Dayton Peace Accords and Bosnia Ten Years After From The Perspective of Foreign Journalists
Panelists: Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Endgame and New York
Times writer David Rohde, and Stacy Sullivan, the author of Be Not
Afraid, for You Have Sons in America : How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure
the US into the Kosovo War
May 25, Day of Youth - Tito's birthday. 5pm - 8pm
Since there were just a few of us, we made a roundtable: David, Satcy,
Indira, Ivo, John Kraljic, Tea Rozman-Klark, her hubby Nate, Toula,
Isabelle, Sreca Perunovic. Tea last summer did a study on Wahabbism
in Bosnia. That was an interesting angle. She saw a rise of religion in Bosnia. I was merely annoyed with the 6 am call from the King Fahd mosque every morning at Ali-Pasino Polje. David said that Dayton
proved better than what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, where
Rumsfeld said that US is not interested in nation building. And that
Bosnian passivity, and lagging behind booth Croatia and Serbia economically, despite all the international help, may be due to reasons other then Dayton. Oh, boy, don't we all know that! Alija was certain that there would be no war just three weeks before
it started. But between
Tea's, John's, Indira's, Sreca's, and mine completely different arguents
the Dayton was biting the dust. The fact that Rumsfeld walked into Iraq
like Breznev into Poland, does not make Dayton look better: it makes Rummy
look like a complete idiot. the OHR was supposed to help in nation building, not to provide a surrogate nation structure, akin to the colonial era of Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians. Neither were the war criminals all apprehended, nor are the kids in schools all learning the same history about their country. Worse, their religious difference is exposed and accentuated by involving different religious education in their school curriculum. And the average age of cars in Sarajevo is 5 years older than in Belgrade, 10 than in Zagreb. Ruins still rule the skyline, rivaled only by the minarets of the newly build mosques, as it seems that every Arab country entered a competition in who would build the bigger mosque in Sarajevo. The flashy buildings of Western corporations sit there like alien space-ships, so out of place. It is plausible that the international help, actually put brakes on the natural process of early laissez-faire economy for good reasons, to avoid corruption, organized crime, widening the gap between rich and poor. The result however is a neo-patrimonial society fully dependent on foreign patronage that is neither here nor there. But we all agreed with David's argument that
Bosnia is a country like Afghanistan that got tired of war (well that was a day before the riot in Kabul), while Kosovo
is more like Iraq, and that witdrawal of KFOR would sure mean hell for
minorities. Stacy, then, filled us in on colorful Kosovar leadership characters, whose faces adore walls, and whose war record makes Gotovina look like an angel..
map and driving directions
43-32 22nd Street, Suite (buzzer) 301 in Long Island City, between 43th and 44th Avenue
subway to 23rd Street, Ely Avenue
This project ended in February 2004.
