4 They were joined by dozens of other “occupiers,” who announced that they would not let the parliamentarians out until they reached an agreement and resolved Ibišević’s problem. On 6 June, a group of eight self-organized Sarajevans used cars and their own bodies to surround the building and block the entrances to the parliament. 3 However, this time, with the life of a sick newborn at stake, many Bosnian citizens were losing both their patience and their postwar ambivalence about direct political engagement. The disagreement at hand was not at all unusual, since such disputes have become routine fixtures of postwar political life. Because Belmina had never been assigned a JMBG number, she could not be issued a passport needed for travel outside of Bosnian borders.īaby Belmina’s plight exemplified the absurd and frequently outrageous costs borne by Bosnian citizens amid ongoing quarrels between the country’s governing nationalist parties, which have persisted long after the infamous 1992–1995 Bosnian War.
The interruption of this routine process eventually became a life-threatening problem for Belmina Ibišević, a three-month-old baby in dire need of specialized medical care that was only available in Germany. Six months before the protests, a standoff between nationalist parties in the Bosnian parliament lead to the suspension of the law regulating the issuing of “JMBG” numbers, 2 personal identifiers used in nearly all administrative encounters between citizens and the state. This wave of demonstrations-eventually nicknamed the JMBG protests or the Babylution (Bebolucija, or baby revolution)-was sparked by a dramatic if unsurprising political scandal. In June 2013, after years of mounting political discontent and periodic expectation of a large-scale civic 1 insurrection, the sleepy streets of Bosnian-Herzegovinian cities and towns suddenly filled with protesters.
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