British politics, a dirty, dirty game.

I wasn’t going to write much about the resumption of Karadzic’s trial last week. It was all going to be fairly predictable and it was. The trial began on Monday which happened to also be a Bosnian National Holiday, their Independence Day, a fact not lost on the Serbs*. Karadzic asked for (and got) more time to prepare, but not before he managed to go on for two days in a speech designed more to remind the Bosnian Serbs of their greatness and less to prepare for his defence. He denied everything, calling the seige of Sarajevo and the events in Srebrenica myths and then called the war ‘just and holy’. I mean holy? Really? I’ve heard many opinions as to why Bosnia imploded in the early 1990s, but religion is most certainly not one of them. Most people I know here couldn't even be bothered to listen to what he had to say, it was all so predictable.

Of far more interest is what else was going on around that day.

For some time, the EU has been trying to encourage Serbia onto the road of EU integration. The biggest obstacle in its path to full membership has been its failure to bring about the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the leader of the Bosnian Serb forces during the war. Everyone thinks Serbia knows exactly where he is. Serbia say they are doing all they can to find him, but he never seems to be found. Either way, every now and then the EU feels that they need to throw Serbia a bone, something to make them remember that they do want to join the EU and to encourage them to continue behaving themselves.

So on the very same day that the Bosnian Serb Karadzic’s trial restarts, Serbia asks Britain to arrest a Bosnian Muslim whom they regard as a War Criminal. Britain, to its eternal shame, did so, arresting Ejup Ganic as Heathrow and detaining him as a prisoner. Ejup Ganic, the Bosniak Vice-President during the war, has already been investigated by the ICTY in The Hague, but no indictments were made, nor formal charges bought.

Essentially the charges revolve around Ganic's role in protecting Sarajevo from the JNA (the Yugoslav army, which essentially became the Bosnian Serb army, as the Bosniak's had to create their own armed forces to defend themselves from agression, particularly difficult as there was an international arms embargo on the region, so they could not buy the weapons that they needed to defend themselves against the heavily armed Serbs). For more information I recommend you read this article by the London based Bosnian Institute,  this post by Marko Attila Hoare**,  this by Amila Bosnae and finally this by the Srebrenica Genocide Blog (read the comments too)

The British Government has said that it was "just a case of the judicial authorities following their legal obligations" and they were not making a political statement at all. Try telling that to the thousands of protesters outside of the British Embassy in Sarajevo on Friday. They, like pretty much everyone else, see it as a way of appeasing Serbia for the trial of Karadzic.



Sometimes I'm ashamed of my country. They couldn't even get the right country. The arrest warrant for Ejup Ganic's arrest talks of crimes committed in Sarajevo in Serbia. Ethical Foreign Policy? The Bosnians are right to be furious. In the meantime we've been advised, as British citizens, to keep our heads down.

*The Serbs did not want independence, they were essentially fighting against Bosnia’s cessation from the then Yugoslavia. They don’t celebrate Bosnia’s Independence Day.

** the picture that Hoare uses in his post is of an event in Tuzla. Tuzla did manage to repel the JNA army and as such was spared the worst of the ethnic cleansing that afflicted the rest of north eastern Bosnia. This picture freaks me out though. Brcanska Malta is where I go scooting with the boys. I know it well. But every time we go there I find that I can see the burning tanks in the middle of the road.

What country are we in again?

Caught out once again by the semantics of this country. I was out and about near the east of the Bosnia, very close to the border with Serbia. This part of the country is a part of the Republika Srpska, the Serb half of Bosnia, usually known as the RS. It is very beautiful; forested hills, green valleys and the stately Drina River. This time of year there are cornfields and fishermen. The temperature is cooling to very pleasurable levels, it is really pretty Garden of Eden perfect like.

I'd been having a coffee with some very nice people, who had been more than welcoming and had offered me vast quantities of food and drink leading to us all having a very convivial time. They asked me where my children were, and I had said, in Bosnian, that the boys were at nursery. They asked me how the boys were coping with the language and I had replied that I thought they understood everything and that now they were actually starting to speak Bosnian.

There was a silence and then one of the men looked straight at me and in that sort of voice that says do not even think of contradicting me said that they weren't learning to speak Bosnian, they were learning to speak Serbian.

I forget sometimes about the realities of this country. If I had been to the south or the west of Bosnia, the men would have looked at me and told me that my children were learning to speak Croatian. The fact that these 'different' languages are as different as American and Australian are to English is neither here nor there. Nor was the fact that I struggle to speak any of them well, so to have to worry about who I am talking to and to remember to say Bosnian, Serbian or Croatian is way beyond me. It was important to them that I knew and that I understood that the language we were speaking was not Bosnian.

It is not restricted to the language. If you are in the RS when Bosnia are playing football you would never know it. Noone is watching. Their football team, the team they want to go to the World Cup, is Serbia and they are passionate about that. In the Croat areas of the country, they support Croatia (must remember not to say 5-1 at inappropriate times, the Croats are devastated, their media is imploding with grief in a way that I thought only the English could really do).

It is only the Bosniaks (also known as the Bosnian Muslims) who really identify with Bosnia. They speak Bosnian, they support Bosnia, they understand themselves to be Bosnian. They will do whatever it takes to keep the country together and at the more extreme end of the scale this involves trampling all over the sensitivities of the Serbs and Croats in the country.

The Americans say that they speak English. Chucking the Brits out of their country didn't lead them to insist that their language is American. It really doesn't matter what they call their language, noone is going to get upset about it. But, when the conflict here is so recent it becomes obvious that this tiny thing, a foreigner mistaking the name of the language they are trying to speak, is unbelievably important.

Suddenly I feel that 14 years after the conflict ended, Bosnia still has a long way to go before it can really function as a normal country.

visas ... or maybe not

The quest to obtain the proper permission to remain in this country continues. This has been going on since we got here and is becoming so unbearably bureaucratically mind numbingly dementedly dull that all we can do is laugh, shrug our shoulders and mutter, as the Bosnians do, 'this is Bosnia'

Our tourist visas ran out again so we made the trip to Serbia for coffee on Sunday (see my previous post from the last time we had to do this, deludedly thinking that that would be the last time). Dave's company is now officially registered and he has a Bosnian bank account, a Bosnian employee and a Bosnian salary. The big step forward is that company is now permitted to employ him, the creator of the company, as of last week. This is a process that has taken 8 months. Now we can start the process of obtaining temporary residency visas. Having seen the application form we suspect this will take us another 8 months. We also need to re-obtain a load of documentation, such as UK police checks, that we had already obtained before we left the UK as they are now, apparently, out of date.

Back to the police station we must go, where we will be told off, again, for not having a residency visa. We will be told, again, that as we only have a tourist visa we really ought to leave the country for 3 months before we are allowed back in again. We will be told, again, that this is the last time they will renew our visa but not until we point out that we simply cannot move this process along any faster, and it is not our fault that it is taking so long. Once again, the boys will use the corridors as 100m racing tracks and we will be told off by some scary looking policemen having cigarettes. Really, it is so frustrating and such a waste of everyones time and energy. If the powers that be in Bosnia really want people to invest in this country, and create companies which generate income and employment, they really do need to sort this process out.

Oh well, onwards and upwards.

Serbian gas and generosity

The gas spat between Russia and the Ukraine has been resolved. Gas should start pumping back through the pipelines to Bosnia (amongst other countries) in the next couple of days.

An unexpected side effect of the crisis has been an improvement of relations between Bosnia and Serbia. Apparently Serbia, also badly affected by the crisis, managed to negotiate a deal for some emergency gas provisions from some other EU countries and offered some of the gas to Bosnia, at no cost and therefore providing some very much needed domestic heating over the weekend when temperatures were reportedly as low as -29C (See more on this story here).

Serbia, for at least 30 minutes

It happens to us all in the end. The 90 day tourist visa is up and we had to leave Bosnia and reenter again to reinstate our right to be here. We had all sorts of plans. Pre children we'd have driven to Budapest for a romantic weekend. We could have taken a romantic weekend down in the coastal town Dubrovnik, also stunning. We could have hopped on a bus to Zagreb and, with a bit of luck and endurance to go further, gone skiing in the Slovenian mountains. We could have gone for a party weekend in Belgrade, recently cited as the best nightlife in Europe by the Times (article here).

All options a bit tricky with the kids. Partying is severely restricted when you need to be home for an absolute latest 9pm bedtime. Long car journeys to the coast or eastern European capitals are even less attractive when you need to sing Baa Baa Black Sheep for 3 hours continuously. Skiing might be a bit ambitious when Lukey has only known how to stand for under a year.

So instead we left the dog behind and drove to the nearest border, happening to be with Serbia which is about an hour away. We parked the car (don't have insurance to drive outside of Bosnia at the moment), changed a nappy and walked across a bridge spanning the Drina river, huddled against the biting wind signalling the arrival of winter, snow, hail and ice. Once on the other side we sidled into a cafe, ordered a quick coffee / hot chocolate to warm up and then headed straight back the way we had come from.

Next stop, badgering our landlord to come to the police station with us to complete all the necessary paperwork. The boys love this part, the long corridors in the police station echo and make brilliant running tracks. The police don't love this at all.

Now that D's company is fully operational (crack open the champagne, he has even managed to open a bank account), we can now start the process to apply for temporary residency visas which will negate the need to be making this sort of trip every 3 months.