It is the fourth day of the hunger strike of Zenica miners. They are demanding an urgent, permanent solution, the payment of salaries for July and August. If their demands are not met, they have announced more radical measures. Zenica miners have been living without salaries for two months. This is not the first time this year that workers have been put in this situation, and now they have gone on a hunger strike, hoping that their suffering will be the last warning to the authorities.
The miners survive with the help of friends and family from abroad or go into debt, which brings them to the brink of existence. Professor Nedim Suljić reminds that the cause of the problem is decades of poor management of the mines.
“For 15-20 years, there has been great disappointment with politicians. With their incompetence, tendency to corruption, robbery, social insensitivity and destruction of everything they touch. This has resulted in a general apathy in society – and so has the Zenica Mining and Metallurgical University,” says Suljić.
The BiH Electric Power Company announced that the mine management would pay the July salaries by Friday, while the August salaries are still pending. However, the miners rejected this offer, requesting an urgent meeting on Monday to jointly find a solution to the accumulated problems at the Zenica Mine.
“If they have come to the conclusion that they should close us, we have agreed to that, let them just find a socially acceptable way to take care of our colleagues,” says Elvedin Alić, deputy president of the RMU Zenica Workers’ Union.
Nedžad Duraković from the RMU Zenica Union emphasizes that the miners do not have the basic means of living.
“People have not had their basic income for 62 days. We do not intend to stop this process without the payment of salary number eight and a final solution for the payment until the closure process itself. We started this by gathering the union board with the support of the workers,” says Duraković.
“The miners are the least to blame for what happened in Zenica. There are people who ran the mines and a profession that works on projects and everything. We just did what we were ordered to do,” adds Senid Dizdarević, a miner from the Rastopočje pit.
The problems go back even further – since 2009, workers have not been paid for their health or pension insurance, which many have described as a reflection of the alleged “just energy transition”, which in the Bosnian context is becoming synonymous with life without income and unpaid work experience.
Coal exploitation in the Zenica coal mine lasted 140 years, until March last year, when production in the Rastopočje pit was suspended. The reasons cited were debts and insufficient coal deliveries, while issues of poor management, investment in new equipment and exploration of new deposits were not resolved.
Professor Suljić also recalls the devastated Mošćanica mine.
“The Mošćanica open-pit mine has not been operating since the war. 146 million BAM was invested in it and that property has been mostly devastated. Why hasn’t production started yet? An assessment of the justification for the work should have been made, but that costs money. It’s a large asset,” he points out.
“It’s always been a situation where it requires a lot of costs. There is coal up there, we agree, but we are no longer in a position to talk about it because of the shutdown, because we will no longer be RMU Zenica as a production facility,” adds union member Duraković.
After the mine’s closure, it is planned that some of the workers will retire and some will be transferred to other mines. However, due to the non-strategic relationship of the authorities, Bosnia and Herzegovina is rapidly moving from an exporter of electricity to a country dependent on imports.
The miners have clearly stated that they will continue the hunger strike until their basic demands – payment of July and August salaries – are met, and if a solution is not found by Monday, they have announced more radical measures.
