My name is Svjetlana Nedimović
I'm based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Currently on, visiting fellowship in the Centre for Advanced Studies
Futures of Sustainability in Hamburg.
And I have been involved over the last,
let's say, 10 to 15 years in,
lots of urban struggles in Sarajevo,
but also some social justice struggles, like the mass mobilizations
that Bosnia-Herzegovina had, back in 2014.
And, protests and plans that we organized back then.
And then since then, lots of social,
I would call them social environmental struggles.
And currently I'm working as an organizer,
for a relatively new platform called ZBOR,
which is: Collective or united Balkans, resistance and labor.
We've been around for nearly a year, two years now.
But we are working on kind of contesting the whole paradigm of green transition.
ZBOR started around 2023.
And it's an interesting,
it's also an interesting term because it is an acronym,
but also "zbor" in our languages, in the languages of the Yugoslav alliance,
was a very particular, traditional form of decision making,
or an assembly or a gathering in villages,
but also it's specifically linked to the legacies
of the Second World War anti-fascist resistance
and also socialist Yugoslavia,
and the self- management practices,
because it was kind of the fundamental unit of direct democracy.
I like to say that it was democracy where it mattered,
where you live and where you work.
And, in a specific way,
zbor is always a place of... it cannot be controlled.
You never know what can come up.
You cannot direct it, you cannot engineer it.
You can have a script before that, but it's basically
people sitting down and talking about what matters to them
and coming to decisions.
That was all
devastated and destroyed
in the Democratic transition of the 1990s.
When we entered the electoral democracy,
where what people have to say doesn't matter,
except every four years and in a standard format.
So we want to also revive that practice
of collective decision making or collective acting.
And, funnily enough, it kind of coincides with
what is happening in Serbia now
and has been happening over the last 6, 7 months
with student mobilizations, because they're also organizing,
as they say, plenums,
and they invited people to join them by organizing themselves in sbors.
So what we are doing,
at the moment, we are working, like,
last year we met in eastern Serbia in Homolje mountains.
To talk a bit about the problems that the region is facing,
and also to support the local rassroots group "Rangers of Eastern Serbia",
that is fighting the new mines, corporate mines,
that would be opening in this region, which is full of fresh water.
And it should have been part of the national park there.
This year, we are doing something different.
We are a bit nomadic.
We traveled, or we shall travel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and we are meeting
at a coal mining community near Sarajevo.
It's called Breza, a vibrant town that is kind of living around
and from its coal mine, because we think that
in all this talk of Green Transition, there are very important things left out,
like the workers of the, what they are saying now, "old" industries.
We are gathering there in September from the 12th to the 14th,
to talk the transition to contest the transition,
and under the slogan "For miners land and water"
The 2021 protest of the coal miners
That was several days
of mass mobilizations of workers and their communities
under the motto: "We ain't giving you no coal!"
And, you know, it's a message like:
what would happen if they were really to stop delivering coal?
Because Bosnian energy sector is dependent still very much on coal power plants.
So what is going to happen with these people
and these communities, where is their place?
Why is it that we talk in this whole talk of green transition, which is coming
kind of imposed from the expert circles in technocratic and bureaucratic circles,
what is going to happen to organized labor?
Why is it that we talk like that, the term that is used in our language
for what will happen with the workers, or what the plans are,
is the same term that you use for wound care or the care for the deceased.
These workers built our country and built these communities.
Alliances
When I saw the power of organized labor is something that we
very much lost in Bosnia-Herzegovina because it was destroyed
through the transition.
We're kind of versed in transitions.
We saw the last one of 1990s.
It didn't bring anything good to us.
It brought impoverishment, or further impoverishment on communities.
It brought about depopulation
through practically mass exodus of not just young people,
but kind of middle age people being uprooted from their communities.
It brought precarious work.
It brought relaxing of,
further relaxation of labor legislation.
So when I saw the miners on the street and they saw the power that they had,
The first thing that occurs to you is: This is also going to go away.
So it's not just the cultural element and the social welfare element
of what they call "coal phaseout".
But it's also the political element because these organization,
you know, organized labor is not just an economic factor.
It's a political factor.
They could stop the capitalist machine in a way that none of us could!
So I think,
there is ground there for building alliances.
And people are saying that perhaps we're experimenting with new alliances,
I think that is nonsensical.
These are old alliances.
The region,
when we were camping in Serbia last year, we heard a lot about,
how people were inspired by something that happened in 1930s,
in that sort of a broader region of eastern Serbia.
And that was the, uprising of the miners and farmers together.
Because they understood they were fighting basically
for the same thing.
They were fighting for work conditions and against environmental destruction.
So our understanding is that if there is no alliance,
if there is an antagonism between land defenders,
that are falsely, perhaps, called environmentalists,
and the workers, that's because it was engineered.
This is not a natural antagonism.
This was engineered, so that we wouldn't see
the common systemic cause of our problems.
And that is profit making of our labor and of our resources.
So we are kind of moving along the lines of:
"We are against exploitation of people and nature."
And this has to go together.
And this alliances, rebuilding of alliances
is something that we are hoping for in Breza, because we want to bring,
people who are trying to defend their land and their water
and their forests, because that's the source of their subsistence,
and people who are fighting for the dignity of their work
and for the recognition of this and material recognition, I have to say.
Symbolic recognition, you know... we've had enough of PR campaigns.
Is there a debate about conversion in the mining sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
What we are seeing,
I cannot really see what is happening internally.
We can see from the outside. There is no proper debate in the public.
Everything is happening in very narrow circles
of foreign experts and domestic experts,
government,
EU bureaucracy consultants, the army of consultants,
and obviously,
some parts of the non-governmental sector, like non-governmental organizations.
And, what we are seeing is that it's very harmful.
I mean, it's harmful also for the open debate of how we are relating
to nature and environment,
because it's all pushed into technological solutions.
An there are plans and programs we basically know very little about.
Just recently the World Bank has been running around
with the latest program for the coal mines restructuring.
I do have to say that anyone who knows what the World Bank
has been up to over the decades, when you hear the word restructuring
it's kind of panic.
And so this is precisely
what we are thinking like what is actually going on?
What does this restructuring bring?
Who is supposed to decide on this,
if people are not involved?
It's the workers and it's their communities,
because, this is very important,
we are talking about the workplaces is that built entire communities.
Like in Breza we shall be meeting
by the swimming pool that was built by the coal mine
for the community and for the city of Sarajevo.
The first Olympic swimming pool, outdoor pool,
which is devastated, obviously, through the latest
round of transition.
So we don't see any debate going on,
out in the open.
We just see some programs and strategies done in these narrow circles,
and I think they are very harmful,
also in the fact that it's not... there is a lot of focus on coal.
We could there bring up the issues
of historical climate injustice.
I mean, the historical contribution
of Bosnia-Herzegovina to CO2 emissions
is like .06, 0.06.
There is also the problem,
that no one is even raising the issue of construction,
which is mainly done for real estate market speculation
and emissions in that industry are huge.
We didn't start from that,
and we didn't start from the end of flying busness.
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the region,
we started
from something that constitutes the basis of energy sector
in Bosnia and Herzegovina, public energy sector.
We also don't see any debate on the renewables, which are,
constitute the creeping privatization of the energy sector,
because there's a lots of calls and lots of offers
made to the private sector to invest.
And this is what we,
what land defenders are fighting against,
because what they see is the private businesses,
companies moving in and taking vast pieces of land,
absorbing also something that used to be publicly owned,
it used to be social ownership, social property, basically.
Societal, you could say, ...moving in and absorbing it
for their private projects, which will render us in this situation
like Greece is paying enormous prices of energy
because it's you're basically renouncing any kind of energy sovereignty.
They will offer it on the market.
If we can't pay, what is that going to mean?
And if they close our coal power plants without any kind of,
not not a phase out, it's going to be
it could be very abrupt.
What is unnecessary and harmful about the mining sector?
Well, the current mining sector,
there are several layers to it, actually.
We can talk public coal mines.
We can also talk private coal mines, because the public coal mines
are constantly addressed as a problem and a burden
that they are not productive enough that they are running losses, deficits,
etc., etc..
At the same time, one of our state owned,
electric power supply companies
is buying coal from private coal mines,
which are being opened as we speak,
with very, very shady, through very shady procedures,
of environmental impact assessment and,
you know, I recently heard of a coal mine,
a private coal mine, that got closed down before it actually,
collected, gathered all the paperwork necessary for it to run.
So it finished exploitation
by the time it got all the paperwork sorted.
Profit is being made.
And the power companies, from some of them buying coal,
at the price,
double the price that is being paid to the public mines.
So they're literally being strategically run
to ruin, to bankruptcy.
But then we have also new mines, corporate mines being opened
hunting for, strategic minerals,
and we see, like in the region, obviously Serbia is kind of in the spotlight
because of lithium in Rio Tinto, but they have lots of smaller
players already inside, in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Also it's
apparently recently
Adriatic Metals sold to a Canadian.
This is what we heard.
Take it with some reservations, because it's always,
we can never get enough information on this, obviously,
- for all the talk of transparency, that was
fed down our throats by European Union through the enlargement process,
like the most interesting non-transparent thing
is how these businesses are operating.
And so the mine in Vareš
which is a neighboring community to Breza, a workers town,
the mine got sold
to a Canadian junior mining company, Dundee,
which is actually operating and doing surveys,
where we camped in eastern Serbia last year.
So it's like all these kind of, connections and intersections.
There are companies interested in Lithium or whatever
also, on the Bosnian side of this region.
So it's like Swiss,
there is magnesium mining done by
a German company in Kupres, where there has never been any mining.
So people are getting concerned.
Mining communities, coal mining communities, all mines are suffering
from imminent closure or the threat of closure.
And new mines are coming into the places where there has never been mining,
where people live of different, they have different sources of living,
which they see as immediately threatened by this.
And the mines?
For how long are they saying? Where is that going?
Whatever they are taking out of the ground,
and that is also obscure, - where is it going?
It's not building our communities.
It's basically the wages that they pay,
and that is like what
we know is that the workers are not unionized,
that many contracts are actually very...
they are determined, as they say, determined term of employment.
So it's not anything stable.
They're also bringing in work force from elsewhere.
And it's mainly expert workforce.
And the low qualified, low paid jobs
are for the local communities.
So what we see is
very, very low concession fees being paid
and some public relations work in the sense that they will donate,
you know, something to the local health center
or something, you know, build a playground or something like that.
So it's, you know,
the mining sector at the moment is kind of looking very strange,
like the public share is being driven to ruin.
And the private share, and especially international corporate,
is rising without any,
any more substantive benefit
for for the local communities.
What would we change about the sector in a post-capitalist society?
I think that's probably,
two big a bite for me to chew, as a political organizer.
But we are hoping that we shall hear about that in Breza.
This is one of the things we want to hear from people rather than go there
with the sort of, you know, instant vision of tomorrow's world.
We actually want to hear from people and also want to hear from people
who were in the sector, in socialist years.
And we have one of the people who I hope is coming,
he's at the same time a miner and the land defender,
and he often says: Mining can work on the conditions of socialism.
And he says this is the only way it can work.
And I think that pretty much sums it up.
And he just describes how miners were
building his community once upon a time in socialist years.
And he's saying, obviously there would need to be
technological improvements,
we have different standards now.
But his very powerful statement is:
This can work,
but under socialism.
The message from Serbia, for example, from our comrades and fellows in Serbia
is: You shall not dig. In Rio Tinto.
Obviously, the region where they're moving into is a region
living of different, economic sort of niches.
There is a great danger to water and the message is very strong:
"You shall not dig."
And I often joke and say that Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot really say:
"You shall not dig."
Because we are kind of, you know, from Hunger Games,
the 12th district, there has always been some digging,
but we need to sit down and see how it is to be done.
What for? Whom for?
Who's going to profit and who's going to suffer the consequences?
I don't think that private mining will ever work,
because it's about profit-making.
It can never balance the social and environmental costs.
We want to kind of sit down in Breza, and hear from people
how they see mining,
what is the meaning of sustainability, socially speaking,
not just environmentally, because this kind
of greening of capitalism is clearly not working.
For different regions, I think it would probably mean different things.
So I can speak for what we are doing, and our political task at the moment is,
first of all, to use the opportunity, take the opportunity
of this rift opened by the "transition" narrative in capitalism,
because it's basically a kind of fundamental admission,
that it's not working, and it's not working in the core.
So we need to take that opening
and rebuild our political and economic forces
on different grounds.
And we also need to speak up
at the beginning, against the Green Transition
that is turning olive green. Because we no longer,
it's kind of a paradigm shift within less than a decade.
Three, four years ago, we were hearing about the need to save the planet.
That's how this green colonialism was being sold.
And 3 or 4 years later, we are listening about geopolitical interests.
This is a completely, this is a big shift,
but it's also a great opening because some people are saying:
"Perhaps we should have been smarter,
perhaps it was about it all along", about the interests of capital
and the interests of the elites.
And I think we need to take this opening and do the,
you know, the famous quote:
"What's the most revolutionary thing you can do?
You can see what is actually going on."
And you can take that as a starting point.
We don't need to go into the past
to dig for inspiration or to dig for reasons.
It's here, right here in front of us.
And take this as a step towards rebuilding old alliances
possibly spreading that
and trying within different niches some kinds of transformation.
Because it's a transformation that we definitely need.
It's just not,
in the paradigm of transition is certainly not in the paradigm of Green Transition
at it's as it is being hammered into us, into our heads
over the last years.
So, for us, the task is to help organizing of people on the ground,
help uniting our struggles,
do what we can do through the resources and capacities
that we have, be it contacts,
be it a kind of facilitation,
and letting people know of each other.
And that they share something that they can fight for.
And that's the most immediate. - And then contesting,
fundamentally contesting the system.
And because if now people see it, it is so obvious.
like, so you hear: Digging for something
you call strategic raw materials or whatever, critical minerals
to do what with it? To feed the arms industry?
To feed wars and to kill other people like us on the other side.
So it's a story, you know,
I often say it frightfully reminds me of 1914.
So let's not make the same mistake that we allow working classes
different segments of working class, to be pitted against each other,
like, for example, land defenders and workers of industries.
I think it's, at the same time,
I keep hearing the doom and gloom and and I do hear it.
And you cannot look at the news and you cannot look at the shots from Gaza
and say, it's not doom and gloom, - it is a catastrophe!
But you cannot allow yourself to be paralyzed by this.
How should we get organizeed?
A great challenge for us at the moment
is transnational organizing.
And I have to say that,
we're still trying to see how you make it
into something more solid than
it's been for the last decades, at least, how we experienced it.
How do you root it, materially?
What can we do? I mean, is it through strikes,
that prevent loading of arms that are shipped against people in Gaza,
to be used on children and people of Gaza and Palestine in general.
So is it that?
But there is there's something, if I'm not a worker in the factory,
in the arms factory, or if I'm not someone
at the port dock or something, what can I do?
What can we do to make it material?
Can we do some boycott?
Can we do, you know, a more substantive boycott?
I mean, not just in the sense sharing on social media.
How can we do something together transnationally?
And to the sort of group where I'm working,
this has been quite a challenge, I have to say, because it's very difficult
to go against the structures that are pre-established.
Also to organize outside of the set pattern
of the non-governmental sector, non-governmental organizations
or the kind of social movements
that we have been seeing very kind of loose, very...
There's something there's a lot to be said for horizontal organizing,
but I think there's a lot to be improved there, as well.
We also have to see how we work with spontaneity
since we don't seem to be prepared.
I mean, things happen and, they're kind of overtaking and
and at the moment when they are happening,
you're not there, if you're not prepared!
So I think these are all these, kind of tasks that need to be done and obviously,
fighting to recover the ground
that was taken from us from the left by the right wing.
Because in many places I've heard, I've talked with people elsewhere as well.
And you, the feeling is that the left
let the right wing move into the field,
and into the communities to work with people,
who would, you know, be kind of,
logically, naturally, people on the left.
And they're very aggressively taking over.
And I think we should have learned the lesson of the 20th century.
We're kind of seeing it repeated.
If the left backs off, if the left is concerned with,
you know, where do we stand?
Like the minuscule kind of ideological,
vivisection of the left,
if we stay there in these debates, I think we're doomed.
We need to move quickly, swiftly, back to the masses,
and not invent the agenda.
And I think it was basically a very easy recipe from Lenin:
Go to the masses and, you know, listen to them what they have to share.
What they have to say, what their real problems are.
And we tried on our part
to go to communities and listen to the voices that are silenced.
And yes, we heard it's the mines, in mining communities.
It's the land in communities that are being exploited for
the renewables.
And it's water in the communities where the new mines are being opened.
So we're not inventing it. This is what we heard.
Is there resistance against militarization by the workers?
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, what I'm seeing is,
perhaps this does not answer the question
of militarization directly, but what we are seeing is
you know, I'm not a great fan of historical analogies,
but this one keeps popping up and it's Berlin Congress.
It's like lots of power is playing on the ground
of Bosnia-Herzegowina for the resources.
We also have an arms industry,
Bosnia Herzegovina was full of arms industry,
even in Yugoslav years.
And that is, from what I'm hearing, that's,
proving to be a very prosperous sector.
So that also makes you wonder, how do you go about that?
How do you in a situation where economically it's so difficult,
how do you go about contesting that as a source of,
you know, source of income for people?
In terms of
militarization in Bosnia Herzegovina,
what we first saw was, investment of European Union
in building our police force,
to organize against protests.
We actually saw it straight after 2014.
That's the first step that was taken.
But Bosnia and Herzegovina doesn't
basically matter, because there are NATO troops
guarding the peace in Bosnia Herzegovina.
We as a sovereign country,
we are not really considered sovereign.
So I don't think we, they play all sorts of games with Serbia,
with Bosnia and Herzegovina, I think we are not even seen.
We don't even see ourselves as a factor.
Where there struggles in the region recently?
The whole idea of ZBOR in Russia
is also to bring back to people, to inspire in them
the will to fight for their communities and their work,
and the fruits of their labor, because we have seen dwindling of resistance,
in the country for various reasons. It has been taking so long,
and young people are leaving and people are really,
they say: "People don't see hope."
You will not see hope, obviously, but they don't see the avenues of action,
and it seems that we shall have to move
off the beaten paths for that, for sure.
So it's kind of...
what we are trying to do in Breza as well through this assembly,
we saw this
feeling that there is something about collective action.
And even if you don't have institutional channels to absorb this,
that you can feed this into
the public pressure rises! If you go out public
and show to people that people can work together
and people can do things together for themselves.
You are also exposing the representative parliamentary democracy for what it is.
And it's basically the elite rule with a very weak, very bleak stamp
every four years by those who go out
and vote in the elections.
And, you know, election turnout
is a particular topic that we shouldn't go into.
So SBOR in Brezy is the idea that,
let us try and inspire, revive our resistance.
Let us not just accept what is being served to us.
And I think there is, there is some...
there is the energy!
People have been fighting for rivers, for a decade
in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and obviously the coal miners protests.
So, it's there, it's just that when the institutional arrangement
blocks it out, it's difficult to see how you pursue it any further
without falling into the trap of the typical kind of
NGO-style, legislation amendments, or
policy making or policy briefings to influence the policy makers.
So let's explore a bit, an alternative way.
If we sit down together and send a very clear message
and if we are united, I think that is also valuable.
And also in terms of people understanding what self-organization can do.
The 2014 uprising in Bosnia and Herzegovina
This was
not long after it kind of withered away
I said that my impression was that it was not heralding,
the what was to come like the
uprising or the rebellion or the spirit of struggle,
but it was more like marking the moment when the regime was consolidated.
It was almost like the last kick of the old energy.
So which is, which blocks you for several years,
you know, people will say, like:
"Wow, we were on the streets in 2014 and it didn't change anything",
but I think it's also, something remains, lessons learned
remain, we still,
you know, quite a few of us from those years are still around,
trying to revive direct democratic mechanisms,
self-organizing mechanisms.
And we are finding that people are more and more,
more open, perhaps now than they were back then.
Also the example of Serbia now it really is inspiring, that people
are trying to kind of self-organize, or at least students are self organizing.
And the lessons are...
it's about the uniting of struggles.
There was a lot of, back in those... I don't think we actually understood
how much we needed that:
here was a lot of mistrust and distrust
and also the lack of organizing knowledge,
because some of the older ones.
And I would count myself into that group.
We kind of thought that it was there.
What we learned back in socialism, like how you organize.
We assumed. We did not know.
It wasn't there.
There was such damage inflicted
upon our society through the years of war and transition,
through the sort of democratization that pushed us into the
"It's either NGO or nothing."
"It's either the elections or nothing."
That we counted as something that was not really there.
Or, it was there but very fragmented and very weak.
And I think, we've been learning since then
and people say, oh, it's pointless, but it's not pointless.
There were rivers saved.
And there were people who learned a lot through that.
We saved a water supply infrastructure company
in Sarajevo from, I think, imminent,
threat of privatization through self-organizing.
There were schools saved in Sarajevo from closure.
There was a city hospital saved in Sarajevo from closure.
I'm speaking about Sarajevo, not because I think it's the prime example.
I think there are important things happening in Banja Luka, in Tuzla,
in many smaller communities like Jablanica
but that's my base.
So I want to talk about the struggles that I know best. - So a lot was saved
through self-organizing, even if at a much smaller scale.
And we were learning through these struggles.
And I think the moment has now come to use our knowledge,
to start with something bigger.
And I think, when people say that was a failure,
I think we have a very naive vision
of what political struggle looks like.
And I think the time has come
to start also learning one important lesson,
which we missed,
- and that kind of reflected on 2014:
There are no instant victories.
There are no instant defeats either, but there are no instant victories.
And many of us, will work and work for another decade,
perhaps without seeing the fruits of our labor, of our political labor.
And I think we need to learn the lesson that there is joy in a good fight,
and there is freedom in the struggle and resistance.
You know, not freedom.
as something that you achieve and the emancipation that you achieve.
And then you can sort of: "Yeah, that's it, we're there."
No, we have to learn to love and embrace this struggle,
because that's when we are free, when we are together in this struggle.
It sounds, you know, it may sound kind of empty,
but this is what I'm trying to, to get the younger generation to understand.
You will never, ever in the world as it is arranged and organized
feel more free than when you are
resisting the system and struggling.
Don't wait for some moment of freedom to come.
It's there.
It's there when you resist.
I think we kind of undermined also that factor.
Thinking about the technicalities of struggle
or thinking about tactics or strategies,
we failed to understand
that this is also that needs to be communicated.
that we need to learn,
because the instant victory fixation,
means that our political reason has been captured by capitalism.
Like you go, you buy, you have it.
No, this is political struggle.
You go and you struggle and you fight and you work and you go back
and you struggle and you fight and you work and move all over again.