human touch: Civil affairs in Bosnia, The

Livno, Bosnia-Herzegovenia, a town of about 30,000, sits in a lush plain between mountains that rise along its eastern horizon and the rocky coastal finger of Croatia to the west. Livno has been famous for its cheese for, perhaps, centuries. Bosnia, of course, has been famous for its war in recent years. For six months last year, however, four members of an Army Reserve civil affairs unit from Maryland were based in Livno to help the local people concentrate more on cheese making than on warfare.

Operating in the British sector of Bosnia, a team from the 450th Civil Affairs Battalion (Airborne) manned a civil-military information center (CIMIC) in Livno with the mission to identify projects that would help the citizens recover from war and to convince various government and nongovernmental international relief organizations to undertake and fund those projects.

"Simply put, our job was to be facilitators," said Capt. Tom Anthony, the senior American member of the Livno CIMIC. (The team was commanded by British Maj. Andy Fontana.) "At one end of the spectrum were large projects to help villages whose whole infrastructure needed to be fixed, and at the other were things like getting firewood to senior citizens in the mountains who couldn't chop their own as winter set in," Capt. Anthony explained.

During the six months the 450th soldiers were there, the Livno CIMIC team completed about 50 projects by raising $6 million in international support.

Civil affairs and psychological operations personnel, primarily Army Reservists, served throughout Bosnia and the surrounding rim countries during NATO's Operation Joint Endeavor, and they continue to serve with Operation Joint Guard as part of the Stabilization Force. The 450th Civil Affairs Battalion, whose normal operational affiliation is with the 82nd Airborne Division, is part of the 352nd Civil Affairs Command, which had teams scattered throughout the theater of operations. (See the related article on Page 24.)

The Livno CIMIC team was lucky. Its area was relatively secure. The threat was low enough for the British command to place the team directly in Livno, living within the community.

"Other areas had a higher security level, and they were not as fortunate as we were to be in a town, but all of the civil affairs teams did the best they could under their particular circumstances," Capt. Anthony said.

Relative to other areas of Bosnia, the Livno area was not hit hard by the war. Although some villages were destroyed, many were left unscathed. In some villages, individual homes were destroyed while neighboring houses were left untouched. Inside some, damage was relegated to a particular portion-the first floor was gutted and ransacked, for example, while the second was left intact. "With dinner plates still on the table," one of the team's soldiers added.

"Sometimes we wondered if everything we were doing was having an impact," said Sgt. Mark Holt, a member of the CIMIC team. "But after a while, the kids didn't seem so afraid, and we got the sense that everyone felt that security was improving and that things were going to get better." "The key to civil affairs is to be flexible and to adapt to the situation," Capt. Anthony said. "If you think about the last four or five operations with civil affairs involvementSomalia or Haiti, for example-each has been different. So you have to be flexible, identify the problems, figure out what is achievable and then work to correct those problems."

"You really have to adapt to other people's ways of doing things," Sgt. Holt said.

"In our area of Bosnia, the situation was not terrible. The people were not destitute; they were not starving or living in tents," Capt. Anthony said. "Their basic needs were taken care of, so our goal was to help them help themselves repair the damage."

"We were limited in the help we could offer," Sgt. Jeffrey Larson, a team member, said. "In one case, some elderly Muslim men came into the office and said they were being shortchanged on their pensions. They wanted us to go to city hall and get their back pay, but that is not what we were there to do."

"Much of our job was finding the common ground," Sgt. Holt said. "We had to find out what the people needed, determine what the [relief] agencies were offering and then get everyone to a place somewhere in the middle." "The key in our situation was to be completely neutral. We had to be careful not to show any favoritism to a particular group, and we had to let them know that we were not there to give handouts-that we were there to give assistance," Capt. Anthony added. "People would see the sign on our office and walk in wanting monetary assistance or a job. You can't fault them for that; it's human nature. But it was clear very early to us that the best thing we could do as individuals while we were there was to concentrate on getting projects done, so we sold agencies on our services as a CIMIC-coordinating and providing information-to get those projects done."

In simple terms, the team practiced the basic art of Army civil affairs-negotiating-but in real, people-to-people terms, the soldiers' jobs entailed much more.

To the people of Livno and the surrounding 875 squaremile area served by the CIMIC, the four American soldiers stood for the United States-and their duty in that regard emerged one tragic day.

"During physical training, we ran through the streets," explained Sgt. Holt. "After we had been there a while, we acquired our own cheering section-kids who would come out in the street and encourage us as we ran by."

A regular member of the cheering section, a boy who lived next door to the CIMIC, one day found a rocket-propelled grenade lost during the fighting and took it home. It detonated, blowing off his feet and one arm.

Sergeants Holt and Larson took the boy to a hospital in Split, Croatia, and stayed with him until his parents arrived the next day.

"When we returned, people started bringing food to the CIMIC...and they seemed to feel better about us being there," Sgt. Holt said.

"They really began to see that we were there to help." Sgt. Larson added.

"Something that eventually became routine after that was a gesture between me and a local policeman who lived across the street," Sgt. Holt recalled. "If the policeman was outside his house when I went to the vehicle in the morning, he would give me a salute, and I would salute him back. We would stand there for a few seconds-me saluting a Bosnian, and him saluting an American."

Copyright Association of the United States Army Apr 1997
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