Youthful summers, river death and deadly nationalism
Podrinje’s rivers and humans shape one another’s lives.
By Michiel Piersma | April 23, 2025
An old, narrow bridge of corroded steel foundations and three-meter-wide wooden planks connects eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina with northern Montenegro. Travelers between Sarajevo and Podgorica straddle the international border while on this bridge, whose one lane often creates long lines of heavy industry trucks, minivans with rafts strapped onto their roofs and motorcycles.
The rickety-looking bridge’s perceived instability is reinforced by the thundering river Tara a dozen meters below, cutting through the steep limestone peaks of mountains Maglić and Pivska. As opposed to the queues of border crossers up above, Tara does not wait. A couple hundred meters downstream, Tara meets mountain river Piva, after which they amalgamate into the river Drina.
Traveling through what is known as the Podrinje region in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Drina does not stop flowing for another 346 kilometers, until it meets the river Sava on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s northeast border with Serbia. Drina’s flow and bed connects the river region’s diverse and contested ecosystems with its human communities. Following Drina and its beaches, conviviality and dams unveils hints about the pasts, presents and futures of Podrinje, its rivers, its people and the relationships within and between them. Podrinje is at once teeming with life and dreadfully dying.
Drina flows in a riverbed of limestone and sandstone sediments between 200 and 250 million years old. The rocky riverbanks and rolling mountain slopes host over 130 endemic plants: irises, carnations, knapweeds and bellflowers that grow nowhere else than overlooking Drina. Fish populations of brown trout and the endangered huchen traverse the wild streams with much more ease than we humans in a floating raft. Rarely-seen mammal species of blind moles and snow voles have key populations here, in the Drina basin.
Although such beings in water, forests, grasslands and mud banks often remain invisible to the everyday human eye, they form the heights, depths and volumes of Drina ecosystems, the roots of which far predate human beings’ conception of Podrinje as a region.
Yet human hands have dramatically altered the river. Concrete hydropower dams regulate Drina’s flow, and the many biotic lives within it. The river’s symbolism and strategic location underpinned wartime territorial violence, and its hidden depths have helped conceal humans’ crimes against humanity. The social ties deeply intertwined with living with the river in the Podrinje region are slowly disappearing. These issues have global, regional and national drivers; however, it is by following the river and its many local lives that the intricate relations between them can be discerned, and that we can imagine their uncertain futures.
In a raft down Drina
We pick up Drina’s flow three kilometers downstream, in the village of Bastasi. It is an already stuffy early morning in July 2022, and Mila has just climbed into an inflatable whitewater raft. Mila studies at a university in Belgrade, but returns to Podrinje during the summer months, just like many of her peers.
Bastasi, in the municipality of Foča, mainly consists of rafting camps along Drina. Today, it marks the starting point of an event called Drinska Avantura, in which 40 rubber rafts float together on Drina’s blue-green surface. All will follow Drina for 18 winding kilometers, reaching Foča town approximately eight hours later. Two of those boats are Mila’s and her friends’, a group of young people in their late teens and early 20s who have all grown up in Foča. Some work or still go to school in town, while others study in places across Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.
I am the only person to whom neither applies; although I am a friend of Mila’s, I am mostly known as that Dutchman who is writing a political science thesis about the everyday of Foča’s youth. That day, however, I paddled, sang, drank, jumped into the Drina and went head-first across its roaring whitewater rapids (almost) as much as my fellow rafters. It was only when I had spluttered to the surface after one of those rapids that a tension manifested.
How could my friends’ deep riverine identities coexist with the garbage regurgitated by the same rapid that I was in? How do generations of human connection to the river interact with the extensive damming plans of Drina and its tributaries? How could this unencumbered riverine joy of a town’s people be rhymed with the unresolved stories of murdered Muslim men that disappeared in that same river in the 1990s?
I did not unsolicitedly subject my raftmates to the musings of a political scientist in a wetsuit, nor do I think such complexities of living in Podrinje can be rhymed or reconciled in the first place. Mostly, joining Mila’s group float down Drina emphasized the necessary connection between human beings and the non-human yet also living river.
Further details about the research process
Although written in Australia’s capital Canberra, the article’s journeys reflect an intimate engagement with Foča, Podrinje, its people and its natural environments ongoing since 2017. Significant parts are based on academic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2022 as part of a PhD research project at the University of Liverpool, U.K., on the politics of landscape in eastern Bosnia. The research was financially supported by a doctoral scholarship from that same university.
The young Fočaci who populate these pages all agreed to take part in this research. To ensure anonymity (which is required for a research project), they all adopted a pseudonym of their choice. The interviews were conducted in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. The eventual PhD thesis titled “The production of joyful, violent and absent landscapes: walking with youth and politics in Eastern Bosnia” was successfully defended in June 2024.
The people of Podrinje live in close association with Drina and its tributaries. The river and the people mutually control each other’s existence and actions; life’s challenges and possibilities are shaped by this association. In light of the many biodiverse and sociopolitical systems across Drina’s 346 kilometers, this story is situated in the river’s upper course — Gornje Podrinje, specifically, there where the river meets the town of Foča, in the Republika Srpska entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drina originates in this municipality, at the confluence of the Piva and Tara on the border with Montenegro, and is joined by 16 tributaries in the municipality.
It is a deliberate choice to present this Drina as this story’s protagonist. Fabulists have long written and thought about worlds in which humans do not take center stage. In recent years, writers like Kapka Kassabova and Faruk Šehić let the rivers, animals and plants of the Balkans speak to people; they are joined by academic work on rivers and love in Bosnia and Herzegovina, farm animals in Croatia and the inconvenience of jackals in Belgrade.
The river flows, trickles, transgresses, retreats, reveals, conceals, warms and freezes. Despite our perennial inability to understand, let alone put into words, all activities of this riverine ecosystem, what follows here is a story of Drina and the people around it.
The force of the rivers
On that day of Drinska Avantura, it took over eight hours for the river to take us and our rafts to the group’s hometown of Foča, 18 kilometers downstream. Our pace decreased considerably throughout the day, as the levels of alcohol-induced and sun-kissed shenanigans increased.
At first, Drina is a winding, fast-flowing river, accelerated by various rapids and narrow sections. The riverbed straightens and widens on its approach to the town of Brod, where it takes one last wide turn to set sail to Foča. Trees growing out of steep cliff edges are replaced by crash barriers of the M20 motorway towards Sarajevo. Seemingly imperturbable, the river takes in Foča’s urban transgressions on its immediate edges: a recently built gas station, a yellow bridge offering vehicles and pedestrians a dry river passage and the municipal swimming pool showing off its chlorine-filtered water.
Directly after the water park, Drina welcomes its right bank tributary, Ćehotina. Ćehotina enters Foča’s town center from the sparsely populated forest areas to the east, before joining Drina. At this confluence, Foča becomes “the town on two rivers,” a common nickname among Fočaci — Foča dwellers— emphasizing its perceived singularity in relation to its Podrinje neighbors.
Mila and her friends compare Foča to Višegrad, for instance, with its UNESCO-listed bridge and visitors from across the world. Miloš says that Višegrad is “dead,” whereas the combined beauty of Drina and Ćehotina “obligate us to look after them.” “Foča wouldn’t be Foča without Drina and Ćehotina,” Dorijan adds.
Drina and Ćehotina are wholly different in many aspects: water quality, depth, temperature, current, smell, personality, even. These differences are understood best at this confluence. Srđan says that it is common for bathers to swim in the very middle of the confluence, to experience how “half of your body freezes, and the other half is warm.” Even on hot summer days, Drina’s water does not exceed 13 degrees Celsius, which, as Dorijan tells me, is because this water originates in the lake Piva, a mountain reservoir up to 190 meters deep.
Ćehotina is friendly, calm, a river that invites you to learn how to swim, at which you lie on the beach until the sun sets. Drina, in comparison, is the pristine yet temperamental counterpart, a being that cannot be tamed easily. Srđan has seen otters swimming in Drina, animals that attest to the river’s cleanliness.
Ćehotina’s swimming infrastructure is more developed than Drina’s, offering urban beaches that we will visit at a later stage. Sweltering hot summer days turn Drina into a more attractive option for a dive, albeit possibly not for the faint-hearted; Laura tells me how she and her friends would hold competitions to see who dared jump into the deep water first, swim to the middle, and then who would stay there the longest.
Mila, with whom I have been in the raft, points at a rock that also serves as a jumping platform: “In primary school we were there all summer long, every day. All day we were outside, 45 degrees, I don’t know how, but we went anyway. I love for the water to be cold. I think if the water is cold, it must be clean.”
I often sensed a careful reverence towards Drina’s waters; the river is dangerous and unpredictable. Its volume and current increase greatly in early spring, and it is at its wildest in May. In winter, the risks of floods increase, and recent memories of Drina overflowing its banks are cemented in many of my interlocutors’ minds. Stefan recalls a recent incident in which Drina’s source river Tara almost swallowed a rafter, which made him realize the river’s temperament, and the need to always have a dose of fear and caution towards nature. The rivers have their victims, he says.
In “Dvije su se rijeke zavadile” — “Two rivers quarreled” — a popular Bosnian folk song also known as sevdalinka, Foča-born Zehra Deović lets Drina tussle with Ćehotina. It is a tale of two siblings, murky Ćehotina asking frigid Drina to wait for her and a love interest. The rivers’ temperament in this song reflects a specific event in the early 18th century in which the two rivers strayed from their boundaries and flooded over 200 houses in Foča. The rivers have overflowed, threatened and shaped people’s bodies and minds for many centuries.
A saying in Bosnian (Croatian/Serbian) states that winding Drina can’t be straightened, alluding to nature’s untouchable force over humankind. Nonetheless, many attempts have been made to straighten the river and its tributaries, primarily through efforts to generate hydropower out of their powerful water flows.
One such attempt has affected the river Bjelava, Drina’s tributary nine kilometers upstream from Foča’s town center, where it cuts through thick forests of hornbeam, beech and oak.
In 2018, Gordan Pavlović, a main investor in Foča, signed a concession agreement with Republika Srpska’s Ministry of Energy and Mining to construct a series of small hydropower plants on the Bjelava. As opposed to traditional hydrodams and their massive reservoirs, small dams rely on running river water, thereby requiring significant modifications to the waterbed and riverbanks. Although branded as key for transitions to clean, green power, research shows that such small plants are ineffective at generating water power and disproportionately damage small waterways’ fragile ecosystems.
In early 2020, Pavlović commenced so-called preparatory works on Bjelava. Even though environmental regulations in Republika Srpska are few and far between, it became clear that Pavlović had no right to dam. The concession agreement did not include construction permits. Pavlović dug his first shovels in Bjelava’s soil anyway, making full use of governmental and protest paralysis due to local COVID-19 curfews.
BiH legal/constitutional structure
By signing the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina was constitutionally divided into two sub-national governmental bodies: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Republika Srpska, alongside the Brčko District. The town of Foča is located in Republika Srpska, as is the majority of Podrinje: of its 346 kilometers, the river Drina flows through the Federation for only 25 kilometers. The Serbian and Bosnian Serb leadership's violent goal of establishing a Greater Serbia did not result in sovereign statehood, but the post-war structure does recognize the territorial space that was violently claimed during the war.
Political scientists have analyzed how Republika Srpska attempts to act as a sovereign state actor, a para-state claiming to represent Serbs in Bosnia. This liminal state of existence — unable to secure international recognition but bestowed with extensive sub-state jurisdiction — has proven especially contentious in regard to claims to Drina. In principle, the Republika Srpska Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water holds jurisdiction on Republika Srpska’ waterways. In 2020, however, its agreement with Serbia on Drina's hydro-economic exploitation was ruled unconstitutional by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s highest court, as sub-national entities are not allowed to interfere with Bosnia and Herzegovina's sovereign boundaries — the Drina as the natural border between the country and Serbia, in this case.
Environmental impact studies, hydrological inspections and opaque public consultation only started after citizens’ protests and legal disputes. Bjelava is one of many rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina whose flow has been disrupted. In the summer of 2024, dangerous damming on the rivers Una and Neretva was ordered to stop, rewarding local river activists’ relentless, round-the-clock labor.
Construction on Bjelava has been put on hold, too, but with impact studies still underway, uncertainty remains. The environmental damage, however, has been done.
Thick bureaucratic clouds of citizen participation and court cases lift only when one walks on Bjelava’s banks. The preparatory works have severely impacted the river: a wide dirt road slices through the remaining forest, river edges have been deeply dug into, broad pipes dangle in the air and a previous meander has been straightened with tons of soil. These are Pavlović’s destructive attempts to tame the river.
In October 2024, Pavlović acquired concessions for three small hydrodams on the Ćehotina, adding to the 411 plants being constructed or planned across Bosnia and Herzegovina as of 2022.
For some, the rivers are liquid gold mines; their currents are the political connections into local and national centers of power. But when we listen to the river’s gurgling sounds, take a breath and inhale the fresh forest air, we can remind ourselves that the Bjelava, flowing towards the big Drina, is more than an economic imagination; it is a meeting place of natural life and socio-cultural existence.
Drina as a border to violence
Throughout the 20th century, Drina was instrumentalized as a natural symbol of the nation, supporting violent territorial claims. In the 1930s, Fascist Ustasha leaders theorized about an extension of their Croatian homeland into Podrinje, with Drina as the easternmost Catholic bulwark against Orthodoxy, sustaining this myth well after World War II had ended.
Even earlier, the river had become a symbol of Serbian sacrifice after a successful World War I military campaign in Podrinje against Austro-Hungarian forces. In the “March on the Drina,” the river is asked to sing, to remember the fallen soldiers who turned the cold river into a bloody stream and “expelled the foreigner from our dear river.”
It is this dual image of Drina as a boundary and a lifeline that has been cultivated in mythologies where cultural imagination and deadly political projects meet. From the 1980s, the river took a central place in the nationalist project of Greater Serbia, and therefore underpinned the mass violence that unfolded against Bosnian Muslims in the Drina basin in the decade that followed.
To Serbian and Bosnian Serb leadership, Drina should have ceased to be a border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Upon proclaiming the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska in Bosnia in 1992, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević said Drina was the spine of the nation, the essential backbone of a Serbian national anatomy. Republika Srpska’s political elite composed the Serbian body differently, considering the river the nation’s windpipe, connecting the two lungs. But whether lungs or a vertebral skeleton, Drina provided the natural flow and connection of Serb lives on either side of the riverbed.
Very shortly thereafter, the partnership between nationalist myths of nature and territorial violence became reality. In May 1992, Bosnian Serb political leadership translated the alleged restoration of the exclusively Serb natural body into officially stated military goals. A Drina corridor was one of those primary targets, in order to unite the allegedly Serbian lands and people separated by Drina. Bosnian Serb military leaders understood the implication, that this unification meant a violent eradication of Podrinje’s Bosnian Muslim inhabitants. The Bosnian rivers Una and Neretva had to form the outer edges of the new Serb homelands.
In the month prior, this political myth of a Serb Drina had been violently operationalized across the river’s 350 kilometers. Bosnian Serb armed forces started besieging Bijeljina on April 1, 1992, Foča and Zvornik on April 8, Višegrad on April 13, Srebrenica on April 18 and Goražde on May 2. These towns, apart from their shared Podrinje location, all had majority Bosnian Muslim populations.
Scholar Edina Bećirević has shown how these attacks involved months of logistical preparation and communication between political leadership in Bosnia and Serbia — local Serb Democratic Party (SDS) politicians — and military commanders from Belgrade-coordinated Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and the Bosnian Serb army. This documented coordination of mass violence is the most important argument to refute popular discourse in today’s Republika Srpska and Serbia, which interprets the Bosnian war as a conflict of chaotic revenge on all sides.
After Bosnian Serb leaders took control of Foča in April 1992, repression began. First, Bosnian Muslims were not allowed to go to work. This quickly escalated into destruction of properties and arrest and abduction of Bosniak civilians. Those who saw a chance fled town, but not everyone could.
Across the municipality, detention centers were set up, in which people were subjected to inhumane conditions, torture and sexual violence. The Research and Documentation Center — a now-defunct nongovernmental organization dedicated to documenting war crimes during the Bosnian War — concluded that a total of 2,707 people were killed in Foča during the war, of which 1,515 were Bosniak civilians. Many of them disappeared into the Drina’s cold, roaring depths. Survivors are still looking for more than 500 disappeared Foča men.
The scale of sexual violence in Foča can only be estimated. No precise statistics exist on the number of victims in Foča alone, but we know that detention centers operated throughout 1992, up until February 1993. Over 10 men were convicted of wartime rape by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Bosnian courts, and sentenced to prison sentences between eight and 34 years.
The convictions rested on many testimonies from Foča’s Bosnian Muslim girls and women. Those kept in residential houses across town vividly remembered hearing “March on the Drina,” the military anthem depicting Drina as a bloody stream from which the foreigner was to be expelled; when it would be played through the mosque’s loudspeakers, the sexual violence would commence again.
Drina’s force in death and electricity
The Drina absorbed Bosnian Muslim victims of war crimes across Podrinje in World War II, and did so again in the 1990s. The perpetrators knew moving, living Drina would hide the bodies, and they knew all Podrinje towns were connected through it. A military commander in Višegrad told its victims, “I’ll slaughter you and throw your body into Drina and have you float to Žepa. We’ll let Žepa see what we in Višegrad can do,” referring to a town downstream that would be ethnically cleansed soon, too. Drina’s physical depths render knowing the exact number of river killings impossible, but reports have shown that it was common practice, especially in Višegrad and Foča.
Only occasionally does Drina release its dead, and only there where humans have tried to tame the river. Just downstream of Višegrad, Perućac is an artificial lake on Drina created by the construction of a large hydrodam. In 2010, the lake emptied when the dam’s turbines had to be repaired, which uncovered hundreds of human remains, 163 of which were identified through DNA testing. The remains belonged to Bosnian Muslims from across Podrinje, including Višegrad and Foča. The lake exhumations were rushed and left incomplete, pressured by the hydroelectric company’s wish to fill up the lake again.
Only a few kilometers downstream from where Mila, her friends and I started paddling for the Drinska Avantura, the Buk Bijela hydroelectric dam has been in the works since the early 1970s. Decades of plans, environmental concerns and failed loans followed, until the foundation stone was laid in 2021 by Prime Minister of Republika Srpska Radovan Višković and Ana Brnabić, the then-prime minister of Serbia, which was a major investor. Construction has since been halted due to a lack of finances and inadequate environmental impact studies. In a waiting room of uncertainty not unlike the one Pavlović has built on the Bjelava, Bosniak Fočaci fear that concreting the Drina here eliminates the possibility of ever finding their missing loved ones.
During the war, Buk Bijela was used as an execution site, and in 2006, the remains of 43 men from Foča were found. Concreting the riverbed would seal the fate of any bodies hidden at Buk Bijela, but Republika Srpska authorities, the hydroproject’s instigators, do not seem to be considering a search operation.
Drina keeps on swallowing the politically marginalized, and green hydro-capitalists keep on attempting to tame Drina. Buk Bijela’s case illustrates Foča’s issues with capitalist environmental degradation and repressed legacies of violence. Foča, and Podrinje as a whole, is a riverine community where river death and deadly nationalism meet. Worlds in which water is life, in which the river determines the flow of the past, present and future, are driven by dialectic forces.
Abandonment as a political choice
Climbing a short, steep road from Foča’s yellow bridge across Drina leads to a two-story Austro-Hungarian-era building with a small field in front. Wide views across the town center, Drina and its surrounding hills open up from the fenced edge of the field. On our walks through town, my friends like to bring me here to soak in the views, but also to show me the lost potential of such a place for Foča’s youth.
In the height of summer, the weeds and wildflowers flourish, covering the entire field except for an empty patch of tiles in the middle. A single rubbish bin attached to the fence, and the concrete legs of a disappeared bench are evidence that this has ceased to be a field for socializing.
During the war, the building next to the field — locally known as Partizan — was a location where Bosniak women and girls from Foča were detained and subjected to torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence. The crimes were committed in the heart of the town community. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia court hearings show close involvement of Republika Srpska military, local political leadership and Foča’s police force.
Nowadays, the Partizan building hosts Foča’s table tennis, self-defense and arts societies. The violence has fallen into oblivion. On one of my visits, a single white rose lay on the building’s steps, a lonely reminder of an annual commemoration of the war crimes that took place a couple weeks prior. After the event at Partizan, members of the Foča 92-95 War Victims Association walk to the bridge across Drina, where they throw hundreds of white roses in the river, to mark the loss of Bosniak men that are still missing. Neither Foča’s mayor nor any other local or national political representative expressed willingness to attend the event, leaving the commemoration on the fringes of Foča’s political landscape.
Local authorities sustain the political and societal emptiness of the field above Drina. Different people have been met with resistance when trying to address its potential. Already in 2004, the Women Victims of War Association requested a monument for the Partizan victims, which was denied by then-Mayor Zdravko Krsmanović, under the logic that suffering had taken place on all sides. The same year, a war monument honoring the suffering of Foča’s Serb “defenders” was erected in the town center.
More recently, a group of Foča youth applied for a participatory budget — funded by the International Organization for Migration and British embassy — to revive the Partizan field. Their proposal included installing park furniture and lighting, planting trees and plants and repairing and repainting the entrance gate. Moreover, given the group’s experience with painting graffiti, the renovated park would be decorated with murals of, as the proposal put it, “peace and friendship.” The budget was part of a public tender, and did not receive the most votes. Instead, a project on diabetes prevention was selected for the participatory budget.
Foča’s Bosnian Muslim victims of Republika Srpska’s destructive campaign are never invoked in name by local youth, nor is the violence that took place at the Partizan site ever referred to. “Peace and friendship” is the motto of an undefined future that Bosnia’s youth have learned to deploy, as a result of the international community’s post-conflict dream of interethnic reconciliation. That Stefan only thinks of friends and adventure tourists when saying the rivers have its victims is an expected result of Republika Srpska’s denial of war wrongdoings across its systems of education, media and public life.
The broken benches, the flourishing wildflowers and the refusal to commemorate missing Bosniak Fočaci are all forms of active abandonment; neglect as a political solution to not address legacies of mass violence or precarious futures of local youth.
Youth’s joy and future of the rivers
In Foča, a young person’s summer’s day takes place on a beach by the river. Drina and Ćehotina are accompanied by countless small beaches, kupalište: pebbly or sandy, central to a neighborhood or hidden from the road, in the city center or a short drive out of town. Each beach carries a new anecdote. A small one by the municipal stadium is where entire generations had their first swimming lessons.
Earlier, Mila mentioned a large rock, a popular jumping platform into the river. The adjacent beach was a favorite of many, Srđan explains, and on hot days the entire place was covered by towels. Central to its popularity is the location: as the easternmost beach in town, it catches the sun for up to 90 minutes longer than the municipal swimming pool alongside Drina. Stojan and his friends, contrastingly, would walk to a beach out of town, hop in old tractor tires serving as giant swimming rings and float down the river back to town, a journey that ideally took up their entire day.
The arrival of the city pools in 2013 have changed swimming in Foča dramatically. The pools allow young children to learn to swim without having to fear unpredictable river streams. They are immensely popular with families and schoolchildren in summer and get busier than any of the river beaches. They are however not to be equated, my friends stress. The pool water can be warm and dirty, and there are not many spots available to hide from the scorching sun. River swimming offers incomparable sensations: cold and wild Drina, and calm and inviting Ćehotina. “Every city has its pool. But not every city has such a river with so many beaches. It’s completely different. The swimming, it is different,” Srđan says.
The differences in swimming joy that the arrival of the pools have brought out, are experienced best at the confluence of cold, temperamental Drina and friendly, meandering Ćehotina, directly behind the pools. The confluence is a central, much-loved spot in town; it is Simeon’s spot to sit down, turn himself to the sun and listen to the river.
These days, the place looks somewhat disregarded. The asphalt footpath along the pools turns into an overgrown, faint track towards the confluence. The beach finds itself at a dead end, a feeling which is reinforced by its overall state. Patches of grass dot the ground; food packaging and broken beer bottles are scattered around. The place is used occasionally for rafts to disembark, but the landing strip is steep and muddy.
My friends have deep-seated worries about the state of the rivers and their beaches. These concerns showcase an intimate association with the water similar to the unencumbered joys of summer swimming. Apart from looming hydropower plans on both Ćehotina and Drina, other forces threaten the rivers.
Miloš recalls a much-loved former beach along Drina, sandy with lots of natural shade, which had to make way for a new gas station. This encapsulates the dire state that this riverine town is in, Miloš thinks, which allows an investor to “destroy the childhood of an entire neighborhood that is already dying out. He’ll earn some money while the kids can’t gather there anymore, you know. At the expense of ecology. At the expense of someone else’s childhood.”
In 2019, Ćehotina suddenly turned white, and large numbers of dead fish floated to the river’s surface. The cause of this destruction was found to be the uncontrolled discharge of industrial wastewater from a thermal power plant across the border in Montenegro. The pollution has negatively affected the water’s smell, and its allure as a river for leisure. And although recent spikes in river water temperature have drawn huge numbers of people to the beaches once again, this is likely a prelude to the projected climate change-driven intensification of droughts and heatwaves in Podrinje.
In spite of ecological and capitalist disasters hurting the rivers, Drina and its tributary Ćehotina are still alive; they meander their way through Foča’s forests, they can be swum in, they make Foča into that unique “city on two rivers.” But Foča’s youth have a keen eye for change and loss in their everyday landscapes. A river’s water becomes less clear, dead fish come to the surface, a river loses its fresh smell, a water park arrives, empty beer cans dominate a river beach, a local businessman builds a gas station, a childhood gets destroyed and a neighborhood dies out.
As my friends spoke of such losses, and of the fear of losing more, I was not always sure whether it is natural or human life that was referred to. But when they tried to define Foča, it became a town delineated by Drina and Ćehotina as it outer edges, the mountain Maglić as the town’s roof, and its total of 17 rivers as a degree of size. Fočaci are prirodnjaci, people of nature, or as Dorijan puts it, “you simply wouldn’t like asphalt if you live with this green, beautiful, healthy air around you.” It became clear that such contests for water and land are in fact contests for life — of flowing rivers, of fish, of being able to listen to the river, of finding a summer job in a rafting camp, of a joyful childhood and of a neighborhood’s future generation.
The attempted destruction of Drina’s tributary Bjelava is one of such contests where hydro-capitalist dreams of river control meet the multitudes of human and non-human life of the river. Bjelava-dweller Miloš Vujičić finds words at a public consultation meeting in March 2024: “no one’s allowed to take the river, I guarantee that with my life. Water will have to flow, even if blood must flow with it.” This is not terribly far removed from the Yugoslav term zavičaj, an embodied sense of attachment in which the person and the land cannot be detached. Podrinje’s zavičaj was targeted in the 1990s, leading to the violent severance of Bosnian Muslim lives and the river.
Expulsion of riverine relations
On a late summer afternoon in 2021, Dorijan and I look out over the Partizan field, the site we visited before and that encapsulates the active abandonment of violent memories and socializing opportunities in Foča. Drina is not far away, and we hear it gurgling its way through its limestone waterbed a couple dozen meters below us. Our eyes are fixated on the broken benches, our feet hidden in the thriving weeds. Dorijan laments the council’s rejection of the proposal for the field’s renewal that he and his friends submitted.
Here, the destruction of the field’s benches point at the contest of the shared lives of people and land (including water) in Foča and in Podrinje. There is a connection to the destruction of Bosniak lives in the Partizan building, whose walls we would touch if we stretched our arms, and to the obliterated Bosniak men in Drina directly below and across its 346 kilometer run. It is a destruction inextricable to the lifeless fish floating to Ćehotina’s surface, and to the irreversible damage to Bjelava’s riverbeds.
The dilapidated benches are connected to gurgling Drina, and to the question how much longer a Fočak, a person of nature, can live with that nature if its health is being threatened from all sides. Drina’s flow connects the riverine joy of a town’s people with the unresolved stories of murdered Muslim men, a constellation of pleasure and violence not unlike the Mediterranean as a sunbathing hotspot and a water grave for migrating brown and black bodies.
In order to grasp the various dimensions of emptiness of the Balkans, political anthropologists Larisa Kurtović and Ivan Rajković understand that these destructions lead to not only people out-migrating, but an expulsion of overall sociality — a sense that life becomes unlivable, that social relations cease to connect. This expulsion is a rather unassuming, quiet process, driven by past and present forces of (hydro)capitalist exploitation and ethnonational suffocation. As Kapka Kassabova writes about the emptied-out Mesta river valley in Bulgaria, such forces produce a “devastating ecological and cultural disinheritance.” They particularly thrive in rural, peripheral areas away from the view of political centers: Kassabova’s Mesta basin, and Podrinje’s Višegrad, Goražde and Foča.
This expulsion is not a homogenous process affecting everyone equally, simultaneously. In 1992, Bosnian Serb forces rendered large parts of Podrinje unlivable for Bosnian Muslims by driving them away from Drina, or leaving them lifeless in that very water. Expulsionist nationalism abruptly and violently suffocated the community’s living bond with Drina.
Three decades later, the people who still live with Drina due to their Bosnian Serb nationality are faced with a powerful partnership of this same leadership with destructive hydrocapitalists. A similar expulsion of riverine sociality, but also so very different: although ecosystems suffer many losses, their human lives are not targeted, and the violence weakens riverine relations gradually over time.
At the Partizan field, as Dorijan reaches for the straws of sociality that remain in the wake of the refused proposal, he says, “Something’s got potential. Not just Partizan, all of Foča. It can be so beautiful and nice.” What he is getting at is that the potential of Foča as much depends on the landscape as it does on people within it.
Drina encompasses life and death; unencumbered summer rafting memories flourish side-by-side with silenced burdens of lost Bosniak life. The river is a site of creation and destruction; unique bonds rooted in love and care are forged between its water and its people, while others have been violently attacked by individuals, their ideologies, bulldozers and arms. Powerful water flows generate electricity, but come at the expense of irreversible losses of fish, plants, carbon storage and water itself. What can be the future for riverine Foča and Podrinje, when such opposing forces collide?
Many thanks to Katarina Kušić, Gemma Bird and Roderick Witjas for sharing their indispensable thoughts and suggestions.
Feature Image: Michiel Piersma.
Illustrations by Dina Hjarullahu / K2.0.
Want to support our journalism?
At Kosovo 2.0, we strive to be a pillar of independent, high-quality journalism in an era where it’s increasingly challenging to maintain such standards and fearlessly pursue truth and accountability. To ensure our continued independence, we are introducing HIVE, our new membership model that offers an opportunity for anyone who values our journalism to contribute and become part of our mission.
Become a member of HIVE or consider making a donation.