[Video] Bosnia: protesters set fire to a government building

By Euronews

Published on 07/02/2014 - 15:22

Protesters set fire to a section of the presidency building in Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo on Friday.

Eyewitnesses said protesters had smashed windows and threw a flare into the building despite special police efforts to disperse them with water cannon.

Earlier a local government building in northern town of Tuzla was set alight during clashes with riot police

This comes amid a third day of unrest over high unemployment and two decades of political inertia since the country’s 1992-95 war.

In Sarajevo, police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades in an attempt to disperse a crowd of several thousand.

Protests were called for Friday in towns and cities across Bosnia, in a sign of growing anger over the lack of economic and political progress since the country broke from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and descended into war.

More than one in four of the country’s workforce were out of a job in 2013.

Dramatic footage: Bosnia govt building on fire as protesters express their joy

A Reuters photographer in Tuzla, once the industrial heart of north Bosnia, said up to 6,000 people had turned out to protest the closure of factories sold off by the state.

Some broke away from the main group and attacked a government building and set it alight. Trapped by the flames, some people leapt from the windows, the photographer said.

Police said two officers were injured, one seriously.

Bosnia’s recovery from the war, in which an estimated 100,000 people died, has been constrained by a dysfunctional power-sharing system of ethnic quotas that has stymied governance and left the country trailing its ex-Yugoslav peers on the road to membership of the European Union.

Civil unrest is not common, however, with many among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks scared that violence could tip the country back into conflict.

Reuters