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HAS ETHNIC CLEANSING SUCCEEDED?

GEOGRAPHIES OF MINORITY RETURN AND ITS MEANING IN BOSNIA-

HERZEGOVINA

Dr Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal),

School of Public and International Affairs,

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,

Alexandria, Virginia 22314-2979. Email: toalg@vt.edu

&

Dr Carl Dahlman,

Department of Geography,

Miami University,

Oxford, Ohio, 45056. Email: dahlmac@muohio.edu

Chapter submitted for publication of the proceedings of »Dayton - Ten Years After: Conflict Resolution, Co-operation Perspectives«, Sarajevo, 29.11. - 2.12.2005.

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Abstract:

This paper examines ethnic cleansing as a geopolitical strategy and the effort of the international

community and ordinary Bosnians to reverse its effects through returns. While ethnic cleansing was

successful in dividing population and territory according to the nationalists’ maps, the Dayton Peace

Accord contained provisions that eventually led to significant return migration by displaced persons, thus

undoing the exclusivity of the war’s segregationist geography. This paper reviews and maps these

geographies of return. It then considers debate, on the tenth anniversary of Dayton, over the meaning of

the current population and territorial structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nationalist politicians,

international diplomats, observers, and journalists are among those disseminating particular geopolitical

visions of contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. Their depiction of a still divided Bosnia-Herzegovina or

partially fixed by international intervention fail to capture Bosnia-Herzegovina’s current condition.

Demographically at least, ethnic cleansing has not succeeded nor has it been reversed.

Summary:

The paper describes the geopolitical strategy of ethnic cleansing as it was used in pursuit of state-breaking

and state-making in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war. It considers the question of whether

this strategy worked in the sense that it left a segregated population and exclusionary political geography

in Bosnia ten years after Dayton. The paper presents two geographies of post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina

which relate to the legacy of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is discussed as a geopolitical strategy that

yields a political geography characterized by the massive population displacement brought by

nationalists’ effort to segregate and partition Bosnia. Although ethnic cleansing was successful in

dividing population and territory according to the nationalists’ maps, the Dayton Peace Accord that ended

the war contained provisions that eventually led to a considerable return migration by displaced persons,

undoing the exclusivity of the war’s political geography. The paper provides maps of the geography of

return to describe and analyze the effect to which the effort to promote minority returns over the last

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decade has ameliorated the political geography of ethnic cleansing. The paper then analyzes the meanings

ascribed to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s current population and territory ten years after Dayton. Nationalist

politicians, international diplomats, observers, and journalists are among those disseminating new visions

of the meaning of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which make claims about the persistence of nationalism or the

condition of human rights in post-war Bosnia. Their depiction of Bosnia as either yet broken by

nationalism or near fixed by international fiat belie the actual lived spaces in post-war Bosnia. We argue,

instead, that Bosnia must be understood as a new political space that defies the purity of nationalist

visions and also fails to satisfy the wish of a truly heterogeneous society. Ethnic cleansing has not

succeeded nor has it yet been reversed.

Key Words: return migration, displaced persons and refugees, political geography, ethnic cleansing

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Ethnic Cleansing as Geopolitical Strategy

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 added a new phrase to the vocabulary of geopolitics in

the late twentieth century: ‘ethnic cleansing’ (etnički čišćenje). The term is a hybrid of

international and local uses, emerging in 1991 when Croatian government officials and

international aid workers promoted it as a description of ‘Serbian’ actions in ‘Croatian’ villages

and towns. The term has its historical origins in a family of military euphemisms like čišćenje

terena (cleansing the terrain) which was used during World War II by the Ustašha. Nationalist

Serbs in the 1980s used the term ‘ethnically clean’ to describe what they alleged was an

Albanian plot to create a Serb-free Kosovo. International journalists, UNHCR officials and

western diplomats embraced the term, translating it through their prevailing conceptions of

identity (‘ethnic’ rather than ‘nations’) as “ethnic cleansing” or “ethnic purification.” A 15 April

1992 dispatch by Sarajevo based reporter Chuck Sudetic quoting a western diplomat is the first

time “ethnic cleansing” appears in the American newspaper the New York Times (Sudetic 1992).

Other dispatches use the term ‘ethnic purification.’ The visits of the Bosnian Foreign Minister,

Harris Silajdžić, to Washington in April and May of 1992 promoted the term as part of an

emergent storyline of the Bosnian war as a European genocide (Ó Tuathail, 2002).

The phrase “ethnic cleansing” articulated not simply the horror of the Bosnian war but

the aims of its perpetrators, initially and overwhelmingly Serb and Bosnian Serb military forces

and irregular militias (Cigar, 1995). Before the self-styled ‘Assembly of Republika Srpska’ in

May 1992, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić articulated ‘six strategic goals’ for the

VRS, Republika Srpska’s army. The first of these was primordial: the separation of the ‘national

communities’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The rest were the strategic geography of that separation.

There should be a corridor between Semberija and Krajina. The Drina should be eliminated as a

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“border between worlds.” A border should be established on the Una and Neretva rivers. The

city of Sarajevo should be divided into Serbian and Muslim parts. Karadžić’s list ends with a

classic geopolitical trope: the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina should have access to

the sea (Donia, 2003). What the Bosnian Serb leadership sought to achieve in rapid succession

was creation of a statelet through territorial conquest and population homogenization adjacent to

Serbia and available for eventual integration into the ‘motherland.’

As the Bosnian case indicates, ethnic cleansing is a geopolitical strategy of extraordinary

ambition. Mann (2004, 11) defines ethnic cleansing as “the removal by members of one group of

another group from a locality they define as their own.” He develops a classificatory table to

distinguish its different forms (Table 1). The Bosnian war falls into the highlighted categories of

murderous ethnic cleaning, mostly ‘total cleansing’ and ‘premeditated’ though more

problematically labeled ‘genocide’ in all instances (cf. Dahlman 2004).

Type of Violence No Cleansing Partial Cleansing Total Cleansing

None Multiculturalism Partial abandon identity

Voluntary Assimilation

Institutionalized Coercion

Discrimination Official language restrictions

Cultural Suppression

Policed repression Selective police repression

Policed language repression; pop

control

Population exchanges;

deportations

Violent repression Generalized police repression

Pogroms; communal riots

Wild deportations; rape; sterilization

Unpremeditated mass death

Mistaken war, revolution

Callous civil war Ethnocide

Premeditated mass killings

Civil war repressions; systematic reprisals

Forced conversion; polititicide &

classicide

Genocide

Table 1: Michael Mann’s Classification of Forms of Ethnic Cleansing

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As Mann and others have argued, ethnic cleansing is a distinctly modern form of social

engineering. It is associated with the modern state formation and the grounding of sovereignty in

‘the people’ except that, in the case of ethnic cleansing, ethnos displaces demos as ‘the people’

become ‘the nation’ qua one singular ethnic group defined by a mixture of characteristics:

‘blood,’ language and religion. It arises in conditions where, firstly, ethnicity trumps other forms

of social identification, particularly class, and secondly, when two old ethnic groups both lay

claim to the state and their claims have substantial legitimacy. The onset of murderous ethnic

cleansing is reached when the less powerful group is bolstered to fight by the prospect of outside

help or when the stronger side believes it has such overwhelming military force that it can force

through its own will. Both instances apply to Bosnia, its Bosnian Serb leadership directed and

bolstered by the Milošević regime while that regime as a whole enjoyed a virtual monopoly on

weaponry and felt it could pursue its goal of creating a ‘greater Serbia’ without serious military

opposition. As is well known, the VRS seized 70% of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina and

drove nearly all non-Serbs from this territory before having to retreat at the end of the war and

settling for a 49/51 division of Bosnian territory at Dayton.

Though the Bosnian Serb leadership received less territory than they would have liked

and did not manage to achieve strategic goals like dividing Sarajevo and uniting with Serbia,

they did gain recognition for their wartime entity, Republika Srpska, and the delimitation of an

internal border separating it from the Bosnian Federation, the entity that was held to represent

‘Muslims’ and ‘Croats’ in the new Bosnian spatial order. Ethnic cleansing succeeded in radically

altering the pre-war demographic geography of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Through force and terror,

the VRS had ethnically engineered a territory that, bar some small minorities of Roma,

Ukrainians and others, was almost completely inhabited by those who identified as Serb. This

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occurred despite the fact that by August 1995 the VRS was an exhausted and defeated army.

Biljana Plavšić later remarked: “In 1995, we were defeated. However, that said, things did not

look that bad around the negotiating table…The people were saying: “It’s good; we could have

come out worse” (cited in Cigar, 2001, 232). The Bosnian Croat HVO, with help from the

regular Croatian army, and the Bosnian army also engaged in ethnic cleansing as a means of

creating their own homogeneous ethno-nationalist spaces. The largest single instance of ethnic

cleansing was conducted by the Croatian army in August 1995 with Operations Storm and

Maestral (Magaš and Zanić, 2001).

Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords contained provisions that threatened the apartheid

geography that was the ‘greatest achievement’ of the VRS and its opposing armies. It not only

promised return for those forcefully displaced by wartime fighting but domicile return, the return

of home as property: “All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their

homes of origin. They shall have the right to have restored to them property of which they were

deprived in the course of hostilities since 1991 and to be compensated for any property that

cannot be restored to them” (The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and

Herzegovina, Annex 7, paragraph one). Yet for all the clauses promising the possibility of

reversing ethnic cleansing and returning to the status quo ante of April 1992, there were others

consolidating the triumph of ethnonationalist homelands over the common Bosnian home all had

shared before the war. The Dayton Peace Accords, after all, were negotiations involving the

organizers and perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. The legal requirement allowing the displaced the

possibility of return contained a choice. The displaced could also seek compensation and choose

to relocate. As ethnonationalist negotiators knew well, Annex 7 could be an instrument for the

consolidation of ethnic cleansing, allowing ethnic engineering through violence to be legitimated

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through legalized property exchange, something that had already developed on an informal basis

during the war.

Reversing Ethnic Cleansing? The Map of Returns

The decade since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords has seen some remarkable

changes in the political and demographic realities of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Due to BiH’s entity

governance structure, the IEBL is still an everyday reality in the country though it constitutes no

form of internal barrier to vehicular movement within Bosnia. Despite international incoherence

and considerable local obstructionism in the years after the war, the international community

slowly developed the capacity and the legal mechanisms required to seriously implement Annex

7 of the DPA. No one in the international community ever seriously thought that the

demographic legacy of ethnic cleansing could be reversed. The debate within the international

community after the war was whether to accept it as an unassailable reality, and provide funding

for local integration at the expense of domicile return, or to set up and fund a serious returns

process which would require people to leave their place of displacement and repossess their

property if they wished to obtain housing reconstruction aid. The UNHCR, charged with

implementing Annex 7, tilted initially towards not forcing domicile repatriation, in part because

of widespread criticism of its past emphasis on forced repatriation (Finnemore and Barnett,

2004). The Bosnian context was different, however, and the UNHCR, the OHR and other

agencies, under guidance from the Peace Implementation Council, decided that the best peace

reconciliation strategy in the long run would be one which incentivized movement from places of

displacement back to places of origin. The 1991 census portrayed a demographic order the

international community decided to institutionalize as their baseline of return. ‘Bosnia 1991’ was

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a counter fantasy to the initial ethnonationalist fantasy of a BiH of separate ‘national homelands.

Through the establishment of a property law implementation process (PLIP) and Return and

Reconstruction Task Forces (RRTF) at the local level in Bosnia’s regions, the international

community assailed the apartheid ‘Bosnia 1996’ created by war in the name of a pre-war ‘Bosnia

1991’. The year 1999 proved a tipping point as numbers of returnees – refugees and displaced

persons, those returning to places where their ethnicity was majority and those where they were

now a minority – peaked in 2000 and 2001. By September 2004, a remarkable milestone had

been reached as the UNHCR and the Bosnian Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees

announced that one million persons out of a total wartime displacement population of over two

million had returned home. Nevertheless, an estimated 38,000 families were still awaiting return

related reconstruction assistance in mid-2004 according to a Ministry for Human Rights and

Refugees (MHRR) re-registration exercise.

Elsewhere, we examine the localized geopolitics behind the achievement of this number

as well as their limitations (Ó Tuathail and Dahlman, 2004a; Ó Tuathail and Dahlman, 2004b;

Dahlman and Ó Tuathail, 2005a; Dahlman and Ó Tuathail, 2005b; Ó Tuathail and Dahlman,

2006). Taking these figures at face value for now, let us examine the political geography of these

returns that totaled 1,011,555 registered persons by late 2005, especially the politically

significant categories of ‘minority’ and ‘majority returns.’ A slight majority of the total number

of returns are ‘majority returns,’ persons returning to homes in areas controlled by parties

claiming to represent their own ethnic group. Majority status relates to the post-war local

geopolitical control of an opština irrespective of its pre-war population structure. So, for

example, Serbs returning to Zvornik in the eastern RS are majority returns though Serbs were a

statistical minority there before the war. Also, majority status does not mean that majority returns

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have been unproblematic. In some locales, tensions exist between majority returnees and

displaced persons from the same ethnic group who have relocated there, sometimes obstructing

majority returns. Conducting fieldwork in Derventa in July 2002, one of the most devastated

places in all of Bosnia during the war, we encountered majority Serb residents complaining

about co-ethnic neighbors while longing for the return of their former Muslim and Croat

neighbors. While we do not mean to suggest this sentiment is widespread, it is important to

remember that the process of wartime demographic upheaval had consequences that have

produced axes of tension and hostility beyond those of ethnicity.

The international community emphasis on ‘minority returns’ is the concrete policy

pursued to lessen the exclusionary geopolitics produced by ethnic cleansing. Minority returns are

those persons returning to homes in areas controlled by a different ethnic group. Though there

was an intense desire by many displaced persons to return home, those who were minority

returnees soon after the war (1996-1999) faced intense obstructions ranging from violence to

discrimination. The turnabout in international community policies began to reverse the

obstructions by 2000 and with it the demographics of ethnic cleansing. At the same time, the

time that passed between the initial wave of ethnic cleansing in 1992 and the easier return period

after 2000 meant many persons had given up or relocated. Still, the nearly 454,000 minority

returns registered by November 2005 reflects a partial success at reintegrating the country.

Like the pattern of displacement, minority returns have been uneven across the territory

of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Table 2 provides a summary of minority returns over the last ten years,

including the ethnic composition and destination of that migration. The largest minority return

movements have been Serbs to the Federation and Bosniaks to the RS. The next largest

migration stream includes both Bosniaks (45,703) and Croats (72,215) within the Federation,

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especially among central Bosnian opštine. Altogether, Serb, Croat and Bosniak returns to central

Bosnia suggest it may come closest to regaining a multiethnic settlement pattern, though with

important differences from the pre-war situation. Bosniak returns to Brčko District are not

insignificant, though they are not a large share (3.3%) of all minority returns. This is due to the

extended population engineering employed by the RS in an effort to retain Brčko for the RS

(Dahlman and Ó Tuathail, 2006). The approximately 15,000 Bosniaks who returned to Brčko did

so against a population of both resident Serbs and displaced Serbs who had left behind homes in

the Federation to take over ‘abandoned apartments’ in key RS cities, such as Brčko.

Table 2. Ethnicity and destination of minority returnsin Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1996-November 2005

Number of registered minority returnsFBiH RS Brčko Total

Bosniak 45,703 149,058 15,145 209,906Croat 72,215 10,663 3,746 86,624Serb 150,877 0 2,491 153,368Other 2,939 1,149 0 4,088Total 271,734 160,870 21,382 453,986

Share of totalFBiH RS Brčko Total

Bosniak 10.1% 32.8% 3.3% 46.2%Croat 15.9% 2.3% 0.8% 19.1%Serb 33.2% 0.0% 0.5% 33.8%Other 0.6% 0.3% 0.0% 0.9%Total 59.9% 35.4% 4.7% 100.0%

UNHCR 1996-2006, compiled by authors

By mapping the specific destination of minority returns within Bosnia, it is possible to

gain a sense of the emerging post-war demography of Bosnia. As shown in Figure 1, the largest

minority return areas are: Sarajevo and its suburbs; western Bosnia around Prijedor and Banja

Luka; and the northeast opštine of Doboj, Brčko, Bijeljina, and Zvornik. Others areas of notable

return are Mostar, in southern Bosnia, and some of the central Bosnian opštine where total return

numbers are small but significant in relation to the local population. In all of these areas,

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minority returns constitute a significant presence in villages and towns ethnically cleansed during

the war. In only a few places, however, have minority returns tipped the ethnic balance in their

favor as most returns are to opštine where they are outweighed by resident and displaced persons

of the locally dominant group. For example, in the northeastern opština of Zvornik, the return of

nearly 15,000 Bosniaks is set against a pre-war Serb population of 28,000 enlarged by an

additional 30,000 displaced Serbs. Before the war, Bosniaks were the majority in Zvornik.

Today, unofficial estimates put the Bosniak population at 30% of the new total (Powell, 2005).

In contrast, a relatively small number of Serb minority returns to southwest Bosnia have

reestablished their pre-war majority in three opština. Many other opština, despite some minority

returns, show the results of ethnic cleansing through the persistence of homogeneous local

populations.

We can visualize the geography of the reversal of ethnic cleansing by examining ethnic

specific maps. Figure 2 shows the total Bosniak minority returns as a percentage of the pre-war

Bosniak population for each opština, providing a map of local minority returns by ethnicity as a

share of their estimated potential. As is evident, Bosniak returns to western and northeastern RS

number more than 30% of their pre-war level with somewhat lower figures for other parts of the

Serb entity. Parts of central Bosnia and the eastern Bosnian Krajina held by Bosnian Croats

during the war have also seen these rates of return. This pattern may be compared with Figure 3,

which shows the rate of Croat minority returns to be highest in parts of central Bosnia (held by

the Bosnian army during the war) and the Posavina region (in the strategic Brčko corridor where

eastern and western RS connect). The total number of Croats in Brčko has declined significantly,

however, and may now be less than 10% as many have moved to the economically more

prosperous Croatia. Similarly, Figure 4 displays Bosnian Serb minority return rates. Most Serb

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returns are to the city of Sarajevo and to the predominantly Serb suburbs they abandoned in early

1996. But it is worth noting Serb returns to the opštine of Titov Drvar, Glamoc. Bosansko

Grahovo, and Bosanski Petrovac, a lightly populated and somewhat remote part of the Bosnian

Krajina region that was overwhelmingly Serb. These minority returns were strongly contested by

the Croat forces that took over this region in the wake of Operation Maestral toward the end of

the war (ICG, 1998). Nevertheless, charismatic local leadership proved significant and Serbs

returned in large numbers to these opštine, reestablishing their pre-war Serb-majority status.

The future significance of these minority returns to Bosnia’s post-war demography and

arguably its political landscape is hard to estimate as there has been no census since before the

war in 1991. While we await the first official post-war census, we have collected available

population estimates that paint a general picture of Bosnia ten years after Dayton. First, the total

population of Bosnia-Herzegovina is probably smaller than many estimates suggest, due largely

to continued emigration, much of it clandestine. The Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and

Herzegovina provides a population estimate (2003) of 3.83 million Bosnians, against a pre-war

total of 4.37 million. The realities of economic hardship and out migration are more likely to

leave a population of 3.5 million, according to survey research conducted by the authors in 2005.

Second, no reliable counts exist for the number of persons in each locale who did not move

during the war nor are there figures for majority returns. Still, data we have collected suggests

that the Federation today is 72% Bosniak, 22% Croat, and almost 5% Serb against the pre-war

composition of 52% Bosniak, 19% Croat, and 20% Serb. Figures for the RS are less reliable but

suggest that its pre-war composition of 54% Serb, 29% Bosniak, and 9% Croat has become a

predominantly Serb population (Josipovič, this volume). We should keep in mind that officially

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the returns process is not over and that, according to MHHR figures, almost one hundred and

thirty thousand individuals are awaiting a ‘durable solution’ to their displacement.

Dayton Plus 10: Interpreting Returns and Whether Ethnic Cleansing Succeeded

The significance of ethnic cleansing and the relative success of minority returns are rarely

viewed on their own terms but are instead represented through dominant geopolitical discourses

about Bosnia and the outcome of the international intervention. This has been especially true of

US diplomats who have taken an exceptional interest in Bosnia as a proving ground for

American foreign policy after the Cold War. US geopolitical culture has long been characterized

by a tendency to envision Bosnia within the terms of its own creed as a ‘multicultural’ and

‘multiethnic’ society that is struggling with its past as it moves towards a better tomorrow

(Simmons, 2002). In more prosaic formulations, Bosnia becomes a mini-United States that is

struggling to overcome the bitterness of a civil war and forge a more meaningful union. What

this typically produces, in official US policy articulations at least, is a framing of the question of

return within predictable narratives of redemption and reconciliation. Admitting that ethnic

cleansing has succeeded, publicly at least, is virtually impossible to do. For example, in

ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the DPA, for example, US Secretary of State

Condoleezza Rice remarked how Bosnia was exhibiting a “more hopeful national story” (sic)

with “Serbs and Croats and Muslims living and working every day for reconciliation in places

like Sarajevo and Mostar and Brčko and Banja Luka.” Rice, an African American woman who

grew up in the racially divided city of Birmingham, Alabama, in the segregationist South of the

United States, is in a powerful position to speak about division and ‘reconciliation’ but whether

such ‘politically correct’ American narratives translate to post-war BiH is questionable. Rice’s

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purpose was actually to use Bosnia to affirm the legitimacy of the US war on terrorism. She

noted that “Bosnia and Herzegovina is not merely a passive recipient of international support” –

a remark that actually signals its persistent status as a dependency – but that it “is joining the

international community to defend liberty and to fight for the freedoms of others in Iraq and to

fight terrorism across the globe” (Rice, 2005). In remarks on the tenth anniversary, Deputy

Assistant Secretary of State Nicholas Burns (2005) similarly affirms the American creed in

Bosnia, singling out Brčko, which he described as having “the strongest economy, the highest

level of foreign investment, and the most fully functioning multi-ethnic institutions of any

municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” as proving that “multi-ethnicity has a future in the

land.”

That multi-ethnicity is associated with the future is acknowledgement by international

officials that the returns process has limits. While it has succeeded better than many anticipated,

it has not significantly altered the demographic ‘facts on the ground’ created by war crimes and

forced displacements. The phrase ‘one million returns’ was part of the talking point script of

international officials reviewing the positives in BiH ten years after Dayton. Some were more

effusive than others on the process of return. The OHR Paddy Ashdown, for example, spoke of

“the miracle of Bosnia” which as “has come so far so fast” (BBC News, 2005). One of the

miracles is that “people are living together again.” Muslims are back in Srebrenica while Serbs

are back in Drvar. Particular sites and anecdotes of return are inspiring yet Ashdown and the

OHR as an institution are aware of the limits of return. No one claims that ethnic cleansing has

been reversed or that BiH is multiethnic across all its territory. Ashdown freely acknowledges

that the ‘hatreds’ that caused Srebrenica still exist. Rather, what international officials claim is

that the process of returns has been a success. For Ashdown, it has “changed the rules of war”

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and established a “new human right,” the right to reclaim your property and return to your home

if you so choose after warfare (Jarinic, 2002). Bosnia, Ashdown argued, compares favorably in

this respect to his own experience in Belfast in 1969, where he commanded a platoon of British

soldiers. There, Catholic residents of particular neighborhoods in the city were burnt out of their

homes, and none were ever been able to return (BBC News, 2005).

While international community officials looked for affirmation and emphasized the

positive in BiH ten years after Dayton, there were those within Bosnia and internationally who

saw only failure and the triumph of ethnic cleansing. One of the more striking articulations of

this sentiment appeared in an opinion editorial by the British Guardian newspaper columnist

Jonathan Steele (2005a). Steele wrote of contemporary Bosnia:

The success of the post-Dayton decade is patchy. The multiculturalism of pre-war Bosnia

is gone. Although tens of thousands of people have returned home to areas from which

they had been ethnically cleansed, most live in edgy enclaves. All but one municipality

have populations which are 90% from the same religious or ethnic group.

Steele cites an International Crisis Group report on police reform as his source for the last

striking statistical claim (Steele, 2005b; ICG, 2005, 4). In a discussion of ‘ethnic imbalance’ in

police forces, which includes the unsourced statistic that “fewer than 8 per cent of the RS police

force are non-Serbs,” this document cites the 2004 report of the Helsinki Committee for Human

Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Helsinki, 2005). This report contains the following claim:

The consequences of ethnic cleansing continue to be prominent in all segments of the

Bosnian and Herzegovinian society. Although nine years have elapsed since the peace

was restored and the process of returning began, it can be said that the number of

returnees, who have returned to the areas where their ethnic group constitutes minority in

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number, is unsatisfactory. In pre-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, only some twenty

municipalities had such ethnic composition that one ethnic group was prevailing

absolutely in numbers over the other two. In about 80% of municipalities, none of the

ethnic groups had an absolute majority of inhabitants. Nowadays, only in Tuzla the

majority population does not reach 90% of the total population, while that percentage in

other communities ranges between 92% and 99%.

This passage is the source of the 90% homogeneous (except Tuzla) ‘statistic’ that appears in the

ICG Report and subsequently circulated internationally to Steele’s column and beyond. It is a

striking statistic and apparently convincing evidence that ethnic cleansing has succeeded. The

problem, however, is that the statistic is not verifiable. Those statistics that do exist actually

contradict it, so much so that we are confident in suggesting that this figure is misleading and

untrue. In the very opštine we have studied in depth (Zvornik, Doboj, Brcko, Jajce), the level of

returns are well beyond 10% of the population.

Let us, nevertheless, take the Helsinki Committee’s basis for making such a claim

seriously. The 2004 Report articulated sentiments and arguments we heard frequently in BiH

during our research visit there, namely that official UNHCR and BiH Ministry of Human Rights

and Refugees (MHRR) statistics are not an accurate picture of the level of returns. The 2004

Helsinki Report reasons:

The estimates of the Helsinki Committee in Bosnia and Herzegovina based on the reports

of monitors, visits to a number of municipalities, contacts with citizens, and data

collected in local communities, say that the figure of one million returnees is absolutely

unrealistic. Actual number of returnees is much lower (sic). The number of returnees is

unjustifiably identified with the number of returned property /houses and flats. The fact is

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that the property returned, or more precisely, the number of approved requests, multiplied

with the number of household members who applied for the return, is registered. The

Helsinki Committee has the knowledge of the fact that a great number of owners, as soon

as they enter into possession of the house or flat, sell the immovable property or

exchange it. Some of them use their pre-war house that has been rebuilt, as the weekend

cottage, or simply rent it out. Quite a number of rebuilt houses have never been moved in.

In the area of Srebrenica, according to the official data, totally 4,000 refugees have

returned. However, in practice more than 60% of them stay there only periodically. For

example, in the village Moračići near Zvornik, 60 houses belonging to the Bosniaks were

rebuilt this year, but by the beginning of November none of the owners moved into them

permanently.

The Helsinki Committee raises the important question of how the official return statistics

are compiled. Until the closure of the RRTF in 2002, this job was undertaken by officials at

UNHCR offices together with the help of those managing returns in Bosnia's localities, the OMI

Ministry responsible for housing in Republika Srpska and housing officers in the Bosnian

Federation. Conditions varied across the regions of BiH as did international community capacity

to collect numbers. Since the RRTF was closed, the collection of return statistic is the task of

local opštine who are required to report these statistics to the state-level MHRR. Return numbers

were calculated on the basis of registrations with the local municipality, which were required

from returnees as part of the process of receiving reconstruction aid for their homes. Throughout

the process there is an incentive for the various agencies involved to maximize the numbers of

returnees. UNHCR implementation agencies like Mercy Corp want to demonstrate successful

returns as does the UNHCR itself while local authorities want to be seen as facilitating returns to

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avoid attracting unwelcome attention from the OHR. It is 'politically correct' to be in favor of

returns. This, however, does not mean that the UNHCR or local officials confuse number of

returnees with the number of returned houses and flats. All are well aware of the difference. The

Helsinki Committee is correct in pointing out that some returnees sell or rent out their property.

But there are no official statistics on how many do this. It is also correct that many returnees

engage in 'hedging behavior,' namely using their property part-time or having some of their

family in one location and some in another. This is also a phenomenon we observed across BiH,

especially in Srebrenica as the Helsinki Report cites. However, there are no reliable data or

studies on this phenomena – its statistic of 60% is unsourced and unexplained – so it is unclear

how significant it is. Our position is that the Helsinki's description of the 'one million returns'

claim as 'absolutely unrealistic' is too strong. The UNHCR/MHRR data set is the best that

administrators and social scientists have. It probably overstates the level of returns and certainly

does not capture the post-return phenomena of sales and rentals. Based on the opštine that we

have studied alone, we know that the Helsinki Committee's claim of '90% minus Tuzla

homogenity' is mistaken. The details of its micro statistics, such as its claim about the village

Moračići near Zvornik, for example, do not stand up either.

The 2005 Helsinki Report repeats the 'demographic success of ethnic cleansing' storyline

and the '90% homogenity' statistic (with two exceptions, Tuzla and Sarajevo) though this time it

is attributed to a non-governmental organization called the 'European Movement' in Banja Luka

(Helsinki, 2006). The Report reasons in a manner that is less than satisfactory, arguing for

example that "it can be easily seen that the population of returnees, particularly minority

returnees, is mainly composed of elderly persons." Declining rates of return provoke the

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following conclusion: "It leads us to horrifying fact that ethnical cleansing is in the final stage in

Bosnia and Herzegovina" (sic).

Conclusion

Our argument is that this is much too negative a conclusion about the results of the return

process. That BiH is not as multiethnic at the opština level as it was is beyond dispute. However,

it is also much more multiethnic than it was after the war when an apartheid political geography

predominated. Bosnia 2006 is between its multiethnic/multinational geography of 1991 and its

apartheid geography of 1996. Demographically at least, ethnic cleansing has not succeeded nor

has it been reversed. Discrete and homogeneous national homelands have not been created. The

principle of ethnoterritorialism persists with the entity governance structures but even this has

been ameliorated by the Constitutional Court decision on 'constituent peoples' and subsequent

constitutional modifications. The most robust and accurate storyline on BiH today is not one that

accentuates the positives and finds redemption for liberal internationalist norms (the favorite

storyline of the international community, especially American officials) nor one that darkly casts

the international effort as a failure and emplots the 'horror' of the triumph of ethnic cleansing.

Rather, it is the story of a Bosnia still struggling with the legacy of wartime ethnic cleansing, a

country slowly transitioning from an unsustainable segregationism towards a modernizing

European future with many obstacles and challenges along the way.

It is too early to answer the question, 'has ethnic cleansing succeeded?' At this stage, what

we can do is identify a series of indications beyond the demographics of return. One is whether

Bosnia's two most diabolical 'political geographers,' Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, end

up in the Hague on trial for the war crimes that accompanied the assault on Bosnia-

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Herzegovina's pre-war human geography they oversaw. A second is whether their creation,

Republika Srpska, survives with its current name and identity as a meaningful governance unit as

Bosnia-Herzegovina transitions towards eventual European Union membership. A third will be if

and when the leaders of Bosnia-Herzegoviana's different peoples come together to create a state-

wide reconciliation process that acknowledges the war crimes committed by all in the last war

while also recognizing that some bear a greater burder of collective guilt than others. While not

definitively answerable, the questions should haunt discussion of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a moral

reminder that ethnic cleansing ultimately only suceeds when the international community and

local forces choose to let it.

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Figures 1-4. Figure 1 (top, left) show the number of minority returns to each Bosnian opština.

Figure 2 (top, right) shows the estimated percentage of pre-war Bosniak population for each

opština that has returned home. Figure 3 (bottom, left) shows the same data as Figure 2 but for

Croats and Figure 4 (bottom, right) for Serbs.

23

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