"The trade unions must learn to fight"
Leaders of the Miners trade union in Tuzla talk to Danish International Workers Aid representative Vagn Rasmussen
* Bosnia-Herzegovina • What do you think about the "peace accords" and the deployment of NATO troops in Bosnia? Marinko: It is good that the killing will stop. But we expect a lot of trouble. We are not prepared for the arrival of 20,000 troops. They will bring the problems which armies of occupation always bring: drugs, alcoholism, prostitution and other forms of criminality, AIDS and so on. We are trying to prepare ourselves, but there is not much we can do. Muhammed: Peace came at the right time. This is absolutely not a just peace. But it is good that the weapons will be quiet now. Many of our members joined the army. Many were killed, even more wounded. At the beginning they had to fight with insufficient weaponry. It will be very difficult to continue the struggle. • What is the prospect for real peace? Muhammed: The war has destroyed all how dependent we are on each other.
We will start a dynamic which will be important tor peace.
Marinko: We will have big problems with the people who are now serving in the army, once they are no longer needed there. They will receive about
400 DEM per month: not in money but in coupons which will entitle them to tools, which will help them start producing.
Omer: Real peace means carrying the peace agreements through to the
For instance, by end.
punishment of all war criminals. We must put names and addresses on all the terrible crimes which have been committed. If we do not do this, there is the risk that some people will put the blame whole on nationalities, instead of individuals.
concrete
Refugees must all be results of privatisation. Many people end up in the street. To work in an industry owned by all society is better than to work in a private factory. You feel more sure that you have a job. We have no great experience of dealing with private capital. We have a lot of things to learn in this respect from the workers' movement in Western Europe.
normal economic relations across Omer Kamperovic, President of the Miners Union in the Tuzla region (left), Fikret
Suljic, Marinko Jakovac mining engineer, who also served as translator, and
Bosnia, and in most of former Muhammed Gutic, President of the union at the Kreka mine.
Yugoslavia. Much depends on whether we can make things run normally again. Tuzla coal is very clean. Before the war we sold much of it to the territory now occupied by the Tchetniks (Bosnian Serb militia). But people there still need coal. And we need to sell coal. If economic ties are re-established, many of the problems will more-or-less solve themselves. People will realise Miners to miners
The miners' union in Tuzla had 18,000 members before the war. Today it has 11,500, of which only 3,800 are in (almost) regular work. About 5,200 are in the army, and 2,500 are "on the waiting list" for reintegration in the mine. In other words, unemployed.
British mine workers, remembering the solidarity of Tuzla miners during their year long strike in 1994-5, launched an initiative which developed in to Workers Aid and International Workers Aid (IWA). In November 1993 an IWA convoy broke the six month blockade of Tuzla. Since then, the organisation has delivered more than 300 tonnes of foodstuffs, which have been distributed through the miners' 20 International Viewpoint March 1996 guaranteed a safe return to their own homes. And there must be free, democratic elections. • And the role of the trade unions? Omer: The trade unions must learn to fight for their real role in society. We must be independent of all political parties. This does not mean that unions should not have an opinion about what is going on in society as a whole. And our members should, of course, be allowed to be organised politically. But the union as such must be independent. Things may change for the worse if peace comes. We will see an influx of foreign capital, which will try to buy some of our industry and close the rest. In Croatia we can already see the
We have recently visited Denmark and Sweden, and talk to trade union leaders, and to the Kiruna coal miners in Sweden. These miners were convinced that industries like mining should be owned by the state. We should fight for that here too. In Britain, we learned from miners there about how the National Coal Board [a public sector monopoly] bought cheap coal from Poland during the 1994 strike. We can learn a lot from west European We hope to organise an international trade union conference here in Tuzla. We also want to establish a trade union school, to educate our members. *