Brčko looks like any small Bosnian city. Smoke-filled cafes line the pedestrianised main street, serving bitter coffee against the blaring backdrop of another regional speciality: high-octane turbo-folk music.
But behind Brčko’s quotidian façade lies a novel political experiment. In the impressive Hapsburg-era city hall sits a municipal assembly with powers that more closely resemble a sovereign state. Brčko (pronounced "Britchko") is almost entirely self-governing. As well as its own education system, the city has free-standing courts and separate health and police services. It is, in essence, a free city in Europe.
Brčko has profited by being unshackled from Bosnia. While ethnic tension arguably holds the rest of the country back, this city of 100,000 people has become a beacon for multi-ethnicity: the mayor is Croat, his deputy is Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and the assembly’s speaker is Serb. The concept of a free city in Europe may not be new – the Baltic Sea port of Danzig (now Gdansk) was semi-autonomous between the two world wars, while Fiume (now Rijeka) was once administered separately from both Hungary and Croatia-Slavonia – but Brčko has given the idea new life.
The unusual arrangement is a product of Brčko’s bloodstained recent history. A border city, pressed close against Croatia and Serbia, it was mainly Bosniak when war broke out in 1992. Brčko became caught in the "corridor" linking two big chunks of Serb-held territory – one in north-western Bosnia, the other in the east. Serb forces needed it desperately, and stormed into the city, expelling Bosniaks and detaining hundreds in brutal camps. Torn apart during the fighting, Brčko then became a thorn in the peace: both the Bosniak/Croat and Serb contingents claimed it as their own. An inability to agree about the destiny of the city almost scuttled the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the war.
In 1999, presided over by the US diplomat Roberts Owen, arbitrators announced a controversial decision: Brčko would formally be part of both parts of the new state of Bosnia and Herzegovina – the Federation and Republika Srpska – but it would also be a separate "mixed" entity. Brčko District, an appellation lifted straight from US constitutional jargon, was born, overseen by an international supervisor.
For people whose lives had been destroyed by tribal hatred, Brčko became a chance to experiment in multi-ethnicity. For example, while in Bosnia and Herzegovina education is often segregated, Brčko took a different approach. All pupils study a single, common curriculum: Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats are mixed in every classroom.
You can see the results on presentation day at Šesta primary school on the edge of town. Girls in traditional dresses with flowers in their hair twirl through a Bosnian folk dance. Seamlessly, the music changes and the children move into an up-tempo Serbian routine. Parents seated on rows of wooden benches clap, cheer and take photographs on smartphones.
"There is no difference between us, we are all the same," says 15-year-old Emira Alić. Her Bosniak parents fled Brčko during the war, only to return a decade ago. In the autumn, Emira will go to a mixed high school. She dreams of becoming a teacher.
Education has not been the only success for Brčko. In its early days the international community, keen to make the free city work, pumped in cash. Brčko was rebuilt. Between 2001 and 2004, more than 200km of roads were built and 8,000 jobs created. Thousands returned to city. Better pay and conditions paved the way for radical reforms in education and policing.
The town’s Arizona market – a haven for drugs, prostitution, guns and counterfeit merchandise during and after the war - was transformed into a licensed, regulated bazaar. While other Bosnian cities struggled, Brčko thrived – going from the most divided city in Bosnia to the most multicultural.
"We were a lighthouse," says Ismet Dedeić of the Bosniak party Union for a Better Bosnia and Herzegovina. "Whoever wanted to return could return without any obstacles." Rather than being Bosniak, Croat or Serb, Brčko residents "saw themselves as citizens of the District", says Dedeić.
However, though Brčko remains one of the most mixed towns in Bosnia, there are increasing signs of division. Self-segregation is rampant. A red, white and blue Serbian flag flies from the bell tower of an orthodox church; at the bus station, a Bosniak fleur-de-lis is spraypainted on a wall. A new multi-ethnic housing scheme at Ilićka, on the outskirts of town, has now become almost entirely Serb, after returning Bosniaks and Croats sold the houses they received. The local assembly was unable to agree on a single, shared war memorial: instead, rival Bosniak and Croat monuments sit within yards of each other near city hall, with a separate sculpture for fallen Serbs beside a nearby hotel.
The ethnic politics that has created gridlock in postwar Bosnia has become the norm in Brčko, too. The assembly recently passed a law making it obligatory for ID cards and driving licences to state whether bearers are citizens of Republika Srpska or the Bosniak and Croat-dominated Federation. The measure, which does not exist anywhere else in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was ostensibly aimed at encouraging the up to 30,000 Brčko residents that are citizens of neither entity to take up citizenship so they can vote.
But with citizenship often a cipher for ethnicity, the move has been interpreted as an attempt to reinforce divisions for political advantage: those with the most to gain from a swath of fresh voters on the electoral roll are the ethnic parties that dominate the assembly. One District civil servant, Mujo Hadžić, is challenging the law in the courts.
Corruption, too, is a particular problem of the free city. Because so many "national" powers are concentrated in a small cadre of people, graft is even worse than in the rest of Bosnia, where it is endemic. "This is a very small community, everyone knows everyone," says police chief Goran Lujić. "That can be a problem."
The future of Brčko is uncertain. The powers of Brčko's international supervisor – who in theory could block laws and introduce new ones – were frozen in 2012, part of a general trend for the international community to have a decreasing role in Bosnia.
Though Brčko was once the most successful of Bosnian cities (it still has a greater municipal budget than others its size), it has not been immune from the economic crisis that has battered the country. Wages are as low as 400 convertible marks (£160) a month. The main government offices are still marked by stains from eggs thrown by angry demonstrators during the protests that swept through the Federation in February. Though the protests had no real ethnic component, any change to Brčko’s unique status could inflame ethnic tensions.
The current supervisor, Tamir Waser, says the free city continues to thrive. "It has broadly been a success story," he says. But Matthew Parish, former chief legal advisor to the Brčko supervisor, disagrees. "The multi-ethnic dream that was Brčko District fell apart more or less from the first elections in 2004," says Parish, author of A Free City in the Balkans. "The veneer of multi-ethnicity is in fact just that."
Fadil Redžić thinks it's not that simple. He spent months in a Serb-run camp for local Bosniaks and Croats at Brčko’s port. Now he is president of the Brčko branch of the Bosnia and Herzegovina association of concentration camp-detainees. "Brčko is Brčko. Things develop differently here," he says, surrounded by grainy colour photographs of the victims of the camp; a museum, part funded by the local assembly, will open at the port next month. "But compared with other cities it is much better. People co-operate here, people spend time together."
Brčko is likely to remain a one-off, but its postwar history can teach us about the viability of "shared" cities in countries riven by ethnic conflict. Back at Šesta primary school, Stefan Tomić, 14, explains that even though Brčko’s classrooms are mixed, pupils are still taught religion and "mother tongue" separately. When Stefan heads off to Serbian lessons, his Bosniak friends go to the library to study Bosnian. "We are a small class. When we are separated, we are even smaller. It’s not fun," he says. "I like it best when we are all together."
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