The Bosnian War and Negative Peace

By Kimberly Mazzocco Hart

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

The end of August brought several high-profile deaths. Two of them I have mourned along with what feels like the entire world. Dolly Parton, in particular, drew loving words from around the globe. And in more particular circles, the writer, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry has been celebrated as a man of great love and wisdom. Their legacies of good will be long remembered.

 

Neither of them wanted to be “political” figures. Dolly, in particular, spent decades masterfully deflecting attempts to assign her a political label. In a 2020 interview for USA Today’s Women of the Century series, she said, “I am not political, and I refuse to get caught up in political things.” In that same interview, she chastised the political leadership of the day, saying, “They need to think more about the people instead of about the party.”

 

Wendell Berry was less circumspect. He wrote on political issues. He held strong convictions and wrote freely of his opinions. Yet he, too, rejected the labeling of politics. In 2013, Berry was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an award given in recognition of Richard C. Holbrooke’s admonition not to forget the power of words in achieving peace. Berry implicitly rejected the vaunted label “peacemaker” to say that he won an award “for having said a few words in favor of peace.” It was the same rejection of the reductionism of labels that prompted him to lament in an essay that same year that “How you vote is who you are.”

 

Yet, in the days after the death of Dolly Parton and of Wendell Berry days later, online space was crowded with those seeking to lay claim to one or the other. Not merely social media, but news, op-eds, and essays built arguments asserting why Dolly or Berry belonged to a particular political “side,” even as they praised their careful neutrality. I can only assume both of them would be appalled.

 

It might be tempting to view this modern online land-grab of our cultural icons as harmless acclamation. But history warns us that the road to dehumanization begins with the quiet subsuming of the individual into an ideological category. The danger of such claiming—labeling—is real.

 

Another man died in those final days of August. Ratko Mladić was a Bosnian Serbian general in the 1990s wars in the Balkans. After nearly two decades of hiding, sometimes in plain sight, he was at last tried and finally convicted of war crimes in 2017 in The Hague, and he spent his final years in U.N. detention for those crimes. He became known in the media as the Butcher of Bosnia, and it was a well-earned accolade. Born in what is now known as Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was the leader of the Serbian army in Bosnia when Croatia broke away from the former Yugoslavia in 1991. As the war escalated in Croatia, Mladić emphasized his Serbian identity and the intent of the Serbian army to protect ethnic Serbs throughout the region. When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence in 1992, the Republika Srpska region declared its own independence and laid siege to Sarajevo—with Mladić at the head of the Serbian military.

 

War is ugly. People die. It’s violent and messy and cruel and sometimes things happen that should not. But Ratko Mladić didn’t just kill as deemed necessary in the course of a war. He ordered the systematic slaughter of more than 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica—a U.N. “safe zone” for refugees of the ongoing conflict. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia determined this slaughter to be a genocide.

 

He was also the man responsible for the four-year siege of Sarajevo. Siege feels an inadequate descriptor for the terror, destruction, and carnage of that city and its civilians. As many as 1,500 children alone died there in those four years, out of several thousand civilians. Civilians shouldn’t be targets, yet Mladić never renounced his decisions and orders that caused those deaths.

 

Bosnia and Herzegovina was—and is—at peace. But even now, it’s not the peace of reconciliation and restoration. It’s a negative peace, a state of nonviolence. The tension, fear, and anger remain. With a significant city such as Mostar lacking even mayoral elections for over 10 years, the polarization evident in lead-up to next month’s general elections is drawing warnings from across the U.N. and EU.

 

I visited Sarajevo in 2005, 10 years after the Bosnian War ended. I went for work, meeting with the local office of an international NGO, visiting humanitarian development projects, listening to stories, taking notes. The primary concern then was discrimination and economic disadvantages within Roma communities, with a somewhat forced belief in the “peace” imposed by the Dayton Accords obscuring ongoing ethnic tension and conflict among Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. My daughter, then a young toddler, traveled with me on that Balkans trip, with Bosnia as our final stop. She went out to dinner with us one night—our U.S. staff and Bosnian staff together—in a restaurant in downtown Sarajevo.

 

We’d spent time in Kosovo and in Albania, gathering stories of economic struggle, cultural reclamation, fear, and hope. But in no place were those paradoxical stories more obvious than in Bosnia. Three peoples, three government entities, one country. Peace was a word, a state of nonviolence—but it was not the peace of shalom, the peace of reconciliation. Yet in that restaurant were the seeds of that peace. While I ate with colleagues, the manager (or was he the owner?) came and helpfully whisked my daughter away to another corner—to the “writers’ group,” our waitstaff told me. The writers were never known to me—just faces and deep voices and a haze of smoke above a table of glasses—but I was told that the restaurant was a place of gathering for those who sought more than the negative peace of the end of war, who didn’t fear the hard work of honest and painful reconciliation.

 

We are linked to our homes, to our language and religion, our food, our accent, our clothing and history, but for the people of the former Yugoslavia those roots were tangled, blended and knotted—and then torn apart. The Balkans have been subjugated to the cultures—the religions, the food, the names even—of many other cultures for centuries untold. Always another empire, another great power playing tug-of-war with the land and the people, until the fabric of their shared identity began to shred. What made you Croatian and not Serbian when the language, the food, and the place seemed the same, yet not quite?

 

I can’t answer if war was inevitable in the former Yugoslavia. I would hope, with the magic of hindsight, that it didn’t have to be, that if wise voices had prevailed, that acknowledged and uplifted the identities of all Balkan peoples, maybe they could have recognized the dignity and worth of one another and found a different solution. All we know now is that they did not. And out of that disintegration and fear and anger and desperate resolve to reclaim themselves arose men like Ratko Mladić, who used the scraps of identity not to weave a new and stronger regional identity, but to patch and fill the remembered glory of Serbia—and only Serbia. But it was not only Serbia that fell prey to such men. Mladić was Serbian but not all who were accused of war crimes were Serbs. While we rightfully condemn Srebrenica, do we forget the victims of Operation Storm, which was waged by the Croatian military against ethnic Serbs?

 

When Yugoslavia found itself free of the authoritarian fist of the revolutionary Josip Broz Tito in 1980, its people began a decade of pulling apart the tangled roots of their various identities. Were they Slovenes or Croats, Slavic or Albanian, Muslim, Orthodox, or Catholic? How did one determine who was who? Leaders arose that exploited that search for identity, and the rise of nationalism led to war. One was not just Serbian—one was also not Croatian or Bosniak. To be one, you must necessarily not be the other.

 

And then the other became more than just not you. The other became the one preventing you from being you. They were the ones subjugating you, preventing you from … something. Labels became hatred. And not you, the Other, became less than. Those others didn’t necessarily deserve to be treated with dignity. They were bad, they were your enemy, they didn’t deserve the same as you. People were encouraged to label. And then encouraged to hate.

 

But hate gradually becomes more than individual action. Hate allows us to accept that some deserve violence—even state violence. Maybe I would never hurt the Other, but if the State determines the Other is some sort of threat to me, then of course the State can act against them. The State can enact the violence that I cannot.

 

In Srebrenica, Mladić ordered the deaths of every man and boy. They were rounded up, removed from buses taking families to safety, herded into the woods, and murdered. Nura Muminović died in 2005 without ever having the chance to bury her sons, Suljo, 16, and Saudin, 13. I have sons who are 16 and 13. The younger one sometimes startles me with a deep man’s voice, but then I turn around and, though he’s taller than me now, I see the long skinny arms and legs and face of a little boy. The long thin legs that hang off the end of the sofa are attached to the boy reading a fantasy book, the same boy who giggles when his sister teases him. A boy should never have to be part of a war.

 

But Suljo, who was found fleeing in the woods with his father, and Saudin, pulled from the bus that was meant to bring him to safety with his mother, were the Other to Mladić, a problem to be eliminated for the sake of the State he served. He had the right to eliminate that problem because the State was supported by people who didn’t call Nura or Suljo or Saudin by name. They were reduced to the label of Bosniak—enemy of the Serb.

 

Since Mladić’s death, he’s been hailed as a hero by some. In the shadow of a war over labels,, he’s given many—to some, he’s the Butcher of Bosnia; to others, Gen. Mladić, defender of Serbia. Do the ones who acclaim him the latter recognize him in the former? Do they hear that in calling him their hero, they diminish the pain of those who lived through his terrorizing of Srebrenica, Sarajevo, and others? Do they know they deny the grief of Sarajevo—Bosniak Muslim, Croat, and Serb alike? Do they mean to condone the rape of girls and old women, the murder of children? I think most do not.

 

And that’s the danger of reducing one another to labels. Whether butcher or defender, Ratko Mladić was not, in the end, a label. He should be mourned by those who knew him and loved him—as a man worthy of the dignity belonging to us all. And it is part of the grief of the Serbian people that they have worn the label of aggressor and of evil, but they, too, have been grieving their dead for 30 years. They, too, have been mourning the loss of culture and of unity over centuries of occupation and oppression.

 

Who won the wars of the 1990s? Who wins today if we persist in making categories, assigning labels, and claiming the “good guys” for “our side”? We are a very long way from Srebrenica here in the United States in 2026, but my heart gets a little heavier, my fear a little louder, with every post I read assigning Dolly Parton to a political party with glee or asserting Wendell Berry would never be one of them. I have loved Dolly Parton since I was a child and wanted to grow up to be as sassy as she was. I have devoured Wendell Berry’s words on rootedness, the land, peace, and the importance of the particular. I have never been the slightest bit concerned with their political party. If Dolly were found to be a liberal Democrat, does that mean she couldn’t be a country star? If Wendell were claimed by conservatives, would he no longer stand for care of the environment and the absence of violence?

 

It may seem insignificant, this assigning of parties to celebrities who cannot confirm or deny them, but in this I see a disintegration of cultural unity, the sort that emboldens those who divide by race or religion or ethnicity. We divide ourselves into our respective “teams,” and then, like children choosing players in gym class, we call on the best and most beloved public figures to play for us. From the safety of our team, we have the platform to justify racism or antisemitism or Islamaphobia. We see that in the growing fight over Israel and Palestine, with labels of antisemite, Islamophobe, or Zionist hurled across a divide very few seem to be trying to bridge.

 

If we label someone, we reduce them to that label. And once they are merely a label, they can be assigned all the characteristics we’ve added to that label. All X are Y. You are your label. And labels can be hated. Labels can be evil. And labels can be crushed by a state that is defending itself or its people.

 

In Life is a Miracle, written in 2000, Wendell Berry teaches us that: “Affection requires us to break out of the abstractions, the categories. …To defend what we love, we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.” We can’t know a label. For a label is merely an abstraction.

 

Dolly put it another way. In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she said she looked for the “God-light” in everyone. And me? I’m simply who I am—not a label, not a category. And I should be loved for that particularity.

 

Let Mladić’s family mourn the particular man he was. Let Serbians mourn a war that cost them, mourn a label of violence that reduces them to a nation of Mladićs. Let the mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives of Srebrenica mourn their dead. And let Serbians, Bosniaks, and Croats find a way to peel off their labels and find in one another a positive peace.