“This essay has been produced as part of the project ‘District of Reconciliation’, co-funded by the European Union, implemented with the participation of the European Movement in Serbia and coordinated by the Foundation Novi Sad European Capital of Culture. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the project partners.”
How a tram incident reflected three decades of unfinished statebuilding
On the morning of 12 February 2026, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a 1975-model
tram on Route 1 failed to brake at a sharp turn near the National Museum in the central part
of the city. It derailed at near full speed, striking the platform and killing Erdoan Morankić, a
23-year-old student of fine arts from Brčko. A 17-year-old girl, Ela Jovanović, lost a leg. By
the following evening, citizens had gathered at the crash site to pay their respects and leave
flowers and candles. By 14 February, thousands had blocked the main roads in protest.
Within days, the Prime Minister of Sarajevo Canton had resigned.
The tram had told a story before it even derailed – it was nearly fifty years old, and, as
investigators would later confirm, the vehicle’s onboard camera system had not recorded
footage since November 2025. This was not simply an infrastructure failure. For many of the
demonstrators who filled Sarajevo’s streets following the incident, it was the manifestation of
what they had long suspected: that the political system around them was not designed to keep
them safe, it was designed to sustain itself.
As protests grew, the frustration was not directed towards the tram driver, rather towards the
authorities. The messages that echoed were “Justice”, “Your hands are bloody”, and perhaps
most symbolically, “We are angry in all three languages.” They represented the discontent
that led Bosnia and Herzegovina’s protest movements over the past decade, which
emphasized that corruption, institutional failure, and political irresponsibility affect citizens
across ethnic lines. In a political system still heavily structured around the ethnic divisions
institutionalized by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, such messages represent a powerful
attempt to articulate political grievances in civic rather than ethnonational terms.
More broadly, the Sarajevo protests illustrate an important dynamic in contemporary Bosnia
and Herzegovina: growing frustration among younger generations with political structures
that many perceive as ineffective, unaccountable, and disconnected from everyday social
realities. This raises the question of whether the emerging generation in BiH is willing and
able to transcend ethnonational divides on the basis of shared sociopolitical grievances.
A system based on division
To understand why a tram accident could carry this much political weight, it helps to
understand the system in which it occurred. The 1995 Dayton Agreement ended the war in
Bosnia and Herzegovina but embedded ethnicity into the constitutional fabric of the state.
Political representation was made dependent on ethnic identity (Bosnian, Serb, and Croat)
which created, as scholars have noted, a system that keeps institutions in a near-permanent
state of deadlock, as elites face few incentives for cross-ethnic compromise and instead
sustain zero-sum competition.¹ The system was led by a liberal peacebuilding logic: stabilise
the country, separate the warring factions, build institutions, and democratic long-term peace
and stability will follow. Three decades later, BiH records a democracy score of 3.18 in
Freedom House’s Nations in Transit report – one of the lowest in the region.²
What the Dayton framework could not resolve was the gap between its formal institutional
architecture and the everyday realities of a society that had, before the war, been deeply
interwoven across ethnic lines. Over time, this system has contributed to widespread public
frustration. Three decades after Dayton, Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to struggle with
political paralysis, corruption scandals, and slow progress in democratic reforms.³
One questionnaire respondent, a 27-year-old student of history at the Faculty of Philosophy in
Sarajevo, described the system’s structural dysfunction: “There is a certain apathy in Bosnian
society when it comes to protests and resistance. Society unfortunately resembles a group of
people with a high tolerance for injustice, until – as a local saying goes – shots are fired. …
Parliament blockades, where parties simply don’t show up to sessions until they get
something in return, should be treated as criminal offences, but the entire judicial system is
corrupted and under the influence of different political parties.” For him, the question is not
whether BiH needs reform, but whether the civic energy to push for it can survive the weight
of the structures pushing back.
“We are angry in all three languages”
The slogan “we are angry in all three languages” did not originate in February 2026. It first
appeared in 2014, during protests that began with laid-off factory workers in Tuzla which
spread across the country. The previous version “we are hungry in three languages” was a
direct pushback to ethnonationalist post-war politics by insisting on a shared experience of
hardship that goes beyond ethnic lines. An interesting characteristic of those protests were
plenums: open citizen assemblies where people made decisions outside the established party
structures, imagining, at least briefly, a different kind of political community.⁴ As philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed at the time, the demonstrators’ act of waving Bosnian,
Serb, and Croat flags side by side reflected “a rebellion against nationalist elites – the people
of Bosnia have finally understood who their true enemy is: not other ethnic groups, but their
own leaders who pretend to protect them from others.”⁵
That movement lost momentum. But the slogan survived, and the generation now carrying it
is a different one – younger, less familiar with the war, and increasingly impatient with a
system they did not choose. Journalist Slađan Tomić, in an interview for the news portal
Mašina, explains the logic behind the more recent protest messages: “When you live in a
system that kills you because of corruption, it kills you equally, whether you are Serb,
Bosniak, or Croat. In all three languages we are angry, and in all three languages we demand
accountability” ; in addition, he observed that this new generation in BiH is “less receptive to
narratives of ethnic division.”⁶
A 26-year-old philosophy student at the University of Sarajevo described the recent events:
“The girl injured by the tram attends a Catholic school centre, and a large number of her
classmates come from different parts of Bosnia, and had participated in the protests out of
solidarity with her. There was even a solidarity march organised in Banja Luka. Despite
strong ethnonational pressure on the protests, they did gather people from different ethnic
backgrounds.” The significance of a support march in Banja Luka (the capital of Republika
Srpska, the ethnically Serb entity) should not be overlooked. It is the kind of cross-national
solidarity that the Dayton framework’s borders perhaps could not understand.
The same student reflected on the generational dimension of what he was witnessing: “What
mostly gave me hope from the start was the rebellion of young people, particularly high
school students, who are completely unaware of the many premises of BiH’s complicated
political system, yet who came out and demanded basic human rights and justice in the face
of a failing system.” The protesters who blocked Sarajevo’s main streets in February 2026
were largely born after the end of the war. As such, this generation appears to truly push back
on the strict ethnonational divisions and reject the institutional legacy that continues to shape
their everyday lives.
Glimpses of regional solidarity
The resonances with Serbia’s ongoing protest movement were impossible to ignore. Since
November 2024, when a concrete canopy collapsed at the newly renovated Novi Sad railway
station, resulting in 16 victims, Serbian students had led one of the largest civic mobilisations
the country had seen in a generation, eventually spreading to over 400 cities and towns. The
many slogans that emerged including “Corruption kills”, “Your hands are bloody” and red
handprint iconography, crossed the border into Sarajevo almost entirely.
The borrowing of protest slogans was noted by participants with both admiration and honest
critique. Sarajevo students explained: “The same slogans, the same age group, the same
desire for a better tomorrow”,” If anything needed to be borrowed from Serbia, it should have
been the organisational model: a central social media account, an efficient stewarding
structure, chosen speakers, avoiding a fan-chant style of protest.” They also noted that while
demands evolved with each gathering, becoming “more inclusive – a platform for every
bereaved mother, father, brother and sister”, the lack of a coordinated organisational structure
ultimately cost the movement momentum.⁷ Tomić also observed the resemblance between the
two movements: “A similar generation of young people is mobilising against similar social
deviations caused by nepotism, corruption, and the appointment of the politically loyal rather
than the capable”.⁸ These testaments uncover that the protests in BiH and Serbia are less a
story of regional solidarity by design, rather a parallel dissatisfaction that led to the same
conclusions.
The solidarity went both directions. During the earlier phase of the Serbian protests, students
in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Slovenia organised their own demonstration, thus
sharing the underlying grammar of generational frustration with systems perceived as corrupt,
unaccountable, and unmoved by the tragedy.⁹ Additionally, several news articles reported
that the participation of Bosniak students from Novi Pazar in the Serbian protests was widely
noted as a meaningful moment in Serb-Bosniak relations.¹⁰
What connects these two movements is neither shared ethnic identity nor post-Yugoslav
nostalgia. It is something more pragmatic – a shared civic language, developed by a
generation that sees its problems as structural and regional rather than national and cultural.
This cross-border dynamic carries a significance that should not be overlooked.
Applications for regional reconciliation
The Dayton framework has proven remarkably resilient to change, in part because the elites
who benefit from it have every incentive to preserve it.¹¹ But the local perception has changed – the understanding of civic identity as first, and ethnic as second is precisely what top-down peacebuilding has struggled to create in the past three decades. This bottom up development
creates an interesting environment for building sustainable peace, especially for younger
generations, who find themselves in a key moment between choosing to continue imposed
narratives or create their own path, in both national and regional contexts.
For organisations working on regional reconciliation, these events highlight some
conclusions worth thinking about. The cross-border sharing of the protest slogans suggest
that this generation perceives their struggles as structurally connected rather than nationally
separate, thus reconciliation may be more effective in initiatives where shared problems are at
the forefront of the stage, rather than ethnic relations themselves. Additionally, the
acknowledgement of the obstacles is real: the politicisation of universities and civil society,
and the continuing grip of nationalist elites on the media landscape, pose genuine challenges
to sustaining civic momentum. Continued trust and a platform for the young generation to
work together on shared challenges across borders, may prove a more durable basis for
building reconciliation efforts, than any framework imposed from above.
To close off, I want to share what the students from Sarajevo responded when asked what
changes they wanted to see in BiH in the next decade: “Change this paradigm,” one
respondent wrote, “and I can then hope for many other changes.” The paradigm he had in
mind was the grip of party rule on every sphere of public life. That aspiration, not ethnic
reconciliation as an abstract goal, but the dismantling of a system in which ethnic categories
are deployed to maintain elite power, may be the most honest account yet of what
reconciliation looks like to the generation that is attempting to make themselves heard on the
streets of Sarajevo.
Essay written by: Katarina Ilić, member of the Research Forum of the European Movement in Serbia.
Download the essay in PDF format HERE.
