Slow road to recovery in war-torn Bosnia paved with hope
By Barbara L. Micale, National Capital Region
Grad student searches for answers about her homeland
To say that Gerard Toal is passionate about his research would be an understatement. For more than a decade, the professor of government and international affairs and director of Virginia Tech’s master of public and international affairs (MPIA) program in the National Capital Region, has used his expertise in critical geopolitics — the intersecting field of geography and international relations — to research the consequences of the Bosnian war, and help advocate for a positive and secure future for Bosnia-Herzegovina and its people.
Born and raised in the north of Ireland, Toal’s introduction to Bosnia came as a teenager traveling throughout Europe. The Bosnia he remembers from those days holds little resemblance to the war-torn country he travels to now to conduct his research.
Toal attended college in the United States after getting his bachelor’s degree from the National University of Ireland. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and joined Virginia Tech in 1989 after completing a Ph.D. in political geography at Syracuse University. (He moved to the National Capital Region in 2000.)
When war broke out in Bosnia in 1992, Toal was teaching a course on Global Conflicts in Blacksburg. He traveled to Poland on a “landscapes of the Holocaust” field trip as war raged in Bosnia. “It was very disturbing to be studying genocide during World War II when just a few hundred kilometers from where I was, ethnic cleansing was unfolding,”
He was deeply critical of how the international community was responding to ethnic cleansing. “European powers deployed troops to Bosnia, but they tightly restricted their mandate to non-aggressive peacekeeping efforts,” Toal says. “While U.S. officials freely criticized European passivity, they resolutely refused to send in American troops.”
The result, he says, was “a bankrupt policy of treating the Bosnian war as a localized humanitarian crisis. With a more aggressive policy, NATO might have saved almost 100,000 lives.”
From Toal’s perspective, the war was much larger and much more significant than just a local crisis. “Bosnia was, and remains today, a strategic challenge, a symbol of Europe’s ongoing struggle to overcome violent exclusivist nationalism. We cannot forget Europe’s dark past,” he says.
In July 1995, as war continued to devastate the country, the unthinkable happened: more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in Srebrenica, a small town in eastern Bosnia. The massacre was the largest in Europe since World War II.
Toal, who happened to be visiting nearby Italy when the genocide occurred, was horrified by the atrocity. He resolved to one day focus his academic research on what happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Srebrenica and continued attacks against other UN “safe areas” were the tipping points that triggered international action. On August 30, 1995, NATO finally became aggressive, launching a three week air campaign with aircraft and personnel from 15 nations. The subsequent diplomatic effort resulted in three weeks of intensive negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. In late November, the leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia agreed to end the war and signed the Dayton Peace Accords.
Four years later, Toal took a sabbatical from Virginia Tech and went to Bosnia-Herzegovina for the first time since his visit as a teenager. He says he was “astounded” by the degree to which the countryside was destroyed by the legacy of warfare. The Dayton Peace Accords treaty had ended the war in Bosnia- Herzegovina, but did not resolve the conflict, he says. The treaty compromised the principle of modern civic democratic politics within a unified polity, hindering the development of Bosnia- Herzegovina as a modern, effective, and coherent state.
Much of Toal’s subsequent research is focused on the results of the Dayton Peace Accords and the returns process. At the end of the war, more than 1 million people (from a prewar population of 4.4 million) had been made refugees by the war and another million were internally displaced within the country. In an attempt to reverse ethnic cleansing, the Dayton treaty allowed refugees and the internally displaced population to return to their homes, but by 1999 there had been relatively little progress. From his research, Toal argues that the weaknesses of the peace agreement accounts for this lack of progress.
“The peace agreement,” he says, “rewarded ethnic cleansing by dividing Bosnia into ethnoterritorial entities with state-like administrative powers. “Bosnia-Herzegovina became a weak central state with two strong entities, 10 cantons, and a special district under military occupation and international supervision. It had 13 different constitutions, prime ministers, assemblies, and law-making institutions. In sum, the Dayton Peace Accords created what some have termed an ‘ungovernable country,’ a cumbersome excess of administrative offices for political party capture and patronage.”
NSF grant supports research
Toal’s opportunity to study the process of Bosnian refugees and displaced persons returning to their homes came from a $90,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). A two-pronged question is the heart of the research: how has the international community sought to reconstitute multiethnic Bosnian locations and how have local authorities mediated this process? The NSF study was designed to:
• focus on local municipalities to analyze how the extensive efforts of the international community to reverse ethnic cleansing in Bosnia impacted particular places,
• develop, more broadly, a conceptual understanding of the problems associated with the rebuilding of post-conflict states, especially the political geographic aspects of ethnic identity, and
• offer insight into how post-conflict plans conceived in international peace agreements are mediated and thereby transformed by the local contexts of their implementation.
In the summer of 2002, Toal headed for Bosnia with a research colleague and collaborator who he once taught at Virginia Tech, Carl Dahlman, then an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina and now at Miami University, Ohio. The two based themselves in Tuzla and studied in detail the ethnically-cleansed towns of Zvornik, Doboj, and Jajce. They collected statistical data on the returns process from many other locations across the country, as well. But they wanted to get at the story behind the numbers, so they did extensive interviews with the powerful and powerless in these communities: international officials, local politicians, nationalist parties, and war veterans, as well as ordinary returnees and those left with little after the devastation of the war. The pair returned to their Bosnian fieldwork sites over the next four years and constructed a detailed story of the “localized geopolitics” of displacement and returns in these places.
“What’s really shocking, and still true today, is that many of the people involved in ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina have not been charged with war crimes. Some are still in power,” says Toal. “As difficult as it is, you have to ignore the emotional aspect and take a pragmatic approach in order to make any progress.”
From all the gathered data, Toal and his colleague were able to map the geographies of displacement and return, chart the reconstruction and return policy process, and complete an analysis of the storylines politicians and policy-makers use to justify their support for the“ethnic engineering” of population across Bosnia.
Returns process improved
By Jan. 31, 2005, the returns process in Bosnia had greatly improved. Officially more than 1 million people had returned to their pre-war homes. “We found that, after a slow start, the international community took the Dayton Peace Accords seriously and correctly grasped that an extensive and effective returns process was central to building peace in Bosnia,” says Toal. After an initial period of disorganization, the international community, under the leadership of the Office of the High Representative, developed an inter-agency Reconstruction and Return Task Force that was a clearing house for the returns strategy and returns process. This allowed the development of a comprehensive approach to the returns challenge and brought together reconstruction funds from a number of different countries.
“The international community was the decisive force behind the ability of Bosnia to move beyond the wartime politics of violent coercion, allowing it to recover some of its multi-ethnic traditions and history,” he continues. “The Bosnian people deserve much credit, too, however, because they were committed to making this happen. The rate of returns would be impossible without the desire of the displaced to return and the crucial involvement of displaced person associations that disseminated information and organized the returns process among returnees.”
Toal says, “In stark contrast to the Iraq war, the aggressive NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995 had international support and legitimacy. And since Dayton, not one peace keeper has died from hostile actions in Bosnia.”
Limits on returns
“While the return of a million refugees and displaced persons is a remarkable achievement,” says Toal, “our studies show that there is a limit on these returns and that there is a lot more work to be done in Bosnia.”
He cites the following among major concerns that still need to be addressed:
• Ethnic Engineering. Facing the inevitability of return, many ethnonationalist organizations devoted their energies to “locking in” their ethnic dominance in certain localities through a strategy of land allocations for displaced peoples. In this way, even if returns did materialize, returnees would never become an ethnic majority in the community again. Ethnic engineering began among Bosnian Croats and is practiced, to a debatable degree, by all ethnic communities in Bosnia. Obstructionism and violence against returns are still found in parts of Bosnia.
• The Funding Gap and Local Ownership Questions. The returnee policy process has been turned over to local institutions: a state-level Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees (MHRR), a Commission for Refugees and Displaced Persons, a Return Fund, and opstina (municipality) level commissions for development and integration. More than 23,000 families registered to return with the MHRR but there are not enough funds available to allow them to do so.
• Education and Pensions. Education is still organized along ethnic lines in parts of Bosnia; there are still 52 “two schools under one roof,” where children are segregated according to ethnicity. This has long been a serious obstacle to returns, though progress is slowly being made on this issue. Also, divergent pension benefits between the entities have been a disincentive to returns.
• Economic Sustainability. The major outstanding obstacle to returns is lack of employment. In 2004, the nominal unemployment rate in the area was 45.4 percent and Bosnia’s economy is still stifled by political corruption and institutional dysfunctionality. Discriminatory employment in those industries that remain productive is a problem. In some instances, return is viable because people can provide for themselves if they have agricultural land free of landmines. For example, in one town, Toal and Dahlman interviewed former factory workers who are now returnees learning to become farmers (their food cooperative receives support from USAID).
Toal’s research in Bosnia-Herzegovina has resulted in more than 10 academic articles, as well as other activities. He has been interviewed by Voice of America’s Bosnian language television and his article on the weakness of the Dayton Peace Accords was published in the leading Croatian magazine, Hrvatska Revija (Croatian Review). He has shared findings from his decade-long studies of Bosnia-Herzegovina in testimony before U.S. congressional members of the Europe Subcommittee of the International Relations Committee.
In addition, Toal was invited to speak at a series of conferences organized to mark the 10-year anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords. These included a Woodrow Wilson Center conference and an “Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe” conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia, attended by the high representative for Bosnia, Lord Paddy Ashdown, as well as the members of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia. Toal’s analysis of Ashdown’s tenure as high representative appeared in the first issue of the journal Geopolitics in January 2006.
The future of Bosnia
Looking to the future, Toal says the grand strategy of the international community is to fully incorporate and embed Bosnia into modern Euro-Atlantic geopolitical space. In the words of European Union High Representative (Foreign Minister designate) Javier Solana, the goal is to move from “the era of Dayton,” the Bosnia created by the Dayton Peace Accords, to “the era of Brussels,” the Bosnia that needs to be created for it to become a member of NATO and the European Union.
Toal stands by what he told the congressional subcommittee hearing on “Bosnia-Herzegovina: Unfinished Business” in April 2005: “ Bosnia has the possibility of a future in the European Union… But this will require that the country face the fact that it needs a significantly revised constitutional structure.
“I would like to suggest,” Toal stated before Congress, “that one path towards change is through a statewide referendum on a new constitutional convention. Voters in all of Bosnia could be asked if they approve of the establishment of a constitutional convention under European Union supervision to draft a new constitution to make Bosnia-Herzegovina a European Unionready state (with decentralized ministries)… The referendum could prove divisive, but, if promoted as a choice between the stagnant past and a prosperous future, it could draw significant multiethnic support and create an opportunity for Bosnia to transcend the dysfunctionality of its Dayton-era constitutional structures.”
Research continues with new NSF grant
One recognition of the significance of the work Toal conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina is that he was immediately successful in a follow-up proposal to the National Science Foundation. Toal and a collaborative team of scholars from other universities across the country were awarded a $650,000 NSF grant to explore “The Dynamics of Civil War Outcome: Bosnia and the North Caucasus.” While there have been many valuable studies about the causes of civil war, few have examined the economic, social, political, and health consequences of violent conflict for the communities and societies in the war zone and contiguous regions.
“Adding southern Russia to the study of Bosnia has widened the research project, deepening an empirical analysis of the factors that caused conflicts in two strategic regions with substantial Muslim populations. Understanding the localized impact of civil wars is vital in helping us understand if peace agreements are working or not, and whether peaceful relations between nationalities in the two regions can be maintained,” Toal says.
The research is ultimately about “state-building” in wartorn regions. “Our goal is to provide answers to key issues about the nature of community conditions in former war zones as local, national, and international agencies try to cope with the disruptions to peoples, economies, and environments during the past 15 years,” he says.
Public opinion surveys in Bosnia and the North Caucasus are a major part of this research project. In fall of 2006, Toal and a colleague were invited as academic guests of the Republic of Dagestan to share some preliminary findings with students and professors at the University of Mackhashkala.
Working in conflict regions and war-ravaged regions generates mixed emotions for Toal. “I remember standing alone in a huge morgue with bags of human remains from Srebrenica around me and being totally overwhelmed by the terrible atrocities the Bosnian people have suffered,” says Toal. “But then, there are encouraging things, as well, like the positive side of the returns process, which demonstrates that there is hope for the future.
“Having the privilege of academic training, and ability to use social scientific techniques, I feel a great sense of obligation to tell the Bosnian story of expulsions and returns, and tell it well,” says Toal. “Hopefully, I can provide some insights that will make a difference.”
Learn more about the Dayton Peace Accords at the Office of the High Representative site.
