Brčko looks like any small Bosnian city. Smoke-filled cafes line the pedestrianised main street, serving bitter coffee against the blaring backdrop of another regional speciality: high-octane turbo-folk music.
But behind Brčko’s quotidian façade lies a novel political experiment. In the impressive Hapsburg-era city hall sits a municipal assembly with powers that more closely resemble a sovereign state. Brčko (pronounced “Britchko”) is almost entirely self-governing. As well as its own education system, the city has free-standing courts and separate health and police services. It is, in essence, a free city in Europe.
The unusual arrangement is a product of Brčko’s bloodstained recent history. A border city, pressed close against Croatia and Serbia, it was mainly Bosniak when war broke out in 1992. Brčko became caught in the “corridor” linking two big chunks of Serb-held territory – one in north-western Bosnia, the other in the east. Serb forces needed it desperately, and stormed into the city, expelling Bosniaks and detaining hundreds in brutal camps. Torn apart during the fighting, Brčko then became a thorn in the peace: both the Bosniak/Croat and Serb contingents claimed it as their own. An inability to agree about the destiny of the city almost scuttled the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the war.
You can see the results on presentation day at Šesta primary school on the edge of town. Girls in traditional dresses with flowers in their hair twirl through a Bosnian folk dance. Seamlessly, the music changes and the children move into an up-tempo Serbian routine. Parents seated on rows of wooden benches clap, cheer and take photographs on smartphones.
“There is no difference between us, we are all the same,” says 15-year-old Emira Alić. Her Bosniak parents fled Brčko during the war, only to return a decade ago. In the autumn, Emira will go to a mixed high school. She dreams of becoming a teacher.
“We were a lighthouse,” says Ismet Dedeić of the Bosniak party Union for a Better Bosnia and Herzegovina. “Whoever wanted to return could return without any obstacles.” Rather than being Bosniak, Croat or Serb, Brčko residents “saw themselves as citizens of the District”, says Dedeić.
(Source: theguardian)
