When asked about the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic of China, apocryphally answered: "It's too soon to tell." However, when it comes to the continuing protests in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it's not too soon to tell that they are not just violent outbursts without a meaning.

Let us remember, the protests started in Tuzla, once the industrial centre of Tito's Yugoslavia, on 5 February, the same day that Sarajevo marked a sad anniversary – 20 years since the first massacre on the Markale market. A grenade, fired from Serbian positions around the city, fell on a full marketplace. Sixty-eight people were killed and 144 were wounded.

Last week an army of impoverished workers gathered in front of the regional government building of the Tuzla district. They demanded their salaries and pensions; basically everything that the state and the new company owners still owe them.

The unrest has now become the biggest outburst of discontent ever seen in the country with the privatisation process – a plague that has spread throughout every republic of former Yugoslavia. The protestors seized the local government building. The special forces were called into action, and a wave of protest has now spread to other cities across the country.

The Markale massacres (there were two attacks on the marketplace: one on 5 February 1994 and a second on 28 August 1995) together with the Srebrenica genocide are symbols of the tragedy of the war in Bosnia. Tuzla, along with the industrial mining town of Zenica, is a symbol of the economic destruction of the country. The war and the foul play of the transition to democracy are connected on many different levels. And this is not a peculiarity of Bosnia-Herzegovina but an all too familiar story across the whole region.

In the face of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the urgent need to transform the planned economies of socialism to the economy of the free market, the political elite of ex-Yugoslavia found a way to convert the growing social dissatisfaction of the late 80s and early 90s into ethnic hatred.

The collapse of Yugoslavia was triggered by the nationalist (former communist) elites, from which the future "winners of transition" were to emerge. The process began when the first fighting broke out, and it was still going strong when the wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo ended. It transformed itself into a fourth Yugoslav war, which, although undeclared, was no more humane than the others – a total war against the poor. Now the poor are saying: enough.

The unrest in Tuzla is therefore important. The way in which the ethno-elite play with "their own people" and claim to be defending them against another ethic group in return for absolute power over that society's wealth must be questioned. Instead of endlessly arguing about national identity, religion and linguistic differences, people are now asking the real question: where is our money?

The elites of the region are worried and their western allies are anything but indifferent – revolutions have this bad habit of jumping over borders. All around Bosnia "plenums" (or assembly) are taking place, with protesters wanting to replace the dysfunctional political system with direct democracy. They ask for the revision of the privatisation process and the dismantling of the whole political elite. In answer to these requests, drones are flying over demonstrators in Sarajevo. High representative Valentin Inzko announces that the EU will send troops to Bosnia. Last time foreign troops came to Bosnia to calm the ethnic conflict. If they come again it will be to suppress the revolution.

In Sarajevo, just before the war in Bosnia, no more then 50 meters from Markale Market, at a post office I passed every day on my way to school, graffiti appeared one day: "This is Serbia". The very next day, someone added: "This is the post office, idiot". This revealed a lot about things to come.

A completely different graffiti explains what is happening in Bosnia today. The truth of the Bosnian protests lies in the scene of a burning building in Tuzla, with the flames illuminating an inscription on the wall made by protesters: "Death to nationalism".