Bosnia and Herzegovina

Baroness Hussein-Ece Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Ashdown for initiating this debate and for his remarkable opening speech, which was very sobering.

I have visited Bosnia several times in the past year, the last time being in April with Remembering Srebrenica, a UK charity established to honour the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. It has a large educational programme to send more than 750 delegates to Bosnia and Herzegovina to learn the lessons of conflict and hatred. In return they pledge to use what they have learnt and seen when they return, in relation to the intolerance and barbarism they have learnt about, to enhance community relations in our very diverse 21st-century Britain.

Like many others I have memories from 22 years ago, when the full horror of the Bosnian civil war unfolded in our living rooms night after night. For my family it felt very personal. My late father-in-law was a Bosniak Turk who left the former Yugoslavia with his family as a child after the First World War and settled in Turkey, where there remains a significant ethnic Bosnian community to this day. I have Bosniak family in Turkey, so it felt like a personal journey when I went there. The phrase “ethnic cleansing” became part of the language of warzone reporting then. It was extraordinary that such scenes were taking place in modern-day Europe, half a century after the continent had seen such terrible wars.

As my noble friend quite clearly set out, Bosnia’s precarious ongoing financial and political situation further exacerbates continued nationalistic divisions—a state of affairs that the recent severe flooding in the country has worsened. World Bank data for 2009-13 revealed that Bosnia has some of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. The country is often considered as having the basic infrastructure necessary to succeed as a small nation but political deadlock at numerous administrative levels blocks genuine development on all sides. This is a source of great frustration and despair in Bosnia.

I was on a delegation which included Members of your Lordships’ House, and our visit included a presentation from the director of the International Commission on Missing Persons. The ICMP was set up to deal with one of the terrible consequences of ethnic cleansing: a countryside with mass graves of unidentified bodies. As we soon learnt, the bodies which are still being discovered are partial remains. One of the sights that we saw was in the mortuary and lab in Tuzla, where there are floor-to-ceiling shelves with bags of different sizes, each containing unique remains and fragments that require DNA testing. Thanks to forensic science 6,000 matches have so far been made, giving closure to grieving relatives, some of whom have been given at least a small part of their family member to bury. It also adds to the evidence of war crimes.

It is important to bring to the attention of the House the current situation in Srebrenica, the site of the 1995 genocide which the two previous speakers have already mentioned. The survivors of the genocide and relatives of the victims, such as the remarkable Mothers of Srebrenica group whom we met, live under the Government of Republika Srpska, who refused to prosecute those responsible for war crimes and have at times denied—and are still denying—the existence of the genocide itself. On a daily basis, returnees are forced to live alongside individuals who are implicated in atrocities. It was so shocking to hear how these brave women continue to experience harassment and intimidation in their daily lives. They still seek justice and recognition from the rest of the world. Meeting these brave women, hearing their personal stories and being invited into their homes made a huge impression on us all.

On our visit, we met the spiritual and political leaders of the Bosnian Muslims. The Grand Mufti in Sarajevo, a very wise man, told us that he feared the rise in nationalism. He fears for the young people and worries that the situation could easily flare up again. But, interestingly, he also told us that the Serbs were victims, too, as they have to live with the knowledge of the war crimes that many of them had committed or condoned—crimes which their political leadership still denies. With this deadlock, no one can move on with their lives.

Years later, this legacy continues to impact on daily life and the old divisions have not been forgotten. By refusing to acknowledge and move towards reconciliation or restitution, the Republika Srpska Government condemn returnees to a continual fight to maintain recognition of the terrible wrongs suffered at the site of the genocide. After the billions of dollars in foreign aid that we have heard about, and despite various attempts by the EU, the three communities still have conflicting goals and interests which are a permanent source of crisis, exacerbated by a constitution that meets no people’s needs. Bosnian leaders, with international support, need an urgent search for a new constitution at the very least. Earlier this year, a countrywide popular uprising of mainly young people demanded urgent reforms, but after the election of last week it seems that nothing much is going to change.

What support are the British Government providing to progress this state of affairs and to begin the process of Bosnian membership of the EU, as my noble friend Lord Ashdown said? Does she agree with a recent report by the International Crisis Group, one of whose recommendations was that Bosnia needs support for reform as well as the expertise resulting from the European models of federalism and community participation in states with multiple language areas and peoples? Do Her Majesty’s Government agree that kick-starting these reforms would be a good start in trying to get things back on track?