'Politics is a whore': Women, morality and victimhood in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina

In the summer of 1999, a group of Bosnian women politicians and leaders of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were gathered in the city of Tuzla under the auspices of the Bosnian League of Women Voters (Liga žena glasaa) to discuss strategies for increasing women’s participation in formal politics. Senka Nožica, a member of the civic opposition in the Federation and one of the most prominent women active in Bosnian politics, held forth on the superiority of women politicians over men: Several months later, Irena Soldat-Jovanovi, a parliamentary representative from Republika Srpska speaking on Bosnian television lamented the dramatic fall in the number of women in formal politics which had accompanied the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. While the socialist system had required women’s participation through quotas, the multi-party elections of 1990 did away with such requirements (although quotas for ethno-national representation were stipulated), and only 4.9 percent of those elected in those pre-war elections were women (Ler- Sofroni 1998: 91). 1 Soldat-Jovanovi therefore concluded: Both of these women were appealing to popular notions of gender and politics circulating in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. Politics itself is often gendered through the common phrase, ‘politika je kurva’ (‘politics is a whore’), which is used to emphasize the corrupt, fickle, and immoral nature of political deal-making (Jaluši 1994; Grandits, Kolind, this volume). While politics is in this way feminized, it is nonetheless understood and portrayed in everyday and official discourses alike as a male arena where women, especially respectable women, have no place. 2 Since the end of the war, however, women have increasingly been active in a variety of capacities in the public sphere, engaging issues of political importance, as well as directly in the realm of formal politics. 3 In fact, a broad- based, multi-ethnic group of women NGO activists and politicians from a range of political parties, with substantial backing from the ‘international community’, has formed a movement of women calling for increased participation of women in politics and attention to a variety of ‘women’s issues’.