Editors’ note: This article is the last of a six-part series. You can read the entire series here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

It seems that at every place in Bosnia-Herzegovina where there is a lovely river, there is a dire threat to its well-being. But just about everywhere, local people are mobilized to defend their livelihoods, their health, and the natural beauty that surrounds them. The drive to protect the streams and lakes where they swam and fished in their younger years comes, as we have seen, from their respect for nature and awe at its power.

This final entry in our series on environmental activism brings us to Kakanj in central Bosnia, the center of a sustained campaign of resistance against Adriatic Metals and its mining project at Rupice, upstream toward Vareš. We also travel south to Fojnica to meet Robert Oroz, a veteran river protector. Both locations are home to an abundance of rivers, many of which are endangered by international mining projects, dam construction, or both. 

This chapter, once again, illustrates a conflict between powerful international corporations (along with their international and domestic promoters) and the ordinary people of the region. Throughout this record, we see that there are advances on the part of the profiteers, and occasional victories by the resistance. The struggle is ongoing.

Bosnia and its citizens are in the age-old position of a peripheral nation at the whim of one empire after another. More than one activist in the post-war period has expressed the thought that the domestic profiteers “have stolen everything that’s not nailed down,” so that the last target is the natural wealth of the country, to be sold to the highest bidder. But love of one’s natural surroundings persists, together with a bit of Balkan spite (inat), and there will always be resistance to the assault.

Mining, Pollution, and Resistance between Vareš and Kakanj

Kakanj is an environmentally beleaguered town that is plagued by the presence of a coal power plant supplied by nearby coal mines. Pollution from that plant is compounded by dust from the local cement factory, making Kakanj’s atmosphere grey and gritty. In addition, Kakanj has the bad fortune of being situated downstream from Rupice, a forested site near Vareš where the British company Adriatic Metals has established a lead, zinc, and silver mine.

The mine at Rupice is situated near tributary streams that feed the Bukovica River, which provides the 40,000-strong population of Kakanj with its drinking water. For several years mineral exploration at Rupice, and then excavation of ore, have been polluting the Bukovica to the point where its contamination threatens the health of Kakanj’s residents. Hajrija Čobo has been a leader of the local movement to prevent the mining company from further polluting the land and water.

A native of Kakanj, Hajrija is a high school English teacher. She is also trained as an attorney with degrees both in criminal law—with a focus on environmental crime and corruption—and in civil law, focusing on Law of Obligations and on Mobbing (corporate harassment). This background, combined with her persistence and positive outlook, makes her a formidable opponent to the network of domestic and international operators who are collaborating to raid Bosnia’s natural riches without regard for the environment. Hajrija works with the organization “Nature Reserve Trstionica and Boriva” (Park prirode Trstionica i Boriva), named after the natural riches it strives to protect.

In the fall of 2024 I traveled to Kakanj to meet Hajrija, whom I had introduced in a spring 2024 essay. For that writing, I had interviewed her on the telephone, so this was our first in-person meeting. She picked me up at the bus station, greeting me with a disarming smile. We drove through Kakanj on the way up into the surrounding hills, and then headed east through the historic town of Kraljeva Sutjeska, the home of a Franciscan monastery established in the 14th century. Higher up in the hills, we ascended Lipničko Brdo and continued northeast toward the Mehorić forest.

There are many rivers and streams that beautify the hills and valleys between Kakanj and Vareš; they are the soul of this region. Among the people who are fighting for their preservation, one feels a near-spiritual connection with these rivers. Exploring the terrain between Kakanj and Vareš, you learn that the Bukovica River is fed by Borovički Potok, which is fed by Srednji Potok. To the west of the Bukovica is the Trstionica River, fed by the Boriva River and by Vrući Potok, among many other tributaries. Downstream from that confluence, at Kraljeva Sutjeska, the Bukovica also joins the Trstionica, which then arrives at Kakanj. According to Hajrija, in Zenica-Doboj Canton’s spatial plan, the entire area from Kraljeva Sutjeska on up to Mehorić is designated as a nature reserve. “To date, it has not been implemented,” she said. “Instead, we got the mine. The spatial plan means that there is supposed to be a high level of protection, and the mine should not have happened. So, the Canton is in conflict with itself.”

In the runup to the 2024 opening of Adriatic Metals’ mine at Rupice, while the company was prospecting and preparing to excavate, it dumped mining waste into an illicit landfill; constructed a cement plant in the middle of the forest near a river; “accidentally” clearcut a large section of forest near Rupice mine; and turned a modest hiking path into a paved road. Members of Park prirode Trstionica i Boriva monitored these activities and fought back where they were able. They succeeded in having the deforested area replanted, and Adriatic Metals was compelled to remove its polluting cement plant from the forest. Activists put up fierce resistance, but the mine was opened in early 2024. In the course of Adriatic Metals’ preparation to open the mine at Rupice, the Federation’s Ministry of Agriculture, Water Management, and Forestry scandalously granted the company “temporary” permission to exploit state-owned property. Reacting to this decision, the state-level Attorney General lodged a complaint with Bosnia’s Constitutional Court.

In July, 2024, responding to the Attorney General’s complaint, the Constitutional Court annulled the Federation Ministry’s granting of land use to Adriatic Metals. Hajrija discussed this outcome: “Ninety per cent of the Adriatic Metals concession is on state-owned land. We won the case before the Constitutional Court; thus, the contract with Adriatic Metals is invalid.”

In advocating the illegal disposition of land to Adriatic Metals, Federation Prime Minister Nermin Nikšić had attempted to justify the move by stating that High Representative Christian Schmidt supported it. Upon the decision of the Constitutional Court, Nikšić said, “some apparently believe that it is better [for the forest] to remain a useless scrubland that is state-owned, rather than having a promising investment in land that is still part of the state.”

All of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s state-owned land has been subject to dispute since the end of the 1990s war, and it is not legally available for disposition by any authority until the eventual resolution of this conflict. A 2007 “Law on the Temporary Prohibition of Disposal of State Property of Bosnia and Herzegovina” prohibits the sale or granting of state-owned land until the matter is resolved at the state level. This is a sensitive problem, because authorities in the Republika Srpska have made a regular practice of illicitly selling off state-owned land in crony fashion to their friends and colleagues. The Federation Ministry’s move—clearly in the interest of profit to Adriatic Metals and its helpers in the Bosnian government—implicitly validated the RS’s flouting of the ban.

Hajrija had earlier announced that pollution rendered the drinking water for the population of Kakanj dangerous. She told me that Vodokom, the water authority, puts chlorine in the water. “”So I’m not worried about pathogens, but about heavy metals,” she said. “Vodokom tested our water for these components, but the results of the tests have not been made accessible. I received one result that said there is a high level of cadmium.”

In early 2023, activists from Nature Reserve Trstionica and Boriva staged a series of demonstrations against the mine at Rupice. Hajrija reported that the first demonstration was small, explaining that “there was much fear.” But at the second one, held in June of that year, 300 people attended. Hajrija informed me that mostly men have been active in the organization. “They get around, and they get information. They find out in advance what Adriatic Metals is going to do. They don’t work for the company, but they have friends who do.”

In late 2023 Adriatic Metals filed a libel suit—clearly a form of harassment called a “SLAPP suit” (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation)—against Hajrija for “spreading false information about the company via the media and damaging its reputation.” The company demanded 2000 KM (Bosnian marks—about $1300) in compensation. Hajrija responded to the lawsuit, as she wrote me, by presenting “a pretty nasty response of 473 pages with evidentiary material against the company, along with two CDs of proof.”

The company took three months to study this response, and then requested that its suit be withdrawn. Hajrija refused to accept withdrawal of the lawsuit, proposing instead that the plaintiff waive the claim, and that the court deliver a finding based on that waiver according to its customary civil procedure law. Alternatively, she proposed, the court could allow the dispute to proceed to its conclusion. The court chose the latter alternative; in late June of 2024 it rejected the plaintiff’s request, and Hajrija was cleared. 

We continued driving through the mountains, getting as close as we could to the operations of the mining company. Hajrija showed me the place where the Vrući Potok stream flowed into the Trstionica. I had seen photographs of this tributary, clouded and milky. Today, the water was clear. The work of the environmental activists had compelled Adriatic Metals to clean up its excavation processes and to divert polluting byproducts.

Standing by the clear stream, Hajrija spread her arms and said, “I am satisfied.”

I was a bit surprised—with a multi-million dollar adversary, I would expect her sense of victory to be a fleeting thing. Upon my questioning her comment, Hajrija insisted that this is a positive development.

I see progress, I see steps forward. We have compelled them to clean up, to clear away the refuse, to repair the terrain, to remove the concrete factory. For that, I’m satisfied. I don’t look at things so darkly. The struggle goes on. It will be an ongoing, exhausting struggle. But it is not without results, and so that is where I’m satisfied.

Indeed, Hajrija and her fellow activists know that they must not sleep soundly. The mining companies will not relent in their drive to expand their mining operation, which is sure to be accompanied by ever greater pollution.

Hajrija drew a broad picture for me, putting the community’s struggle in context:

This is not just a struggle against foreign corporations. This is a struggle against bad administration, against power, against crime, corruption. A colonizer cannot come to Bosnia if there is not a corrupt government in place to let him in. Furthermore, this is not only about nature. Yes, our struggle is to preserve life—for biodiversity, the right to water, and to a healthy environment—but it is also about honoring legal conventions and preserving human rights.

Legal machinations and expansion of operations

At the very end of 2024, there was an apparent legal setback in the status of the Adriatic Metals mine at Rupice. At that time, the cantonal court at Mostar revoked the company’s mining permit. This was the outcome of a lawsuit that the Kakanj water agency Vodokom had filed in mid-2021, just a month after the Federation Ministry for Energy, Mining, and Industry granted the permit. Vodokom objected to the permit on the grounds that Adriatic Metals (then called “Eastern Mining”) had not submitted valid documentation of any analysis of the mine’s impact on the waterways feeding into the Bukovica. Three years after the filing of the lawsuit, the Mostar court annulled the permit, determining that the mining constituted a potential danger to Kakanj municipality’s drinking water. It found not only that Adriatic Metals had not provided a concrete answer regarding that danger, but also that the Ministry had irresponsibly permitted mining in an area where mineral exploitation was prohibited.

The cantonal court’s annulment did not last very long. With uncharacteristic speed, the mining ministry granted Adriatic Metals a new permit for excavation two weeks after the Mostar decision. The ministry announced that the new permit was “supported by all-encompassing findings, analysis, expert testimony, reports of monitoring, and cartographic evidence that clearly confirm that the work of the mine has no influence on Kakanj’s water supply.”

Neither the Federation’s mining ministry nor Adriatic Metals provided background to this confirmation, nor an explanation of the way all this evidence was so quickly compiled. 

Hajrija Čobo responded harshly to the mining ministry’s speedy reversal:

It is a blatant lie that the mine does not have an impact on Bukovica! All of the runoff water from the newly built industrial roads in the water protection zone—where that kind of construction is strictly prohibited—flows into the waters that feed Bukovica, and thus arrives at the spigots of the city. To clarify, that water is polluted not only with heavy metals, but also from micro-particles of truck tires that traverse that road.

Adriatic Metals’ operations near Vareš are not confined to one mine, nor one tailings dump. The excavating machines’ hunger for more ore demands expansion. With the Constitutional Court’s mid-2024 decision prohibiting the use of state land—at Veovača forest—to receive mining waste, Adriatic Metals sought and received permission from the Federation Ministry for the Environment and Tourism to establish a new disposal site in an area east of Vareš. The new tailings dump lies immediately within a complex of settlements named Pržići, Daštansko, and Mir. There are houses that are now bordering immediately on the poisonous dump.

Residents of these villages were not involved in the decision to dump mine tailings near their homes. In September, 2024, their representatives drafted a public resolution making it clear that they opposed the new dump. By the end of that year, nevertheless, Adriatic Metals had started preparing the location to receive truckloads of tailings. Soon heavy trucks, clouds of dust, and ongoing clamor filled the days of the villagers.

One woman, a resident of Pržić village, lamented,

It used to be lovely to live here, but now, I don’t know. At times ten trucks in a row pass by here.” Dino Ahmedović of Daštansko similarly complained, “My house is 250 meters from the dump, and the sights we are seeing are dreadful. Road travel is nearly impossible, and all of this destroys our will to live, especially among the young people.

The mayor of Vareš, an avid promoter of the mining operation, stated, “Everyone who thinks that something is not all right has the right to complain. We are dealing with a serious project and a serious company, which would not allow the endangerment of the environment.”

In late December, 2024, residents of the affected villages held a meeting to discuss the new danger. One resident noted that “cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and other heavy metals and poisonous substances” are contained in the mine tailings. The assembled villagers concluded their meeting with a warning:

In the event that Adriatic Metals ignores the will of the residents… protests and a blockade of the roads will ensue, because we cannot permit that anyone can wreck our homes, destroy our health, and devastate nature, because of small profits and the compliant approach of the government.

In its first year of operation, Adriatic Metals extracted nearly 146,000 tons of ore from the Rupice mine. Half of this amount was excavated in the last three months of 2024, showing that extraction of silver, gold, zinc, lead, and other minerals was accelerating. Projections hold that Adriatic Metals could take up to eight times as much more ore out of the ground in 2025.

The company’s earnings in 2024 totaled $27 million for the approximately half of the ore that was so far processed and sold. Of that total, some 568,000 KM (about $315,000), or approximately one per cent of AM’s income, was paid to Vareš town and Zenica-Doboj Canton in concession fees. The paltry compensation of approximately $2.15 per ton of ore led one commentator to compare the exchange with “the worst neocolonial practices.”

Looking at a photo of the mine at Rupice, one has to ask whether the scar on the land, the poisoning of Kakanj’s drinking water, and the disturbance of the peace at Daštansko are worth the price. Hajrija Čobo and her colleagues from Nature Reserve Trstionica and Boriva say it is not, and they will continue to resist.

Fojnica and a visit with Robert Oroz

A widespread flooding disaster ravaged several parts of central Bosnia in early October 2024. The most extensive damage took place not far from the main road between Sarajevo and Mostar in Donja Jablanica, where 19 people were killed. Flooding also struck the Željeznica River near Fojnica, to the northwest of Sarajevo. In Fojnica municipality, the village of Luke was the hardest hit, and three people lost their lives.

Luke is also the home of Robert Oroz, a veteran of ongoing struggles to protect the rivers. I met Robert in Fojnica, and he took me on a tour along the Željeznica. An electrical engineer by trade, he became involved in river activism relatively early. Back in 2009, a domestic construction company received a concession to build a hydroelectric dam on the Željeznica, close to Luke. Robert and his fellow activists, seeing that the proposed dam was going to destroy the ecosystem around the river, formed a blockade that lasted three months. “That was the first movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina against the mini-hydroelectric dams,” he told me.

Robert reported that the blockade succeeded in discouraging the construction, but in 2011, a new company came to resume building. But this was just the beginning.

Then, we blockaded the work for 325 days and nights, non-stop. We blocked the machines with our bodies and cars. We built wooden barracks so we could at least warm ourselves, and we slept there. If the workers came, we would announce the alarm and then more people would come up to join in the action. It was the only power we had; we didn’t have political power, but in a very short time we could mobilize a lot of people.

At the time, activists used alternative communication means in alerting local residents to come participate. As Robert recounted, 

When we were starting up, the social networks were not that developed. There wasn’t Viber or Facebook, so people mainly used SMS messages. We would have three or four people who stayed up all night, and if they saw something, they would send messages to a couple of people, and then that would get spread around. Everyone knew someone to pass the alert to, so it worked very well….

Already in 2009, we understood that we had to fight on three fronts. First, there was the legal route, with lawyers finding ways to file complaints. The second thing was the struggle in the field; we had to obstruct the work. And the third part was that we had to break through a media blockade to get our message out to the public. At that time, this [protection of the river] was not a popular theme.

At first, few people got involved. But soon, the fight became a concern to everyone, and there was more and more of a turnout. There were times when people were coming to drive us away from the encampment. There were some people who would come and do all kinds of things to provoke a physical conflict that would create bad publicity for us. So we would have to be very restrained; it was very difficult to maintain that peace, so that it would not come to some ugliness. At times when it was on the edge of an incident, the women would stand in front of us like a kind of buffer zone, thinking that this would prevent a problem. 

With the tactics that we learned, we gave workshops in other areas where there was similar resistance to the construction of mini-dams. We shared our practices at Kruščica—although we then saw that the authorities there had no particular respect for the women.

Robert told me that over the years, he had attended nearly every protest against dam construction in Bosnia: “Sokolac, Višegrad, Kruščica, Neretvica, Foča, Jablanica, and many others, wherever there was a protest. The biggest, most massive and strongest protests were in the valley of the Neretvica. They were in 2020 and 2021.”

The large state-owned company Elektroprivreda, for many years dogged by accusations of corruption on the part of a series of directors, planned to build fifteen mini-hydroelectric dams on that stretch of tributary running into the spectacular Neretva River. Activists from Konjic to Mostar and beyond mobilized over several years to prevent the implementation of this project that would have profited a few operators, and destroyed the pristine waters of the Neretvica once and for all.

Driving along the Željeznica, Robert showed me a scene of recent devastation many kilometers long. The power of the swollen river pushed downed trees along the current, and crumpled concrete embankments. Operators of heavy equipment were now trying to put things back in place, moving branches upcountry and away from the riverbanks.

We arrived at Robert’s home. His house was intact, but much of his property had simply been washed away. Robert showed me where he had had an orchard between his house and the river. “Here’s where my garden was. There was a little pond here, with otters. By the river, it was all woods: maple, ash. The floods took it away. Now that area looks as if it were on the moon.”

I asked if this flooding was considered a natural disaster, or was it caused by people’s behavior. According to Robert, it was certainly a natural disaster, but,

 [T]here was an additional catastrophe based on people’s carelessness: ongoing, bad maintenance of the riverbanks. Road workers often shove all extra material there. In the last three or four years they have been widening the road. Each time they do that, they narrow the river. That works to the detriment of the riverbanks.

These are wild mountain rivers. And when something is disturbed, all kinds of things happen. The workers piled up wood, rocks, and branches in the river, creating an obstruction. When that obstruction broke during the flooding, it caused a disaster downstream. There, the debris makes a little dam, and then that breaks again, another bigger one, until it is a full-fledged flood.

We know this river. We have always looked at it with great awe (strahopoštovanje) and respect. This is exactly why we went into this struggle, because we knew how much damage could happen from the construction of a mini-dam and other abuse of the rivers.

As the new law in the Federation prohibits the construction of new mini-dams, new forms of activism are still needed in the future. Robert commented,

 We are still fighting for the protection of our rivers, against pollution from various industrial installations, and against lining the riverbanks with concrete. In the main, we’re struggling to defend our nature in different ways. There are many different environmental problems here, which we will have to work on for a very long time. For example, since 2009 the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina has not had a law about forests. That is probably the most unregulated sector in the country. There is no kind of plan, no kind of control.

Forests are part of the great wealth of Bosnia, but with the corruption in government, the whole society has been plundered. Everything that could be stolen has been taken. The giant state-owned companies such as EnergoInvest and Hidrogradnja have all been plundered. When state-owned property disappeared, then they started on the natural resources. First, it was our forests and water, and then they came for the minerals, the ore.

At the whim of Empire

For its thousand-plus years of history, Bosnia-Herzegovina has been a small land contending for survival against a succession of empires. The demands of those empires east and west—whether on the rise or in decline, have buffeted Bosnia and, at times, exerted extreme pressure not only upon the population’s material welfare, but also on people’s very identity.

Such processes are still underway today, whether or not the imperial centers consent to calling themselves “empires.” And today, as before, Bosnians are exquisitely sensitive to their status as an occupied land. Numerous times people have told me, “We survived one occupation after another, and we will survive this one as well.” There is a strain of resistance that is always under pressure, but it endures.

The pressures from without are complemented within Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the person of politicians, tycoons, and collaborators who are prepared to betray their country for personal profit. In recent generations their strategy has been to manipulate nationalism in order to divide Bosnians. Robert Oroz noted that nationalist division has made inroads among coalitions of environmentalists too, saying, “This is a problem throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina. People who oppose our efforts are trying to play the nationalism card. As the saying goes, ‘why change tactics, when nationalism works?’ And they are trying this everywhere.”

But for every manipulator or collaborator, there are people who are prepared to work together to preserve their land. The environmentalists have their solid place among this number. 

As this series winds up, threats against the well-being of Bosnia-Herzegovina appear to compound. The separatist regime in the Serb-controlled entity seems determined to shred the constitution and set out on their own. There is also an ongoing criticism from the West of Russian meddling in the region.

This criticism has merit, but those pointing the finger at the east should look at what is arguably the greatest threat of all: the environmental assault waged by Western corporations and facilitated by international and domestic officials. This assault has already caused grave damage to the land, and threatens to do much more.