Video of a government building in the Bosnian city of Tuzla in flames on Friday. Graffiti sprayed on its facade read “Stop Nationalism.â€
As protesters fed up with economic and political stagnation sacked government buildings in cities across Bosnia on Friday, journalists and bloggers shared images and firsthand accounts of the unrest on social networks.
Video posted online by the Bosnian news site Klix showed flames engulfing a municipal building in Tuzla, where unemployed workers protested the botched privatization of state-owned factories, and demonstrators forcing riot police officers to retreat outside the regional government headquarters in Sarajevo, the capital.
Video of protesters overwhelming the police in Sarajevo on Friday.
Haris Alisic, an Al Jazeera correspondent in Sarajevo captured the descent into mayhem as the riot police fell back in clouds of tear gas. Video posted on Instagram from the scene by the Dutch journalist Marcel van der Steen showed protesters storming the government building before moving on to the office of the Bosnian presidency, which was also set alight.
Video posted on YouTube by the news sites Novo Vrijeme and Dnevni Avaz showed police cars set on fire afterwards and the presidency building in flames. Officials said later that the fire there had burned part of the national archive that had survived the war.
Video of unrest in Sarajevo on Friday from the news site Nono Vrijeme.
Video of the fire at the Bosnian presidency on Friday from the Sarajevo news site Dnevni Avaz.
Edis Jasarevic, a journalist with the online men’s magazine Muski Portal, reported on the demonstration in Tuzla as it unfolded via Twitter. One of his images showed that the protesters who stormed the office building in Tuzla added anti-nationalist graffiti to its facade. Nearly two decades after the Dayton Accords ended the bloody civil war, Bosnia remains largely divided along ethnic-nationalist lines.
Mr. Jasarevic, who noted that protesters have been demonstrating peacefully outside the government offices in Tuzla for years over unpaid salaries, made an attempt to explain their frustration to readers outside Bosnia.
Saša Ibrulj, a soccer writer in the city of Mostar, which was divided between Croats and Muslims during the war, watched as protesters set government offices on fire and called on the police to join them.
Video from bloggers and journalists in the city of Zenica showed protesters there driving back the police near a burning government building and then hurling cars parked outside off an embankment.
A Bosnian television report on an attack on a governemnt office in the city of Zenica.
Video posted online by a radio station in Zenica showed a car being tossed into a river in Zenica by protesters.
The aftermath of mayhem in the city of Zenica on Friday.
Darko Brkan, an activist in Sarajevo, expressed his hope in an interview with The Balkanist magazine that the protests might rid the nation of the politicians who rose to prominentce during the ethnic-nationalist violence on the 1990s.
The editors of The Balkanist helped round up coverage of the protests on social networks and even rebuked the United States Embassy in Sarajevo for seeming to place blame for the unrest solely on the protesters.
While most of the unrest was the half of Bosnia ruled by politicians from the Bosnian Muslim and Croat communities, protesters also took to the streets in the mixed town of Brcko, and a correspondent for Al Jazeera, which has a local channel based in Sarajevo, reported from the Bosnian Serb city of Banja Luka that several hundred protesters marched there.
Mitra Nazar, a Dutch correspondent in Belgrade, reported that a handful of activists in neighboring Serbia expressed their solidarity with the protesters in Bosnia.
Peter Beaumont, a Guardian correspondent watching events unfold from afar, recalled that during a visit three years ago, frustration with unemployment and the unwieldy political system imposed by the Dayton Accords was palpable.
Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.
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