Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can spend as much as 10 billion dollars in a single year.[i] In certain situation they have more money available than the United Nations. In many instances certain governments feel more dollars will reach the intended purposes by dealing with the international NGO rather than the local federal government. In the case of Serbia proper (Serbia minus Kosovo) this has certainly been the case in the past. In order to work this way certain sacrifices have to be made. There has been an international presence in Belgrade, which while small to start with has been deteriorating steadily. Project selection for the most part has occurred from a distance. Random visit has been the only feasible contact. The NGO workers in Serbia are mostly local workers with little or no exposure to international organizations. There was a rather alarming episode of a local NGO in Belgrade only producing material in the English language. The situation in the Bosnian and Croatian Federation was markedly different. There was a large international presence and projects for the most part where initiated and managed by international staff. In the Serbian controlled parts of Bosnia there was a similar experience as that in Serbia proper, however this area will not be a focus of this research as it is so similar and represents an almost completely rural area. The only exception is Banja Luka in the northern part of Bosnia. The NGO community there has always had close ties with Belgrade and for our purposes will be considered an extension. Where information is given about the history of these NGO communities in Serbia and Bosnia it must be understood that there was no corollary to the current third sector before the break up of Tito’s Yugoslavia. In communist system the only non-governmental organization where the mountaineering groups and other similar loose associations and the idea of citizen action with out the direct support of the government was completely foreign. The entire history of the NGO community in the former Yugoslavia spans less than ten years. The international NGO arrived in an emergency situation and needed to train a new labor force. They found very capable workers and due to the time and money constraints their introduction to the basic idea of the NGO as experienced in the west was limited. International NGO workers were given sweeping tasks to complete and relative freedom in their general approach. In an emergency response coordination of vehicle use is a higher priority than coordination of ideas. This is not a condemnation of international NGOs, but a simple reality. Safety of international workers is of primary concern of the NGO as is appropriate in the current environment. An emergency project is by nature a constantly evolving process. A good example of this is was the implementation, by the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) emergency shelter project. UMCOR began repairing several collective centers. These for the most part were located in schools and other government structures providing supposedly temporary shelter for displaced persons. Field workers identified the lack of service for the youth living within these centers. While services to the this population were limited, for the workers on the ground the presence of idle and stressed youth was certainly more disturbing. Services available in the urban field were generally not available to the displaced person, as they were seen by most of the native residence as the largest problem within the city. Discrimination was in most cases strong enough to discourage the displaced population’s hope of integration in the short-term. The UMCOR workers identified spaces within the collective centers that could be economically recreated as childcare centers. Material excess from the general repair budget was used to create these areas. These spaces where naturally tied to the newly open Youth House Zenica, which we will discuss later. This example shows the common sense remedies inspired by the local work force in Bosnia. In July of 1995 the UN safe haven Zepa fell to the Bosnian Serbs. Five to ten thousand displaced persons were expected to arrive in Zenica, which was already overflowing. UMCOR was asked to construct sanitation facilities for the tent city being created on the very edge of the urban field. In this case it was the local government that came up with an innovative solutions to their own political problems. By placing the new arrivals on the fringe of the urban field residence within the urban core would not be as affected by the large influx. From these temporary tent cities the new arrivals would be later integrated in to the existing collective centers. Lessons where learned from a similar arrival of displaced persons from Serbrenica a week early. These arrivals were placed again in yet more government buildings within the urban core, which was a direct immediate hardship upon the community. A lack of space within the urban core lead directly to the creation of the tent city concept seen throughout central Bosnia in 1995, which some later evaluated as the superior model. There was a paradigm shift in the dialogical context of the international NGO worker, but it was the real-time problem solving skills of the local workers that made the tent city concept possible. The workers came from private industry, academia and even the transitional government. This was their first experience in the third sector and they accomplished the majority of the actual work being done.
In Bosnia many thing were new; UNHCR for the first time was keeping an urban population from starving in Sarajevo, which was never their design. The unsteadiness of international communities response to the crises in the former Yugoslavia is in stark contrast to the innovative work being created by the local work force through 1995. With the Dayton agreement a new era is ushered in, that of the multinational contractors entering Bosnia, we will revisit this era later. Hoffman describes the international communities response as a flip-flop practice of assigning blame. At times the various Serbian militaries where seen as aggressors. While at other times the situation was treated as a civil war. At certain times each military manifestation was treated on equal terms, but the reality of the situation was that the majority of International NGOs were located and worked exclusively within the Republic of Bosnia, which contained the majority Moslem population and was seen by most casual observers as the victim of the war, civil or otherwise. There was a paper and vocal neutrality, but there was a real and massive bias for one side. Naturally the most experienced NGO workers in the region are from within the Republic of Bosnia. These individuals accommodated this irrational position held by the international work force in the daily workings of the International NGO, officially neutral and quietly biased. In most cases since this bias severed their own community this contradiction was seldom challenged by the local work force.
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