The Painful Legacy of Brcko’s Imperial Experiment

Brcko is a seemingly innocuous small city in northern Bosnia. It is a bland place, a border town with a couple of factories, a few shopping malls and a smattering of Ottoman architecture. Its citizens share the same glum expressions of poverty and economic depression that characterise most of Bosnia.

Yet this town has already earned chapters in two types of history books. One are histories of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

Although not well publicised, the atrocities committed in Brcko were second only to those in Srebrenica in scale; up to 5,000 non-Serb civilians were murdered here in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in early 1992 that occurred before the foreign television cameras arrived.

Indeed this reflected a trend during the war: of the some 100,000 deaths throughout the course of the conflict, 70 per cent took place in the first six months. Brcko was the rule, and Srebrenica the exception.

Brcko experienced some of the most devastating consequences of civil war not just in terms of loss of life but also sheer physical destruction.

By the time the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in December 1995, some 85 per cent of the city's buildings had suffered critical structural damage. Brcko represented the strategic land bridge between the two halves of the Bosnian Serb statelet, the Republika Srpska.

In an attempt to split Serb territory in two and bring the war to an early conclusion, Bosnian Muslim forces mercilessly shelled the town and bombarded it to a smoking ruin.

At Dayton the rival parties could not agree in whose territory the contested town, by then reduced to rubble and awash with impoverished refugees from Krajina to Sarajevo, would fall.

The threat of renewed hostilities overhung the negotiations on the fate of Brcko, the most intractable of all the problems at the Dayton negotiations.

If the Bosnian Muslims won the town, the question of Bosnian Serb independence would forever be foreclosed. If the Serbs won it, that independence project would be all but guaranteed. Hence neither side was prepared to budge.

The second reason why Brcko has made it into the history books is the path-breaking means by which this impasse was resolved. The US government imposed a solution on the region by parachuting in a “Supervisor”, a viceroy with a band of civilian staff, a barrage of military muscle and a cache of international funding with which to rebuild the derelict town and reconstruct a divided society.

In time, the Supervisor would recreate the area as a multi-ethnic free town, called Brcko District, with its own autonomous government, outside the control of any of the warring parties and whose independent status would be guaranteed by its US guardians.

The purpose of this intensive exercise in state-building was to preserve the sovereign integrity of post-war Bosnia by denying the Bosnian Serbs the territorial continuity they need for their independence project.

At the same time international oversight assured the Serbs that they need not fear Muslim domination as the Serb refugees who found themselves in Brcko at the end of the conflict were to be integrated into the town’s pre-war multi-ethnic population.

The first such Supervisor was Robert W ("Bill") Farrand, who held this office for some three years from April 1997. This book is an autobiographical account of what he did and the challenges he faced.

Farrand’s account makes grim reading. It is neither light nor easy to digest. His account of the town is harrowing. The methods he used to force fearful and hate-filled people to live and work together again were draconian.

He was a dictator who micromanaged almost every aspect of reconstructing a multi-ethnic government in one of Bosnia’s most benighted corners. Farrand faced opposition at every turn.

It was not just the legions of nationalist politicians, racist security forces, uncompromising community leaders and undisciplined armed militias who stood in his way. He was also faced with increasingly frustrating bureaucratic obstacles from the international officials overpopulating the diplomatic community elsewhere in Bosnia and who were supposed to be on his side.

The Office of the High Representative, the European overseer of Bosnia’s transition from civil war, was in turn obstructive and envious of Farrand’s powers and achievements.

Eventually these bureaucratic absurdities drove Farrand from the job he loved and for which he earned the Brcko population’s enduring respect. Perhaps the most revealing feature of this text is the perennial political battles in which Farrand had to engage with other members of the international community.

The endless conferences with parades of jealous or indifferent diplomats, and the extraordinary exertions to which Farrand and his staff had to put themselves to achieve their goals, are a consistent theme of the narrative.

A sense of repeated frustration leaps from the text. That the man endured the circus of international community politics for over three years of is testament to his single-mindedness of purpose.

Until his forced departure, Farrand transformed this desolate corner of Bosnia through sheer force of will; how he did that is the subject of this extraordinarily detailed book. The answer was a colossal amount of hard work, negotiation and talking, often forcing local people to pursue his agenda.

The challenges were extraordinary. Government had to be reintegrated. There was no security. Muslims and Croats faced physical violence if they attempted to drive into the town centre.

The courts were flyblown and populated by politically compromised and ethnically partial judges. Government buildings lacked all facilities. Civil servants sat at desks without computers without receiving meaningful salaries. Public records had been cast to the winds.

US tanks rolled around broken streets in an attempt to keep the peace and restore a sense of security. Running water and electricity were scarce.

Farrand had to rebuild all these things, move Muslims and Croats back into their pre-war homes, reverse the effects of ethnic cleansing, find new accommodation for Serb refugees, rejuvenate the local economy, promote freedom of movement, create a legal system from scratch, populate a multi-ethnic legislative assembly, appoint a mayor, find and train judges, reintegrate the police force, battle corruption and more.

The most extraordinary feature of this story is that he managed to achieve a great many of these things in a relatively short space of time.

Farrand intended this book to be a practical manual for peacekeeping. The work he did being sui generis, his legal powers extraordinarily broad and the environment in which he operated so unusual, it is hard to know whether his text will achieve its aim.

The tools he had available and challenges he faced may never be repeated elsewhere. As a personal memoire, however, his writing is fascinating.

The cast of hoary characters with which Farrand had to deal, the bizarre and unusual problems he faced and the theoretically unlimited legal authorities at his disposal lends this account the air of an autobiography of a governor in a far flung corner of the Roman Empire.

One lesson any reader will be able to take away is that any mission of this kind is not for the fainthearted. It requires extraordinary resolve and none but the most exceptional, hardy officials will be able to undertake it.

Farrand correctly observes that the usual circles from which civilian peacekeeping missions are drawn, diplomats in mid- career, are not a good stock for the challenges facing them in a pro-consular role.

Lacking management experience, they do not know how to get the best results from a large team of diverse people. Eyeing their next promotion, they are not prepared to confront vested interests in the international community and step on toes in the way that is necessary to achieve results.

Farrand was already semi-retired when he accepted the role, and hence  had nothing to lose. It was this, combined with an irresistible determination and an irrepressible decency of spirit, that enabled him to achieve so much.

If this book has a flaw it is the failure to place this species of international intervention in context. Was supervision a noble project or a quixotic fantasy? Farrand achieved significant results during his Bosnian mission.

But any model of state-building that relies on the strengths and peculiarities of a single man may prove unsuitable in other contexts, because the individual is irreplacable. Moreover the singular tragedy of the Brcko experience consists in what happened after Farrand left.

Subsequent supervisors more or less kept the experiment going until 2004, when the US government accepted the inevitability of elections over imperial rule.

Farrand had appointed his local government by fiat; once the successors to politicians appointed by decree held democratic mandates, they no longer felt compelled to abide by the miscellaneous strictures of the supervisory regime.

Multi-ethnicity collapsed, corruption re-emerged, the public institutions created by Farrand and his team disintegrated, and private capital fled. When, from 2006, the US disengaged more or less completely from the supervision project, Brcko District collapsed.

It now persists as a sad well of endemic poverty, ethnic resentment and political insecurity. Tacit repartition has begun, and gradual envelopment by Republika Srpska – the very evil that supervision was supposed to foreclose – has returned as a credible political prospect.

If the results of supervision have proven unsustainable through want of continued attention by the US government, was the project ever worth commencing? Only the next few years will answer that question.

One conclusion can be drawn with some certainty, however: if Bosnia reverts to inter-ethnic violence or political disintegration, Brcko will play a central role in the ensuing catastrophe. At that point the consequences of premature US disengagement from the experiment will become apparent.

Bill Farrand was an extraordinary diplomat and a remarkable man. To understand what post-war intervention in an ethnically divided society by foreign powers really involves, this book is essential reading. For all the text's lacunae, there is no work quite like it.

The manuscript reveals a fascinating world of neo-colonial proconsulship, the experience of which is so alien to common understanding that outsiders can have only the faintest conception of it.

There is also an abundance of lessons wrapped within the folds of this book for any foreign government brave enough to again attempt what the US sought to do in Brcko.

If rebuilding a society torn apart by war is so intensive an effort and requires such a concentration of resources, even in one town, then the prospects of success in an entire country like Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq or Afghanistan are remote indeed. Although Farrand did not perhaps intend it, that may be the principal lesson that emerges from this careful and detailed study.

Reconstruction and Peace Building in the Balkans: The Brcko Experience. By Robert W Farrand. Rowman & Littlefield, US$39.95.

Matthew Parish is a partner with the international law firm Holman Fenwick Willan in Geneva. He was formerly the Chief Legal Adviser to the International Supervisor of Brcko. His first book, ‘A Free City in the Balkans: Reconstructing a Divided Society in Bosnia,’ is published by I.B. Tauris. www.matthewparish.com