Ecology policies can heal Eastern European rifts

By Frank Kuin

Peter Stoett is exploring how environmental collaboration between states can help heal the wounds of war.

Stoett, a professor in Concordia’s Political Science Department, has been traveling to the former Yugoslavia during a sabbatical to examine ways in which new ecological policies foster co-operation there.

During his stay at the University of Bihac, in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was at once struck by the physical and psychological scars of war and impressed with early efforts to draft environmental regulations.

“There’s a lot of depression and post-conflict trauma that does not go away in six months or two years,” he observed, adding that the University at Bihac bore the physical evidence of the conflict, with “bullet holes all over the place.”

But at the same time, he was impressed with the abilities of former enemies in the civil war of the 1990s to “sit down together and work things out.”

An example of such budding cooperation involves the issue of river management, where it is internationally recognized that upstream states have an obligation not to excessively pollute rivers for downstream nations. The Sava River runs through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. “They have developed an international management commission for Sava conservation,” Stoett said. “It involves Muslims, Croats and Serbs.

“And they had to sit down together and work out how to manage the river so that by the time the water gets down to one region, another rendered it unusable.”

Stoett is planning a case study of this issue, comparing it with river management projects in other regions in the world, to determine “whether or not this can help overcome ethnic conflict in those regions.”

As a political scientist, he is interested in the relation between war and the environment — not only the ecological impact of war, but also the question of how shared responsibilities in environmental matters can bring potential adversaries together.

“What sort of arrangements and institutions can be constructed so that we can avoid environmental damage as a result of military conflict, or avoid military conflict though the pursuit of environmental co-operation?”

Still, ecological policies are far from the top of the agenda in the former Yugoslavia, Stoett said.

“For people in the street, the environment is way down the list,” he observed. “It’s difficult to get environmental policy to register when people have to deal with daily struggles.”

Institutional players, however, are motivated to draft environmental regulations by the desire to eventually join the European Union. For that to happen, ecological policies will have to be in line with those of other European countries.

That’s a challenge in itself, Stoett said, because “the socialist era of Eastern Europe was an ecological disaster” in terms of toxic and nuclear waste.

Ironically, the war has a mixed record in the region, he said, because it shut down polluting factories.

Now, Stoett sees economic potential in ecotourism. Some of the former Yugoslavia’s natural beauty, such as Bosnia’s Una River and Croatia’s Adriatic coast, is absolutely breathtaking, he observed.

For that to happen, however, it is important to foster ‘environmental security,’ he said. “Individual health and human security are contingent upon ecosystemic health. You need fundamentals. You need clean air, clean water, and a toxic-free environment.

“In the longer term, it’s going to be absolutely essential that there is sustainable development from which they can draw.”