Police and atrocity crimes in Bosnian Krajina

INTRODUCTION

The Blogajevo pages came into existence when I spent 9 months in Sarajevo in 2014. I was there to research police violence during the 1992-1995 war. Criminologists sometimes assume that police are ‘natural’ partners in ethnic violence. I wasn’t so sure, and spent my time away from Edinburgh going through court records to see what the story was. What I found was that processes of democratisation, politicisation, deprofessionalisation and militarisation fundamentally changed the shape of the police and help to explain their involvement in atrocity crimes. A full paper, with sources and citations, is available here. 

My nine months were spent analysing over 50,000 pages of court transcripts and 3,000 pieces of evidence from two cases heard in The Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (Prosecutor v Brđanin, Prosecutor v Stanišić and Župljanin). 

Police participation in genocides and atrocity crimes is well recognised. Police are trained to use violence and to obey senior authority, but to me that’s a fairly thin understanding of police. At best, it suggests a potential role in violent state action against civilians, at worst it risks taking police violence for granted. The underlying assumptions can be questioned. They ignore the possibility of untrained personnel; fail to consider in what ways and in what contexts police are trained to use violence; side-line ideological conviction or other explanations; and don’t treat violence as a process unfolding over time. Detailed description and analysis of a specific case can shed more light on these processes. 

DESCRIBING POLICE VIOLENCE

The police contributed to ethnic cleansing in the Krajina region in the north west of Bosnia through the creation of an inhospitable environment for non-Serbs, forced transfers of population and murder.

Krajina municipalities in pink and blue

Disarmament

Serb authorities, including the police, targeted disarmament programmes at Bosniaks (known at the time as Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnian Croats. In contrast they accommodated and cooperated with irregular armed formations of Bosnian Serbs and Serb neighbourhoods and villages retained or received weapons. Radio broadcasts explicitly targeted non-Serbs with calls to surrender arms. In this way, Serb authorities secured a monopoly over the material means of physical violence.

Joint military and police weapon collection programmes targeted towns, villages and individuals. Weapons taken in by the civilian police included those retained after military service, illegally procured arms and legally owned and registered pistols and rifles. These operations involved intrusive and violent police searches, arrests and large scale detention of civilians. Both before and after the expiry of deadlines, military attacks were threatened and occurred.

Detention camps, arrests, interrogation

Evidence from detainees and members of the Serb Interior Ministry describe various detention camps, often in schools, public facilities and industrial sites.

Camp detainees were held in inhumane conditions. Camps were crowded, had inadequate provision for nutrition and personal hygiene, and inmates slept on hard floors. They were humiliated and denigrated, beaten and killed.

Beatings took place during police interrogations and as part of the daily activities of the police acting as guards. In Kotor Varoš, at the school building and sawmill, acts against inmates extended to sexual violence and rape against men and women.

Individual killings include the suffocation and beating to death of men being transferred to Manjaca, and the July massacre of detainees from Brdo in the Omarska camp. Further details on individual killings and massacres in Omarska and Keraterm are found in other cases at both the ICTY and the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The ICTY evidence only includes the clearest and strongest examples, where eye-witnesses survived to testify. An association of camp detainees has wider evidence of around 700 killings at Omarska. 

Lines of control are often ambiguous in camps, but police involvement is evident. Examples include the sports hall in Sanski Most; the Manjaca detention camp; and in leadership and day to day running of camps at Omarska and Keraterm.

Interrogations took place in police stations and in camps. Teams of interrogators were made up of the regular police (Public Security Service), the intelligence-oriented State Security Service, and Military Security. In Keraterm, Manjaca and Omarska camps, interrogations categorised detainees into three groups, including men singled out to be killed. These included those in leading functions, wealthy citizens, intellectuals and professionals, suggesting a strategy to undermine non-Serb communities by removing those playing a role in organisation and representation.

In some cases, police acted to protect non-Serbs during transfers or in detention. These are limited, but indicate points where police break from the script of persistent, repeated and serious abuse and violence.

Violence outside camps and police facilities

The camps provided a contained environment in which violence was routinized. Violence, including police violence, was also prevalent outside. The police cooperated with military forces in violent attacks on villages and were involved in individual and large scale killing outside the detention camps.

The massacre at Korićanske Stijene is one of the better documented mass killings. On 21 August 1992, a police intervention squad from Prijedor shot around 200 Bosniak men at the edge of a canyon. Clothing lying in the canyon and a bad smell suggested this was not the first mass killing at the site.

A hostile environment

As part of the strategic goals of the Serb authorities to separate the peoples of BiH and to secure territory, a combination of killings, detention and harassment sought to rid the area of non-Serbs by elimination and by creating a hostile environment to promote mass population movements out of the region.

The court documents allow detailed description of this process, and can serve as a foundation for an explanation of how a multi-ethnic police force is transformed to carry out such acts.

EXPLAINING POLICE VIOLENCE

Three developments changed the structure and function of the police. First, the democratisation process and the victory of ethnically-oriented parties; second politicisation and polarisation in police agencies leading to fragmentation and deprofessionalisation; finally, the militarisation of the police.

Democratisation

In BiH’s first multi-party elections in 1990 three ethnically-based parties, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ), Party for Democratic Action (SDA) and Serb Democratic Party (SDS) secured 202 of 240 seats in the Republican Assembly.

A minimal consensus existed between parties around a principle of dividing up control of republican, municipal and socially-owned institutions and offices. This shows continuity with party penetration of state institutions common under communism, but in a new multi-party context.

An arrangement known as the 'ethnic key', ensuring representation of BiH's different constitutent peoples in key state functions, was also adapted to the new context.

The relative strength of ethnically-based parties became a proxy for working out the relevant ethnic composition at all levels, and parties put forward their preferred candidates. Agreement that roles and functions should be distributed across the parties did not mean agreement on the specific allocations, and many appointments were contentious.

Attachment to a party (rather than the party) remained important in securing key roles after the elections, but now with three parties rather than one. In many cases, experience was disregarded and people with no police background were appointed to leading positions or relatively junior staff were promoted rapidly.

Politicisation and deprofessionalisation

Police professionals, appointees with no previous policing experience, and party members all describe how parties put forward their own people for key police posts. In Prijedor the SDA even made a pre-election promise to appoint a Muslim Chief of Police.

Party appointees often fell short of the requirements of the job. In many cases, appointees had no background in policing. It was claimed that the Chief of Police appointed by the SDA in Prijedor had no experience policing outside being stopped for drunk driving. After an armed takeover of the town the role went to Simo Drljača, from the education service, then to a mathematics teacher. In Kotor Varoš an engineer with no experience of policing was appointed as Chief of Police, and in Ključ, the same role went to a man with experience in construction.

Regardless of the professional background of police-leaders, party-based nomination meant that candidates owed their jobs to political parties and were likely to be loyal or sympathetic to their aims. Further, candidates that did not meet pre-existing criteria diluted the professionalism of the police and new leaders were not schooled in the police values of SFRY.

Irregularities were noted throughout the service, not just at the top. Police officials sacked over disciplinary or criminal matters were reappointed after elections, while normal appointment procedures were ignored for regular police officers and circumvented to stack the police reserve with party supporters.

As BiH disintegrated ethno-political appointments and dismissals were more explicit. In June 1992, an official decision by the Krajina authorities limited all positions involving the protection of public property to Serbs and excluded those “who have not confirmed by plebiscite or who in their minds are not clear that the Serbian Democratic Party is the sole representative of the Serbian people”.

Changes in the composition of the police force question police training as a factor in their role in atrocity crimes. One witness saw men as young as 16 or 17 in police uniform.

Instead a restructured and mono-ethnic police provided an organisational framework and badge of convenience with access to the material means of violence. These means of violence were then expanded through the militarisation of the police.

Militarisation

The militarisation of the police impacted upon the structure of the organisation, the skill set of its members, the tools available, and the opportunities for engagement in activities against civilian populations.

Military tools were sometimes redeployed to police. Former military vehicles were repainted in police colours and militia in blue uniforms manned the front lines. Once mobilised, police reserves had access to weapons including automatic and semi-automatic weapons.

In the Krajina, Serb police requested military hardware from the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) in April 1992. It was subsequently paraded in Banja Luka and elsewhere in the region. The request included helicopters, armoured vehicles, machine guns, sniper rifles, hand grenades and other explosives.

The creation of an expanded and militarised police reserve is something that began before the division of the Ministry of the Interior in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rooted in a Yugoslav concept of All People’s Defence, it was also a logical move in light of restrictions on military force in the UN-backed Vance plan, and the limited defensive capacity held by republics in Yugoslavia.

Special units or detachments were set up, like the special detachment of the regional Public Security Centre (CSB) in Banja Luka. The unit was formed from a mixture of police, members of the paramilitary Serb Defence Forces, and the military. Criteria for inclusion in the unit included front line experience.

Regular use of police in combat was a further threat to the distinction between police and military. The expert witness, Christian Nielsen, identified the extent of police deployment in military roles. In 1992, it was suggested that police served 300,000 man days per month in combat functions.

The different dimensions of the apparent militarisation of the police support two separate conclusions.

First, the ‘policeness’ of those who appear to be a part of the police is called into question. The wholesale transfer of personnel and weaponry from military and paramilitary units into police organisations shows a fundamental change to the nature of the police in the Krajina region, marginalising officers whose training and service started before the war.

Secondly, regular utilisation of police in military roles can create an embattled and brutalised force who view their role in terms of securing their people from an enemy as opposed to securing a more general sense of order.

A NEW POLICE: POLITICISED, DEPROFESSIONALISED, MILITARISED

The police in the Krajina region of Bosnia and Herzegovina were transformed into a tool of the SDS programme of ethnically targeted violence. This was not inevitable, but used the existing structures of policing and defence from Yugoslavia, and was shaped by the ethnicisation of politics in Bosnia’s democratic transition.

It created a police force distanced from a professional ethos, in which senior positions were held by ideologically committed party men often with no previous police experience. Uncontrolled recruitment and an absence of police training left no scope for sharing professional values that might have countered the SDS strategy.

Coupled with the military potential of a police force viewed, equipped and utilised as an integral part of the emerging state’s military capacity, this helps explain the role of the police in atrocity crimes in the Krajina, especially in the period of spring to winter 1992.

The ICTY files are a rich resource, but not without problems of coverage and interpretation. This work makes a start at mining the files to make sense of what happened in the war.

Post-Socialist Policing in Bosnia and Herzegovina

In the newly published Sage Handbook of Global Policing, I write on policing after state socialism, comparing Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Georgia and Poland. What follows is a reduced version focusing on BiH only. Full references can be found in the book. It looks at a framework for comparing policing, policing in socialist systems, explores police legitimacy and structures in BiH, and the locates these in the comparative post-socialist framework, also examining police functions.

Police systems and political regimes

Rob I. Mawby suggests three dimensions of police systems for comparison: legitimacy, structure and function. Legitimacy is the source of police power. For example, a social elite, the popular will or an external power. Structures separate the police from other institutions. Structural variations include territorial divisions, hierarchies, functional divisions within and between forces, and the relationship between public and private forms of policing. Function assumes a distribution of tasks including maintenance of law and order and prevention and detection of offences.

Police and policing in exist in a wider environment and react to inputs from law makers, law breakers, from civil society and citizens, and from inside and beyond national frontiers. Changes in respect of any of these can result in changes in a police system. Equally, a police system contributes to its environment.

Police systems in a state socialist environment

János Kornai defined socialism as a ‘social-political-economic’ system based on observed historical formations, rather than on ideas. This led him to focus on the party monopoly on power as the defining element. Change in this monopoly, rather than economic policy, reflects a transition away from socialism.

Party power and police legitimacy

Many communist governments took power during, or just after, periods of revolution, war and disorganisation. The subsequent focus on retaining power was central to Kornai’s analysis. Yugoslavia is something of a special case. As a successful national liberation movement, the partisan movement enjoyed a greater degree of power.   Still, early acts of repression show the regime adopting a defensive position. By 1986, party membership stood at 9.3%, somewhere between Mongolia (4.5%) and Romania (16%). Faced with an ambivalent population, protecting a regime based on the undivided political power of the ruling party was a key task of legal and police systems.

In terms of the legitimacy, the party was the sole source of police authority. In all areas of state activity, the party played a key role in decision making, in supervising state action and in making appointments, leading to the ‘interpenetration’ of state and party. In Yugoslavia, the 1948 split with Stalin encouraged the development of an alternative model of socialism involving greater local autonomy and self-management. Nonetheless, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ) was the basic political force and the country remained a one party state.

The party authorizes the police. The police enforce party domination. But because of their access to means of violence and surveillance, the police can threaten centres of power in the party structure. The party reacts to this periodically, as seen in the removal of Aleksandar Ranković, head of the Interior Ministry and secret police in Yugoslavia.

Structure

There is not one communist model of territorial structures of policing, rather general territorial structures of government shape police structures. Countries with some element of federalism (Czechoslovakia after 1969, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia) reflect this in their police structures, although strong central oversight through the party remained. In Yugoslavia policing was divided functionally between the political Division for the Protection of the People (established with Soviet guidance and later changed to the State Security Service) and a Service for Public Protection.

In line with self-management and reforms geared towards destatisation, Yugoslavia developed a further element of the police system: the socialisation of security’. Responsibility for protecting their own property fell on social enterprises involved in production and socially owned security enterprises were established.

Function

Regime protection was a central function. Police functions have an implication on who is employed within the service and party penetration of the police was particularly high.

Patterns of property ownership further reinforce the function of the police in defending the party regime. Law and police are historically tied to the protection of property and productive capacity. De-privatized ownership mean the position of property in socialist economies is distinctive from that found under capitalism. Party control of property, through state ownership of the means of production, means that the protection of property is another dimension of protecting the party and reinforces the police role in the party-state-bureaucracy nexus of power.

Post-socialist trajectories and policing in Bosnia and Herzegovina

A special issue of the Slavic Review in 1999 observed that the now ex-socialist regimes in Europe shared certain similarities in form and functioning of regimes, trends leading to regime collapse and the rapidity of the end of single party systems. These commonalities were contrasted with diverse outcomes in terms of post-socialist regimes. Some states successfully consolidated domestic reforms, other slip back to or never really escape authoritarian rule, while the bulk occupy Carothers’ ‘grey zone’ in between.

Within Yugoslavia, single party rule ended in stages. Slovenia and Croatia were the first republics to hold multi-party elections in the spring of 1990, while BiH and others waited until the end of the year. The elections in BiH handed power to three ethnically-based parties which continue to play a major role in politics today. Control of the police and territorial defence units became contentious as the republic, still part of federal Yugoslavia, had no other armed forces. Throughout 1991, tensions mounted between the three parties. By spring 1992 the country was in a de facto situation of war and remained so until external intervention imposed peace in 1995. The dominant drivers of policing in BiH are as much post-conflict as they are post-socialist, reflecting the interaction of legacies of communism and conflict.

Legitimation

In socialist BiH police authority and legitimacy derived from the party, as in other socialist regimes. This was overlaid with ethnic considerations, ensuring leadership posts were shared across ethnic groups. These two factors combined in the new context emerging from the 1990 elections. The three successful parties acted as representatives of ‘their’ people in nominating police chiefs and other senior officers. Tensions surrounding this were part of the process leading to war. The fragmentation of the police along ethnic lines was clearly evident by March of 1992.

At the end of the war two competing sources of legitimation are evident: local sub-state units and external actors. The immediate post-war period saw the division of police authority across sub-state units in BiH. The Republika Srpska and many of the Cantons in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina were now more ethnically homogenous and local police authority provided ethnically-based security to majority groups. At the same time, peace agreements and international institutions supported the right to return for millions of refugees and displaced people. This required oversight of local police to ensure that minority returnees were secure and that they were not victimized by police tied to local ethno-political elites. International oversight applied to individual officers and police organisations and was undertaken primarily by UN and EU missions.

Structure

The territorial fragmentation of state policing in BiH has already been identified. Peace agreements at Washington (1994) and Dayton (1995) translated wartime divisions into peacetime police boundaries, and limited central state policing powers. International agencies in BiH promoted an expansion of police functions under central state control and even attempted (and failed) to implement a consolidated framework for policing with local police areas established without reference to existing entity and cantonal boundaries.

A UN certification process saw large numbers excluded from the police, in part as a response to police involvement in war crimes and in part dealing with the entry of untrained personnel into the police between 1990 and 1995.

In the former Yugoslavia, where socially owned security firms did exist, their function was the protection of socially owned as opposed to individual property. At the end of the war, prior to the establishment of a legal framework for commercial security services, demobilized soldiers and dismissed police officers moved into this sector. Armin Kržalić's survey of licences granted in BiH suggests slow growth.

BiH joined Interpol while at war in 1992. Like other Western Balkan states, BiH’s policing is somewhat shaped by the requirements of EU association and accession. It also responds to more direct international intervention. I wrote elsewhere on the EU role in shaping policing in BiH, and voiced concerns that the EU’s narrow focus on its own security concerns risks marginalizing those of BiH’s citizens. Nonetheless, even in a small and apparently relatively weak state, domestic political forces successfully resisted EU attempts to impose a single state structure of policing. This is a good illustration of David Bayley’s view that police structures resist external change.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s trajectory and post-socialist police systems

New regimes require new forms of legitimation and this extends to police systems. In BiH and the other cases studied, efforts were made to find new sources of legitimation for the police in the absence of single party rule. In BiH the first shift in legitimation was still very much linked to the parties in power and was associated with the stalling of the transition and development of conflict. Post-war international oversight in BiH has addressed this to some extent.

All countries studied engaged in replacing internal security personnel but with variation in how and when it was carried out. Both the Georgian and Bosnian examples show continuity in that the police remained, in the first instance, tied closely to a particular party or governing regime. In both, this is associated with a subsequent breakdown in peace and order. In each of these states, further waves of lustration take place at a later stage. Changes of personnel in line with shifts in power serve important symbolic and practical ends. As well as changes to the personnel, other changes of an important symbolic nature took place including the renaming of forces, changes in ranks and changes in uniform. This apparent shift to civilianisation sometimes sits uneasily against public information campaigns which police in more military style clothing and carrying long-barrelled weapons in the battle against organized crime, particularly in BiH.

Commercial forms of security were largely undeveloped in state-socialist police systems and have experienced ‘sudden booms’ and ‘spectacular growth’ in the subsequent period, but with significant variation. Variable growth can be explained by a range of contextual factors, including legal frameworks, demand and supply.

New possibilities for private enterprise, including in the security sector, combined with a rise of private property to create a potential market and a framework for provision. The collapse of the centrally planned economies and the introduction of market liberalisation opened formerly socialist states to a new level of consumerism and the commodification of goods and services previously provided by the state.

On the demand side of the equation, failures of state police make various forms of private security more attractive. Fear generated by increasing crime rates and the visibility of crime was common across the post-socialist world and further insecurities specific to post-war contexts featured in BiH (and Georgia). On the supply side, a boom in private security was fed by changes in state police personnel.

The opening up of previously closed economies also created opportunities for major players in the globalized security industry to extend their reach into post-socialist countries. Starting from a controlling stake in Alarm West in 2010, Securitas now employs 1,900 staff in BiH. Compared to Poland, growth in BiH and Georgia was slow, suggesting that even in the context of a security gap, a minimum of security and stability is required for the industry to develop.

In BiH, the fragmented structure of the state and state policing is reflected in companies operating in only one political unit, whether entity, canton or district. The difficulties of establishing firms in more than one entity, while not insurmountable, may have slowed consolidation and growth in the sector.

As the opening up of states in the post-socialist period generated the conditions for participation in a global security market, it also created the opportunity for greater police cooperation across borders and with states outside the former communist bloc. Arguably it made such cooperation more important, but it is structured by the integration of states in global and regional frameworks for cooperation. Of post-communist states 12 joined the EU, 4 are candidates, 2 potential candidates and a further 6 are in the Eastern Partnership scheme.

The central function of protecting and maintaining the regime has been identified in socialist police systems. Post socialist policing is often associated with a reorientation public protection. After the end of single-party rule, certain police functions also develop around the need for protection of the democratic form of politics and associated freedoms, securing the space for free political debate.

While the crime control element of policing was never absent under socialist governments, shifts in the balance between private and state ownership of property mean the police crime prevention and detection role is reoriented towards serving the public and businesses rather than the state. Each country studied took steps to break the police-party link in terms of functions of regime protection, but again with variation in timing, with Georgia being the last to do so.

In the full version of this paper, Poland, Georgia and BiH provide examples of states which made a relatively clear break from socialist power structures. They experienced divergent trajectories and development of police systems. Poland shows the clearest example of a clear and quick break, and more than 25 years on it makes as much sense to describe it in terms of its present as against its socialist past. It provided the best environment for such a break: a well-formed civic movement ready to displace and dismantle the authoritarian regime. In Georgia and BiH there was no strong, unified, and non-nationalist civic alternative to communist successors. In these two cases, the result was conflict which undermines a clear break. This shaped the development of the BiH police system through external intervention and oversight, while it took an internal revolution to challenge police abuses in Georgia. In these cases both the domestic and international environments shaped the police system, which can be understood as both post-conflict and post-socialist. If these states are also able to make a clearer break from remaining legacies of their past, it will make sense to remove them from a category defined by that past.

Bosnia’s EU Candidacy Cannot be Sustained by Minimal Internal Compromises

This entry was originally posted on 15 February 2016 on the European Futures website.
Bosnia's formal application for EU membership, received today, is predicated on a new and untested framework for the country's political entities to cooperate with each other. Looking at the EU and OHR's earlier attempts to reform the police, I argue that, if leaders continue striking political agreements that barely meet the minimum required by international actors, the country will not resolve the serious challenges it faces.

Bosnia's application to the EU

The announcement that Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) would submit an application for candidate status to the EU today, 15 February, has been greeted with a degree of surprise. The agreement of a coordination mechanism within BiH, a precondition for candidacy, had not previously been publicly disclosed.
The creation of a framework for coordination on paper, the last-minute claims of achieving an apparent minimum for the next step on the European path and a backlash from key domestic political actors recall the fate of an earlier, EU-driven, attempt to reform the country's police. These previous events present a cautionary tale for optimists, a rare breed in contemporary BiH.

The policing precedent

In the summer of 2005, there were signs of optimism about BiH's European future, and yet clouds could be seen gathering on the horizon. At that time, inter-party negotiations were taking place over police reforms, including proposed policing territories defined by technical criteria and disregarding existing internal political boundaries within BiH.
A participant from the Office of the High Representative (OHR) described his amazement at hearing Bosnian delegates saying 'this is something the European Union wants… let’s get on with it'. This was seen as a big step. When the OHR was shifting to less forceful intervention, it was presented as evidence of what could be achieved when Brussels was leading the agenda.
But ahead of negotiations, the main parties of government in Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb Democratic Party and the Party of Democratic Progress, had been clear that they would not accept any police boundaries which did not align with those of their entity. During the negotiations, they showed signs of pulling out, and likewise their main opposition in RS, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, also signalled coolness towards the negotiations.
In multi-party negotiations, and at a point when power in RS was shifting, these parties all represented potential veto players. RS parties anticipated continued electoral support from positioning themselves as protectors of the power and status of the Serb entity.
A clear rejection of cross-entity policing areas in the RS People's Assembly followed, but agreement on policing was a precondition for opening negotiations on a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA), a key milestone on the path to EU candidacy. After missing initial deadlines, Bosnia’s various parliaments came to a limited agreement on policing, but parked the issue of territorial boundaries with an implementation directorate. The minimum requirements of the SAA had been met, but the most difficult political issues had been set aside, to be resolved (or not) later.
More than ten years on, police boundaries are not defined by technical criteria, and continue to be tied to the political structures of entity, canton and district.

Unresolved issues and local dissent

Following on from the announcement of the candidacy application and the coordination mechanism, the RS President, Prime Minister and Government have all issued statements which question the authority of the decision on the mechanism. This alone would suggest that the EU should exercise extreme caution before entering a process where a weak agreement on paper proves inadequate to the task of coordination.
Beyond this, major unresolved issues continue to suggest a lack of capacity, will or some combination of the two, to prioritise EU conditions over the concerns of domestic politicians. The incompatibility of the BiH constitution with the European Convention on Human Rights, was first noted by the Venice Commission in 2005, and was reinforced by the Sejdić-Finci and Zornić judgements of 2009 and 2014 respectively.
The ongoing exclusion of ethnic 'others' from key political offices in BiH continues. Likewise, a census conducted in 2013, the subject of extended political negotiations from at least 2008, has yet to be published.
The police reform negotiations of 2005 seem long forgotten now, but provide a useful precedent. In a system as fragmented and complex as BiH, apparent achievement of the minimum thresholds for progress is meaningless in absence of serious engagement with key veto players and their driving motivations.

Notes

The original analysis of police reform can be found in chapter four of Making the Transition: International Intervention, State-Building and Criminal Justice Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Andy tweets @Andy8chi
The entry here is reproduced with kind permission from European Futures.

The one-toothed police officer

Yesterday, I had the chance to catch up with someone I met on my way over here. He works in one of the traditional crafts that are still pursued in the old town district around Baščaršija, something that his father and grandfather did too. I like to think that at least one member of the family would have been there when my Fodor 1973 guide to Yugoslavia was being written – it describes the owners of the small shops sitting in the entrance way, making their wares as the crowds amble past.

There will be more stories to tell, I hope, from this chance encounter. The craftsman has had some interesting personal experiences that say something about Bosnia in the last 20 or so years. As (ok - if) my language skills improve, I hope to be able to do those justice. For now, much of what he said (what I understood him to say) about his hopes and his disillusionment chime with things I have been hearing elsewhere, so in coming posts, I want to cover some general themes from our conversation. Today, it's the police.

My direct experiences with the police here so far have broadly been positive: a couple of traffic stops conducted efficiently, professionally, and in a more or less friendly manner*. Ten years ago, I would have been less confident that this would have been the case, in 2004 a Transparency International survey found that 15 per cent of respondents had been asked to pay a bribe to the police. There is still an impression here that police enjoy a range of 'fringe benefits' from their position of power.

The 'one-toothed officer'

There is a strong contrast between the image of a modern capital city (symbolised in Sarajevo by the proliferation of new shopping centres) and the police officer with only one tooth in his or her mouth as described by the craftsman. The latter is certainly something of an exaggeration, but it sums up a view of a lack of professionalism, and the clear sense that many people are in positions only on account of a system of patronage. There is no other explanation for their presence. A friend here encountered this directly, losing out to a candidate 15 or so places further down in the rankings and below the minimal required competence for the job in question.

Lack of competence is one concern, but equally so is the lack of independence that goes with this patronage. In many ways there is a sense here that police will turn their eyes away from the wrongs of those in power, while simultaneously using the law as a tool to help those elites pursue their own goals. The 'over-policing' of the protests is one example of this, perhaps too the use of terrorism provisions in pursuing charges, but other examples around the plenums, and around citizens' attempts to use public space to maintain a dialogue on change come up regularly in conversation.

So, while there may be effective, professional, good police officers here, there is also a structure that creates pressure for partisan policing and that creates space for incompetent and sometimes corrupt policing. While this structure may have been modified by processes of political division, and the arrival of multi-party democracy, it builds on the features present in the (second) former Yugoslavia.

State and party

In the one party state, there is very little differentiation between the party (in this case, the League of Communists) and the apparatus of state (government, civil service, etc.). To hold key posts throughout the system (such as the Presidency of a local court) would require party membership. With democratic elections in November 1990, and the rise of the three main nationalist parties (Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ; Party of Democratic Action, SDA; Serb Democratic Party, SDS), the strong link between party and state was not necessarily broken, it just fragmented somewhat.

Reading through case material that deals with the period from 1990 through to the middle of 1992, you can see that the shift in state-party relationship involves the new parties dividing up the offices among their own supporters. This was assisted by a system called 'the key' which was designed to achieve ethnic balance in a number of government-controlled posts, making sure that they matched the composition of the political unit (Republic, municipality). In municipalities where there was a division of power after democratic elections, that division often matched the ethnic composition of the area, and so there was a certain harmony between the objectives of the key and the party political appointments.

In such a system, the holders of offices owe their allegiance not to the state or to the people of that state, but to the partisan interests that put them there.

*More friendly when it was just a standard 'control' stop to check papers, less friendly when it was a ticking off for forgetting to drive with my headlights on, which is a legal requirement here. 

Mass policing and micro protests

A couple of weeks back the director of the police in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dragan Lukač, predicted mass protests for 7 March. His predictions came with warnings about the need for new laws on dealing with disorder, suggesting that he anticipated mass protests and disorder would go hand in hand.

The protests continue in Sarajevo and elsewhere, but a visit to the city centre yesterday painted a different picture, one of mass policing and micro protest. Yesterday, with a heavy police presence (including special public order units with full protective gear, helmets etc.), a small group of protesters was restricted to the pavement and an area in Mali Park (see pictures). Again today, traffic was running normally as the protesters were limited to the park area, albeit behind a far lighter cordon of police in their normal, civilian uniforms.

Throughout the protests, which have lasted for more than a month, demonstrators have been blocking one of the city centre's main cross roads. A few days back, after police decided to let traffic through before the end of the protest, a car injured two protesters. In the following days, taxi drivers joined the protests, using their vehicles to block traffic and thus making an important contribution to the safety of the demonstrators. Meanwhile, in Mostar, the last couple of days have seen new police restrictions on protesters.

All in all, it points towards a more 'robust' response from police to what have been, since Saturday 8 February, peaceful, if disruptive protests. Another Sarajevo Plenum will be held on Wednesday. The Plenum has already voiced its objection to the policing of the protests, including the arrest of three protesters (in German here). We can expect to hear more on this.

In the meantime, regarding the violence of 8 February, police are dealing with this using legislation on terrorism and attacks on the constitutional order. On Friday, two were detained under the relevant provisions of state criminal law.

Police and protesters, Sarajevo, 7 March

Reading the (Bosnian) Riots

Last summer, William Hunt, Ferida Duraković and Zvonimir Radeljković wrote in Dissent about the possibility that a younger generation of Bosnians might turn to protest. Less than a year on, this has come to pass, but it is not just the younger generation, rather people of all ages. 

My first few days in the country have given me a chance to talk to people about the protests in a number of cities here, and about the violence that took place in early February in Tuzla, Bihać, Mostar, Sarajevo and Zenica, the five largest cities in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

The move from relatively peaceful protests to a swift escalation and spread brought to mind the UK’s own riots in 2011, when what started as a peaceful protest outside a police station in Tottenham became violent, and then spread first to other areas of London and then to other major urban centres in England. 

The most obvious difference between those riots, and the riots here in Bosnia, is the targeted nature of violence. Here, the targets were overwhelmingly government buildings, including cantonal government offices, state institutions, and in Mostar, political party offices. This is in stark contrast to the UK, where a joint Guardian/LSE report, Reading the Riots, paints a picture of a combination of battles with police and the widespread targeting of commercial premises. 

The sources of dissatisfaction bear some similarity, albeit defined by different contexts. The Guardian/LSE study sample of rioters most commonly cited poverty, policing, government policy, unemployment and the shooting of Mark Duggan as important causes of the riots. 

Before the widespread riots of 7 February, protests in Tuzla had centred on the collapse of the canton’s industries, particularly after a series of privatisations. Workers who saw their industries, their jobs and their livelihoods disappear, sought some form of compensation. Alongside this is a strong sense that the politicians here are doing very well in a country suffering widespread poverty and mass unemployment. A common chant heard during protests is lopovi (thieves). Again and again, injustice comes up. But the background of dissatisfaction with the police and policing has not been a factor I have seen here yet. 

In another way, policing may be important. When I was last in Sarajevo in 2005 various international agencies, including the EU and the Office of the High Representative, were focusing on the problem of police coordination in a country with 10 cantonal forces, two entity forces, a special district force, a state force, and a border force. A television campaign featured a police officer pursuing gangsters, only to be stopped by an invisible barrier. While maintaining day to day order is a responsibility of Cantonal police, the security of Federal and State buildings is down to those particular levels of government. So in Sarajevo, when there is a mass protest, which involves attacks on Federal and State buildings, three forces are involved, and it has been suggested that failures in coordination limited the police ability to contain the violence. 

A number of stories are doing the rounds regarding the violence, the extent to which it was orchestrated and if police ineffectiveness might have been part of a political strategy. It’s interesting that these stories have currency, but on the question of the police response, it is also worth remembering how many days passed in the UK before the riots of 2011 were contained. 

As it happened, the violence was more or less limited to two days in Tuzla and one in other cities. Like in London and other UK cities, it was followed by citizen-led clean-up actions. It has also been followed by a more peaceful form of direct democracy, as plenums meet in various locations and pass requests to governments. Already, the Tuzla plenum has claimed a victory in the scrapping of the bijeli hljeb (white bread) payments that representatives receive at the end of their mandate.