Through Bosnian Eyes: The Political Memoirs of a Bosnian Serb

PREFACE

PREFACE Mirko Pejanovic is not the kind of Bosnian that most of us have come to know through media reports. Those narratives left us with the sense that every Bosnian is either a victim to be pitied or a war criminal hardened to indifference by unfathomable brutality. Pejanovic was neither of these. He fonned no paramilitary group, organized no concentration camps, and ravaged no civilian populations. He neither gave riveting interviews to international journalists nor struck photogenic poses while toting menacing weapor:uy or sporting a flamboyant hairstyle. Pejanovic spent the war in a quiet but unrelenting quest to find a peaceful exit from war and to end the violence against his people. As a member of the highest governing body of Bosnia and Herzegovina for all but a few months of the war, he both witnessed and participated in that regime's struggle to acquire international respectability and protect its citizens from their enemies. He tells of that struggle in the following pages: it is a story of some successes and at least as many failures. Pejanovic was buoyed by the triumphs but largely undaunted by losses. Such indomitable optimism, coupled with a well-defined vision of a future for Bosnia, led him to spend the war coping with the complex challenges that confronted the members of Bosnia's collective presidency in the difficult conditions of wartime Sarajevo. Pejanovic is a Serb. In fact, he was the most prominent Bosnian Serb politician of his time to remain loyal to the internationally recognized government of Bosnia. Such loyalist Serbs constituted a perpetual bone in the throat to Radovan KaradZic and other nationalists of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS - Srpska demokratska stranka) who urgently wanted the world to believe that they, and only they, spoke on behalf of all Bosnian Serbs. As a participant in his government's delegation to the Geneva peace negotiations in 1993, Pejanovic sat across from fellow Bosnian Serbs (now indicted war criminals) who sought in vain to entice him to defect and join their separatist project. But this was not an isolated incident The SDS Serbs campaigned relentlessly, using arguments, enticements and threats to despoil the Bosnian government's claim that it encompassed Bosnians of all nationalities. Unable to explain why thousands of Serbs and Croats had elected to endure shelling and deprivation to remain with their neighbors in·Bosnia's cities, the nationalists portrayed such stay-behinds as hostages being held against their will or, more effectively, marginalized them as inconsequential people.o(no political conviction. It was critical to ix RobertJ. Donia their nationally exclusive territorial units to dismiss the significance of those Serbs and Croats who favored the "civic option" and supported tolerance ofother nationalities. Pejanovic and his ilk were likewise a standing inconvenienCe to the international negotiators who hoped that the war could be ended by simple territorial division In Otapter XIX Pejanovic relates the apparent complicity of Lord David Owen, the principal international convener of peace talks, in an effort to entice his defection from the government delegation (In Otaper Ill, it should be noted, the author portrays a somewhat differentOwen , one quite sympathetic to the plight ofbesieged Sarajevans and their practices of mutual coexistence.) International representatives viewed their task as pacifying the "guys with the guns," as one of them put it It suited the diplomats well to have the advocates of the civic option languish in shadowy obscurity. Neither the pragmatic demands of international diplomacy nor the marketing needs ofthe international media found room for highlighting the peaee-seeking idealists who led the the nonnational opposition Mirko Pejanovic is very much a "son of the Sarajevo asphalt," to borrow a phrase from the local vernacular. Born in 1946 in Matijevio in northcentral Bosnia, he completed his studies at the University of Sarajevo, obtained a doctorate in political science there, and subsequently became both a Professor of Political Science and a Vice Rector of the University. He was active for many years in the Sarajevo branch of the Socialist Alliance . Not until 1990 did he become President of the Socialist Alliance of Bosnia and Herzegovina, just at a time when waves of democratization and the collapse of communism were sweeping across Eastern Europe. His accession to higher office thus corresponded with the epochal changes thatwere sweeping the land. In the former Yugoslavia, the road from communism proved also to be the road to war. Pejanovic and others favoring the "civic option" lost decisively in the 1990 elections, but his relatively...