On Wednesday 4 November, the Frontline Club marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement – the peace agreement that marked the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – by welcoming a panel of those who helped shape negotiations at the time, and who reported on the three year conflict.

The discussion was moderated by Allan Little who reported on the war for the BBC. Anthony Loyd, foreign correspondent for The Times who reported on the Bosnian war in 1993 and wrote about his experience in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, recently returned to Bosnia for the first time in 20 years and kicked off the discussion.

Describing Bosnia as two countries, Loyd said: “In most of the towns they seemed as depopulated as they had done in the war… Sectarian divisions were more glaring than ever before and had been entrenched by Dayton. It seemed a sad and zombified place.”

Kemal Pervanic survived the atrocities of the Omarska concentration camp and has since dedicated his work to education and reconciliation in Bosnia. He painted a picture of a country whose youth are seeking to heal the wounds of the past and look to the future. “There’s a crop of new people, born towards the end of the war, a small group of people who want to see real change.”

Describing the often tortuous reconciliation process, Pervanic told of a fellow volunteer who had tried to kill him during the war. “We reached a point where he kind of apologised to me,” he said. He also blamed the government for the country’s division, saying: “Politicians are driving a wedge between us and young people.”

Zrinka Bralo was a radio journalist in Sarajevo and came to London in 1993 where she has fought for social justice and refugees’ rights. She described how “consumerism and capitalism [had] moved in and glossed over” many of the country’s issues, particularly the lack of democracy in the Bosnian constitution which reserves the highest political positions, including the Presidency, to three “constituent peoples” – Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

Paddy Ashdown served as high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union special representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from May 2002 until January 2006. He was instrumental in ensuring the success of Dayton in the early years. His outlook for the country’s future was bleak. “The sky is darkening in Bosnia, by the day, by the month and by the year,” he said.

Ashdown was particularly critical of the international community for failing maintain peace and stability in the country. “It takes a long time to wash away the aftermath of conflict. You need strategic patience to see it through and the international community has failed to see it through.”

He described the first ten years after the Dayton agreement as “brilliant” but through neglect, the progress of the country “has been allowed to unravel.”

"The international community is going to do f*ck all for us," @KemalPervanic on Bosnia's problems @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/gZZM92W2Uw

— Harriet Agerholm (@HarrietAgerholm) November 4, 2015

Bralo and Ashdown both spoke of a country returning to a “three mono-ethnic state” – Bosniak, Serb and Croat – in which multi-ethnicity is in “severe danger.” Bralo lamented the fact that Jews and Protestants are blocked from standing for president.

Among the audience questioners was Clive Baldwin, a lawyer for Jakob Finci, a Bosnian Jew who successfully launched an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights on the basis that Bosnia’s Constitution violates the European Convention on Human Rights. Baldwin pointed out that six years later nothing has been done and the constitution has not been changed. “It’s because Europe has given up on Bosnia,” Ashdown said.

Bralo agreed, saying: “Bosnia wanted to become more like Europe but Europe is becoming more like Bosnia.”

Pervanic, to the agreement of the panel, identified the youth and grassroots level initiatives as the key to the country’s development. Ashdown added: “They need time and need to get rid of generation that ran the war. The people in charge are exactly the same people at Dayton and they use peace for the same purposes of the war. They need to create a state were younger people can break through.”

On Friday 20 September, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of David Evans’ Pretty Village, which was followed by an emotional debate and panel discussion featuring protagonist and producer Kemal Pervanic and journalist at ITV News, Penny Marshall. The debate was moderated by Ed Vulliamy, writer for The Guardian and The Observer.

L-R: Ed Vuilliamy, Kemal Pervanic, Penny Marshall, David Evans. Photo: Doug Brown

The film is centred on the Bosnian village of Kevljani and follows author and youth worker Kemal Pervanic as he, amongst other things, revisits the site of his internment in the nearby Omarska detention camp, confronts a former teacher who sanctioned his torture and runs a reconciliation camp for the area’s youth.

The Muslim village in the north of Bosnia is surrounded by ethnically Serbian communities and as such was directly affected during the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Using archival footage along with personal testimonies from the surviving villagers, Evans manages to give a good sense of what pre-war life in the mixed Croat, Bosnian and Serb neighbourhoods was like; a place where Pervanic remembers that his “childhood was really beautiful”. This is an idea that the still visible destruction makes hard to imagine, especially when coupled with horrific accounts of torture, beatings, humiliation and deportation by former neighbours – the men who became the guards, torturers and perpetrators of many of the associated crimes against the six thousand strong Muslim community.

During the panel discussion following the screening, Vulliamy asked Evans why he made the film, to which he replied:

“The reconstruction from the war seems very very slow and there are lots of unresolved issues. . . . Just sitting in people’s houses and listening to people talk in ways I have never really heard people talk about war and how it affected them . . . for me, I just wanted to hear their voices and have the opportunity to tell their story, and its been a very moving experience for me, to have the privilege to be in these people’s homes, and hear them talk about these things. No one listens to their story; they have no one to tell their story to.”

This inability to talk about what happened during the war was a central theme throughout the discussion, with Pervanic stating that:

“This was so personal . . . what happened was so big that the perhaps the Serbs cannot recognise what they did. There is a lot of denial in our community”.

Left: director David Evans and journalist Ed Vulliamy Right: journalist Penny Marchall and protagonist Kemal Pervanic

When asked who else would want to see this film Pervanic replied:

“It’s a human story, it’s not just about a small village in Bosnia…I want everyone to see it. We must know our past. Without it we are nothing, we learn nothing.”

The audience – which included a number of Omarska camp survivors – was asked by Evans for their feedback, and while the loud applause suggested it was well received, the political tensions and divisions that the Balkan states are infamous for quickly rose to the surface. A number of questions focused on why the film didn’t cover how or why the war happened, or give a more balanced perspective – including more Serbian views – to which Evans repeated that he was not “interested in making  political statements or a  piece of journalism. . . it was never my intention to make a film about war in Yugoslavia”.

Despite all that Pervanic has experienced, his sober response to a somewhat antagonistic pro-Serb question provided a calming closing statement to the night:

“Generals don’t suffer, politicians don’t suffer; it’s people like me who suffer. . . . I don’t want to blame, that is not the point of the film”

More information can be found on the film’s website, and you can view the trailer of Pretty Village here:

View in iTunes

With crucial post-war elections due in October this year we will be discussing present-day Bosnia and asking what lies ahead: How fragile is the peace established by the Dayton Agreement that ended the 1992-1995 war?

With the 3 October elections and the trial of ex Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, at the Hague, the months ahead are likely to be critical for Bosnia.

Paddy Ashdown, former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina will be in conversation with Kemal Pervanic, founder trustee of Most Mira, who is a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp and author of The Killing Days: My Journey through the Bosnian War, and Allan Little, BBC correspondent in Former Yugoslavia 1991 – 1995.

Kemal Pervanic will also be talking about his return to the area with the Most Mira charity to bring together Serb and Bosnian Muslim young people in the Omarska Prijedor area for annual arts festivals.

 Photocredit: blandm via a creative commons licence