His Excellency Mr. Zeljko Komsic, Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Addresses the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

On Tuesday, October 1, His Excellency Mr. Zeljko Komsic, Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, gave a noontime Presidential Address to a standing-room only crowd at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The event was attended by faculty, staff, students, and distinguished guests, including the First Lady of Bosnia and Herzegovina Mrs. Sabina Komsic, the Bosnian Ambassador to the United States Ms. Jadranka Negodic, the Consul General, and leaders of the Chicago and St. Louis Bosnian communities. President Komsic’s visit came about from REEEC undergraduate student Medina Spiodic’s ambitious vision, and from the growth and greater recognition of South Slavic Studies at the University. Along with REEEC, the European Union Center and the Office of International Programs and Studies co-sponsored the event. President Komsic’s visit highlighted his advocacy of cooperation across ethnic lines and strengthening links to the Bosnian-American community.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

With the help of Mirella Bajric, the interpreter, President Komsic addressed the audience in his native Bosnian. He began by expressing his “pleasure to be here at the second-oldest university in Illinois.” He praised the University Libraries, and the University’s research and teaching, particularly the blossoming interest in Slavic Studies.

President Komsic then remarked on contemporary Bosnia. He observed that the majority of Bosnians are grateful for the help of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in stopping the war in 1995. He pointed out how Prof. Francis Boyle, of the College of Law and a REEEC faculty affiliate, was a key player in the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords. However, he acknowledged the challenges that Bosnia faces. Politically, there is a weakening of international interest in Bosnia. The international community, which had previously played a large role in ending the war and had a strong presence in the country, is now allowing local communities to lead. As a result, the Dayton Accords appear to be weakening. The country is stalled on its way to the European Union (EU) and NATO. Currently, it has not been able to fulfill the requirements for membership into both organizations. Since Bosnia lacks formal constitutional standards to equalize citizens, many Bosnians are denied basic human rights and face discrimination based on their ethnicity. President Komsic questioned how quickly and effectively Bosnia can make the necessary changes to become part of the EU and NATO.

President Komsic continued his address with a comparison between the United States and Bosnia. Both are multinational countries, but Bosnia has more work to do to repair its social divisions. In contrast, the U.S. had the strength to carry Barack Obama to the the Presidency. There were formal measures in place for him to become President, regardless of his background.  According to President Komsic, Bosnia needs a government and society based on the U.S. model of individualism, not collectivism. His goal is to end discrimination and make Bosnian society comparable to that of the U.S.

In conclusion, President Komsic spoke about the Bosnian diaspora in the U.S. He praised those who became successful in their new home, but also revealed that the majority of the adult generation that escaped the war had not really adjusted to life in the U.S. They still struggle with communicating in English and long for their homeland, despite knowing that they have nothing left there. However, the young people, their children, have adapted well and are fully integrated into U.S. society. Yet, those ethnic divisions that pit Bosnian Croats, Muslims, and Serbs against each other continue to exist even within the diaspora community. President Komsic believes in the need for drawing people to the Bosnian embassy and consulates, regardless of their ethnicity. All in all, President Komsic remains optimistic. He hopes that the media will strengthen connections between Bosnia and the Bosnian diaspora.

The University of Illinois was one of several U.S. destinations following President Komsic’s address to the United Nations in New York on September 24. Prior to his campus visit, he met with the Bosnian community in St. Louis. After his day-long stay at the University, he went to Chicago to meet with the Bosnian community there.

Bosnian President Talks Politics, European Union Membership at University

This is a re-posting of an article from The Daily Illini. To view the original article, please click on the following link: http://www.dailyillini.com/news/campus/article_6a090d00-2b01-11e3-9138-001a4bcf6878.html

_____________________________________________________________________________

In an address at the University on Tuesday afternoon, the head of state of Bosnia-Herzegovina outlined the politics of his country and its pursuit of joining the European Union.

Bosnia-Herzegovina President Zeljko Komsic spoke of the political state of his country at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science on Tuesday. Negotiations regarding the Balkan state’s membership to the European Union are still ongoing.

Chairman of the three-member Bosnian presidency Zeljko Komsic spoke at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science during a day-long stop in Champaign-Urbana. His remarks preceded a roundtable discussion, “Bosnians in the U.S.: Communities, Connections, and Homelands,” which was led by faculty and staff across several departments that study Bosnian culture and politics.

Sponsors included the Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Center; the European Union Center; the University library; and the Slavic languages and literatures department.

Komsic was at the U.N. General Assembly last week in New York, and he remained in the U.S. to travel to St. Louis, Chicago and other cities with large Bosnian communities. He stopped in Champaign-Urbana on his way from St. Louis to Chicago, where he will speak with the Bosnian community there.

His remarks coincide with a developing partnership between the University and BosTel, a Chicago-based Bosnian television station, said Judith Pintar, a visiting assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures.

She said the partnership will lead to a Bosnian media archive in the International and Area Studies Library at the University. Because Chicago maintains a large Bosnian population, the University’s Slavic languages and literatures department hopes to build a relationship with the community there, she said.

Negotiations to admit the Balkan country into the European Union are at a stalemate because Bosnia-Herzegovina has not met certain political and economic conditions set by the union. According to a European Court of Human Rights ruling, the current constitution discriminates against minorities.

“There is no one way for Bosnia and Herzegovina to enter the European Union,” Komsic said through a translator.

He said the ethnic divides within the country present numerous challenges for governance, which is why Bosnia has not acceded to the European Union.

The three major ethnic groups of Bosnia — the Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats — remain segregated, which is why the presidency of the country includes one elected official from each group. The last census in the country took place over a decade ago, so the exact ethic composition of the country is not available.

In 1995, the country emerged from a three-year civil war, which began when Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence in 1992 after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The armed conflict, which crossed ethnic lines, ended after peace negotiations held in Dayton, Ohio.

Bosnian Leader Calls for End to Ethnic Divisions

This is a re-posting of an article from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. To see the original article, please click on the following link: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2013-10-01/bosnian-leader-calls-end-ethnic-divisions.html

_____________________________________________________________________________

Chairman of the presidency visits campus between two other stops in St. Louis, Chicago

CHAMPAIGN — Dividing citizens, and government, along ethnic lines is not sustainable for Bosnia, the republic’s current president said Tuesday.

Zeljko Komsic, chairman of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, visits the University of Illinois Tuesday Oct. 1, 2013.

Zeljko Komsic, the current chairman of the three-person presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the ethnic divisions entrenched in his country’s constitution threaten its future and potential membership in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“There is no way forward for Bosnia Herzegovina without NATO and the EU,” Komsic said through a translator during an appearance at the University of Illinois.

Komsic visited campus as part of a program on the Bosnian “diaspora,” or the more than 1 million Bosnians who fled a three-year war, discrimination and a poor economy to live in the United States and other countries. The UI is developing a program in Bosnian studies, pulling together scholars in history, music and other fields who study the Balkans.

Komsic, who holds a degree from Georgetown University, is the Croat member of the three-person presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which rotates every eight months and also includes a Serb and a Bosniak (Muslim). He was first elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2010.

Part of the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in March 1992 after a referendum that was boycotted by ethnic Serbs.

Bosnian Serbs, supported by neighboring Serbia and Montenegro, fought to partition the republic along ethnic lines and join Serb-held areas to form a “Greater Serbia.” That plunged the republic, which includes Muslims, Croats and Serbs, into a three-year civil war.

The factions agreed to U.S.-brokered peace accords in November 1995 in Dayton, Ohio, which created a multi-ethnic democratic government that gave each of the three main ethnic groups a share of power based on the size of their populations. It included a second tier of government composed of the Bosniak/Bosnian Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bosnian Serb-led Republika Srpska, which oversee most government functions.

Komsic expressed gratitude to the United States and other NATO countries for helping end the Bosnian War. But he said the Dayton Accords didn’t resolve the longstanding ethnic tensions in his country, and substantial changes are needed to meet basic human-rights standards.

Under the constitution, not all citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina can be elected, he said, and a human-rights court has ordered changes.

“This is a type of discrimination,” he said.

The country can’t survive divided among Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks, Komsic said, as it has “stalled” Bosnia’s progress and desire to join the EU.

On the day a congressional standoff brought parts of the U.S. government to a halt, Komsic nonetheless praised U.S.-style democracy as something his country should emulate. The U.S. Constitution guarantees individual rights, including the right to vote and be elected, he said, and Bosnia needs to establish a society where people are judged as individuals, not by their ethnicity.

As an example, he pointed to the election of Barack Obama as the first U.S. black president despite the country’s struggles with racial discrimination. It was the “strength of society” and the protections of the Constitution that allowed that historic moment, he said.

“We’re still struggling to get that. We want that moment in Bosnia Herzegovina,” so society will no longer be divided by ethnicity or race or “what God people believe in,” he said. “We need to overcome this so we can move on.”

Despite decades of ethnic conflict, Komsic thinks his country can change, and that almost half of Bosnia’s citizens agree with him.

Bosnia began a new census Tuesday, and thousands of citizens have joined a campaign to reject the ethnic and religious labels that still divide the country, using “ethnically challenged” or “a citizen above all” instead. The government power-sharing arrangement among Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks left out Jews or the children of mixed marriages who refused to pick a side and are excluded from public-sector job quotas.

Komsic called the protest a positive step.

“The biggest question is, who we are. Are we Bosniak, Serb or Croatian, or are we ordinary people? I believe that we are primarily ordinary people,” he said after his talk Wednesday.

Komsic, 49, earned degrees from the University in Sarajevo law school and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He received the Bosnian army’s highest honor, the Golden Lily, for his service in the war. He traveled to the United States last week for the U.N. General Assembly and agreed to visit Champaign in between stops in St. Louis and Chicago, which both have large Bosnian-American populations.

Student Helps Bring Head of State from Her Native Land to Visit UI

This is a re-posting of an article from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. To see the original article, please click on the following link: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2013-09-28/student-helps-bring-head-state-her-native-land-visit-ui.html

_____________________________________________________________________________

CHAMPAIGN — Medina Spiodic was just 7 when her family left war-torn Bosnia for a new life in Chicago.

Medina Spiodic, a native of Bosnia who is a student at the University of Illinois, sits near a U.S. flag and Bosnian flag, at the International Studies Building in Champaign on Friday, Sept. 27, 2013.

The University of Illinois sophomore doesn’t remember much about her childhood in Bosnia, other than moving from place to place, but returned for a visit last summer. She was shocked at how little her home country had progressed since the 1992-95 civil war, which killed 100,000 people and displaced 2 million more.

Countless buildings still pockmarked by gunfire in Sarajevo, Mostar and Srebrenica. Her family home, like so many others, reduced to four walls with grass growing inside. More than 43 percent unemployment.

“I could not believe I was born there,” she said.

Spiodic, 20, who played a key role in the upcoming visit to the university by Bosnia’s head of state, is part of the Bosnian “diaspora” in the United States. Many Bosnians fled the country during and after the civil war prompted by Bosnia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. More than 1.35 million Bosnians live outside that country, in the U.S., Canada, Germany and elsewhere.

Spiodic was born in 1993 in Srebrenica, in the kitchen of her parents’ house because they feared the hospital would not be safe. The war was in full swing and her father was a commander in the Bosnian Army. Her mom was on her own with three children and two other relatives.

In July 1995, Srebrenica was the site of a mass genocide against Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces, who executed more than 7,000 men and boys and expelled 20,000 others.

As Spiodic’s family, which is Muslim, was being loaded onto a bus, her grandfather was pulled out by Serb forces, who told him the bus was too crowded and another would be coming soon.

“That was the last time my family ever saw him,” she said. They discovered his remains 10 years ago in the small village where he’d been shot.

During her visit last summer, Spiodic tried in vain to find his grave at a mass burial site in Srebrenica that contained bodies of more than 8,000 people killed in the massacre.

Spiodic can’t talk about it without crying. Seeing her last name and her mother’s maiden name on so many graves, many of them likely related to her somehow, was just too much.

“They actually found the bones of a little girl, a baby, under a year old,” she said. “That was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done thus far in my life.”

The family emigrated to the U.S. in 2000 seeking better economic opportunities. Her father’s brother already lived in Chicago and helped them find an apartment and jobs.

Her parents don’t talk in depth about the war or their life in Bosnia, except to remind their children to “remember where you came from and what happened to us.”

Her father is a member of Survivors of Srebrenica, which raises money to help people in Bosnia, particularly those who lost one or both parents in the war. It also raises awareness so that “youth in Chicago don’t forget their roots,” she said.

Returning to Srebrenica was “eye-opening,” Spiodic said. “It made me realize what they had gone through, what they had lost, and how life was before the war. I feel like I got a part of my culture back. It definitely made me appreciate where I came from. It made me more connected to Bosnia than I was before.”

She is a Vekich Scholar, given to outstanding students of South Slavic cultures and languages, and works for the UI’s Russian, East European and Eurasian Center. She is also taking classes in Bosnian to beef up her native language skills, and she wants her own children to speak Bosnian someday.

“It’s where I come from,” she said. “It’s important to know where you came from and how you got where you are now.”

Spiodic took a South Slavic Cultures class from Judith Pintar, then a visiting assistant professor in Slavic languages and literatures, which explored the culture and history of Yugoslavia. Through Spiodic’s Bosnian connections, she and Pintar had the opportunity to meet Zeljko Komsic, current president of Bosnia, in Chicago last spring, and they invited him to campus. He agreed to visit this fall.

Spiodic said Komsic, the Croatian member of the three-person rotating Bosnian presidency, “wants Bosnia to be one nation. Instead of Bosnian Croats, Bosnian Serbs or Bosnian Muslims, he wants one nation that works together as a country versus how it is right now,” she said.

Bosnia is preparing for its first census as an independent state, and thousands of citizens have joined a campaign to reject the ethnic and religious labels that still divide Bosnia two decades after the war. They adopt labels like “ethnically challenged” or “a citizen above all,” according to a recent Reuters report.

The move challenges the delicate system of power-sharing created by a 1995 U.S.-brokered peace deal. The Dayton Accords defined the warring sides — Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims) — as “constituent peoples,” splitting territory and power between them but leaving out Jews or the children of mixed marriages who refused to pick a side and are excluded from public sector job quotas, the report said.

The last census was in 1991, when 43.5 percent of Bosnia’s then 4.4 million people declared themselves Muslims, 31.2 percent Serbs and 17.4 percent Croats. More than 5 percent said they were “Yugoslav.”

“I’ve always called myself Bosnian, not a Bosnian Muslim or Bosniak,” Spiodic said. “It is my nationality.

“I think for Bosnia to develop and to progress from where it is right now, I think it’s important to know what you are,” she said. At the same time, Bosnians have to “leave a part of their pride behind and identify themselves as Bosnians.”

Her parents still miss Bosnia and would like to retire there to be closer to family,

“That’s where their hearts are. That’s where they feel most comfortable,” she said. “But it’s really hard to live in Bosnia right now.”