The war on Bosnia: in the ethnic war of a decade ago, people and communities suffered and died. Now, it's the environment's turn.

AuthorClancy, Tim

In war, the silences are sometimes more terrifying than the noises. It was one such silence, in the cratered streets of Mostar, that made me pause in mid-stride and duck behind a bombed-out van--moments before a mortar round crashed to earth and exploded a few feet from where I had been standing. Stinging clods of dirt peppered my face, but the metal hulk absorbed the shrapnel.

Another falling shell, another inexplicable escape. They happened all the time during the recent (1992-1995) war in Bosnia and Hercegovina (Bill). But thousands of people were not so lucky, as I saw in Mostar while helping to evacuate wounded children from the besieged eastern half of the city. Few areas there could be called safe, and even the makeshift hospital where the children awaited my ambulance had been hit nine times in the previous week by the artillery and mortar fire that rained down on the sector east of the fiver.

Yet horrific as it was, this was just a small corner of a complex and vicious war (see sidebar, "A Brief History of the Bosnian War," page 14) that wreaked widespread devastation on people, communities, and the countryside. Whole villages were destroyed--families driven out, the men sometimes executed, and houses put to the torch. Sarajevo (the capital), tinged closely on three sides by mountains, endured a four-year reign of terror that exposed its residents to indiscriminate death from artillery and sniper fire delivered by Serb gunners on the heights above. Over 10,000 died during the city's ordeal, including more than a thousand children. The pockmarked sidewalks and shattered buildings can still be seen. Casualty figures have been heavily manipulated by all sides for poetical purposes and thus vary widely, but there is little doubt that the war cost hundreds of thousands of Croats, Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims their lives.

Of course the tragedy did not end merely because the shooting stopped. Much of the lasting legacy of the Bosnian war can be read in the landscape itself. Apart from the "cleansed" villages, where the walls of roofless cottages rear up like tombstones, the physical scars are nowhere more apparent than in the huge clearcuts of ancient forest growth--emblems of the desperation and opportunism spawned by a war-ravaged economy. For in addition to the immediate toll of death, dislocation, and ancient enmities revived, the Bosnian war inevitably disrupted economic life and crippled the physical, social, and political infrastructure necessary for a functional economy. Unemployment remains as high as 40 percent, the lack of economic opportunities has driven many to the edge of despair--and the country's rich natural resources have been laid wide open to predatory exploitation.

* CONTESTED RICHES *

Those "rich natural resources" may be a surprise. Few people think of Bosnia and Hercegovina as a land of pristine wilderness in the heart of the Dinaric Alps, but the clash of Mediterranean and alpine climates has created one the most magnificent ecosystems in all of Europe. Mountain rivers from the high peaks of the Dinaric range have carved deep canyons on their way west to the Adriatic Sea or east to the Black Sea basin. Bosnia is abundantly watered by its rivers, streams, and springs (the name derives from bosana, Indo-European for water), and though it is smaller than the U.S. state of West Virginia, the country hosts a staggering diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna. Over 400 types of rare and endemic plant, and 200 animal species, can be found in this middle Balkan state.

BiH's resources have helped make it a battleground for centuries. The Romans fought the native Illyrian tribes for over 150 years to conquer the region, not only to expand their empire but also to secure access to the gold, silver, salt, and other resources found there. The Ottomans followed suit more than a millennium later, seeking less to convert the mainly Christian population to Islam than to claim those resources in their push toward Vienna. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire assumed control in 1878, its engineers immediately began sinking mineshafts and building railroads to extract the vast wealth of hardwoods, salt, and coal. The old communist state of Yugoslavia in effect used BiH as an energy base for its six republics, tapping its hydropower resources and siting coal-fired generating plants there. BiH accounted for 32 percent of total air pollution in the former Yugoslavia--but only 20 percent of the territory and 17 percent of the population, according to the Sarajevo-based Center for the Promotion of Civil Society (CPCS).

Today a similar pattern can be seen, as some European Union members exploit the weakness within the present government (see sidebar, "The Most Complicated Government in the World," page 16) and the lack of effective regulation. Very little is being done to urge Bosnia and Hercegovina toward reform of its environmental laws and adoption of European standards, and a number of local policymakers seem more than willing to sell the country's natural bounty, to the highest bidder. This ecological colonization and thievery is evident in the treatment of Bosnia's forests, water and energy resources, and vulnerable "protected" areas.

* FORESTS *

With the unemployment rate sky-high and per-capita gross domestic product about one-twentieth that of the United States, few people in BiH have the time or inclination to address what amounts to a forestry crisis. Over 50 percent of the country was covered by forest be(ore the war, but the harvesting of old forests and the changing land-use tendencies alter clearcutting put that figure at less than 35 percent today. (The Economist has pegged it at around 30 percent). The institutions legally responsible for regulating the logging industry have an appalling record, and most environmentalists believe few or no exact statistics exist because exposing the truth would mean the forced resignation of many government officials and the drying up of the river of cash from sales of high-quality hardwood. Around Pale, the former capital of the Republika Srpska entity of BiH and a region of staunch nationalist support for war criminal Radovan Karadzic, there are over 240 timber companies. Fondeko, a Sarajevo-based environmental group, estimates that at least 60 percent are not registered.

This year alone, more than 3,000,000 seed trees from a tree farm in Olovo will be destroyed because Sumarstvo, the state forestry service, has failed to manage their cultivation properly. The norm for annual seedling plantings is 20 million, but this year Sumarstvo planted only 500,000. Eighty percent of the forested land in Bosnia and Hercegovina is state-owned, and the responsibility to ensure replanting lies ultimately with the state. The current law spells out the replanting requirement in very specific terms, but Nesad Bojadzic, the former head forestry inspector for BiH when it was part of Yugoslavia, says the requirement is blatantly ignored at every level. He can cite some telling figures. For example, according to Bojadzic, in the valley of the Vrbas River in central Bosnia, 2,900 hectares of hardwood have been totally clearcut without any replanting. Clearcutting of black pines on Ozren Mountain in the northeast has devastated 3,400 hectares of forest, again with no replanting. The lumber company Voljice Pidris brutalized an old hardwood forest to such an extent that the entire town of Gornji Vakuf had no potable water all last summer. This type of clearcutting is not a criminal offense in Bosnia and Hercegovina (i.e., offenders can be fined but not imprisoned). Bojadzic has done his best to fight this corruption, by lobbying for the criminalization of clearcutting and the prosecution of complicit forestry officials, recommending that the replanting requirement be increased to compensate for almost a decade of completely unregulated logging, and calling for a moratorium on logging until local inspectors can make accurate assessments of the situation. He was once one of the most respected men in local forestry, but his expert advice has fallen on deaf ears.

Ironically, the law may not protect Bosnian forests, but landmines sometimes do. The war left as much as 20 percent of the forests littered with mines--one of the few protections they enjoy. But some illegal loggers have managed to twist even this circumstance to their advantage in the intense competition over BiH's rich hardwood forests. Several clearcutting locations--marked with landmine tape and warning signs to keep inspectors and forest rangers away--aren't mined at all. A few dozen meters behind the tape is a hardwood graveyard. Although not commonplace, this tactic shows the lengths to which illegal loggers will go in order to clearcut the forests without being regulated and taxed.

* WATER AND ENERGY *

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) predicts that the world's water use will increase 31 percent over 1995 levels by 2020. Bosnia is better positioned...

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