Social security and refugeeness

When the systemic conflict between the Soviet Bloc and the West began to dissolve around 1989, not only apologists of capitalist democracy nurtured hopes for a more humane period in world history (Kalb et al. 2010). The work of liberal intellectuals from the global South, like the Indian welfare economist Amartya Sen and the Pakistani economist Mahub al Haq began to influence the conceptualisation of human progress. Elaborating on Adam Smith’s notions, the authors of the first Human Development Report of 1990 postulated that the real wealth of a nation lay in people and in an enabling environment “to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives,”

not in the accumulation of commodities and financial wealth (UNDP Report 1990 in Englund 1997, 389). A humanist ethos also underlay the definition of social security “as a component or domain of general social organization” including practices and relations beyond the state

112 On unintended consequences of transnational humanitarianism on government, see Ticktin (2014, 281).

122 provided by the Benda-Beckman’s (Benda-Beckmann & Benda-Beckmann 2000 [1994], 14).

Such expansive understanding of social security met a new world in disarray, epitomized for many observers by the civil war that exploded the SFRY in the 1990s.

Humanist views on social security and military definitions of the prevention of insecurity were now amalgamated into the new concept of “human security” headlining the 1994 UN Human Development Report. Human security meant “safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease, and repression, as well as protection from sudden and harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily life” (Carlsson 1995 in Makaremi 2010, 107). Both concepts – human security and social security – could be used by individuals, organisations and social movements to push the borders of state responsibility. Social security sharpened the concern for human wants and needs beyond the boundaries of the “left hand of the state” (Wacquant 2009, 289).

Conversely, human security provided arguments to press the international state system to secure wants and needs beyond the Weberian notion of sovereignty (Weber 2002, 821–4).

However, there were also warning signs that such concepts could serve hegemonic projects of dominant elites. A case in point was the bombardment of Serbia in 1999, when NATO intervened unilaterally to protect the Kosovars. By declaring war on Milošević’s Serbia, NATO escalated the human security crisis of both the Serb and the Kosovar populations (Sundhaussen 2012, 366–80).¹¹³ Concerning the category of needs that is central to both social and human security, Nancy Fraser has theorized that in such democratic struggles dominant groups

“articulate need interpretations intended to exclude, defuse and/or coopt counterinterpretations.

Subordinate or oppositional groups, on the other hand, articulate need interpretations intended to challenge, displace and/or modify dominant ones. In both cases, the interpretations are acts and interventions” (Fraser 1989, 296). We will follow in this chapter how struggles over need intersected in local state relations.

In Serbia, the politics of needs interpretation and of distribution was profoundly shaped by the events leading to the end of the Croatian and Bosnian War. In July 1995, Ratko Mladić’s Serb paramilitaries murdered 8000 Muslim boys and men in the UN enclave Srebrenica (in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina). In the aftermath of these crimes, the Croatian and Bosnian armies deepened their alliance with the US-American military and decided to end the conflict by expelling the Serbian population. The joint Operation Storm (Oluja) began on 4 August 1995.

113. By 2005 an EU Report on Human Security differentiated “survival rights” like food, health and housing from the “narrower core human rights,” i.e. the absence of “[g]enocide, large-scale torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, disappearances, slavery, crimes against humanity and war crimes” (Makaremi 2010. 112, 123, fn.26).

Transnational law thus reverted to the debates about absolute and relative human rights waged since World War II (Benda-Beckmann 2012).

123 It overran the positions of the Serbian Krajina in Eastern Croatia and ended on 8 August, when the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia (APWB) fell (Sundhaussen 2012, 351–2, 358–

61).¹¹⁴ During the operation, hundreds of civilians were killed and 200,000 people fled (Rangelov 2013, 142–6). International help for these refugees (izbeglice) was coordinated by the UNHCR. The Serbian counterpart to the UNHCR was the Commissariat for Refugees, whose municipal branch distributed the refugees among urban and rural settlements. This is how one trek of refugees was sent to Lower Village, where it arrived in mid-August 1995.

Refugees and the Local Community

As an organ of the Local Self-Government, the SMZ was ordered by the municipality to help the displaced people and to open up a rural refugee camp. The SMZ was quite ill prepared for the task but tried to be helpful. This is how then president of the SMZ Duško Buba Janković remembered the challenge:

There came 55 refugees, without anything, and our task was that they are given something, to eat, to warm themselves, that they have clothing and the like. The Municipality assumed that responsibility. The Committee for Refugees, they gave food, etc. (D, Duško, 8.9.2013).

The number of refugees equalled about 4 per cent of the village population and taxed the possibilities of the SMZ. Some 12 refugees were accommodated in the SMZ house (in the Old Srez building), 17 in the House of Culture, others in school buildings and the former veterinary station. Still others were offered free private housing. Pero Krajišnik, who independently arrived with his wife, two sons, father and mother on a tractor and trailer, was offered a week-end house in the Ɖokovići neighbourhood.

Living in the old Srez building, which had four rooms (including the office of the MZ clerk) were one family of three, one of four, and one of five members. The former MZ clerk, who had shared his coffee daily with his new neighbours, explained: “The first thing in the morning was that they came to me. And even though this is a family, it is cramped, and all are in a nervous state” (D, Pavle, 4.9.2013). In this stressful situation, all hands were needed. The SMZ councillors and their relations organized the aid. One councillor in 1995 was the dairy farmer Boro Jovanović (b. 1956), who was repeatedly elected into the SMZ and the Municipal Parliament: “He is like Tito, always [there],” his wife Olga loved to tease him. When asked about the refugee situation, Boro recounted: “Well, listen, my father was more involved in it ...

114 The Serbian Republic of Krajina existed as a Serb dominated, “ethnically cleansed” mini-state between December 1991 and August 1995. It occupied a quarter of the territory of the formerly socialist Republic of Croatia. Its beginnings dated to August 1990, when local Serb paramilitaries blocked major Croatian roads. By December 1990 the area was declared autonomous. It received support from the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and Serbia (Sundhaussen 2012, 311–5, 335–43, 358–61).

124 Every evening he carried food there, the village collected food, we received [from NGOs] and collected it in the village, and then my father, he had the key [to the depot in the House of Culture], in the evening he left and distributed the food ... and the next day the same” (tI, Boro, 4.9.2013).

Many villagers participated daily in providing for the refugees, whose impoverishment they saw as a human tragedy. In the beginning, the refugees all seemed to be the same to her, my host Rajka Janković recalled. But with time she distinguished the different family histories, character traits, saw that “there were good and bad people among them.” From the start, she was only afraid of the look of one former police man, Stanko. Stanko indeed used to be a police type (policajska faca), her neighbour Simo Lukić agreed. Rajka and Simo remembered how camp beds were everywhere in the House of Culture – on the rostrum, in the hall, even in the cafeteria. People like Miro Supervizor went from house to house and asked for donations. Rajka donated food, kitchen appliances, clothing etc. The cellar contained the food donations from the Red Cross, and Bane Erić distributed them (I, Rajka Janković, and Simo Lukić, 30.8.2013).

As these recollections suggest, there was an overall solidarity towards the refugees, and in the beginning they were rather lumped together. But soon the villagers appropriated the concept

“refugee” and filled it with values particularly resonant in the locality.

Refugeeness and the land-workerist ethos

I argue that the analytical co-evolution of human and social security was translated in post-socialist rural Serbia to perform peculiar work. Humanitarian reason was locally adapted to denote a citizen’s responsibility to provide for the refugees. The latter were seen as deserving people, co-ethnics who were presumably innocent victims of an ethnic cleansing. The predominant picture that the villagers formed was one of civilians fleeing a war, even though there remained doubts about whether refugees had been involved in the violence, as Rajka’s fear of Stanko referenced. There were several registers with which villagers made sense of the situation, but I concentrate on the most common double step of first assigning sameness and then difference. Locals used images of patriarchal, heterosexual common humanity, which they differentiated with a land-workerist ethos.

When people try to overcome difference and to establish sameness as grounds of common interaction in crisis situations like displacements, they often start by constructing a common humanity. In Post-Yugoslav states these commonalities were typically not sought in alternative discourses – be they pacifist, cosmopolitan or feminist. Rather, as Stef Jansen (2010) has demonstrated, Bosnians, Croats and Serbs typically performed strategic essentialisms of an

125 assumed common patriarchal heterosexuality which established a shared “cultural intimacy”

between the actors (see Herzfeld 2005). The position of social actors towards these “affirmative essentialisms” ranged from full embracement, over irony, to recalcitrance and distance.

When Post-Yugoslav men met, they displayed their “performative competence” of “being man enough” to perform the typical motifs of the “frajer”¹¹⁵ or the “father” (Jansen 2010, 41).

According to Stef Jansen these were relational opposites, of “a serious, highly educated, well-earning, married father or an unserious, irresponsible, unattached frajer on the prowl” (Jansen 2010, 44). Of course, most of my senior village interlocutors did not pretend to have high education and rather valued vocational distinction and achievement. With this minor qualification, middle aged men predominantly displayed their bonding through the father motif.

Take the example of the agriculturalist Savo Janković, who in 2009 was 68 years old and had worked in agriculture since he was 11. As he presented himself (while talking about Pero Krajišnik), Savo was a hard and skilled worker, which as a father he needed to be in order to bring up the family and to retain the home. Savo valued Pero highly because of the latter’s work ethos and skills in welding. The loss of Pero’s house and land was tragic in the eyes of Savo, and explained his later misfortunes. Pero only needed to think more about his future, Savo was convinced (D, Savo, 15.1.2010). Like Savo, most long-term inhabitants of Lower Village understood the male role of a ‘father’ in terms of five qualities: 1) working hard, 2) doing skilled work, 3) providing for the family, 4) keeping up the “house” (kuća) and land (zemlja), and 5) planning for the future.¹¹⁶

Unlike the refugees, most families in Lower Village owned some land, and the importance of working it and thus keeping it fertile was emphasized. Their patriarchal land-workerist imagery rooted the village as place to its second nature – as an always already produced cultural landscape. Many times I heard villagers state with conviction that “the land has to be worked!”

(zemlja mora da se radi!), and if they could not work it themselves, they tried to lease it out or lend it for usufruct to local family fathers willing to engage in agriculture. Similarly, empty houses were offered by their absentee owners for free use so that the houses did not decay.

Thus, land-workerism and house-keeping set the grounds for a rural variant of the father motif.

115 Jansen defines frajer as a “widespread colloquial term, used both by men and women, denoting a ‘guy’ who displays a certain degree of cool. While often employed as a neutral word for any man, when used on its own as a predicate (“he’s a frajer”) it usually refers to a form of youngish, irresponsible, ostentatious, yet nonchalant heterosexual masculinity. Importantly, the term is used both in positive and in negative, slightly ironic ways”

(Jansen 2010, 41).

116 Given the economic hardships at the time of my research, many locals had a diminished horizon of plannability: future planning was seen as a particularly hard feat and failing it was not evaluated as unusual.

126 The difference between “refugee fathers” without land and house, and “rural fathers” who owned both made it possible to simultaneously include and exclude refugees in relation to the moral economy of patriarchal subsistence production. Accordingly, men who did not own, work, and inhabit property could suggest themselves to be refugee fathers who the villagers should include into their (asymmetrical) social security relations. To see how the villagers navigated this inclusion-exclusion over time, I start with the wider social policy changes since 1995. In fact, the early experience of locals chipping in for the state in caring for the refugees repeated itself as the trans-national humanitarian industry moved on. Remembering the history of humanitarianism allowed villagers not only to make claims on resources and to a future generating social relations and support (McKay 2012, 288), but also to actively shape the present configurations of local state welfare.