Explosive Remnants of War 

Richard Lee Peragine

In September 2021, EUFOR published updated mine-contamination maps that show the location across Bosnian national territory of explosive remnants of war (ERWs), such as minefields, cluster munitions and other unexploded ordinances. This cartography documents the proximity of unexploded military weapons to former and current migrant encampments and routes; in the Una-Sana Canton, for instance: the quasi-abandoned hamlet of Bosanska Bojna, the landfill beneath Vučjak camp, the outskirts of Bihać, mount Plješevica, as well as slopes, areas along and around beaten migration trails. Despite joint efforts by BHMAC (Bosnia’s Mine-Action Centre) and international landmine-monitoring centres, the Gorska Služba Spašavanja (GSS), aid organisations such as the Red Cross, and autonomous solidarity networks, to inform migrant and refugee people of the presence of ERWs, in March 2021 one Pakistani man died and four more people were injured in an explosion, while walking in the forests around Saborsko, Croatia, 50 kilometres north of Bihać. The victim had set off a landmine.

In the uncanny reemergence of a war-time form of toxic weaponization of space, this death brings to the fore how explosive remnants of war was a means to prevent the return of displaced communities to their homes, and thus an essential tactic in the campaigns of ethnic violence from 1992 to 1995, that is: “a systematic policy of ’cleansing the ground‘ (čišćenje terena), often translated as ethnic cleansing (etničko čišćenje), designed to clear the landscape of all those labelled as the Other” (Berman 2003: 273). The violent and long-term clearing of the Other is a constitutive aim of the weaponization of the environment in its many forms: denying the very conditions and means of life, literally subtracting space and rendering terrain inaccessible for many years after the end of war-time violence. ERWs constitute a long-term condition, an active form of emptiness which “offers a powerful lens for localizing the effect of late modern warfare, and for attending ethnographically to what living around such deadly environments entails” (Henig 2020).

The death of one migrant in Saborsko is in fact a reminder of the enduring militarisation of this territory that local communities have had to endure since the 1990s and has caused in Bosnia alone 1781 casualties, either deaths (624 people) or severe injuries or maiming, since the end of the conflict. War-time soil-contamination in the country is concentrated along the 1100-km-long and 4-km-wide Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL) that separates the Federation of BiH, the Republika Srpska and the Brčko District from one another. Areas around the IEBL therefore have priority when it comes to demining operations. But non-IEBL swathes of land are, at times, just as contaminated. The presence of multiple confrontation lines, as well as the rapid and continuous changes to them that occurred in the fighting, have made soils in the Una-Sana Canton (USK) some of the worse affected by ERW-pollution today. In April 2022, BHMAC officials had it that mine-suspected areas in USK amounted to 93 km2, that is, 3% of cantonal territory: the third largest extent in the FBiH by canton, and almost half of the total quantity contaminating the RS.

Since 1995, men from deprived rural areas—the milieu of the poor—have been the main victims, since they rely on surrounding land to fulfil basic needs, such as collecting firewood and carrying out agricultural work. Most incidents take place in spring and autumn when the land is tilled and households stock up on firewood. Indirect victims such as other family members are then forced into the same patterns of radical indeterminacy (Henig 2016; 2019), having to provide for the same necessities either in the same way or via other, often insufficient, means. The mere presence of landmines hinders social and economic development, endangers housing and livestock, land use and infrastructure, such as roads, power lines, and irrigation systems. It is one of several obstacles to Bosnia’s structural economic issues since the war and, due to lack of funds and political conditions, corresponds to a form of systematic inaction that leaves shares of the population—including understaffed and underequipped BHMAC workers—to confront an everyday form of indeterminacy.

Extreme geo-climatic events, such as floods and landslides, add to this indeterminate condition, by displacing mapped ERWs and upsetting years of mine action, as was the case during the 2014 South-European floods. This structural and lethal unpredictability is moreover likely to surface more frequently in light of the increased incidence of extreme events in the Anthropocene.

This toxic indeterminacy today gravely imperils migrant people as well. On Plješevica, as well as on other routes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia or Kosovo, the threat of ERWs further obstacles border crossings on foot, off beaten tracks and so out-of-sight, thereby restricting movements to better-known routes and smuggling lines. Bypassing main infrastructure and moving through forests to remain undetected, people walking stretches of the Balkan Route have fewer chances of noticing the red signs warning about the dangers of ERW contamination, which are most often put up where the edges of woods or fields come up against the fringes of towns and the side of roads. The decision to rest overnight in a forest, in such a case, potentially leads to inadvertently entering a contaminated zone.

ERWs from previous bargaining over territory and targeted at the Enemy have been funnelling migrant Others into prescript movement patterns, making undetected, if not unscathed, movements even less likely. All the more so when coupled with karstic and hostile geophysical terrain, ERWs have thus acted as a deterrent to illegal(ised) crossings: an indirect bordering practice that has funnelled migration routes into more restricted movement patterns, allowing pushback violence to operate in specific areas, instead of along the entirety of the over 900-km-long land border between Bosnia and Croatia. ERWs are part of the broader more-than-human biopolitical project of weaponization of emptiness.  This legacy of war is one of many factors to create an indeterminate and toxic environment that enables extractive logics to persist, affecting both the livelihoods and environments in which citizen and migrant lives unfold.

24/9/2024

Literature

Berman, David M. 2003. “Calling The Wandering Souls. A Journey through the Heartland of Ethnic Cleansing”. War, Literature and the Arts 15/1-2: 267-282.

Henig, David. 2020. “Emptiness and Deadly Environments”. Fieldsights.

Henig, David. 2019. “Living on the Frontline. Indeterminacy, Value, and Military Waste in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina”. Anthropological Quarterly 92/1: 85-110.

Henig, David. 2016. “Fragments of Village Life and the Rough Ground of the Political in Post-War BiH”. In Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Stef Jansen, Čarna Brković and Vanja Čelebičićeds. London: Routledge, 46-59.