as a term that is frequently misused and manipulated within BiH, primarily because it has been too frequently and too lightly used in the day-to-day discourse of politicians, international representatives and NGOs, so that it has become vacuous. The term translated into local languages means “to be able to suffer someone or something”, which has a somewhat negative connotation – “to be able to suffer/cope with” is not the same as “to be able to accept the other as such”, and that is one of the missions of YRC”.

Miralem’s personal mission – as well as that of YRC – is to continue facilitating and promoting the power of youth by offering various forms of informal education and trainings, facilitating networking and connecting young people throughout the region as a precondition for building a safe, secure, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. For Tursinovic:

“Reconciliation can only be truly achieved if young people start communicating and connecting on a more comprehensive level, by visiting other parts of BiH, breaking the walls, demistifying imposed notions of the ‘other’ and ‘enemy’, finding common interests and objectives.”

Mirjana Kosić is the co-founder and executive director of TransConflict Serbia.

This article was originally published in Insight on Conflict and is available by clicking here.

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What are the principles of conflict transformation?

The post Bosnia and Herzegovina today – the view from Tuzla appeared first on TransConflict.

By Jan Muś

On 19th April, an agreement was signed in Brussels between the governments of Serbia and Kosovo on “principles governing the normalisation of relations”, which was followed by approval from Kosovo’s parliament and the Serbian government. The agreement deals with a number of disputed issues between Belgrade and Prishtina, especially the status of the four municipalities in northern Kosovo inhabited by about 40,000 Serbs which have remained outside Prishtina’s control. A compromise was reached over many of the contentious issues including police, education, urban planning, economics, culture, and the health & community organisations of the Serbian municipalities in Kosovo. By 15th June, an agreement on telecommunications and energy issues will be announced.

The agreement has been interpreted differently by both sides. The authorities in Kosovo claim that it represents Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo as a de facto state, whereas the Serbian side maintains that the agreement will ensure the autonomy of the Serbian municipalities, and that establishing good relations with Kosovo does not amount to a recognition of its independence. However, these agreements do not guarantee Kosovo’s international recognition or its membership in the United Nations and other international organisations. Nor do they give autonomy to the Serbian communities; the community of Serbian municipalities will only have executive and coordinative powers.

The normalisation of relations between Kosovo and Serbia is a prerequisite by the EU for continuing the process of the European integration of the two states. After signing the agreement on 22 April, the European Commission recommended the opening of accession negotiations with Serbia, and of negotiations on a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with Kosovo. In this case the German position will be decisive. Although the German government received the signature of the document with satisfaction, Berlin also made it clear that it expects the agreement’s provisions to be implemented effectively. Negotiated under the auspices of the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, it may form the basis for accelerating the process of integrating Serbia and Kosovo into the EU, but nevertheless it does not pre-suppose the development of such a scenario.

Guarantees for the Serbs in Kosovo

The 15-point agreement primarily concerns the status of the Serbian municipalities in Kosovo, and provides for their voluntary association. This will therefore include both four municipalities in northern Kosovo and the municipalities inhabited mostly by Serbs in the country’s interior. This solution only partially meets the expectations of Belgrade, which seeks to strengthen the Serbian minority institutionally and politically, especially in the four northern municipalities. The community authorities will coordinate the municipalities’ activities within their executive powers in the fields of urban planning, education, culture and health. The community is to represent the municipalities in their relations with Prishtina, but it will not have its own competences, apart from any which may be delegated by the central government. In this way, the Serbian local community’s competences will not generally go beyond those of Kosovo’s other municipalities, although it will provide a platform for the leaders of the Serbian community to represent its interests.

The mayors of the four Serbian municipalities in northern Kosovo will be able to submit a list of candidates from which Kosovo’s interior minister will select the local police commander in northern Kosovo. The matter of who takes up this position will therefore depend on agreement between the authorities in Prishtina and the leaders of the four Serbian municipalities. The Serbian police structures already existing in the north will be incorporated into the Kosovo police. The police forces are to be fully funded from the Kosovo state budget; the agreement does not specify whether the Serbian institutions in Kosovo will continue to be funded by Belgrade, which may prove to be an area of future conflict. In matters relating to the judiciary in Kosovo, the Serbian municipalities will be responsible for a specific department appellate court in Prishtina, composed of judges representing the Kosovo Serbs. In addition, Serbia’s Prime Minister Ivica Dacic has stated that he has received assurances from NATO’s Secretary General Anders Rasmussen, in the presence of Catherine Ashton, that the Kosovo army would not enter the Serb-inhabited municipalities in the north of the country.

Relations between Serbia and Kosovo

Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo is the most important demand of the Prishtina authorities. The agreement makes only limited reference to relations between Kosovo and Serbia; the penultimate paragraph of the document requires the parties to refrain from mutually impeding their progress in integrating with the European Union. During the negotiations, the Serbian side requested similar wording relating to the UN and the OSCE to be removed. Kosovo did not insist on this because the agreement and its signature by the Prime Ministers of both countries was most important to it; according to Kosovo’s leaders, this indicates that the document constituted an agreement between two states. The Serbian government unanimously adopted the document, but it has avoided taking any actions which would demonstrate that it has recognised Kosovo as a state. Therefore, the debate in the Serbian parliament called for 26 April does not mean that the agreement is subject to a process of ratification, which would be appropriate for agreements between states. Thus, the nature of the agreement is open to an asymmetric interpretation. It is unlikely that Kosovo and Serbia will agree on its true nature any time in the near future.

Challenges and threats to the agreement

The agreement is an important step in the direction of establishing good-neighbourly relations between the two countries, although it does not determine the ultimate success of the Kosovo/Serbian dialogue. To improve relations between the countries and their prospects for being integrated into the EU, the smooth implementation of the agreement will be essential. The biggest challenge to it is the scepticism of the Serbs living in northern Kosovo and of representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church. In recent months, the Serbs in northern Kosovo have been taking a more independent stance from Belgrade; the leaders of the four municipalities rejected the agreement calling for a referendum on the issue. The Serbian Orthodox Church, for its part, has accused the Serbian government of surrendering Kosovo in exchange for the prospect of accelerating the process of European integration. Kosovo Albanians in turn have welcomed the agreement.

The question of how to implement the agreement remains open. It provides for the creation of a special Kosovar/Serbian committee to deal with its implementation. Not specified in the document, however, is who would be able to join the committee, or what competences such persons will be granted.

Implications for the EU enlargement process

The agreement removes a major barrier to the integration of Serbia and Kosovo with the EU, but it does not conclusively establish any specific date to start Serbia’s accession negotiations or Kosovo’s association talks. The European Commission and the European Parliament clearly recommend these actions; and many European leaders have also expressed similar sentiments. A much more muted reaction, however, has come from Berlin; the German government has stated that the agreements are only the first step towards an expected ‘normalisation’ of relations. Germany may demand rigorous implementation of the agreement before the date for starting accession talks is fixed (i.e. at the Council meeting in June), perhaps by imposing conditional clauses for its approval. Serbia has made far-reaching concessions in order to be granted the June deadline, and it is depending on at least a partial and visible implementation of the agreement by then.

Jan Muś currently teaches courses on contemporary Balkan politics and on history of Balkan conflicts at the Catholic University of Lublin and Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Born in Poland, Jan has spent a considerable amount of time in the Balkans as a volunteer in a refugee camp, and later on as a researcher and scholar. He has cooperated with, and worked for, a number of public and private institutions involved in the affairs in South Eastern Europe.

This article was originally published by the Centre for Eastern Studies, a research institution dealing with analyses and forecast studies of the political, social and economic situation in the countries neighbouring Poland and in the Baltic Sea region, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

To learn more about both Serbia and Kosovo, please check out TransConflict’s reading lists series by clicking here.

What are the principles of conflict transformation?

The post Agreement between Kosovo and Serbia appeared first on TransConflict.

By Alex de Waal

For most of my adult life I introduced myself as an “activist” first and a writer, researcher, or practitioner of humanitarian action or peacemaking second. Then, about seven or eight years ago, I became rather uncomfortable with the word. Not because I had diluted my personal commitment to working in solidarity with suffering and oppressed people, but because a group of people, in whose company I didn’t want to be, were claiming not only to be activists but to define “activism” itself. I am speaking of course about the policy lobbyists in Washington DC, also known as “designer activists,” who took on the role of promoting certain causes related to Africa, and who arrogated to themselves the privilege of defining these problems and identifying and pursuing ostensible solutions. It was no accident that those purported solutions placed the “activists” themselves at the center of the narrative, because many of them were Hollywood actors—or their hangers on—for whom the only possible role is as the protagonist-savior. The actions they promoted all had one thing in common: using more U.S. power around the world.

I was not the only one to find this arrogation of “activism” offensive, demeaning and counter-productive. One of the most refreshing aspects of our recent seminar at the World Peace Foundation was finding out just how much the consensus among national civil society activists from Uganda and Congo, as well as Sudan, has coalesced around the view that the basic narratives and policy prescriptions of the Enough Project and its ilk are not only simplified and simplistic, but actually pernicious. Theirs isn’t activism: it’s insider lobbying within the Washington establishment using celebrity hype as leverage. They are not just a benign variant of advocacy, perhaps somewhat simplified: they are wrong.

It’s time to reclaim activism. It’s time to reassert some of the fundamental principles that made activism an honorable vocation and practice.

Some of the principles are contained in blog posts relating to our February-March seminar, easily findable under the tag “advocacy.” Let me outline three such principles.

First, activism should be undertaken in partnership with affected people, under their leadership. It should facilitate those people defining the problem for themselves—it is only by defining their problem that they can ever be master of it, rather than it becoming master of them. It should be sensitive to their leadership. Activists should be alert to the possibility that local people will be dazzled by the illusory prospect of outside salvation and surrender their own leadership to their supposed foreign friends. And so activists should approach the people with whom they hope to act, in a spirit of humility and self-effacement. That is the practice of solidarity.

Second, activism should seek truth and speak truth. That means being honest to the facts, and doing the hard work of finding out realities, and when required, changing one’s mind accordingly. There should be no sacrifice of uncomfortable and complicated truths for the sake of simple messages that foreign audiences can understand and to which they can relate easily. A central part of activism is the hard intellectual work of understanding.

Third, activism should challenge power. That doesn’t mean abandoning the pragmatics of calculating effort and impact, of calibrating intermediate and strategic goals. But it does require being honest about where the greatest concentrations of power lie, and how that power is utilized, and making that power uncomfortable, at least. Lobbying that merely adjusts the trajectory of super-power policies, in directions that are not uncomfortable for that superpower to shift, is not challenging power, but giving power an alibi. The U.S. government didn’t need the Enough Project to know that bad things were happening in Darfur, that Joseph Kony is a villain, and that the war in eastern Congo is causing desperate suffering. But maybe it needs principled and brave people to tell it that the interventions in Somalia, Libya and Mali are deeply problematic, that its friends in power in Juba, Kampala and Kigali need to be more honest and less militaristic. “Activists” who pick only on the already-identified bad guys are at best activists-lite, whose inconvenience to policymakers is that handling them takes up precious time. If these policy lobbyists did mount such challenges, they might lose some of their insider access and glamour, but they might gain our respect.

So: three clear principles to guide an individual or organization aspiring to the honorable term “activist.” One: act in solidarity and support of the affected people, and don’t impose on them. Two: be honest to the facts, and open to inquiry into the facts. And when the facts change, change your mind. Three: be ready to challenge the biggest powers: the U.S. government and its allies.

Alex de Waal is Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, which aims to provide intellectual leadership on issues of peace, justice and security.  It is the Foundation’s belief that innovative research and teaching are critical to the challenges of making peace around the world, and should go hand in hand with advocacy and practical engagement with the toughest issues. As the Foundation enters its second century, its underlying theme is reinventing peace for the globalizing world.

This article was originally published on Reinventing Peace, the World Peace Foundation‘s blog.

What are the principles of conflict transformation?

The post Reclaiming activism appeared first on TransConflict.

By Momčilo Pavlović

After the Albanian demonstrations of 1981, the mobilization of Kosovo Serbs began and developed largely in response to changes in the political context and within a political environment that was not totally unfavorable to the action of grassroots groups from this ethnonational group. This mobilization of the Kosovo Serbs played an important part in the political struggles in late socialist Yugoslavia. The controversy and debate revolve around the contention by many specialists that throughout the 1980s Kosovo Serbs were little more than the passive recipients of the actions and attitudes of elites and counterelites. The specialists claim that the mobilization of various groups within this community was inspired, organized, and coordinated by the officials of Milošević’s regime or by Serb nationalist intellectuals, or both. In fact, this was a grassroots mobilization.(41)

The mobilization of Kosovo Serbs, rooted in their discontent with the changing ethnic composition of Kosovo and the post-1966 change in interethnic politics, was initiated and spread principally by various grassroots groups within this community. The grievances of Kosovo Serbs could not translate into collective action in a political system that opposed any reference to their concerns, but they accumulated over time and eventually resulted in a high level of politicization of Kosovo’s Serbs. As a local observer put it, “in the southern socialist autonomous province each and every head of a Serb household who takes himself seriously keeps a library of petitions, appeals, pamphlets and newspaper clippings.”(42) The political change ultimately opened space for the collective action of various groups of Kosovo Serbs. In 1981, protests of Kosovo Albanians swept the autonomous province. As we have seen, a student protest over socioeconomic issues turned into large-scale demonstrations with some calling for a republic of Kosovo, even union with Albania. The government declared a state of emergency, deployed tanks and security forces, closed schools and factories, and suppressed demonstrations. The scale of the protests apparently surprised the federal leadership and raised fears of a major separatist movement. Officials now increasingly paid attention to the complaints alleging inequalities facing the non-Albanian population in terms of the use of language, access to jobs in the state-controlled part of the economy, allocation of public housing, and inadequate protection of their rights and property by the courts and law enforcement agencies. Kosovo’s officials came under much closer scrutiny by the federal leadership, and Albanian-Serb relations in Kosovo ceased to be their exclusive domain. The prevention of Serb emigration and redress of the Serbs’ other concerns now became part of the party’s policy.

The political change raised the expectations of Kosovo Serbs that the authorities would fully address their concerns. Soon, however, many from the community felt that the new policy did not begin to address all of their concerns, and emigration continued. Some believed that high officials in Yugoslavia and Serbia were not aware of the scope of the problem; therefore, they arranged a number of private meetings, sometimes involving large delegations, with officials and other people they thought to be influential. They met, for example, with Nikola Ljubičić, president of Serbia’s state presidency (1982–1984); with party officials in Montenegro; with Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, a retired member of Tito’s old guard; with Branko Pešić, a Belgrade mayor; and many others.(43) In most cases the delegations were given a sympathetic hearing and assurances that the party’s policies, including initiatives aimed at halting the emigration of Serbs, would be implemented.

Simultaneously, a growing number of ordinary people, mainly in predominantly Serb settlements, attended local meetings of official political organizations, mostly those of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People (SAWP, formerly the People’s Front), to raise their concerns. In Kosovo Polje, a suburb of Priština with a dominant Serb population, roughly thirty political outsiders regularly debated various issues and forwarded the meetings’ minutes to officials at all levels, from Priština and Kosovo to Serbia and the federation. Although remaining within the boundaries of officially permitted dissent, they increasingly laid blame for any inequalities on Kosovo’s officials, both Albanians and Serbs. Early on the core members of this group, namely Kosta Bulatović, Boško Budimirović, and Miroslav Šolević, jointly prepared the meetings and gradually shifted the agenda from local problems to the issues of broader political significance.(44) Parallel developments unfolded in other predominantly Serb settlements.

Although Priština’s and Kosovo’s officials periodically attended the meetings in Kosovo Polje, the debaters felt that the authorities would not take their problems seriously unless they gained broader support among Kosovo’s Serbs. Bulatović, Budimirović and Šolević, therefore, extended their activities beyond the official organizations and started mobilizing support at the grass roots. In 1985, they extended the core group to include informal advisors Zoran Grujić, a university professor, and Dušan Ristić, a former chief Kosovo official. They agreed that the post-1981 party’s policy aimed at ending the politics of inequality and emigration of Serbs was adequate and that they should simply press the authorities to implement the policy.(45) In late October 1985, the Kosovo Polje group sent a petition to officials in Yugoslavia and Serbia. They protested against discrimination against Kosovo Serbs and asked for the protection of their rights and the establishment of law and order. They pointed out that Kosovo was becoming increasingly “ethnically clean” of Serbs, accused Kosovo’s officials of the tacit approval of the forced migration of Serbs out of the region, and demanded that Yugoslavia’s and Serbia’s authorities bring that trend to a halt.(46) About 2,000 people signed the petition within ten days, and by April 1986, the number of signatories had multiplied several times.

In 1986, prominent activists initiated several highly visible protests and a series of small-scale local protest events. In late February, early April, and early November, they sent large delegations to the capital to meet officials of Yugoslavia and Serbia. The protest events also included a very visible protest march of several hundred people that unfolded under the label of collective emigration just before the party congress in May, as well as a number of large public meetings in Kosovo Polje, including one before Serbia’s party leader Ivan Stambolić.(47) There were also a series of small-scale protests across the autonomous province, mostly in the form of public meetings or outdoor public gatherings, organized in response to specific cases of nationalist-related violence. As people became aware of the advantages of noninstitutional action, they started petitioning local authorities, and sometimes managers of large state enterprises, to protest against discrimination at work.(48)

The main consequence of various post-1981 initiatives was the incipient and unconnected networks of activists and supporters in towns and villages inhabited by Serbs. Throughout 1986 the Kosovo Polje group, including the newly arrived Bogdan Kecman, worked to link the emerging local networks into a more powerful political force. Each of them took responsibility for a specific area of Kosovo and worked to strengthen links between the existing activists in the area, recruit new ones, and inform potential supporters about their initiatives. Before long the Kosovo Polje group could mobilize small groups of activists for protest events in and outside Kosovo within a few hours.(49) The activists’ demands, which initially focused on the lack of protection by the law enforcement agencies and courts and inequalities in the public sector, gradually evolved toward constitutional issues. The protesters asserted that if the provincial officials were unable to guarantee protection to Serbs then Kosovo should be brought back under the jurisdiction of Serbia’s authorities.(50)

Officials tolerated the mobilization for several reasons. Firstly, the highly decentralized political structure of socialist Yugoslavia, based partly on national rights and identities, encouraged groups to mobilize along national lines. After 1981 officials had already acknowledged the grievances of Kosovo Serbs and put emphasis on forestalling their emigration. Unlike Kosovo Albanian protesters in 1981, who had aimed at important constitutional change, Kosovo Serbs demanded little more than implementation of the existing party policy, which was much less likely to trigger repression. Serbs, though a minority group in Kosovo, constituted a majority in Serbia as a whole and a plurality in Yugoslavia, which rendered their concerns more urgent for Yugoslavia’s political class. Other political changes also mattered. The change of political generations in the first half of the 1980s brought younger politicians into the highest regional offices, and many of them felt that repression against ordinary people would go against the values of their generation. Growing elite disunity, rooted in the decentralized political structure and intensified during leadership succession, had already resulted in deadlock at the federal level and now thwarted attempts to reach a common position on the grassroots protest.

Secondly, the modest scale of mobilization and its limited potential for expansion, which sharply distinguished it from the 1981 mobilization of Kosovo Albanians, were also important. The movement of a minority group in a peripheral region hardly posed a threat to the regime. Officials were mainly concerned about the potential implications for political stability at the center because protesters’ demands were potentially highly resonant with Serbs outside Kosovo. Major protests of Kosovo Serbs that centered on the capital, such as the the May 1986 march, were therefore prevented. Officials often issued public threats to prominent activists, especially after the October 1985 petition, and Bulatović was briefly jailed in early April 1986. Thirdly, activists opted for moderate protest strategies and repeatedly stressed that their protest was not antisystemic. The protests often unfolded under the auspices of the SAWP partly because officials rarely tolerated openly noninstitutional initiatives and partly because the minority constituency of the movement ruled out large-scale discontent. The highly decentralized political structure of socialist Yugoslavia—including complex relationships between organs of Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Kosovo; a high level of local autonomy; and a large number of official organizations—provided space for the activists to organize, recruit new supporters and appeal for support.

From the early 1980s various groups of Kosovo Serbs sought contacts with influential people. Activists kept in touch with some earlier Kosovo Serb migrants, such as the managers of state enterprises and middle-rank officials in the capital and reporters for the Belgrade media based in the province. The confidants helped by identifying targets for appeal outside Kosovo because the activists knew little about institutional structure and informal political alliances, and they commented on protest strategies. Activists also established contact with dissident intellectuals, including Dobrica Ćosić, a well-known dissident novelist who had been purged from the party over the policy on Kosovo in 1968. Ćosić supported their cause and suggested that they make use of all legal channels. Other contacts from the Belgrade dissident circles urged radical action early on and claimed that protests of Kosovo Serbs in the capital would trigger demonstrations by hundreds of thousands.(51) Ćosić claims that he initiated the October 1985 petition at a meeting with a number of Kosovo Serbs but that a Belgrade journalist, an earlier Serb migrant from Kosovo, actually wrote the first draft.(52) This is probably true. Although Kosta Bulatović claimed that he initiated and drafted the petition, other prominent activists suspected that the Belgrade journalist, a friend of Bulatović, wrote the text.(53)

In January 1986, some 200 Belgrade-based intellectuals signed a petition supporting the cause of Kosovo Serbs, and the writers’ union subsequently held a number of protest meetings. A number of dissident intellectuals had already initiated a debate on Kosovo a year before, partly from the perspective of a revisionist history of Serb-Albanian relations and partly focusing on the current grievances of Kosovo Serbs.(54) Without doubt the dissident intellectuals’ actions alerted the general public in central Serbia to the concerns of Kosovo Serbs and made a strong impression on officials throughout Yugoslavia and Serbia. However, this was only a part of the intellectuals’ sweeping critique of the Communist regime and had little to do with either the creation or consolidation of the local protest networks. There was little difference between a few meetings of activists with Ćosić and their contacts with other potential allies, insofar as the activists initiated nearly all of them. The significance of the October 1985 petition, drafted by the intellectuals, did not lie in its content; the same demands had featured prominently in the activists’ discussions in the official organizations. The Kosovo Polje group had even drafted a similar petition two years before but collected only around seventy signatures.(55) The 1985 petition became important because nearly 2,000 Kosovo Serbs signed the text within ten days and thus demonstrated strong commitment to their cause despite a widespread fear of job loss or imprisonment.

Nor were the dissident intellectuals the only group that helped publicize the cause of the emerging movement. Kosovo Serb war veterans occasionally supported some activists’ demands and demanded resignations of various Kosovo officials, both Albanians and Serbs. Before initiating any major protest event, prominent activists tested their ideas with at least some of their confidants to find out whether the chosen targets and timing were appropriate. While seeking contact with, and advice from, various quarters, the protest organizers made decisions on protest strategies on their own. They firmly believed that people at the grassroots level understood their problems best and could make appropriate decisions. More importantly, they were painfully aware that they, and not their confidants, would have to suffer the consequences of any wrong moves.(56)

Kosovo under autonomy is a component of the larger Scholars’ Initiative ‘Confronting Yugoslav Controversies’ (Second Edition), the extracts of which will be published on TransConflict.com every Friday.

References

41) See for example Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, BBC, 1996), 34–47, 58–59; Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 47–55; Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 339–43; and Mertus, chapter 2.

42) Aleksandar Tijanić, Šta će biti s nama (Zagreb: Globus, 1988), 130–31.

43) For an account of one of the meetings see excerpts from the diary of Draza Marković in Mirko Djekić, Upotreba Srbije: optužbe i priznanja Draže Markovića (Belgrade: Besede, 1990), 209–10.

44) Boško Budimirović and Miroslav Šolević, interviews by N. Vladisavljevic, 15 and 17 July 2001, respectively.

45) Boško Budimirović and Miroslav Šolević, interviews, and Dušan Ristić in Miloš Antić, “Srbija nema rešenje za Kosovo,” Borba, 11 February 1993.

46) “Zahtevi 2016 stanovnika Kosova,” Književne novine, 15 December 1985.

47) For details see Vladisavljević, “Nationalism, Social Movement Theory, and the Grass Roots Movement of Kosovo Serbs,” 772–73.

48) See, for example, “Šta je ko rekao u Kosovu Polju: stenografske beleške razgovora u noći 24. i 25. IV 1987,” Borba, 8, 9–10, and 11 April 1987.

49) Boško Budimirović, Miroslav Šolević, and Bogdan Kecman, interviews by Vladisavljević, 29 August 2000.

50) See “Šta su Kosovci rekli u Skupštini,” NIN, 23 and 30 March, and 6 and 13 April 1986, and “Šta je ko rekao u Kosovu Polju.”

51) Miroslav Šolević and Boško Budimirović, interviews. See also Dobrica Ćosić, Piščevi zapisi, 1981–1991 (Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 2002), 169–70, 186–88.

52) Ćosić, Piščevi zapisi, 169–70.

53) Boško Budimirović and Miroslav Šolević, interviews.

54) For details on the views and actions of the intellectuals in relation to Kosovo see Jasna Dragović-Soso, “Saviours of the Nation”: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (London: Hurst, 2002), chapter 3. For the text of the intellectuals’ petition see ”Zahtev za pravnim poretkom na Kosovu,” in Aleksa Djilas, ed., Srpsko
pitanje (Belgrade: Politika, 1991), 260–61.

55) Šolević, interview.

56) Šolević, interview

What are the principles of conflict transformation?

The post Kosovo Serbs, Serbian nationalist intellectuals, and officials of the Milošević Regime appeared first on TransConflict.

By Gerard M. Gallucci

It’s too early to say that last month’s agreement between Belgrade and Pristina is unraveling.  But the way forward is certainly not clear.  Pristina is fidgeting but so far patient while Belgrade seems to be getting nowhere in convincing the north Kosovo Serbs to cooperate.  Belgrade has alternated between warnings of consequences for northern leaders who don’t follow its lead and suggestions that it is open to working with them on defining the details for implementation.  Back-and-forth about a possible referendum has given way to a possible constitutional court challenge.  Meanwhile, the EU keeps reminding Belgrade that it expects implementation and the clock is ticking down to June.

As noted before, the change being demanded of the north Kosovo Serbs needs more time than the next two months to be absorbed.  The northerners need space to consider their own bottom lines.  And everyone needs more time to fill in crucial details of an agreement that seems to place the north firmly within a Kosovo framework.  Clarity about how continued links to Belgrade – and Pristina’s exact role in funding northern structures (without controlling them) – fit into the overall approach might help the northerners think about their options.

Implicit behind the 15-point agreement has been elements already contained within the Ahtisaari Plan, such as continued funding from Belgrade and “enhanced” competencies for North Mitrovica with university education and a hospital.  The Plan also adds depth to an understanding of how the Association of Serb Municipalities could work.  In some ways, the Belgrade-Pristina agreement seems to go a bit further than Ahtisaari – such as the separate regional police commander and northern appeals court – but it doesn’t explicitly incorporate important pieces of the Plan.  The EU should stop fussing over deadlines and instead focus on bringing the outline agreement into the context of what the Ahtisaari Plan already provides and adapting it into a framework for implementation.

For such progress to be made, there needs to be a second set of negotiations, this time with the northern Kosovo Serbs.  As long as they resist implementation, little can be done peacefully.  Belgrade faces this challenge directly as it cannot simply run over the northerners.  It may threaten measures against those who resist but the most likely immediate result of cutting support or trying to remove local leaders would be to cast the north off on its own.  This could lead to violence and/or partition.  As the the EU presumably does not want either, they should support Belgrade in finding a negotiated result rather than continue to threaten progress on membership.  The US can help by making clear to Pristina that further flexibility may be required.

Everyone else can help by refraining from painting the agreement as some form of recognition by Serbia of Kosovo statehood.   The agreement should be seen instead as a possibly useful practical approach to the continued disagreement over Kosovo status.  Yes, Belgrade’s decision to be practical about its loss of control over Kosovo is a step forward.  But it does not abandon Serbia’s position that Kosovo is not an independent state.  Indeed, it offers the only real approach that allows practical adjustments while both Belgrade and Pristina remain unable to agree on fundamentals.

This is how it works:  Belgrade can allow the northern Kosovo Serbs to be subject to Kosovo’s legal and political framework – but not to Pristina’s actual control – by seeing it not as an independent state but, in effect, as a province beyond control.  The northern Kosovo Serbs can accept being part of Kosovo in the same light and also as a way to keep alive Serbia’s presence in the territory.  Meanwhile, Pristina can continue to assert its statehood.  This might be seen as a form of self-deception.  But it might be more productive to view it as artful ambiguity, the kind that allows movement forward while people on both sides of the Ibar continue to fundamentally disagree about which country they live in.

Gerard M. Gallucci is a retired US diplomat and UN peacekeeper. He worked as part of US efforts to resolve the conflicts in Angola, South Africa and Sudan and as Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council. He served as UN Regional Representative in Mitrovica, Kosovo from July 2005 until October 2008 and as Chief of Staff for the UN mission in East Timor from November 2008 until June 2010.

To read TransConflict’s policy paper, entitled ‘The Ahtisaari Plan and North Kosovo’, please click here.

To read other articles by Gerard for TransConflict, please click here. If you are interested in responding to this article, please do not hesitate to contact us by clicking here.

To learn more about both Serbia and Kosovo, please check out TransConflict’s reading lists series by clicking here.

What are the principles of conflict transformation?

The post Kosovo – more negotiations appeared first on TransConflict.

What are the principles of conflict transformation?

 “Our contemporaneity is manifested as a time when we analyse everything. The present is not only a transitory instance, but becomes a site of permanent rewriting of the past and the future, of permanent rewriting of history.” – Boris Groys

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, Europe entered a new historical era. Marked by its Communist past and a European Union future, many of the countries have undergone radical changes in the last 23 years. The countries of the Balkans and their people, though neighbours, do not share the same personal, historical, political and social experience of these changes. As a result, even their expectations about the future are different.

What questions and issues about the past and the future are important for the present? How are the Balkans, with all its diversity, rewriting their past and reinventing their future? How to translate or embody this into moving images?

Young artists up to the age of 35 from the Balkan region and beyond (Southeast Europe) are invited to send their own short film related to this year’s topic.

The submission period will run until the 1st of June 2013, and the festival will take place in Bucharest in September 2013. Share your standpoint through your short film!

More information on how to apply is available on the Balkans Beyond Borders website, Facebook page, Twitter or through email.

Balkans Beyond Borders is a non profit organization formed by nine young individuals from South East Europe. Its overall goal is to promote youth mobility and cooperation in the Balkan region and enhance the European “identity” amongst them. This is achieved in four ways: through a thematic short film festival, film making workshops, a wide network of young individuals and seminars.

What are the principles of conflict transformation?

The post Reinventing bridges appeared first on TransConflict.

To read other articles on Confronting Extremism, please click here.

By Vladimir Ninković

International contacts between political organizations are a perfectly normal thing; contacts between organizations fostering radical left or right wing views less so. In the cordial contacts maintained by almost all Serbian far right parties and organizations with their Russian counterparts, there are some obvious peculiarities.

The story of the two Obraz could be considered a “not so peculiar” one. The Serbian Obraz is “the older brother” of the two; an unusual fact given that the influences have normally been exerted in the opposite direction. The Serbian Obraz was banned by a decision of the Serbian Constitutional Court in July 2012, whilst their leader, Mladen Obradovic, was sentenced to two-years in prison for threats and hate speech towards the LGBT population, as well as for coordinating violent protests during the 2010 Pride Parade. The sentence was suspended in February 2013 by the Serbian Appellate Court.

The younger brother, on the other hand, is still active. According to the Russian based web-portal, ‘Right World’, the Obraz brand was brought from Serbia to Russia by a young historian, Ilya Goryachev, in the autumn of 2002. The creation of Obraz in Russia in 2007 was authorized by members of the main board of the Serbian Obraz. From 2006 to 2007, Ilya Goryachev served as an assistant to Nikolai Kuryanovich - from Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) – a deputy of the State Duma.

In 2012, Goryachev co-founded the Right-Wing Conservative Alliance (Pravo-Konservativny Alyans), which declared Vojislav Seselj – the founder of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), currently on trial at The Hague for war crimes - an honorary citizen of Moscow. The initiative followed Goryachev’s visit to the Serbian parliament as a guest of the SRS, together with his fiancée,  the leader of Italian Forza Nuova, Roberta Fiore, and a member of banned Serbian neo-Nazi, National Alignment (Nacionalni Stroj), Miodrag Milikić.

The Right-Wing Conservative Alliance and Russian Obraz maintain contacts with with far-right parties and movements from all over Europe – including the Serbian Radical Party, Forza Nuova, the English Democrats, Golden Dawn etc. – and are apparently rather critical about the current Russian government, who they see as a “false union of the conservative forces with liberals and leftist”.

Things get more complicated if we monitor the activities of the most media-exposed far-right organization since the banning of Obraz; namely, SNP Naši. In a recent trip to Moscow – recounted in detail on their website – SNP Naši were hosted by an organization called the Kosovo Front, whose leader, Alexander Kravchenko was a volunteer in the Serbian paramilitary units during the wars of the nineties. The Serbian representatives also allegedly met with Russian experts participating in drafting the law on foreign agents and seeking a one-hundred year ban of gay propaganda; two models that SNP Naši seek replication of in Serbia. One of the laws co-authors stated that they would provide precise translation of the laws to aid SNP Naši’s efforts.

Representatives of SNP Naši also visited the Sergey Radonitzky Church, next to which a new Orthodox temple is being built. In the basement of the new church – allegedly with the blessing of the local priest, Father Sergey – is an “Orthodox military-sports club”, which trains young men in military and survival techniques. According to the SNP Naši website, the members also receive talks from priests in order to “strengthen their spirit and national consciousness.” There are believed to be around 3,000 such clubs in Russia, with an estimated 75,000 members, many of them underage. SNP Naši apparently expressed their wish to help establish such clubs in Serbia.

With respect to other similar movements, the far-right, conservative Dveri and far-right nationalist SNP 1389 have also had contacts with SNP Naši’s Russian namesake, Nashi, who are are in the process of “rebranding” due to a bad image amongst the general population. Nashi – with whom the creation of a Russian-Serbian youth society was discussed – has been officially endorsed by the Russian president’s administration, having been established by the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezh). They were created in 2005 by rebranding the previous official state-controlled youth organization, ‘Marching together’, established back in 2000. The modus operandi of Nashi has caused controversy  with their political opponents (mostly liberals and the media) accusing them of intimidation, thuggery and hooliganism.

Since 2005, Nashi has been headed by Grigoryevich Yakemenko, from the Moscow satellite town of Lyubertsy, who was a prominent member of the notorious Lyuberi street gang back in the late eighties. Lyuberi were a group of young (mostly teenage) thugs who patrolled the streets targeting what they saw as unwanted, deviant and westernised youths (hippies, metal-heads, punk rockers etc.) and promoting the Soviet way of life. Their links with the criminal underworld and security structures are well documented, with the CPSU and KGB understanding their usefulness. Following the break of Soviet Union, the saviest members of Lyuberi entered private business with the help of their still powerful backers, with Vasily Grigoryevich acquiring significant wealth and benefiting from the coming to power of Putin, whose closest collaborators remain his comrades from his KGB days.

These contacts between Serbian and Russian organizations pose a number of important questions, particularly concerning their relationships with the respective security agencies and the extent of the threat they pose. With the political and economic situation in Serbia – and indeed the wider region – unlikely to improve significantly in the medium term, the appeal of these organizations is only likely to increase. Banning these organization would do little to diminish their support and would only encourage them to find other, possible more violent, means of expressing their views. Whilst some may be tempted to use these organizations as proxies for their daily political goals, they would be wise to remember that even the most powerful political and security actors have ‘overplayed’ with fire and created potent adversaries. Whether this lesson of history is heeded, however, remains to be seen.

Vladimir Ninković is a project officer for security at TransConflict Serbia.

This article is published as part of TransConflict’s project, Confronting Extremism, which aims to improve understanding about the concept of extremism itself, plus the groups and ideologies that manifest extremism in their aims, rhetoric and activities.

If you would like to contribute to the debate on Confronting Extremism, please do not hesitate to contact us with your ideas and suggestions by clicking here!

What are the principles of conflict transformation?

The post Serbia and Russia – far right friendships? appeared first on TransConflict.

By Matthew Parish

In one sense Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated half of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is already independent. Bosnia’s protracted civil war ended in December 1995 with a peace plan that formally partitioned the former Yugoslav republic into two near-equal areas of land mass: a Muslim-Croat “Federation” and a “Serb Republic”. The line of territorial division followed the respective armies’ ceasefire lines, cementing ethnic cleansing and perhaps permanently obliterating Bosnia’s previously multi-ethnic composition. But the peace plan contained a political contradiction within its own terms. Formally Bosnia and Herzegovina would remain a single country, a loose federal system with two “entities” over which a weak central government would preside. Yet the very names of the two entities suggested that they were to be treated as independent states; and this, at least, was how the Serb Republic saw itself from the very first day. Serb politicians refused to cooperate with the institutions of central government and went their own ways.

For a few years, foreign peacekeeping troops remained present in both halves of Bosnia in significant numbers, constraining the Serbs from too explicit shows of independence. A UN High Representative reinforced this military power with a series of political edicts, penalising Serb politicians who refused to pay lip service to the pretence of Bosnian unity. But in time the troops waned in numbers from some 80,000 at their apex to a mere 600 today. Lightly armed and thinly spread across a mountainous country, they represent no political might at all amidst tens of thousands of equally well armed police officers loyal to local politicians.

As the foreign military presence in the country dissolved, so did international political authority. Now Serb politicians feel effectively unconstrained by international pressure, they have eviscerated the political bonds that Republika Srpska was formerly bound to with the central government and with the Federation. Republika Srpska now has a government that, at least for internal purposes, is almost entirely separate in its activities from the Bosnian central government. Its President, prime minister, cabinet of ministers and parliament all operate without influence or accountability to anyone except the electorate of Republika Srpska. In theory the entity’s judges are appointed by a central authority; but in practice deals are done so that the RS gets the judges it wants, in exchange for not blocking appointments of Federation judges. The only other source of central government influence is monetary policy – the two Bosnian entities share a common currency – and a certain level of fiscal policy: all VAT revenues are paid into a single account (held by an authority in Banja Luka) from which state expenditures are met before distribution of the balance to the entities. However income and property taxes are levied regionally.

Hence for internal purposes, the influence of Bosnia’s central government in Sarajevo upon the affairs of Republika Srpska is minimal. In this regard the affairs of the RS are similar to those of Transdniestr, Abkhazia or South Ossetia. In each case these territories have their own governments that, to all intents and purposes, are distinct from the internationally recognised countries of which they ostensibly form a part. As with other internationally unrecognised territories, the writ of Bosnia’s central government counts for virtually nothing in the Bosnian Serb capital Banja Luka. The Bosnian Serb, not the Bosnian, flag flies outside government buildings. Civil servants’ business cards typically make no reference to the country of which they are apparently a member. The autonomy and loyalty of politicians lies with the Bosnian Serb President, Milorad Dodik, who despite some recent electoral setbacks to his (still more nationalist) opponents maintains a firm grip upon the Bosnian Serb territory and remains by far the most powerful politician in that part of the country. The level of deference he gives to his Muslim and Croat colleagues in the Federation is at best nominal, at worst mocking.

The principal difference between Bosnia and these other frozen conflicts is that Republika Srpska has not formally issued a declaration of independence from its parent country. By contrast all of Transdniestr, Abkhazia and South Ossetia have done so. But the difference is little more than semantic; no other countries have recognised these states’ declarations of independence, with the result that they do not have formal diplomatic missions abroad. Rather they remain holes in the global political map, with no representation at the United Nations or anywhere else. They have failed to emulate Kosovo’s achievement, namely substantial (if only partial) recognition by other states. Because they lack recognition, they want for achievement of the commercial and economic ties normally incidental to statehood. These territories have no international airports; no trade agreements or visa arrangements for recognition of their passports; customs and border entanglements with their neighbours, restricting ordinary imports and exports; lack of foreign investment due to their uncertain legal status; no access to international capital markets or international financial institutions; no access to development aid; and a host of other disadvantages that collectively condemn them to financial penury.

Because it has not formally declared independence, Republika Srpska does not suffer from these disadvantages to the same degree. There is a limited level of foreign investment. Further investment is deterred at least as much by corruption, administrative opacity, poor infrastructure and burdensome taxes as it is by legal uncertainty over the territory’s status. Being part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the RS benefits from trade agreements the country has signed. The RS even manages to maintain an independent foreign policy, have opened representative offices in a number of foreign countries that operate separately from Bosnia’s formal embassies. A number of the country’s embassies are controlled by the Bosnian Serbs in any event, due to a principle of ethnic quotas for dividing embassies between the country’s three ethnic groups. Because Bosnia as a whole is internationally recognised, freedom of movement and border controls are unproblematic. Bosnian Serbs generally hold both Bosnian and Serbian passports, and can travel without visas across the Schengen zone. The RS has a sub-sovereign borrower’s relationship with the World Bank, and receives development assistance from donors paid directly to the RS rather than through Bosnia’s central government.

All these benefits would be lost if the RS declared independence. At the current time its de facto independence is tolerated begrudgingly by the west, because the EU and the United States do not have the political will to deflate it. They tried to undermine the RS’s autonomy through the neo-colonial Office of the High Representative, investing vast resources in a decade-long programme of fortifying the central government and stripping the political powers of the entities through coercion. This was ultimately ineffective, because one product of war was irreversible ethnic cleansing: the population of the RS is now overwhelmingly Serb, and inadequate internationally-driven attempts to encourage refugee returns were mostly unsuccessful. The political institutions of the RS were recognised in the post-war constitution enshrined in the Dayton Peace Accords. This constitution has proven impossible substantially to amend because it contains ethnic vetoes. Hence as soon as international pressure relented, RS institutions reclaimed the competences they had unwillingly abdicated to the central government, with the full support of their electorate who wish to have nothing to do with their Muslim and Croat cousins.

If the RS now sought to cement its de facto independence with a de jure proclamation then the international community might be prompted again into making Bosnia the foreign policy priority it once was, to the Bosnian Serbs’ detriment. At the very least, interested foreign states would take active measures to exclude the Bosnian Serbs from the world of international relations whereas at the current time they are reluctantly accepted, albeit through a veil of insincere political dialogue in which a pretence is made that the central Bosnian state is functional. Nobody wants to see the RS formally independent. For the EU and the US, accepting the RS’s independence would be an acknowledgment of the failure of policies in Bosnia since 1992, which have been to maintain the country’s unity in the face of its natural centrifugal political trajectory. The reasons why the west has embraced the principle of uti possidetis juris (that the borders of a new country must follow pre-existing political boundaries, in this case the internal boundaries of socialist Yugoslavia) are complex. They range from a perception of relative Serb war guilt that provides increased credence to the Muslim goal of preserving the country’s sovereign unity, to a desire to dilute European Islam within multi-ethnic states. Whatever the reasons, billions of US Dollars were spent perpetuating the vision of a unified Bosnia that moved beyond the 1995 Dayton partition plan. Even though this project has been an abject failure, nobody in the west is yet prepared to concede this to the extent of formally recognising the RS’s independence.

Russia would probably also not recognise a declaration of independence by the RS, albeit for different reasons. For Russia the danger is of setting a precedent for its own secessionist movements that exist on the edge of Russian territory, particularly in the Caucasus. Even Serbia would not eye an irredentist project for the RS with much favour. The Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik is enormously popular in Serbia, more so than the country’s own politicians. Serbian union with an independent RS might thrust him into power in Belgrade. It might also isolate the country from the west, reversing its slow recovery towards international respectability after the atrocities of the Yugoslav wars, the autocracy of Slobodan Milosevic and the intermingling of politics and violent criminality in the early years after Milosevic’s overthrow.

There is also a geographical peculiarity of the RS that might make an independence programme particularly tricky. The entity has an unwieldy geography, amounting to a bulbous snake surrounding Federation territory but pinched in the middle around the city of Brcko. The eastern part of the snake is contiguous with Serbia, but the majority of the citizens live in the western part. Brcko is ostensibly a “free city”, a district independent from either entity that for a number of years after the war was presided over by an American supervisor who enforced multi-ethnic reintegration with an iron fist. This is where the two halves of the RS meet, and without Brcko the RS has no territorial continuity. Although there are formal guarantees of freedom of movement for Bosnian Serbs through Brcko, in principle the town remains a practical obstacle to independence because it is sufficiently narrow that it makes a tempting target for military action by Bosnian Muslims to prevent RS secession by cutting the territory in two.

Hence it seems unlikely, at least in the short term, that the RS will declare independence, even if the Bosnian Serb leader periodically threatens so. There would be no international support for such a move, which would make any attempt at independence during times of peace diplomatic suicide. Rather the RS is destined to continue in its current ambiguous condition: formally part of an unloved mother country, but for practical purposes a highly autonomous unit of government that will continue to ignore the dictates of Bosnia’s capital. Nevertheless the political uncertainty regarding the future of Bosnia renders the country an unattractive investment prospect, and the preposterously unwieldy Bosnian government structure of 10 cantons, two entities, thirteen prime ministers, five presidents, three constitutional courts and fourteen general legislatures compounds a permanent sense of political anarchy.

Frozen conflicts may remain frozen for a long time. Perhaps Bosnia’s destiny is to remain an uncertain black hole on the map of Europe indefinitely, much as has Moldova / Transdniestr. However events can change quickly, and we must consider what triggers might cause un unstable situation to change. One possibility is general poverty fomenting revolution or extremism. It is imaginable that Dodik loses power to a less moderate Bosnian Serb leader in some future election, by reason of the Bosnian Serbs’ grinding poverty being exacerbated through continuing economic crisis in the European Union. His replacement might revert to the wartime agenda of total political independence for the RS, no matter what the international political price. However on balance this seems unlikely. It would assume highly irrational behaviour by the leader of a weak territory without Great Power support.

The more likely scenario that might change the chaotic but endearing state of Bosnian politics is a regional change in the balance of power. The most pressing imminent event of this nature is the accession of Croatia to the European Union on 1 July 2013. So far Zagreb has done an impressive job of constraining the Bosnian Croats’ own secessionist aspirations. The rationale for doing so was that overt advocacy of policies entailing dissolution of Bosnian sovereignty would block Croatia’s accession to the EU. Hence Bosnia’s Croats were left in limbo. Formally they could expect no support from Zagreb. Nevertheless the Croatian government ensured they all hold Croatian passports; and many left for a more prosperous existence there. Those who remained quietly ignored Bosnia’s de jure institutional structure, setting up parallel de facto institutions. The international community periodically spotted what was going on and attempted to dismantle Croat efforts. The forced liquidation of Herzegovacka Banka, a money laundering arm of the informal Bosnian Croat government, was the most notorious example. But parallel institutions proved impossible permanently to suppress. The Bosnian Croat capital of Mostar still has no functional central government. It remains run by two separate Muslim and Croat war veterans’ associations, just as it was when the war in Mostar ended in 1994. The political separation is too deep now to be unwound. Nevertheless the Bosnian Croats have remained discreet in their machinations. Their incentive to do so is the benefit they gain from their mother country’s unimpeded EU accession.

Now Croatia’s membership of the EU is guaranteed. Hence the incentive for Croatia to subdue the separatist tendencies of her Bosnian Croat cousins is shortly to subside, and the incentive for Bosnian Croats to stay tactful in pursuing them will also evaporate. Contiguous Croat-majority parts of Herzegovina are already in a de facto political union with Croatia. The Croatian flag flies, and the Croatian currency is in use. Every opportunity is embraced to prevent paying tax revenues to the official Bosnian government structures. Off main roads, the many rural border posts are nominal and facilitate unrestricted movement of goods and persons between the two ostensibly separate states. The Croat-majority regions of southwest Bosnia are mostly very remote. Further steps towards de facto or even de jure detachment of those regions from Bosnia are therefore possible. Bosnian Croats have every desire permanently to remove themselves from the despised Dayton constitutional structures, which they perceive as deeply unfair to them. This is not least because the member of the tri-partite Presidency that the Bosnian constitution ostensibly assigns to Croats, Zeljko Komsic, is sympathetic to Muslim centralising goals. He was elected by the votes of numerically-dominant Muslims and not by Croats at all.

While Croats living in Croatia have only limited sympathy for the plight of their Bosnian counterparts, Croatia’s politicians are sensitive to their wishes because they vote in Croatian elections. The danger amidst prolonged economic hardship in the region is that after Croatia’s EU accession is complete, a push towards further political union between Croat Herzegovina and Croatia becomes an attractive distraction from joblessness and poverty. Bosnian Muslims may react to a Herzegovinan spin-off by escalating the frozen conflict in Mostar. However the narrative plays out, Bosnian Serbs will be sure to take advantage of the ensuing mêlée by taking further steps to detach themselves from the institutions of central government. Bosnian Serb leaders are always quick to exploit Muslim-Croat frictions by arguing that they demonstrate the Bosnian state’s unviability, which itself justifies their own measures to separate themselves from it.

Ultimately it will take a sea-change in international diplomatic thinking for the Bosnian Serbs successfully to mount an independence project. They cannot achieve their goal without, at the very least, several other powerful countries with an interest in the region reaching the conclusion that the Bosnian state is unsustainable. At the current time no western country, having made deep prior moral commitments in the opposite direction, has an incentive to change its view. Only serious political upheavals with a direct effect upon its European neighbours might cause the international community to adopt a more realist approach to Bosnia’s chronic political instability. Infection of an EU member with the secessionist politics of one of the country’s three ethnic groups might be the most likely key to unlocking the Dayton constitution and dissolving this unstable territory.

Whatever one’s political opinions, it is hard to view Bosnia’s dissolution in unqualifiedly desirable terms. The reaction of Bosnia’s Muslims to the country’s disintegration, already disappointed with the west’s increasingly lacklustre commitment to their cause, is unpredictable. Muslim leaders have threatened renewed civil war if the Bosnian Serbs take any further steps towards secession. Yet it is not clear they have the means, will or political unity to mobilise. Bosnian Muslim politics are substantially more divided than Serb and Croat politics (although an act of Bosnian Serb secession might be the catalyst for their reunification). Bosnia’s people are already partitioned by war into mono-ethnic Bantustans. Hence one of the principal dynamics of Bosnia’s 1992-95 conflict – ethnic admixture – is now lacking. Although still resentful of other ethnic groups, most Bosnians now just want to get on with their lives. Even if armed conflict across the country is unlikely, localised violence remains a real possibility, particularly in multi-ethnic Mostar and Brcko. The fragmented borders make any form of partition troublesome.

Absent the catalyst for renewed disintegration and conflict, the status quo of Bosnian Serb gradualist secessionism, international community disapproval but inaction, and virulent ethnically-directed domestic political rhetoric and economic stagnation seems destined to continue. But Bosnia’s sorry status as a neglected yet quiet European calamity cannot persist forever. Sooner or later some event will cause the country’s natural political dynamic to prevail. Bosnia’s political geography creates a perpetual propensity for the country to spin apart, and at the current time nobody has a realistic plan for mitigating the damage caused when this eventually comes to pass.

Matthew Parish is a partner in the Geneva office of the international law firm Holman Fenwick Willan, where he specialises in international law and international dispute resolution. From 2005 to 2007 he was the Chief Legal Advisor to the International Supervisor of Brčko, a division of the Office of the High Representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He publishes extensively on the law and politics of the Western Balkans and on issues in international law. In 2013 he was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and Bilan magazine identified him as one of the three hundred most influential people in Switzerland.

This article is a modified version of a presentation to the University of Texas at Austin on 1 March 2013; for more details please click here. The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of any organisation with which he is or has been associated. www.matthewparish.com

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What are the principles of conflict transformation?

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What are the principles of conflict transformation?

By Kirthi Jayakumar

That gender-based and sexual violence is a weapon of war – and a painfully common occurrence in nearly every war – is a brutal fact. What is obscure, and perhaps little considered in the strategies developed to tackle sexual violence, is that it is as much rooted in peacetime as it is in wartime. Gender violence is ubiquitous and exists as a phenomenon in a “continuum” of sorts between peacetime and wartime.

In both peacetime and wartime, the occurrence of gender-based violence is a representation of the dominance and aggression that men assert over women, and of the fact that the bodies of women are focal points for aggressive discrimination based on sex. The only difference between both situations lies in the proportion.

In peacetime, there are scattered or episodic instances of violence. The bodies are “individual” in that the cases are separate incidents and rape is not pursued as a policy of dominance. In wartime, the scale and proportion extends beyond this limit, where bodies become ‘social bodies’, with the number of events taking place tolling much higher – both, as a matter of policy of dominance, and by any and every person.

Wartime gender-based violence is proof of a prevalent undercurrent of gender discrimination in peacetime. This is precisely the reason for the “effectiveness” of gender violence in war in breaking a nation’s social order. If there were no prevalent concepts in peacetime of honour, shame, sexuality, sacredness of virginity and modesty, gender-based violence cannot function so effectively in war. The element of cultural salience in peacetime surrounding a woman’s honour is a reflection of the connotations that sexuality has in peacetime.

 A women’s shelter for victims of sexual abuse in Goma (photograph by UN Photo/Marie Frechon, published 

The dynamics of male dominance stem from the notions surrounding the protection of female honour, which in turn, is inherent in many traditional cultures. Most countries that have remained thriving hotbeds of impunity with gender-based violence in wartime are those that are peppered with a sanctimonious perceptions of women as sex objects in peacetime.

By “sex objects”, the connotation intends to convey that women are representatives of the code of honour of their families and the code of honour of their blood and lineage. This in turn leads to the augmented sanctity attached to the virginity, chastity, honour and virtue of a woman. Women themselves are brought up with the preconditioning that their honour and shame are non-negotiable elements for their acceptance in society. A woman is deemed the representation of the honour of the three-tiered hierarchy that commands her life: her husband, her family, and the community or province she represents.

Given the importance of and emphasis upon a woman’s chastity, monogamy and fertility in peacetime, it is understandable why women become the critical targets of enemy combatants in a state of war. An act of violence against women is a means for combatants to show their control over the “sexual property” in a conflict.

Bodies don’t turn into battlegrounds when peace descends into to war, but remain battlegrounds through peace and war. Sexual violence in peacetime is often construed as crimes against the individual – while in war the very same offences gain greater magnitude. The continued existence of a culture of silence in peacetime is a springboard for the unhindered occurrence of violence against women in war.

Kirthi Jayakumar is a Lawyer, specialized in public international law and human rights. A graduate of the School of Excellence in Law, Chennai, Kirthi has diversified into research and writing on public international law and human rights. She has worked as a UN Volunteer, specializing in human rights research in Africa, India and Central Asia and the Middle East. She also runs a journal and consultancy that focuses on international law, called A38.

This article was originally published by Insight on Conflict and is available by clicking here. 

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What is the Global Coalition for Conflict Transformation?

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