Declining Hate Crimes Are Deceptive In Bosnia

A war cemetery in Mostar, where fire and police departments and schools are separated along ethnic lines. Photo by Kimberly Winston.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina— The country responsible for the term “ethnic cleansing” can show off a respectable drop in religiously motivated hate crimes over the last decade — at least on paper.

According to the Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina — a nongovernmental organization with members from the country’s Roman Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities — the number of hate crimes involving religion or religious property has fallen nationwide from 56 incidents in 2011 to just 11 in 2017, the last year for which the council has data.

“Attacks are decreasing,” Stefan Terzic, the IRC’s executive secretary, told a gathering of journalists and leaders from international community-supported organizations in the old city’s Gazi Husrev-Beg Library in October. “I hope, of course, it will continue that way.”

But experts inside and outside Bosnia-Herzegovina — where in the 1990s, Catholic Croats, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Bosniak Muslims engaged in the bloodiest European conflict since World War II — say the IRC’s current numbers are misleading.

“It is not about numbers — numbers do not mean much,” said one Bosnian security scholar who asked for anonymity out of fear for their personal safety for speaking about hate crimes. “It is about conflict potential. One high profile case can light the fire.”

And the potential for conflict may be at an all-time high. In October, Milorad Dodik — leader of the Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority portion of this mountainous nation — threatened to withdraw the region from Bosnia-Herzegovina and reestablish the Bosnian Serb Army, one of the main perpetrators of the war’s ethnic cleansing and other crimes. That prompted the United Nations high representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina to report that the country now “faces the greatest existential threat of the postwar period.” 

Parallel lives

Bosnia-Herzegovina may be small — about the size of West Virginia — but it captivated worldwide attention in 1992, when war broke out among its three main ethnic groups. By the time peace was brokered in 1995, between 90,000 and 300,000 people were dead, more were displaced and the names of Bosnia’s cities and villages had become bywords for war crimes — genocide in Srebrenica, forced expulsion in Banja Luka and systematic rape in Mostar.

At the height of the Bosnian war, the term “ethnic cleansing” was coined to describe the goal of such atrocities — the eradication of one or more ethnic groups from an area by a different ethnic group. At the time of the war, Bosniaks made up 44% of the population, Serbs made up 31% and Croats accounted for 17%.

And unlike in other countries split by internal conflict, religion and ethnicity in Bosnia and Herzegovina are inextricably linked. In Northern Ireland, both Catholics and Protestants share Irish ancestry; in Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis generally practice the same religion. But in Bosnia and Herzegovina, being Catholic means to be Croat, being Muslim means to be Bosniak and being an Orthodox Christian means to be Serbian.

“It is very hard to separate religion from ethnicity in Bosnia,” the security scholar said. “Even if you don’t practice, you are these things.”

That situation made ending the Bosnian War especially problematic. The peace agreement created three presidents, one for each ethno-religious group; two autonomous entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska; and a district, Brcko. Today, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats have separate school systems, political parties and, in especially divided regions like Mostar, police forces, fire departments and garbage collection services.

Hikmet Karcic, a genocide scholar who studies hate crimes and hate groups in Bosnia, likens Bosnia’s current system to the American pre-civil rights era “separate but equal” system, where Blacks and Whites lived in the same cities and towns but had separate schools, separate churches and separate lives.

“We have Jim Crow laws in Bosnia,” he said. “Our society doesn’t bring people to live with each other but brings people to live next to each other.”

Hate crimes then and now 

Stefan Terzic, executive secretary of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Interreligious Council, said hate crimes have declined in the country since 2011. Photo by Kimberly Winston.

As the IRC’s numbers indicate, reported hate crimes in Bosnia are relatively rare. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitors lawlessness in the region, found that in the first nine months of 2019, there were 109 hate crimes in Bosnia — about two-thirds involving religion or ethnicity. The Bosnian government does not officially track hate crimes, something the OSCE warned “impede(s) comprehensive assessment of the problem and effective response to it.”

Other European countries have much higher numbers. In 2019, the OSCE reported 972 and 8,585 hate crimes in Poland and Germany, respectively. The United States, too, dwarfs Bosnia and Herzegovina in hate crimes. In 2019, there were 7,314 hate crimes in the U.S., of which 21% were religiously motivated, according to the FBI.

According to the security scholar’s research, hate crimes were relatively unknown in Bosnia when it was still part of Yugoslavia. Under that country’s socialist system, “The official line was, ‘We are all brothers,’” they said. So hate crimes were both infrequent and underreported, as they would draw the attention of authorities eager to present a good face. 

But in the immediate aftermath of the Bosnian war, hate crimes spiked, most aimed at returning displaced persons, their property or their places of worship. In Banja Luka in 2001, Bosnian Serbs attacked Bosniak Muslims as they attempted to rebuild the foundation of a mosque destroyed in the war. Flags were torn down, prayer rugs set on fire and a pig — considered unclean by Muslims — chased onto the site. Several international officials were briefly trapped at the site.

One of the most severe hate crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina was the 2002 murder of three members of the Anđelić family on Christmas Eve in the village of Kostajnica, near Konjic. The murderer was a Bosniak Muslim who admitted in court he singled out the Andelic family because they were Catholic Croats. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. In another case from 2014, a Serb Orthodox man murdered a Bosniak Muslim in the town of Kolzuk after the victim refused to accept an Easter egg from the murderer.

Today, the most common hate crime is hate speech, followed by physical fights and vandalism. Research shows hate crimes usually occur around religious holidays, elections and sporting events, and most incidents — even some that may not be motivated by ethnic or religious hate — are reported to authorities.

“Each group wants to be seen as a victim” to cast suspicion and doubt on another group, the security scholar said. “They want to say, ‘They did this to me because I am a Muslim, or I am a Croatian or I am a Serb.’ It is a blame game.”

Karcic, the genocide scholar, agrees the situation is dire.

“For me, the trouble is not if someone throws a bottle at a mosque — that happens every day in the U.S. and other places,” Karcic said. “The problem here is you have people who were involved in mass killings and war crime rapes, and here they are still (government) ministers. We have human rights violators in state institutions, and that could allow hate crimes to get out of control.”

As of January 2020 — 25 years after the end of the war — authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina had warrants for the arrest of 47 fugitives suspected of war crimes. And when Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the United Nations’ criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, left his post after 10 years, he told The Guardian there were more than 3,000 war crime cases related to the Bosnian war still awaiting processing.

“It is deeply distressing that so many alleged perpetrators of genocide have still not faced justice,” Brammertz said in 2017. “I have witnessed the pain of the survivors who must face the reality that some of those alleged to have murdered their loved ones can still walk the streets freely.”

The rise of hate speech

Like most places touched by the COVID-19 pandemic, many Bosnians have reduced their face-to-face encounters over the last 18 months. And while that has led to a drop in hate crimes, it has highlighted different threats.

“I can say that in terms of hate crimes, Bosnia is OK right now,” Karcic said. “But in terms of hate speech, that is really where we are going high up.”

Most of this, he said, is happening online and via social media and often relates to the glorification of war criminals and genocide denial, both of which were made punishable by imprisonment in July of this year. At the same time, the Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia’s two autonomous states, officially declared the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica was neither genocide nor a war crime.

Karcic monitors another ominous threat: hate groups.

“Bosnia has become a very interesting spot for far-right neo-Nazis,” Karcic said. “They don’t contribute much to hate crimes, but they see Bosnia as an escape point” when things heat up for them in places like Serbia, the Ukraine, Germany, Great Britain, Poland and Greece.

That list also includes the United States. Karcic recently confirmed a visit to Bosnia by Robert Rundo, the California-based founder of the Rise Above Movement. Three members of the movement were arrested at the Charlottesville ”Unite the Right” rally that led to the death of Heather Heyer.

And just before Bosnia-Herzegovina’s last national election, Zeljka Cvijanovic, prime minister of Republika Srpska, visited the Washington, D.C., home of Steve Bannon. After stepping aside as a strategist for former President Donald J. Trump, Bannon established a Brussels-based think tank aimed at empowering nationalist leaders in Europe.

“The transatlantic connection between far-right leaders in the U.S. and leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina is more connected now,” Karcic said.

And he agrees with the U.N.’s high representative that the region is again on the brink of a hate-fueled war.

“Europe is frozen, the U.S. is worried about China and, to be frank, nobody gives a damn about Bosnia,” he said.

The reporting for this story was made possible through a travel grant provided by the Global Exchange on Religion In Society, a project of the European Union.

Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more. She is the recipient of the Religion News Association’s 2018 award for best religion reporting at large news outlets.