Case Studies

The past in parenthesis (Non)post-socialism in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina

05.05.2008

Late in 2003, eight years after the end of the war that left
the country’s social and physical infrastructure in ruins, a
series of four books was published in Bosnia-Herzegovina
under the title Cuvari Jugoslavije: Suradnici UDBE
u Bosni i Hercegovini (The guardians of Yugoslavia:
Collaborators of the internal state security service in Bosnia and Herzegovina). Page after page, files identified
so-called collaborators (suradnici) and operative contacts
(operativne veze) of the Yugoslav internal state security
service (Uprava dr˛avne bezbjednosti or UDBA). Each
file contained the name of the informant, their codename,
the name of their handler, a brief description of whom they
had been recruited to inform upon and why, and why their
file had been retired.
For a few weeks, public interest appeared to be significant.
Experts and retired members of the UDBA commented
on the authenticity of the books’ contents and what
the existence of such a file for any given person might
actually mean. Lawmakers questioned the legality of the
publication of secret state materials. Some of those with
files, like Professors Mustafa Festic and Suljo Borovina,
denied any knowing collaboration. Other commentators
speculated about who was among the 5500 whose files
were not included in these four volumes. In Islamic circles
there were calls to purge the institutional cadres of
the Islamic community of anyone known to have collaborated
with the communist regime, and Mustafa Ceric,
the Reis-ul-Ulema, was criticized for not having already
done so. And yet, almost as quickly as the furore erupted,
it dissipated: after the first few weeks, the books and most
references to them completely disappeared from the headlines
and from public discourse. Three months after they
first appeared, the books’ main distributor in Banja Luka,
the country’s second largest city, said that sales were sluggish
at just a few hundred.

A post-socialist scandal with little impact

Controversy about files like these and the practices they
represent is nothing new in former state socialist societies.
The 1990s were replete with contentious discussions
about such documents and the need for lustration laws in
such former Eastern bloc countries as Albania, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and above all East Germany. Debates about
what ought to be done with such files, what they meant,
and what public positions – if any – known collaborators
should be allowed to hold were all part of larger arguments
about what conditions were necessary to create a
strong moral break with state socialist practices and lay
the foundations for a specifically post-socialist transition
to democracy…
Read more…

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