Nicolas Moll: Solidarity is More than a Slogan. International Workers Aid During and After the 1992–1995 War in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Nicolas Moll’s book Solidarity is More than a Slogan deals with a new topic in the field of Southeast European Studies: solidarity work of West European civil society activists during and after the wars in the dissolving Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Moll documents the work of International Workers Aid (IWA), an organisation and platform of activists who arranged aid convoys to the Bosnian town of Tuzla. The book provides insight into how activists from different West European countries organised to offer practical aid “in a very hands-on way, even if the reality on the ground was far from glamorous” (100). The study highlights the extraordinary and compassionate work of activists who stressed an alternative approach to aid work—they combined solidarity and humanitarian aid with the explicit aim not to subordinate the recipients of their aid, but to empower them. Additionally, Moll gives prominence to how civil society actors provided humanitarian aid outside the bigger humanitarian actors in the region, thereby putting their own political convictions into practice. The book is divided into two parts. While the first part traces the activities of the IWA, its organisational structure and political aims between 1993 and 2000, the second part is a collection of primary sources, such as letters by activists and protocols of international IWA meetings. This selection of primary sources as well as the photographs, leaflets, newspaper articles, and other materials presented throughout the book give the reader a lively insight into the IWA’s projects and (occasionally dangerous) activities.

The IWA started its work in London in 1993. A group of trade unionists, socialists, and other individuals became aware of the worrying situation in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and decided to help. A group of people in the United Kingdom organised a convoy of trucks carrying donations. On its way through other European countries, more trucks joined the convoy so that finally 16 trucks with over 60 drivers and accompanying persons from more than 10 countries drove towards Bosnia. Even though the United Nations (UN) forces refused to accompany them through Croatia, the convoy managed to drive to the border with Bosnia, where it stopped. Confronted with the war and not having the option to cross the border, most of the trucks turned around and distributed their donations to refugees around the Croatian capital of Zagreb. Only three trucks decided to continue and take the “southern route”—along the Adriatic coast—and managed to enter Bosnia-Herzegovina and reach Tuzla. Their success in actually reaching their destination was the beginning of a host of strenuous activities in Tuzla that lasted several years.

From 1994 onwards, the IWA started to organise humanitarian convoys to Tuzla more frequently. Establishing two offices, one in Tuzla and one in Makarska, a coastal town near Split on the Croatian coast, they organised and coordinated many convoys, among them 30 food convoys and one with special items for women. Although the IWA organised aid to other towns in Bosnia as well, Tuzla remained its pivot. A mining town with a long tradition of labour, during the 1990s war Tuzla was the only city in Bosnia-Herzegovina whose ruling party defended its multiethnic way of life and fought against nationalist attacks. For the IWA this was a decisive factor: it supported the city because of this struggle to counter nationalism and provided help for the members of the local mining trade union, which was the city’s biggest. After the war’s end, the IWA remained in Tuzla and initiated several projects. Two of the longest-lasting activities were the launching of a trade union paper, which was published from 1995 to 1998, and the establishment of a women’s centre, which existed from 1997 until 1999. The newspaper aimed to inform and prepare workers for the upcoming privatisation process. In addition, it was “intended to address the lack of communication between the trade unions and the workers and to strengthen the links between them” (68). The women’s centre had an analogous function in that it connected and gave information to women, provided childcare for working parents, and hosted an SOS hotline for women suffering from domestic or other forms of violence.

The book’s aim is to document the extraordinary activities of the IWA during and after the war in Bosnia. A comprehensive analytical approach to its actions is not an explicit aim of the author, so a theoretical or historical framework is largely missing. Moll deals with the war in the 1990s, but, like many other authors writing about Bosnia during the war, omits the socialist past from his narrative. As most of the actors involved with the IWA considered themselves leftists or socialists, it would have been interesting to learn more about the IWA activists’ attitude towards socialist Yugoslavia. Did the former system of workers’ self-management, or the socialist system of Yugoslavia as such, play a role in motivating West Europeans to support the workers in Bosnia? Moll frames the IWA as an integral part of a global social movement of the 1990s, but never characterises or contextualises this movement in more depth. What made the IWA part of a global social movement? Even though the reader might suspect the answer, it remains unclear if and how humanitarian aid can be considered an actor towards social change. Furthermore, the reader learns little about what the IWA’s work reveals about humanitarian aid more generally in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina, or about what it meant to act as a leftist political organisation in a war context.

It is the enthusiasm of the activists, the multinational character of the IWA, and their strenuous political and humanitarian, yet by no means dogmatic support that catches the reader. The book Solidarity Is More than a Slogan shows how the IWA activists struggled and navigated between their own political beliefs, their expectations, and the actual situation they faced on the ground. This narrative is the book’s strength. On the one hand, political activists will find many of the IWA’s discussions and conflicts familiar. On the other hand, the book reminds readers that, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, humanitarian aid was not reserved for “big players” such as the International Red Cross or the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). This alone makes Moll’s book a valuable contribution to the research on the wars in Yugoslavia during the 1990s.