Profile: Ken Hashimoto

The Balkans began rebuilding homes, roads, neighborhoods and towns ravaged by war after the Dayton peace accords were signed just over four years ago. As outlined by the accord, the construction activity also must focus on an area of life in which the region has little experience: democracy.

That's where UC alumnus Ken Hashimoto stepped in. Before enrolling in law school in fall 1999, the Finneytown high school graduate spent the past two-and-a-half years of his life helping to lay a democratic foundation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the west central region of what used to be Communist-controlled Yugoslavia.

Hashimoto's role in forging democracy, working as a resident representative in Bosnia for the Washington D.C.-based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) from January 1997 to July 1999, presented him with an unexpected dilemma. "It's not like their democracy is taking root through a constitutional congress. I had to ask myself what makes our way the right way?"

"What I fell back on was that in Bosnia, even though many of the democratic structures were being organized through the peace agreement rather than a constitutional congress, this is the system that needs to start working because there is nothing else peaceful in its place right now," said the 30-year-old, who graduated from UC in 1991 with double bachelor's degrees in history and international relations.

The enforced peace agreement, hammered out in December 1995 at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, has brought an end to the ethnic conflict that began in 1991 when Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Many people of Serbian ethnicity did not want to live in an independent Croatia ruled by Croatians, sparking the first conflicts. Soon after, Bosnia declared independence and a three-way ethnic war ensued among Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs as the three groups, with heavy pressure from the outside, fought over whether Bosnia should be independent, share a government with the Croats living in Croatia or be part of a greater Serbia.

In contrast to those years of strife before he arrived, the time that Hashimoto worked in Bosnia was relatively calm. One had to use common sense and stay on the roads to avoid hitting a mine inadvertently. There are sometimes reports of harassment, but the peace is being enforced by the Stabilization Force, SFOR for short.

"As an American I was not at risk really. As the ethnic populations dislocated during the war move back into their communities, there are sometimes grenades tossed into homes after they return or crops burned down. In Serb-held areas to the north of Bosnia, there was a kind of anti-American sentiment because of our perceived role in forcing a peace agreement. But I had the luxury of working closely with many Serbs and Croats and made great friends with many of them."

Since he spoke little Serbo-Croatian, he relied on translators to communicate most of the time. To teach democratization to Bosnians, the former inner-city teacher who taught in Los Angeles, trained and coached paid civic organizers, who worked in three regions of the country to engage citizens in political processes -- the kind of grassroots political participation that citizens in the United States take for granted.

For example, the small rural village of Vionica in southwest Bosnia needed repairs to the only road connecting it to the larger municipality nearby. In a small town in the United States, citizens might attend a village council or township trustees meeting to complain. But in Vionica, the villagers didn't know what to do.

Hashimoto helped to point the way. "We worked with a group of citizens, first talking about general democratic policies, and then that group began working to change things. The community was run by a municipal government with one strong, dominant political party. The group decided to crash one of the municipal political party meetings and told the party leaders that they wanted to elect their own representative to the municipal council...Within four days, the community group had a town meeting to elect a representative.

"Now the group is organizing citizens to work on the road repairs and calling for donations to get it done."

One of the most exciting moments came in another town as Hashimoto watched a dominant, central party disintegrate during a meeting, as a break-away female candidate rallied support. "It was pretty thrilling to watch people stand up to a prevailing, mainstream way of thinking. That kind of empowerment is very exciting to watch."

Hashimoto knew the time had come to leave when the staff he had hired and supervised began to get things done without his help. "Suddenly I realized, they don't need me anymore. It was hard, but at the same time a huge relief. It felt really good."