Youth Ethnic and National Identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina

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Part II

Ethnicity and Identityin Qualitative Focus


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4Ethnic and National Identity andEthnic Nationalism in the PublicSphere in Bosnia and Herzegovina:The Case of Major Print Media

In the omnipresent ‘anarchy of definitions’, whether we choose to follow inthe footsteps of primordialists, perennialists or modernists (constructivists),we inevitably position ourselves in relation to whether we think ethnicgroups or nations are constructed categories, which can be further decon-structed and re-constructed, or whether we believe there is some historicalmemory which ethnic groups claim the right to and which is transmittedthrough tradition, education, language and history, as ‘realities that last’.Regardless of which theory we opt for, perhaps a more important issue iswhich narratives – both those homogenizing and seamless and those ‘burst-ing at the seams’ construct ethnic and national identity here and now.In what way do the television and newspapers still, as the most dominantrepresentatives of the public domain in B&H, transfer and construct narra-tives, and into which subjects do they interpellate us? What are the rulingideas of the ethno-political ruling elites or the ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’, asBrubaker labels them, and how is the simultaneous coexistence of the ethnicand national frames possible within the public domain?

If we opt for the social-constructionist approach, the problem is not solvedby saying that ethnicity in B&H is a mere construct that can be brokendown or deconstructed by the fact that ‘we cannot know all members of ournation/ethnic group.’ Ethnicity, which relies heavily on professing one’s reli-gion, which does not necessarily correspond with religiousness, has becomea matter of life and death and a sense of belonging that is inscribed in theinstitutional and political, as well as everyday life, in an ethnically dividedstate of B&H. Some scholars (Sarajlic, 2011) argue that in transitional soci-eties such a distinction, which is primarily cultural, is created by the politicalelite, relying on the ‘current state of affairs’ in order to shift people’s atten-tion away from welfare to symbolic issues, thus ‘providing the capital for its

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PROOF66 Ethnicity and Identity in Qualitative Focus

“final product”-legitimately elected representatives and the infinite renewalof the ethno-political project’ (Sarajlic, 2011: 26).

The fact is that B&H society almost does not exist; it is very poor, and itsfuture is uncertain since there is no common denominator for all of its citi-zens. On the one hand, in the Federation of B&H, Bosnianhood is equal toBosniakhood, and compatibility between Bosniak nationalism and the pro-B&H discourse can be noted; in the Republika Srpska, on the other hand,the slogan of the winning party in the elections, SNSD,1 was ‘RS foreverand B&H while it has to last’, which indicates that such compatibility is notonly lacking, but is undesirable, too. Although it is possible to talk aboutthree different projects of nationhood, as was the case during the war – thetwo segregation-oriented (Croats and Serbs) and one integration-oriented(Bosniaks) projects – the nature of such segregation and integration is highlyquestionable, which will be more evident in the data obtained from the focusgroups. Divisions along these lines, and the politics that followed due tosuch irreconcilable differences related to everything that was happening inthe 1990s, but also in relation to modern history that preceded the war, makeB&H principally an indeterminate state. There is no political crossover; themainstream parties still carry a strong ethnic connotation, regardless of thedesignators ‘social democratic’ or ‘democratic’ in their names, programs anddiscourses, and interpellate voters not as citizens but as ethnic subjects, sincethe state politics represents ‘victorious war policies’ (Vlaisavljevic, 2010: 30).The media, with the exception of Public Broadcasting Service BHT, are stilldivided, except for commercial media focusing mostly on entertainment,and they are financed mostly by the aforementioned politics; in educa-tion, there is weak mobility of students and academic staff between thetwo entities and abroad. Politically constructed difference ‘at any cost’ isparticularly reflected in politics, news and documentary programs2 as wellas in newspapers and education, as school textbooks contain differences inreligion, history, language, and so on, as the ideologically most suitable ele-ments for consumption in the public domain of the economically unstabletransitional B&H.

Whether the centralization or decentralization of the country is advo-cated, it is even more important to reflect on opportunities of re-constructingthe unity and solidarity in the region and encourage values that are notexclusively ethno-nationalist, assuming that insisting on unity and sol-idarity, or determinations that are not ethnic in nature, could end theimpasse and empower citizens of B&H, primarily as emancipated subjects.However, knowing that the ‘current ethnicism cannot propose a produc-tive interaction between ethnic groups, and certainly not of their essentialmetamorphosis induced by such interactions’ (Vlaisavljevic, 2010) and that‘the victorious, war politics’ is still ongoing in B&H, we must ask ourselveswhether such a thing is even possible. If we believe that national and eth-nic identity is socially constructed (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm and Rangers,1983; Anderson, 1983) and that each modern state is characterized by ‘the


PROOFIdentity and Nationalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina 67

production of the ethnic’ as something which is not inherent, we must alsoknow that the Dayton Constitution of 1995 defined the rules of the gamein the post-Dayton social legitimating and furthering the ethno-nationalistdivide. Although Dayton itself was the result of the divided society and theconflicting politics (Bardos, 2011),3 in a way, it has further divided B&H bypractically inscribing the ethnic into the national in terms of the politicaland institutional agenda setting. Therefore, the preservation of the existinghegemonic pattern has never been easier for the ethno-nationalist elites whohave no intention of sharing their 20 years’ worth of prey.

In the past 100 years alone, B&H has been a part of the Austro-HungarianEmpire, the Kingdom of SHS (Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca/Kingdomof Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, NDH(Nezavisna država Hrvatska/Independent State of Croatia), then FNRY andSFRY. Politically, the most enduring union occurred after the Second WorldWar, within the framework of FNRY, followed by the establishment of SFRY,which ended in 1992, only to be replaced, after the bloodshed and war,by particular ethnic unities. This was accompanied by strengthening ofethno-national identities, while the socialistic past and the former state,in which at least the youth elicited some other identity polarities suchas urban/rural or snappy dressers/dumbbells/punks,4 were to be forgottenand erased as soon as possible. Along with this went the invention of tra-dition in which the key role was played by discourses within the publicdomain seeking to obtain public support in a populist manner5 that bloomedin SFRY in the 1980s and continued in the turbulent 1990s of the lastcentury.

In order to underline the ideological premises of such practices, wefind it important to show that ethnic nationalism, as a set of exaggeratedsocial identity attitudes/discourses with elements of discriminatory behaviortowards the other – since ethnicity is essentially a matter of relation towardsthe other, not a property of a group (Eriksen, 2004: 31) – and as a ‘normal-ization practice’ of preserving the status quo, is discursively constructed inthe Bosnian-Herzegovinian public domain, specifically in the print media.In this regard, it is equally important to define what kind of discoursesunderlie the structure of the ethnically divided society or the entity-dividedstate. Following in the footsteps of Althusser (1971), it can be said that ide-ology, in our case the ideology of nationalism, interpellates citizens intoethnic/national subjects through discourses and it is important to exam-ine the nature of the discursive matrix of representations, legitimations, andcoercion on which such ethno-national identities are constructed and onwhich ethnic nationalism rests. Such a content analysis, with occasional‘digressions’ into the textual, can offer an insight into the myths, metaphorsand other cognitive–linguistic resources which, due to ‘priming’ of specificnewspaper articles, especially, though not only, at times of increased mediaactivity, ensure uninterrupted protection of power of the ethno-nationalisticelites and their capital (Husanovic, 2010).



In the following section, we will provide some considerations concerningthe public domain and the media in B&H, as well as a content analysis of themajor print media in the month of April 2010, in order to provide insightinto the main trends when it comes to national and ethnic interpretativediscourse frameworks.

The lack of public domain?

When talking about the public sphere, Habermas (1991) speaks of the civilsociety that evolved in the salons and coffee houses in the 18th century,which stood in relative opposition to the state and had relative autonomy.Principles of the public sphere include an open discussion on all matters ofgeneral interest in which the general interest and public welfare are argu-mentatively confirmed. The public sphere implies freedom of speech andgathering, free media and the right to freely participate in political debateand decision-making, and these are the standard Habermasian definitionsof this term. To talk about the public sphere today is to extend Habermas’s(1991) concept of the bourgeois public sphere within which a public dis-course is developed and which represents the very center of discussionbeyond the current political and institutional system transferred to the massmedia, and which are the places of political organization, fighting and trans-formation (Kellner, 2000). Although in the USA corporations have colonizedthe public sphere, while Europe has a more or less successful system of publicbroadcasters in power, Kellner (1999) believes that it is through language andcommunication that we can resist the imperatives of power and money. Hefurther argues that new technologies and the Internet can in fact be the ‘newbasis for a participatory democratic communication politics’ (ibid.). How-ever, although the public sphere itself can carry emancipatory potential, weneed to study it in a given context and define the discourses it carries.

When arguing that participant political culture (including the public)in B&H is almost non-existent being more like subject or parochial polit-ical culture (Almond and Verba, 1963) we allude to a rather vague dis-tinction between political and public spheres in the country where thepolitical is literally expelled from the public unless it is pertaining toethnonationalism. Widely available ‘traditional’ mass media, such as news-papers and television,6 certainly shape the public opinion of all social strata.The analysis of the mainstream print media in B&H, as an indicator of thepublic sphere and the public in B&H, at first glance shows that they reflectethnic interests or represent national interests that correspond to a singleethnic group. The Habermasian public sphere is, therefore, taken in its mod-ified form as a form of public discourse, primarily of the mass media, whichare shaped by the power and create the power. Furthermore, due to ide-ological and political-economic reasons, it is deeply dependent upon thepolitical elites in power. Partly due to the fact that B&H is at the early stage



of capitalism, or rather in transition, and partly because of the destruction,poverty and fear in B&H post-war society, other interests that could resistthe mainstream are almost non-existent.

Therefore, it can be argued that there is no established educated elitewhich is a part of the public in B&H that would care to oppose the publicauthorities in B&H by insisting on ‘provoking a critical judgment of a publicmaking use of’ and ‘insisting on the public use of reason’ (Habermas, 1991:24, 27) and, by doing so, transform the meaning of opinion publique througha series of concrete practices (Calhoun, 1992), even if they are reduced toidentifying the slightest common denominator acceptable to the entire B&Hor politicizing the public in ways different than ethno-nationalist.

If a public sphere in Western Europe and America is in decline due to themass media, the task of which is to generate consent through public relationsand advertising (Herman and Chomsky, 1988), lack of a public sphere andre-feudalization7 are characteristic of B&H, and the government’s influenceon the mainstream media, which, as such, establish the agenda, is more andmore obvious.

Undesirable majority of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian media (i.e. public andprivate) do not advocate public interests, they rather represent the inter-ests of those that the market privileged through the capitalistic ‘horrorfairy-tale’ of poverty, corruption and trivialization in everyday life. Thatis the reason for the campaign against those who are ‘rebelling’ againstthe ‘new’ social norms and ideological hubs of the socio-political core ofBosnia and Herzegovina.

(Husanovic, 2010: 1)

Re-feudalization is a direct consequence of a rigid neo-feudal-clan politicsand structures of government which survive by spreading fear of the ‘other’since they cannot provide the citizens with a decent life and prosperity(Bogdanic, 2010b).

With regard to the influential and mainstream media in B&H, it is worthnoting that in the Republika Srpska they are mainly funded by the Govern-ment of RS, headed by the ruling SNSD,8 while the owner of the best-sellingdaily newspaper in the Federation of B&H (FB&H), Fahrudin Radoncic, is thepresident of SBBB&H,9 another influential political party in FB&H. B&H isstill a small, underdeveloped and less interesting market when it comes toforeign media and, in recent years, the funding of the media by the interna-tional community has been kept to a minimum, which indicates that opera-tional political economies are not inclined to discourses opposing the main-stream, with the exception of showbiz and tabloids (Majstorovic, 2011.10)

One of the main features of the speech in the media is more or lessexplicit hate speech and quite often defamatory or unprofessional journal-istic discourse. Regardless of the institution of verbal offense in SFRY, hate



speech and warmongering speech, as a notorious way of communicatingin the ex-Yugoslav public sphere of the 1990s, were a clear sign that theformer state was collapsing and that the war was approaching (Bogdanic,2010a, 2010b). Nowadays, the Communications Regulatory Agency (RAK)of B&H condemns and imposes penalties on broadcasters who promote hatespeech. However, it continues to exist, more or less explicitly, despite thebans and sanctions. In the public sphere of B&H today, by which we meanthe media, education and politics, hate speech is more implicit and obviousin the arrogance and neglect of the other, disregard of certain themes thatare not included in the agenda or historical revisionism, than it is explicit.The Internet, as a space where the alternative to hate speech may be cre-ated, is at the same time the nursery of the most-manifested hate speech,suggesting that omnipresent technological progress is by no means a guar-antee of democratization of social consciousness (Kreho, 2011). Mass media,as an important segment of the public sphere, have the agenda-setting role(McCombs and Shaw, 1972) by emphasizing one issue at the expense ofothers and by introducing themes or removing those that are no longer‘relevant’.

Content analysis of the aforementioned media is intended to describethe themes and frames within which the reports on Bosnian-Herzegoviniansocio-political life were made during 2010, and especially during the ten daysof increased media activity that followed the arrest of Ejup Ganic, a mem-ber of the pre-war and wartime presidency, a suspect in the DobrovoljackaUlica case. The study therefore deals with one point in time; since no similarstudies have been carried out earlier, it would be very interesting to carryout a range of similar studies in order to longitudinally monitor the devel-opment, progress or (de)construction and re-inscription of similar discoursesdeveloped with time.

Language, nationalism, ideology

Ideology as patterns of belief or practice, which make existing social orderappear ‘natural’ or inevitable (Eagleton, 1991), and formation of ideologi-cal consciousness rest exclusively on the role of language (Volosinov, 1973;Billig, 1995). Every ideology operates under the premise that people forgetthat the world they live in is historically constructed and may as well be re-constructed. Nationalism as an ideology operates on the basis of the dialecticof memory and forgetting, in which the memory is ‘embedded in routinesof life which constantly remind, or “flag”, nationhood’ (Billig, 1995: 38),and such a daily reminder is largely based on forgetting (ibid.). Althoughmany psychological phenomena that were assumed to be inherent in peo-ple actually proved to be socially and discursively constructed (Potter andWeatherell, 1987; Billig, 1995) this section, in terms of the analysis itself,is based on a critical discourse analysis (CDA), which builds on content



analysis, in an attempt to gain insight into ideological patterns that languagecarries along (Fairclough, 1989, 2003; Wodak et al., 2009) when used forparticular purposes and mobilizations.

The media and the use of history as propaganda in the 1990s warswere the key factor in the construction of belonging to the new ‘old’ eth-nic groups. The ethnic discourses in SFRY, even though institutionalizedby the 1974 SFRY Constitution, were not that popular and the ethni-cized media, following the SFRY breakup, created consent in the contextof mythological interpellations mobilizing even those who had lived theYugoslav ‘brotherhood and unity’ for 50 years. Hobsbawm (1990) also notesthat there is nothing constant in the history of Serbs, Croats, BosnianMuslims and Kosovo Albanians which would predispose these peoples toconflict; however, he finds that there is no more effective way of bind-ing together the different parts of restless peoples than to unite themagainst the ‘Other’ (Hobsbawm, 1990). In the texts that entered the analysis,we tried to find and analyze such contents and their mutual restrictions,especially when it came to the analysis of the selected media. Accord-ing to the aforementioned scholars, the dimension of conflict refers tothe degree of agreement on the experience of shared identity withinthe group, whereby identity is perceived as changeable and unstable.Within each collective identity there is an agreement or disagreementabout what the identity means and what it implies, and this very dis-agreement or conflict indicates the fluid and context-dependent nature ofidentity, which will be even more intensified in the focus groups and lessin the media. For all these reasons, we have decided to use an eclecticapproach that tries to apply the abovementioned theory to a specific placeand time.

Levels of content analysis

Since the chapter dealing with the methodology provided a detailed descrip-tion of the data collection process, we will turn to the levels of the analysis: atthe first level we attempted to identify constructs such as the ethnic and thenational identity in terms of their representation in the print media – frame-works of the ethnic and the national were often deeply interwoven and thusdifficult to separate. The second level of the analysis deployed quantitativecontent analysis to determine the dominant frames, whereby ‘framing wasunderstood the process by which a communication source, such as a newsorganization, defined and constructed a political issue or public controversy’(Gitlin, 1980; Goffman, 1986; Nelson et al., 1997: 221) within which thepolitical Bosnian-Herzegovinian identities and their dissemination in partic-ular newspapers and thematic groups of politics, economy and society werethen interpreted. ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived realityand make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to



promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evalu-ation, and/or treatment recommendation’ (Entman, 1993: 52). The contentanalysis of the media, operationalized through the content of the majorprint media, roughly offers some preliminary indicators and presents situa-tion analysis and the relationship between the ethnic and the national in thepublic sphere in B&H. Content analysis itself, in terms of counting frames,cannot provide us with much insight into the complexity and intricacyof relations between the two identities and the power play between them(Majstorovic and Turjacanin, 2006; Majstorovic, 2009). Therefore, the levelof discourse goes more deeply into the text to examine how certain framesbecome constructed, what is in their foreground and what is in their back-ground, what is presupposed and what is taken for granted, who is excludedand who is included, how individual, ethnically charged media interpret cer-tain ‘common’ themes, and how they represent ‘us’ and ‘them’. This analysiswas a key way of confirming the validity of the statements included in thecontent analysis.

Content analysis does not go deeply into the text and therefore cannotprovide much insight in relation to ideological or argumentative–rhetoricalelements of the analysis. This method was originally developed as a result ofthe practical and theoretical need to establish objective and accurate infor-mation on types, themes, or genre of the media messages in certain formsof social communication. The method allows systematic, quantitative andobjective access to the data on message content (Šušnjic, 1973: 247; Milic,1978: 571), which focuses primarily on the structure of content in terms ofthemes and subjects that are reported on. The discourse themes are crucial inunderstanding the text and the speech (Van Dijk, 1997: 10) and they repre-sent intuitive notions of the text interpreters. ‘The notion of “topic” is . . . anintuitively satisfactory way of describing the unifying principle which makesone stretch of discourse “about” something and the next stretch “about”something else’ (Brown and Yule, 1983: 70). Van Dijk’s analytical categories,such as discourse topics as the macro-textual topics outlining a specificgenre, their order, quotation patterns, nomination of participants and distri-bution of grammatical agency, have also proved to be an adequate analyticalframework.

The issues of categorizing themes of discourse content inevitably reflectthe position of the analyst of a given discourse. As the definition of the termtopic is in itself quite intuitive, the key concept in determining the bound-aries of each theme or sub-theme was the very centrality of the ethnic, theentity and the national. The criterion on which the approach to analysiswas determined rests on the headlines of newspaper articles and first para-graphs, as they have ‘defined the overall coherence or semantic unity of thediscourse’ and represented the information that the readers ‘best rememberfrom the news stories’ (Van Dijk, 1988: 248).



It is clear that this method is problematic when it comes to the validity ofthe data, since the selected themes which corresponded to the research werecontextually specific coding categories due to the unique government orga-nization of B&H in line with the system of the ‘three constituent peoples,two entities, one district and one state’. Furthermore, there is currently nosoftware in the Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian language11 which would allowstatistical examination of corpora nor were all the media available in elec-tronic form, for example, Dnevni list and Glas Srpske; thus, frequency analysisproved to be a necessity. Of course, if we were to analyze large amounts ofcontent in this way, and not just the ten-day time interval that we have cho-sen, we would have to resort to more detailed and complex methods whichwould require far greater financial and human resources. For these reasons,the analysis of the data content was used only as the starting point of theanalysis. Its aim was to show the basic trends related to the ethnic, entityand national reporting as processes of such a creation of media messages,the distribution of the ethnically, entity and nationally oriented articles ineach of the newspapers, and their comparison.

The four dominant identified categories or interpretive frames withinwhich reports had been made are the following:

a. the ethnic frameb. the entity framec. the national frame andd. mixed-national frame (this category includes isolated articles in which

there was a combination of the national with the ethnic and/or entityframes).

When it comes to Glas Srpske, the total number of articles that fitted intothese four categories was 109 out of the total of 127 articles from the selectedsections; of the total of 145 articles in Dnevni Avaz, 121 articles were selectedfor the analysis; of the total of 213 from Oslobodenje, 148 articles wereselected; of the total of 354 articles from Nezavisne novine, 167 were selected,and 117 out of 132 articles from Dnevni list were included in the analysis.As we can see, a significant number of articles contained in these sectionsare related to the state and the national; however, the percentages presentedin the tables should not be regarded as commensurable, but rather as theindicators of general trends. The analysis does not contain comparable num-bers of newspaper articles, since the sections varied from one newspaper toanother and the articles themselves were not of equal length. In addition,such a macro-analysis does not distinguish between the speakers, since itequally includes quotes, agency news, political speeches, editorial commentsand so on. Content analysis has shown that the selected sections, politics,



economy and society, were mostly about politics themes and that two mostimportant and prevalent, frames were:

a. the national frame, which includes the mixed-national frame (in Croatand Serb newspapers), and in some cases only the ethnic frame (associat-ing Bosniakhood with Bosnianhood in Bosniak newspapers), and

b. the ethnic frame (which includes the entity frame, since there is anoverlap in Serb newspapers and also with regard to the mixed-nationalframework).

Although these two interpretive reporting frames often overlapped, hencethe two separate categories, they were always the most conflicted and rep-resented one another’s sine qua non. Of course, such interpretations havea strong foothold in discourse analysis, which we employed in an attemptto prove the validity of these claims, given the familiarity with the socio-political context in B&H as discussed at the beginning of the chapter, andwithout which no serious critical discourse analysis could stand strong.

National and mixed-national frameworkin Bosnian-Herzegovinian media

If we observe the results of content analysis of the five major newspapers,we see that the national and state frames – articles referring to the stateof B&H (30, 73) – are dominant; fairly equal representation of speech (dis-course) related to the state in all newspapers is not surprising, since thenational speech is the expected and unmarked speech in daily newspapersof a state and it is logical that it is the most frequently represented, espe-cially when it comes to the speech of the international community, whichis less interested in ethnicities and entities as such, but is exclusively relatedto the state of B&H. Figure 4.1 also shows the distribution of all articles bynewspapers and the themes of politics, economy and society; the first thingthat draws attention is the small number of articles concerning the econ-omy and society, compared with a very large number of political articles,which indicates the primacy of politics over social life in B&H and its ethnicorientation.

A more detailed review of Figure 4.2, concerning the national frame inarticles related to politics, economics and society, shows that coverage ofpolitical issues is the most prevalent, while issues related to society andeconomy remain less salient.

When referring to B&H as a state, newspaper articles include reporting onthe common12 or state13 bodies (Council of Ministers, SIPA (Državna agencijaza istrage i zaštitu or State Investigation and Protection Agency), State Attor-ney’s Office) and their relationship with the international community andits representatives, or they focus on visa issues or issues related to meeting


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0.0Nezavisne Glas Srpske Oslobodjenje Dnevni Avaz Dnevni list Total

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Figure 4.1 Distribution of the ethnic, entity, national and mixed frames in five B&Hnewspapers

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Figure 4.2 National frame in articles concerning politics, economy and society



the requirements for EU integrations. It is peculiar that B&H is mostly men-tioned in terms of its responsibilities towards the international community,but also through negative representations of the current situation in thecountry; hence, B&H is ‘the blackest sheep’, an ‘artificial creation’, ‘withoutpurpose’, a place with no human rights, as can be seen from several examplesof negative lexical–semantic context:

in late April in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a conference on theWestern Balkans is to be held. With emphasis, of course, on the blackest ofall regional sheep.

(Dnevni list, 10 March 2010)

Hyperbole: the blackest of all regional sheep

Metaphor: B&H as a black sheep

Johan Galtung, international mediator in about 40 conflicts aroundthe world, says in an interview for Glas Srpske that ‘the present, com-pletely artificial construction of Bosnia and Herzegovina without anypurpose used only for deteriorating the self-determination principle, isunsustainable . . .Bosnia and Herzegovina is maintained forcefully. Whenthis constraint becomes removed, and the OHR is a part of that con-straint, more appropriate balance for all will be established in Bosnia andHerzegovina, hopefully without violence’.

(Glas Srpske, 11 March 2010)

Implication (IMP) – B&H is unsustainable, OHR needs to leave, the con-straint should be removed to allow B&H to continue, the possibility ofviolence

Presupposition (PRSP) – there is no balance in B&H

Constitutional changes will strengthen the state that cannot protectfundamental human rights.

(Dnevni avaz, 7 March 2010)

presupposition (PRSP) – B&H cannot protect fundamental human rights

Positive representations are quite rare, although there are cases when animportant agreement, usually among the three constitutive peoples, isreached:

(Lajcak)14: B&H has met all the requirements for visa regime liberalizationand no political connotations or political conditions will be imposed forthe citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina to gain a visa-free system . . . theachieved results are concrete and impressive.

(Glas Srpske, 8 March 2010)



or when the international community occasionally praises the stability andsecurity in B&H:

B&H is a stable and secure country and the EUFOR sees no threat to thesecurity situation in this country.

(Nezavisne novine, 13 March 2010)

Negative speeches about B&H mostly focus on its non-sustainability andweakness, and often imply involvement in international terrorism.

B&H is not used for the preparation of attacks. However, the presence ofa certain number of foreign citizens originally from Afro-Asian countrieswho have previously been connected to international terrorism, opensthe possibility that under certain circumstances, an earlier indicative con-nection could be activated, even in the context of providing concretesupport.

(Dnevni avaz, 6 March 2010)

The aforementioned examples present apparent denial of the implied par-ticipation or complicity of B&H in international terrorism (mujahedeen,Wahhabis) as well as the use of hedging strategies; however, it is indisputablethat these examples refer to B&H as a state.

When it comes to the mixed, national-ethnic or national-entity frames inB&H media, Figure 4.3 shows that there are fewer such articles found pre-dominantly in Dnevni list, a paper which aims primarily at Bosnian Croats,and even less so in Glas and Avaz.

The mixed national frame is a frame in which reporting on the nationalissues occurs simultaneously with reporting on ethnic and entity issues. Itis reflected in statements by officials from the Republika Srpska, who typi-cally say that something is, for example, in ‘the Republika Srpska, that is,Bosnia and Herzegovina’, while one rarely hears that something is ‘in theFederation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that is, Bosnia and Herzegovina’.Glas Srpske is a newspaper which is positioned as entity-based because itdeals with the Republika Srpska and is ethnic in the sense of interpella-tion of the Serb people; however, this is not the case with Avaz, becausethe terms ‘Bosniak’, as an ethnic term, and ‘Bosnian’, as a national term,nearly overlap but do not coexist side by side. In Dnevni Avaz, the eth-nic/national frame is least represented in a formal sense; there are noconstructions of ‘Bosniaks and Bosnians’ or ‘Bosniak entity and Bosniaand Herzegovina’, or even constructions such as ‘Federation of Bosnia andHerzegovina and Bosnia and Herzegovina’; however, since this newspaperinterpellates Bosniaks/Bosnians, it could be said that such a frame princi-pally exists because it is stated that Ganic’s ‘indictment is a humiliationand an insult to the Bosnians’ and that ‘the Bosnians were targeted for



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12.0

14.0

16.0

18.0


Politics ethnic/national %

Economy ethnic/national %

Society ethnic/national %

Figure 4.3 Mixed national framework in articles concerning politics, economy andsociety

extermination by the Yugoslav Army’. Furthermore, the same newspaperstates that ‘the genocide against Bosniaks was committed’ and that ‘signifi-cant traces of political and anti-Muslim logic are visible in the entire process(Dnevni Avaz, 6–12 March 2010). Nezavisne novine and Oslobodenje havethe least significant representation of such articles, contrary to their preva-lent reporting within the national frame, suggesting that they are orientedtowards the state of B&H and the interpellation of its citizens.

Although this frame is quite similar to the national frame, the differencelies in the fact that it reflects the dynamics of unresolved relations, as seenin the example concerning the distribution of the state property and entitycompetences (for example, a generally negative, rather than neutral, attitudetowards B&H is expressed):

if the Council of Ministers does not deliver the list within 60 days, theGovernment will propose that the Republika SRpska National Assemblyshould urgently adopt a Law on Property of the Republika Srpska . . . andall property which in the territory of the RS would be registered as theproperty of the RS.

(‘the RS Government is awaiting the decision of the Council ofMinisters’, Glas Srpske, 8 March 2010)



or is otherwise concerned with interference of the ethnic into the national;such an example is the case of B&H Croats who are dissatisfied with ŽeljkoKomšic as a Croat member of the Presidency of B&H and perceive this as abetrayal of the national interests of the Croat people in B&H.

[Jerko Lijanovic on the conflict at the last meeting of Kreševo Declarationsignees] . . . betrayal of national interests of the Croat people in Bosnia andHerzegovina, and will thus become the servants of Željko Komšic, scatterthe votes of Croats once again and enable Željko Komšic to win the elec-tion on October 3 this year, as they had done in the last election, whichis why the Croat people had suffered the last four years.


The line between the ethnic and the national is thin, and it is not surprisingthat the mixed frame appeared. Since B&H is a country which, in accordancewith Dayton, mainly functions as an arena of ethnic interests, in this wayethnic or entity interests enter the national plane. The mixed frames reflectthe dynamics and internal antagonisms of the contemporary B&H: while,on the one hand, such reporting is currently mostly negative, it also offers ahidden potential or a bypass within which to build a relation with the statein the future, with the inclusion and equality of all of its peoples, since theinterests of its peoples cannot be met without the state, which, unlike theentities, has an internationally recognized legitimacy.

Entity frames of media reporting in B&H media

The entity frame of reporting is also a frame inscribed by Dayton, and itincludes media reports on entities as units within B&H. Figure 4.4 showsthe interrelations among the articles related to the entities in line with theirdistribution in respective newspapers.

The entity frames are the largest in Glas Srpske, with respect to the totalnumber of articles analyzed in the newspaper, followed by Avaz, Oslobodenjeand Dnevni list. Once again, the entity issues are almost always exclusivelypolitical issues. However, in Dnevni list the entity issues are almost equallyeconomic and social, which suggests that this frame places not only politi-cal but also social issues in the foreground, as opposed to the other frames.A lower number of entity-related themes, that is, articles in Avaz comparedwith Glas Srpske, can be accounted for by the fact that, in Avaz, B&H isself-explanatory and Bosniakhood and Bosnianhood overlap. In Glas, the‘Bosnian theme’ is usually pre-modified by the word ‘Dayton’ – focusingmore on the legitimacy of the entity, and not B&H as a state by referringto powers at the entity level, such as the pension system, legislation andso on, which are, among other things, stipulated in the Constitution. Thefrequency of articles insisting on the establishment of the third entity by



14.0

12.0

10.0

8.0

3.9

1.81.3

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

11.5

9.3

1.9

4.3

8.2

7.1 6.9 7.0

3.5

2.1

6.8

6.0

4.0

2.0


Politics entity % Economy entity % Society entity %

Figure 4.4 Entity frame in articles concerning politics, economy and society

Bosnian-Herzegovinian Croats is understandable, since Dnevni list gives theimpression that Croats do not feel equal to others in the Federation of B&H.There would be no problem if the entity frame were treated as a regional,geographical or territorial unit; however, the entities are set as ethnicallypure areas, and texts do not show the existence and presence of the equalstatus of others who live in these entities; thus, these groups of citizens aresymbolically erased from the entity-oriented articles.

The presence of the entity frame in Dnevni list may at first seem surpris-ing, since the Bosnian Croats do not have their own entity, but the relativesimilarity in the number of articles relating to the ethnic, entity and mixed-national frames indicates that the political, economic and social for Croats inB&H is conducted at the interface of the ethnic, entity and mixed-nationalreporting frames. This indicates that Dnevni list interpellates its readers asa constituent people who use all means to fight for their status within theDayton construction in B&H. These articles mostly deal with the future con-stitutional changes that have to do with the intention of creating the third,Croat entity and the future of B&H. The following illustrates such a speech:

constitutional amendments must eliminate discrimination against the con-stitutive peoples, that is, the three members of the Presidency should beelected by the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with mandatorygreen light by the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina . . . thatwould otherwise, once again, prevent the Croats from obtaining a legitimatemember of the Presidency. In particular, in direct election, which is now in



force, Bosniaks or Serbs can easily elect the Croat member of the Presidencyinstead of the Croats since they are larger in number.

(Dnevni list, 9 March 2010, emphasis added)

At first glance, it seems that the Croats are equal people in B&H, but inreality they are not, which is best illustrated in the manner of the electionof the Croat member of the Presidency . . . The simplest solution would beto for the Croats to have a third, Croat entity. There are other solutions,but I think this would be the most feasible one, and it is the easiest wayto protect the rights of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina . . . Nevertheless,I think the third entity is the best and easiest solution.


Ethnic reporting frames in the media in B&H

Exclusively ethnic rhetoric prevalent in Glas Srpske (27.56, or 39.09 if theentity-related articles are added to the number) and Dnevni avaz (34.48), asthe most influential newspapers in B&H compared with other newspapers,relates to the process of erasing ‘the Other’. This frame is also characterizedby the dominance of the political themes. Such a large number of articlescan be attributed to the fact that the arrest of Ejup Ganic in the UK was top-ical during the monitoring period, although it could have easily been someother case of a similar character. The research team decided to include articleswhich referred to the ethnic leaders of the 1992–1995 war, some of whomare the Hague defendants, into the ethnic frame in the process of coding; wehave accordingly grouped all articles that related to, for instance, Karadžicor Ganic, because they were identified as carriers of the ethnic identity dur-ing the war, although Ganic was a member of the former B&H presidency.The presidency was established after the referendum on the independenceof B&H held on 29 February and 1 March 1993. Of the total number of reg-istered voters, 64.31% turned out to vote. Of the total valid votes, 99.44%of the voters voted ‘for’, and 0.29% voted ‘against’ (Bieber, 2008: 36). WhileHDZ (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica or Croatian Democratic Union) andSDA (Stranka Demokratske Akcije or Party of Democratic Action) invitedcitizens to vote for independence, SDS called for boycott. The support wasreflected in 61% of the population; however, ‘although there were definitelysome Bosniaks and Croats among those who did not vote, and some Serbsamong those who did, the polarization of the population along the eth-nic lines clearly affected the outcome of the referendum’ (ibid.). The SDSsupporters first erected barricades in Sarajevo the day after the referendum.The disputed fact about the then-presidency is that, at the time as well asduring the war, it was not considered legitimate by at least one-third (pre-sumably Serb), if not more, of the population, and was generally recognizedby Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). Since the reporting on the presidency of the



35.0

30.0

25.0

20.0

15.0

23.4

11.5

0.80.0 0.0 0.0

4.1

0.8 0.01.3

32.8

11.6

2.2

18.7

1.80.4

2.1

15.0

10.0

5.0


Politics ethnic % Economy ethnic % Society ethnic %

Figure 4.5 Ethnic frame in articles concerning politics, economy and society

period cannot be equated with the reporting on the post-Dayton presidencyof B&H, reporting on Ganic was also codified as reporting within ethnicframes. The distribution of articles in line with the ethnic frame is shown inFigure 4.5.

The table below contains examples of reporting within the ethnic framewith distinctive political strategies of the positive representation of self andnegative representations of others (Chilton, 2004; Wodak et al., 2009), and aspecific strategy that we characterized as a hybrid between the two, which isthe reaction to the negative representation of Us by Them, which is a subsetof the strategy of negative representation of the Other (Table 4.1).

These discourses are characterized by the use of the emotional lexis,regardless of whether they refer to a suspect in a crime as a kind father oremploy the rhetoric that evokes wartime suffering, a disadvantageous statusof one compared to other, presupposing that the ‘Others’ are the ones toblame for what is happening to ‘Us’.

Conclusions

Some of the main conclusions of this chapter, which aims to describe andexplain the dominant media frames in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian publicsphere, are the following: the national reporting frame is the most repre-sented frame – it is unmarked and expected; the national and the ethnicoverlap, particularly in cases of mixed national-entity-ethnic frames. Theentity frame, if not perceived as a territorial or geographical term, tends tooverlap with the ethnic (e.g. when the Republika Srpska occurs in a context


PROOF83

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which deals exclusively with Serbs), although the entity framework prevailsin Dnevni list, a newspaper primarily targeting Bosnian-Herzegovinian Croatreaders. Within this particular frame the political themes merge with theeconomic and social ones hence, the entity frame does not necessarily haveto be a matter of ethnicity but can serve as a frame for expressing socialand political rights granted by the Constitution. However, since Daytoninscribed the ethnic into the national, and entities exist as administrativeunits, it appears that the existing social practice requires the discourse thatwe have identified in this chapter. However, it is discouraging that the ethnicestablishment of entities, and by this we mean 1995 and the end of the warthat Dayton brought, still produces almost exclusively ethnicized discoursesthat speak in favor of the claim that the entities are ethnically pure territo-ries. If this is not true in practice, which will be known after the census, itremains questionable how to exit the impasse and report in such a way thatcitizens of the entities do not feel like ethnic subjects alone, regardless of theentity they live in. Hybrid models of national reporting do not necessarilyhave to be ethnicized; on the contrary, they may offer ‘all inclusive’ frameswithin which the entities will be similar to virtually any other administrativeand legal unit, which will guarantee equal rights, inclusion and visibility inthe media discourse, and the entire public sphere, to those who have so farbeen excluded or ignored.

When it comes to the ethnic frame, this is ideologically still the most dan-gerous frame, since it is dominated by the themes in which one ethnicityis represented as a victim of the other, where the emotional–affective lexisprevails; these articles are still the most appropriate arena where the battlefor the predomination of one is fought, often at the expense of others. Thedominance of the political themes, as opposed to almost invisible economicand social themes, supports the fact that the public sphere in B&H is highlypoliticized, an arena in which the zealous unabated fight for supremacy ofthe political ethno-national elites is fought, and where the struggle over dif-ferent hegemonic forms of truth about what really happened in the 1990stakes place.

In conclusion, instead of working extensively on the economy and thelong and arduous process of truth and reconciliation, this fight results indeadlocks and the discourse of mutual exclusion, without accepting the min-imum recognition of the ‘Other’. For example, in the media in B&H thereare two omnipresent topoi that constitute the current national imagery andentwinement between the ethnic and the national: the genocide against theBosniaks and the legitimation of the Republika Srpska through Dayton, inwhich one excludes the other. If we admit the genocide, we should con-demn, the existence of the RS; if we recognize the RS, then we have to turn ablind eye to the genocide. In all of this, the European factor is not as popu-lar and is almost insignificant, except in the terms of the ‘requirements’ thatB&H needs to meet and the reluctant memory of the High Representative.



With the perpetuation of the constant ‘evil other’ and ‘good self’, the publicsphere where we live simply longs for different discourses which will pro-vide maximum appreciation of the ‘other’ and the collectivization not of theguilt, but of the experience of pain, suffering and destruction, and offer someother forms and other topoi and socio-political practices. Until then, theprint media at least those of mainstream provenance, remain uninventivesocial stakeholders and mirrors of everyday politics.

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