The Internationalist Archive
The sports fishermen’s association was the first to lodge legal complaints against Igman over a decade ago, but both the municipal and federal governments looked away. State-sanctioned environmental violence in the region around Konjic is vast. Industrial and commercial toxic waste is dumped into the river; municipal waste is hauled to illegally built dumps and pits that leak toxic spillage into the watershed and people’s gardens; legal and illegal quarries turn hills into sideline craters; semi-legal construction of small hydropower plants destroys riverbeds and annihilates fish. Further downstream, government-designated waste dumps have come under scrutiny for failing to contain hazardous waste and for being built semi-legally, in unapproved sites. Toxic waste is deposited in open dumps that spill, leak, and emit noxious, terrifying smells. The residents are the ones feel the fallout.
The collusion and entwinement between factories that dump toxic waste and government institutions that tacitly authorize it could be called corruption— a disturbance of order—but it is only partly that. We see corruption when state officials and factory management support and protect each other, prioritizing private, individual, short-term profit over public interest. States help comprise “the structure of toxicity” that to many Bosnians feels like an enclosure. States produce and tolerate toxic waste, and sometimes even profit from it.
Yet, the government’s refusal to regulate toxic waste disposal is not simply a failure or corruption, but is facilitated by neoliberal design. Toxicity is embedded in state structure of environmental regulations. The state does not keep check on illegal dumping because neoliberal policies prescribe trust in the companies’ willingness and ability to mitigate environmental harms. Neoliberal environmental policies rely on self-regulation and self-monitoring, not government oversight or meaningful penalties. Bosnia is one of the places where we see the accentuated effects of deregulation that tolerates the poisoning of the river, soil, air, and human and nonhuman bodies.
First, governments are generally accepting of certain levels of toxicity, as the goal of environmental laws and policies is not to eliminate toxicants, but to set allowable limits. Thus, Bosnia prescribes legal restrictions on industrial waste in accordance with EU regulations that rely on the notion of threshold limits. Threshold limit regulations assume that “ecosystems and bodies can assimilate a specific amount of toxicant before harm occurs”, but fail to consider our layered, overlapping exposures to thousands of toxicants. As Amelia Fiske writes, “current models of toxicity are insufficient for conceptualizing and acting upon the role of toxicants in our lives”.
Second, monitoring adherence to these limits is outside the purview of the neoliberal government. As Zeleni-commissioned reports show, the amounts of allowable mercury, lead, trivalent and hexavalent chromium, and other toxicants are vastly exceeded in Konjic. Everyone, including government agents in charge, knows this. At the government agency Jadran (The Adriatic) in Mostar, I am told that the agency’s job is to issue water permits to companies whose waste flows into Neretva, not to monitor compliance with these permits. The friendly chemical engineer repeats what I have heard from residents: Igman now has bought a new, two-million-euro filtration system, but nobody knows whether it puts it to use. The disposable filters cost money whereas dumping is free, so everyone suspects that Igman and other factories do not use their filtration systems. This official is as clever at identifying loopholes as those who exploit them, but stresses that he cannot act on this knowledge: “Even if someone were to call the inspection team, they have to announce their arrival, and on those days, of course, the factories would use the proper filtration system.”
He also tells me that Konjic is an exemplary environmental steward, compared to the rest of the country. Here and elsewhere, officials legitimize toxic overflows by emphasizing how harms are relative to each other. Bosnia has much bigger problems, he stresses, as toxic dumping in Konjic pales in comparison to the coal mines and steel factories in central and northern Bosnia, or to toxicity that makes Sarajevo’s air pollution the worst in the world. Bosnia as a whole ranks as having the fifth- to second-highest mortality rate from air pollution worldwide. When having most polluted air is not the legal but the experiential threshold limit, the dumping of hazardous waste into a river can be normalized and made unremarkable. And yet the river also mobilizes people’s felt experience of political urgency and they reclaim it as their inheritance.
People of the River
A decade after the war, Tito’s underground bunker in Konjic was turned into an art gallery. A symbol of demilitarization, the bunker today serves as one of the town’s main tourist attractions. On the tour I joined, the guides rushed us through, uninterested in the extraordinary art on display featuring socialist modernism. The military officer who was the main guide brought us to the central electric generator and showed us how it operated. Demonstrating the workings of the lever that turned it on, he said, “The real work of art here is the shelter itself.” The message was clear: we were to be in awe of the military structure itself, not the art installations on its walls. In Konjic itself, the military apparatus no longer inspires pride and awe, but militarization’s capillary hegemony is now supplanted by precarity and enclosure.
The river breaks through the enclosure. Its movement, force, and beauty invite the town residents to recognize it as a part of their inheritance, mustering defiance and cultivating survivance. Konjic and Bosnia are home to a powerful anti-capitalist riverine social movements, as people and activist groups have coalesced around their opposition to small hydropower plants. Zeleni Neretva has helped galvanize this movement, animating publics and generating political support. One reason this movement has been more successful than the struggle against toxic dumping is that small hydropower plants only benefit a very small number of investors and bought-off government officials. Activists have successfully shown that small hydropower plants bring benefits to their builders and government officials they pay off, but fail to benefit surrounding communities while carrying enormous environmental costs. That they alter the rivers’ physical shape and get in the way of migrating fish is seen as particularly violent and destructive.
In July 2022, the government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted the legislation prohibiting the building of small hydropower plants; activist groups are now advocating for halting the work of already built ones. The successes of this movement have clarified the political stakes of people’s entanglements with the river, emboldening and electrifying their critique of toxic dumping. Residents of Konjic have also begun reclaiming the river. They have come to think of rivers as a form of inheritance that needs to be defended from the predatory capitalism/state formation. “Rivers belong to no one; rivers belong to us all,” they proclaim as they protest.
Reclaiming the river and acting as people of the river includes new and old practices, all of which are resignified as acts of defiance and survivance. They are endowed with a politics of opposition, care, and an orientation toward the river as a form of neighborly inheritance. To reclaim being people of the river means:
To seek it out on your daily walk and comment on its beauty, demise, or both each time you pass by: “Vidi nam Neretve!” (Look at our Neretva)
To clean its banks, gathering plastic and debris, even as you know that more will spill from the landfill
To dive into its depths, as divers’ clubs do every year, pulling out appliances and large waste
To keep it alive by bringing the fish back to it
To start a youth school of sport fishing
To say the names of the rocks on its banks and in its stream
To travel upstream to plunge yourself into it, rejoicing when you feel the cold deep inside your bones
To go further upstream where the river is potable because you want to drink its water and feel it inside your body
To photograph its canyons, waters, beaches, rocks, and plants
To paint it
To sing songs about it
To sing by it
To tell new stories about it.
Excerpted with permission of the author, Dr Saida Hodžić. First published in the Catalyst Journal.
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