
It has been over a month since one of the worst natural catastrophes to ever hit Bosnia and Herzegovina. On 4 October 2024, massive floods enveloped five major towns in Herzegovina: Fojnica, Jablanica, Kiseljak, Konjic, and Kreševo. The floods have claimed the lives of 29 people so far, with others still being looked for under the rubble.
Emin Eminagić is a project manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Tuzla Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
According to the Agency for Water of the Adriatic Region, this was the largest downfall ever recorded in this particular area, at over 392 litres per square meter. This heavy downfall, in conjunction with illegal deforestation and construction waste dumping and illegal quarry mining, only added to the erosion of the terrain in the region and caused floods similar to those of 2014.
The town of Jablanica, which lies halfway between Sarajevo and Mostar, received the worst of the floods. A formally defunct stone quarry that, according to the Ministry of Economy of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton, has been operating illegally and without a concession, had been deforesting the valley leading to Jablanica and dumping waste there. This created a dam that accumulated water over months, causing a landslide due to the heavy rainfall during 2–3 October and burying the town under it.
The Jablanica quarry, now aptly named Smrtnik (which roughly translates into “deathbringer”), has been operating under a concession licence that, according to the Ministry of Economy of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton, does not exist. The company operating the quarry Sani doo has been requesting a concession licence since 2009, but the Ministry claims the concession has been repeatedly denied.
The decision to deny the concession application is based on the findings of the cantonal Inspectorate for Safety, deeming the quarry site a hazard for the surrounding area. According to the Government of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton, the last inspection of the site was conducted in August 2021 and concluded: “No workers or machinery were visible on site. The quarry is overgrown with low and mid-sized plants and shows no signs of any activity.”
After all of this, the question is who or what is to blame, and what are some of the steps we can take to prevent this in the future?
However, as reported by istraga.ba, satellite images taken between 2018 and today show that extraction at the site has been going on for years. This is also backed by testimonies of the townspeople, whose concerns were ignored.
The owner of the company Sani doo, Dženan Honđo, is known to have ties to infamous criminals in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to testimonies of townspeople, investigative journalists were taken to the quarry to speak with management, but the townspeople left them at the gate, saying they were too scared to go in due to threats by the owners.
This raises the question of whether it was wilful ignorance by the authorities that allowed the illegal extraction to happen. It may appear as a tragic mistake, but if we look closer into the ties of the criminal underworld in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where private interest and the hunt for profits and accumulation of wealth take priority over the interests and safety of citizens, we can see that this is not the case. That is probably best reflected in the 2014 amendment to the Law of Forests and Greenery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which lowered the deforestation period from the initial 25 years (a relic from Yugoslavia), to five.
Response and Rescue
The floods were not the first natural catastrophe witnessed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2014, floods hit Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia on an even larger scale than this year. On both occasions, we witnessed tremendous solidarity and volunteer efforts from all cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its neighbouring countries, as well as the local governments’ complete and utter negligence in issuing warnings to the people in the affected cities in the election year.
Nermin Nikšić, the former and current Prime Minister of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, promised after the 2014 floods that such a catastrophe would be prevented and that the country would be better prepared next time.[1] Yet, the warning for the October 2024 floods was issued only on the infamous website of the Hydro-Metrological Society of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
After the damage was already done and people had lost lives and their homes, it took the Federal Government 12 hours to coordinate with the Service for Public Safety and the Presidency to mobilize the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina to help on 4 October. By then, many people from other cities were already en route to help before the government decided to act.
6 October 2024, was a local election day in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rather than postpone the election in the entire country by a week, the Central Election Committee cynically deemed that it would cost 20 million convertible marks (approximately 10 million euro) to do so. The election results remained approximately the same as four years ago, but it was impossible to organize elections in Fojnica, Konjic, Jablanica, Kiseljak, and Kreševo. They took place on 20 October instead
The official position now is that Bosnia and Herzegovina’s economy will suffer, and various experts in neoliberal policy are already crying that loans are needed to save enterprises.
Since 2014, the Natural Disaster Fund of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has accumulated 556 million convertible marks. The way it works is that approximately 1.50 euro is paid for through monthly taxes on salaries and other income derived from citizens. If the funds are not spent in the ongoing year, they are reallocated to other government projects.
As the decision process is obviously flawed, these funds are now in some sort of limbo. Meanwhile, various humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross, Red Crescent, and pomozi.ba have done a tremendous job in raising money and aid for the affected towns. The campaign of pomozi.ba raised approximately 80,000 euro in a matter of hours and made sure that aid reached those in need.
This raises the question of where the governmental funds for natural disasters are going. The ruling elite will likely claim the funds were used for developmental projects and stimulus packages for the modernization of current enterprises. For example, Sani doo, the company responsible for the 2021 landslide in Jablanica after the aforementioned safety inspection, received 14,000 marks (approx. 7,000 euro) from the Ministry of Economy of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton to modernize their machinery, while the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina were left to subsidize the aid the government was supposed to provide.
The material damages in Jablanica alone are estimated to be around 50 million euro, whereas the federal government will allocate around 500,000 convertible marks to the Red Cross for aid efforts. Meanwhile, the government has made no effort to remedy the situation for the locals of Jablanica.
The floods also had an effect on public infrastructure. Many homes in Jablanica are currently without heating, and the elementary school in Jablanica, “Suljo Čilić”, which has around 500 students, does not have heating for the upcoming winter. Federal Minister for Education Jasna Duraković visited the schoolon 22 October and stated that this must be remedied as soon as possible and that funds from other government projects will be redirected towards this particular case, pending a budget rebalancing.
The floods also impacted the country’s infrastructure, such as the railway from Sarajevo to the Ploče harbor, cutting off a vital supply line of goods for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The official position now is that Bosnia and Herzegovina’s economy will suffer, and various experts in neoliberal policy are already crying that loans are needed to save enterprises, which is indicative of current official policies, which place enterprises and profits before the needs of citizens.
Despite this disastrous event that claimed the lives of 29 people and left many more displaced, dispossessed, and desperate, we have seen that the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina have not lost their sense of solidarity.
After all of this, the question is who or what is to blame, and what are some of the steps we can take to prevent this in the future?
Jablanica is not the only example of such predatory extractivism in the region. Similar cases can be found in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as the deforestation in my hometown Tešanj, a community that prides itself in being a leader in sustainable and eco-friendly development, with large reserves of natural drinking water. Several private construction companies, hired to work on the construction of a section of the Corridor 5C highway, were allowed to cut down 20 hectares of pristine forest and turn it into a landfill for construction waste. Other examples include the shameless police violence against the women of Kruščica in 2019, who were protesting against the construction of a mini-hydro plant that would devastate a nearby national park, the construction of a mini-hydro plant on the spring of the Una River on the Croatian-Bosnian border this year, or the looming lithium exploitation in the municipality of Lopare.
Those are just a few examples of the ongoing ecological devastation in Bosnia and Herzegovina ever since the war ended in 1995. Most of these examples can be deemed legal, as someone from the local government signed off on them. However, when it comes to deforestation, the situation is murkier, with entire tracts of forest disappearing to private companies like Borja in Teslić, which has been deforesting the territory for over five years and is still under investigation. To contextualize: the territory of the Municipality of Teslić, a city in the central part of northern Bosnia, spans over 870 square kilometres, a third of which are forests. This particular example of extraction has been going on for five years and no efforts by the authorities have been made to stop it.
I will not pretend to have a smart answer, but would rather leave things on a hopeful note. Despite this disastrous event that claimed the lives of 29 people and left many more displaced, dispossessed, and desperate, we have seen that the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina have not lost their sense of solidarity, and indeed were the first to rush to help while the government and their cronies were twiddling their fingers and hoping for good election results. It will be up to us to fight back against the destruction of life for the sake of profit — because if we do not, nature will fight back against all of us.
[1] Nermin Nikšić is a politician from the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of which he served as president between his mandates as Prime minister between 2011–2015, as well as now. Incidentally, Nikšić hails from the city of Konjic, which was also flooded.