Questões de Inglês

A BROKEN PEACE

By Jasmin Mujanović

    The Dayton Peace Accords, which formally ended the Bosnian War in 1995, fragmented Bosnia, ensuring that each of the warring ethnic factions – Serb, Croat, and Bosniak – would be left with a patch of territory to call its own, but with the country being treated as a single entity in the international arena. This internal fragmentation was itself the product of ethnic cleansing [limpeza étnica] and genocide, the process by which nationalist militias created neat, mostly homogenous territories, which they hoped could later become essentially autonomous regions. Although the Western diplomats who negotiated Dayton legitimated these violence-based demarcations of land as the price of peace, they believed that reform could establish Bosnia (also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina) as a vibrant, diverse, and democratic society, capable of membership in the European Union.

    Almost a quarter of a century since the end of the Bosnian War, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people, the shadow of violence lies over the upcoming elections [Note: These elections were held in October 2018.] in this small country, which is still severely divided along ethnic lines. The leader of Bosnia’s main Serb nationalist bloc, Milorad Dodik, backed by the Kremlin, has militarized the police units under his government’s control. He has also recruited the services of Russian-trained paramilitaries from neighboring Serbia. And Russian militants, recently fighting on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine, are now routinely hosted in his presidential palace in Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS), one of the two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina (the other is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or informally, the Bosniak-Croat Federation). Dodik makes no secret of his intentions: he wants the RS to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is willing to use arms to accomplish exactly that if either the Bosnian state government in Sarajevo or the international community try to stop him.

    Meanwhile, the leader of the primary Croat nationalist bloc, Dragan Čovič, may do the same. Despite the nominal ethnic divisions between their two parties, Čovič and Dodik are united in a shared antipathy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina as a territorially integrated state. Each of them wants to revive the territorial-expansion projects conceived in Belgrade [capital of Serbia] and Zagreb [capital of Croatia] in the 1990s: Dodik wishes for the RS to join Serbia, while Čovič aspires to resuscitate the “Herzeg-Bosna,” possibly with the idea of attaching it to Croatia. Herzeg-Bosna was Zagreb’s version of the RS: a self-declared “republic” from which non-Croats were ethnically cleansed, much as non-Serbs were forced out of the RS. The original architects of both the RS and Herzeg-Bosna have been convicted of dozens of counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. Yet Dodik and Čovič remain unapologetic in their aim to preserve and revive, respectively, these para-states.

    Though the largest community in the country, the Bosniaks are fractured by provincial disputes. The Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the bloc cofounded by Bosnia’s first president, Alija Izetbegovič, is now purely a vehicle for the enrichment of the Izetbegovič family and their allies. As a result, the past year has seen three major splinter groups [grupos de dissidentes] break off, each accusing Bakir Izetbegovič, Alija’s son and the party’s leader, of rampant corruption and criminality. And for their own part, Bosnia’s leftists and anti-nationalists have managed to split their vote across four different parties, practically ensuring their own massacre at the polls [urnas].

    Amid this game of thrones, the Euro-American alliance that once guaranteed Bosnia’s peace is fragmented by its own factional disputes, and unprepared to intervene in the event of genuine emergency. And beneath it all is a pulsating cacophony of public anger at the country’s corrupt elite, whose decades of self-dealing have left Bosnia as one of the poorest states in Europe. The country is undeniably already on the brink [beira de precipício], and October’s elections could easily push it over the edge.

Adapted from Prospect, October 2018. [Note: Please remember that the country of Bosnia is also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.]

A BROKEN PEACE

By Jasmin Mujanović

    The Dayton Peace Accords, which formally ended the Bosnian War in 1995, fragmented Bosnia, ensuring that each of the warring ethnic factions – Serb, Croat, and Bosniak – would be left with a patch of territory to call its own, but with the country being treated as a single entity in the international arena. This internal fragmentation was itself the product of ethnic cleansing [limpeza étnica] and genocide, the process by which nationalist militias created neat, mostly homogenous territories, which they hoped could later become essentially autonomous regions. Although the Western diplomats who negotiated Dayton legitimated these violence-based demarcations of land as the price of peace, they believed that reform could establish Bosnia (also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina) as a vibrant, diverse, and democratic society, capable of membership in the European Union.

    Almost a quarter of a century since the end of the Bosnian War, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people, the shadow of violence lies over the upcoming elections [Note: These elections were held in October 2018.] in this small country, which is still severely divided along ethnic lines. The leader of Bosnia’s main Serb nationalist bloc, Milorad Dodik, backed by the Kremlin, has militarized the police units under his government’s control. He has also recruited the services of Russian-trained paramilitaries from neighboring Serbia. And Russian militants, recently fighting on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine, are now routinely hosted in his presidential palace in Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS), one of the two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina (the other is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or informally, the Bosniak-Croat Federation). Dodik makes no secret of his intentions: he wants the RS to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is willing to use arms to accomplish exactly that if either the Bosnian state government in Sarajevo or the international community try to stop him.

    Meanwhile, the leader of the primary Croat nationalist bloc, Dragan Čovič, may do the same. Despite the nominal ethnic divisions between their two parties, Čovič and Dodik are united in a shared antipathy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina as a territorially integrated state. Each of them wants to revive the territorial-expansion projects conceived in Belgrade [capital of Serbia] and Zagreb [capital of Croatia] in the 1990s: Dodik wishes for the RS to join Serbia, while Čovič aspires to resuscitate the “Herzeg-Bosna,” possibly with the idea of attaching it to Croatia. Herzeg-Bosna was Zagreb’s version of the RS: a self-declared “republic” from which non-Croats were ethnically cleansed, much as non-Serbs were forced out of the RS. The original architects of both the RS and Herzeg-Bosna have been convicted of dozens of counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. Yet Dodik and Čovič remain unapologetic in their aim to preserve and revive, respectively, these para-states.

    Though the largest community in the country, the Bosniaks are fractured by provincial disputes. The Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the bloc cofounded by Bosnia’s first president, Alija Izetbegovič, is now purely a vehicle for the enrichment of the Izetbegovič family and their allies. As a result, the past year has seen three major splinter groups [grupos de dissidentes] break off, each accusing Bakir Izetbegovič, Alija’s son and the party’s leader, of rampant corruption and criminality. And for their own part, Bosnia’s leftists and anti-nationalists have managed to split their vote across four different parties, practically ensuring their own massacre at the polls [urnas].

    Amid this game of thrones, the Euro-American alliance that once guaranteed Bosnia’s peace is fragmented by its own factional disputes, and unprepared to intervene in the event of genuine emergency. And beneath it all is a pulsating cacophony of public anger at the country’s corrupt elite, whose decades of self-dealing have left Bosnia as one of the poorest states in Europe. The country is undeniably already on the brink [beira de precipício], and October’s elections could easily push it over the edge.

Adapted from Prospect, October 2018. [Note: Please remember that the country of Bosnia is also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.]

A BROKEN PEACE

By Jasmin Mujanović

    The Dayton Peace Accords, which formally ended the Bosnian War in 1995, fragmented Bosnia, ensuring that each of the warring ethnic factions – Serb, Croat, and Bosniak – would be left with a patch of territory to call its own, but with the country being treated as a single entity in the international arena. This internal fragmentation was itself the product of ethnic cleansing [limpeza étnica] and genocide, the process by which nationalist militias created neat, mostly homogenous territories, which they hoped could later become essentially autonomous regions. Although the Western diplomats who negotiated Dayton legitimated these violence-based demarcations of land as the price of peace, they believed that reform could establish Bosnia (also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina) as a vibrant, diverse, and democratic society, capable of membership in the European Union.

    Almost a quarter of a century since the end of the Bosnian War, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people, the shadow of violence lies over the upcoming elections [Note: These elections were held in October 2018.] in this small country, which is still severely divided along ethnic lines. The leader of Bosnia’s main Serb nationalist bloc, Milorad Dodik, backed by the Kremlin, has militarized the police units under his government’s control. He has also recruited the services of Russian-trained paramilitaries from neighboring Serbia. And Russian militants, recently fighting on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine, are now routinely hosted in his presidential palace in Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS), one of the two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina (the other is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or informally, the Bosniak-Croat Federation). Dodik makes no secret of his intentions: he wants the RS to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is willing to use arms to accomplish exactly that if either the Bosnian state government in Sarajevo or the international community try to stop him.

    Meanwhile, the leader of the primary Croat nationalist bloc, Dragan Čovič, may do the same. Despite the nominal ethnic divisions between their two parties, Čovič and Dodik are united in a shared antipathy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina as a territorially integrated state. Each of them wants to revive the territorial-expansion projects conceived in Belgrade [capital of Serbia] and Zagreb [capital of Croatia] in the 1990s: Dodik wishes for the RS to join Serbia, while Čovič aspires to resuscitate the “Herzeg-Bosna,” possibly with the idea of attaching it to Croatia. Herzeg-Bosna was Zagreb’s version of the RS: a self-declared “republic” from which non-Croats were ethnically cleansed, much as non-Serbs were forced out of the RS. The original architects of both the RS and Herzeg-Bosna have been convicted of dozens of counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. Yet Dodik and Čovič remain unapologetic in their aim to preserve and revive, respectively, these para-states.

    Though the largest community in the country, the Bosniaks are fractured by provincial disputes. The Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the bloc cofounded by Bosnia’s first president, Alija Izetbegovič, is now purely a vehicle for the enrichment of the Izetbegovič family and their allies. As a result, the past year has seen three major splinter groups [grupos de dissidentes] break off, each accusing Bakir Izetbegovič, Alija’s son and the party’s leader, of rampant corruption and criminality. And for their own part, Bosnia’s leftists and anti-nationalists have managed to split their vote across four different parties, practically ensuring their own massacre at the polls [urnas].

    Amid this game of thrones, the Euro-American alliance that once guaranteed Bosnia’s peace is fragmented by its own factional disputes, and unprepared to intervene in the event of genuine emergency. And beneath it all is a pulsating cacophony of public anger at the country’s corrupt elite, whose decades of self-dealing have left Bosnia as one of the poorest states in Europe. The country is undeniably already on the brink [beira de precipício], and October’s elections could easily push it over the edge.

Adapted from Prospect, October 2018. [Note: Please remember that the country of Bosnia is also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.]

RELIGION AND GENTRIFICATION [Revitalização Urbana]

    When Lincoln Temple, a church in the Shaw neighbourhood of Washington, DC, closed this year, it signalled the end of an important chapter in AfricanAmerican history. Founded in 1869 by a group that included many newly freed slaves, it became a hub [eixo] of the civil-rights movement. In the 1950s one of its earliest members, Mary Church Terrell, led successful sit-in protests against Washington’s segregated restaurants. In the next decade the church was used as a marshalling ground for marches. It attracted famous preachers. Roberta Flack sang there. More than a thousand people once attended Lincoln Temple´s Sunday services.

    By 2018, after decades of steady decline, that number had dwindled to a dozen – if the pastor was lucky. In September the redbrick Romanesque Revival church, erected in 1928 to replace an older building, held its last service. Lincoln Temple, part of the United Church of Christ, is not unique. According to Sacred Spaces Conservancy, a Christian non-profit that uses city data to count church closures, Shaw has lost around 30% of its churches – most of them with predominantly black congregations – since 2008. In Capitol Hill it reckons over 40% of religious properties have closed

    One of the reasons behind the disappearance of Washington’s churches is familiar across the West: fewer people are going to church. But as in other big cities, that change has been exacerbated by the departure of African-American to the suburbs. What began in part as a search for more space and a better life has been accelerated by gentrification.

    In 2015 the proportion of black residents in Washington dropped below 50% of the population for the first time in decades. Many of those who left took their religion with them, as the proliferation of churches in some Maryland suburbs shows. Some tried not to. Jeanne Cooper, who attended Lincoln Temple for five decades, says many congregants would drive in from the suburbs on Sunday; she did so herself until the church´s last service. But as parking spaces were swallowed up by development, or claimed by new residents who had lobbied the city for parking restrictions, the journey became too much for many of its ageing members

    Elsewhere in Washington, old churches have been torn down or developed to make apartments blocks. Shaw, where Victorian row houses sit alongside renovated industrial lofts, has become one of the city´s trendiest neighbourhoods. Demand for land is high. But Mrs Cooper says the church´s management team, which she leads, hopes to continue renting out the building to groups that serve the area´s poor. “That way, it almost feels as if the church is returning to its original purpose,” she says.

Adapted from The Economist, December 22nd 2018 – January 4th 2019.

RELIGION AND GENTRIFICATION [Revitalização Urbana]

    When Lincoln Temple, a church in the Shaw neighbourhood of Washington, DC, closed this year, it signalled the end of an important chapter in AfricanAmerican history. Founded in 1869 by a group that included many newly freed slaves, it became a hub [eixo] of the civil-rights movement. In the 1950s one of its earliest members, Mary Church Terrell, led successful sit-in protests against Washington’s segregated restaurants. In the next decade the church was used as a marshalling ground for marches. It attracted famous preachers. Roberta Flack sang there. More than a thousand people once attended Lincoln Temple´s Sunday services.

    By 2018, after decades of steady decline, that number had dwindled to a dozen – if the pastor was lucky. In September the redbrick Romanesque Revival church, erected in 1928 to replace an older building, held its last service. Lincoln Temple, part of the United Church of Christ, is not unique. According to Sacred Spaces Conservancy, a Christian non-profit that uses city data to count church closures, Shaw has lost around 30% of its churches – most of them with predominantly black congregations – since 2008. In Capitol Hill it reckons over 40% of religious properties have closed

    One of the reasons behind the disappearance of Washington’s churches is familiar across the West: fewer people are going to church. But as in other big cities, that change has been exacerbated by the departure of African-American to the suburbs. What began in part as a search for more space and a better life has been accelerated by gentrification.

    In 2015 the proportion of black residents in Washington dropped below 50% of the population for the first time in decades. Many of those who left took their religion with them, as the proliferation of churches in some Maryland suburbs shows. Some tried not to. Jeanne Cooper, who attended Lincoln Temple for five decades, says many congregants would drive in from the suburbs on Sunday; she did so herself until the church´s last service. But as parking spaces were swallowed up by development, or claimed by new residents who had lobbied the city for parking restrictions, the journey became too much for many of its ageing members

    Elsewhere in Washington, old churches have been torn down or developed to make apartments blocks. Shaw, where Victorian row houses sit alongside renovated industrial lofts, has become one of the city´s trendiest neighbourhoods. Demand for land is high. But Mrs Cooper says the church´s management team, which she leads, hopes to continue renting out the building to groups that serve the area´s poor. “That way, it almost feels as if the church is returning to its original purpose,” she says.

Adapted from The Economist, December 22nd 2018 – January 4th 2019.

RELIGION AND GENTRIFICATION [Revitalização Urbana]

    When Lincoln Temple, a church in the Shaw neighbourhood of Washington, DC, closed this year, it signalled the end of an important chapter in AfricanAmerican history. Founded in 1869 by a group that included many newly freed slaves, it became a hub [eixo] of the civil-rights movement. In the 1950s one of its earliest members, Mary Church Terrell, led successful sit-in protests against Washington’s segregated restaurants. In the next decade the church was used as a marshalling ground for marches. It attracted famous preachers. Roberta Flack sang there. More than a thousand people once attended Lincoln Temple´s Sunday services.

    By 2018, after decades of steady decline, that number had dwindled to a dozen – if the pastor was lucky. In September the redbrick Romanesque Revival church, erected in 1928 to replace an older building, held its last service. Lincoln Temple, part of the United Church of Christ, is not unique. According to Sacred Spaces Conservancy, a Christian non-profit that uses city data to count church closures, Shaw has lost around 30% of its churches – most of them with predominantly black congregations – since 2008. In Capitol Hill it reckons over 40% of religious properties have closed

    One of the reasons behind the disappearance of Washington’s churches is familiar across the West: fewer people are going to church. But as in other big cities, that change has been exacerbated by the departure of African-American to the suburbs. What began in part as a search for more space and a better life has been accelerated by gentrification.

    In 2015 the proportion of black residents in Washington dropped below 50% of the population for the first time in decades. Many of those who left took their religion with them, as the proliferation of churches in some Maryland suburbs shows. Some tried not to. Jeanne Cooper, who attended Lincoln Temple for five decades, says many congregants would drive in from the suburbs on Sunday; she did so herself until the church´s last service. But as parking spaces were swallowed up by development, or claimed by new residents who had lobbied the city for parking restrictions, the journey became too much for many of its ageing members

    Elsewhere in Washington, old churches have been torn down or developed to make apartments blocks. Shaw, where Victorian row houses sit alongside renovated industrial lofts, has become one of the city´s trendiest neighbourhoods. Demand for land is high. But Mrs Cooper says the church´s management team, which she leads, hopes to continue renting out the building to groups that serve the area´s poor. “That way, it almost feels as if the church is returning to its original purpose,” she says.

Adapted from The Economist, December 22nd 2018 – January 4th 2019.