The young can’t be bothered to vote in elections, the old are destitute and only the professional politicians with profitable business connections are a going concern in Bosnia. There’s peace, but not much life for most citizens
By Jean-Arnault Dérens
A few days before Bosnia-Herzegovina’s last general election, on 1 October 2006, a handful of activists from an obscure group from the town of Kakanj, in central Bosnia, gathered in Sarajevo. Watched by astonished passers-by, they threw paint bombs at the façade of the state presidency before being hustled away by police. This despairing gesture in protest against the country’s political paralysis aroused sympathy in the city’s democratic circles. But several demonstrations soon after against the brutality of the police reaction attracted only a few hundred people.
The democrats have every reason to be angry. The brutal murder of a teenage boy on a tram earlier this year led to protests about local politicians’ incompetence and refusal to take responsibility. The crowds were mostly the very young and the retired, some waving portraits of Marshal Tito. But this timid manifestation of public concern contrasted with the prevailing lethargy of the political class.
The 2006 election marked the eclipse of the old nationalist political parties: the Party of Democratic Action (SDA); the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS); and the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). But that didn’t improve the quality of political debate.
Although the SDA is still the leading Bosniac Muslim party, its candidate for the rotating presidency, Sulejman Tihic, was beaten by the charismatic Haris Silajdzic, a former prime minister during the war in Bosnia. Silajdzic left the SDA for the Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina (SBH), which campaigns for a reorganised, united Bosnia-Herzegovina “without entities” (see An international mess). This earned him some support among democrats and anti-nationalists. His victory can also be attributed to the open support of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s leading Islamic authority, the Grand Mufti (reis-ul-ulema) Mustafa Effendi Ceric (see Islam in Bosnia).
On the Serbian side, the SDS was swept aside by Milorad Dodik’s Union of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD). During the war, Dodik sat in the national assembly of the Republika Srpska (RS), but he was never an active member of the regime established by the SDS under Radovan Karadzic (extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal in July, after 13 years on the run). After peace was restored, Dodik exploited his relatively clean political record to present himself as a democrat, securing the endorsement of the West, especially the US, as a Serbian alternative.
During the immediate post-war period, Dodik cosied up to the democratic opposition. He went into business between 1998 and 2001 and withdrew from politics. Then, during the campaign for the 2006 elections, he resurfaced to articulate all the traditional demands of Bosnian Serb nationalism, asserting the RS’s right to self-determination and promising a referendum on the subject. This strategy paid off: the SNSD crushed its rivals, winning an absolute majority in the RS, of which Dodik is the prime minister, and establishing itself as the largest party in the national parliament.
Although he is now Bosnia’s most powerful politician, Dodik seldom visits Sarajevo, preferring to remain in his fief at Banja Luka, the RS capital. Bosnian politics has turned into a face-off between Dodik and his direct opponent Silajdzic, with Dodik demanding the devolution of power to the entities, and even the secession of the RS, while Silajdzic calls for their eradication.
This dangerous confrontation has marginalised other political parties: the social democrats have run out of political ideas and the Croatian community has little demographic or political influence. It is estimated that the Croats now represent no more than 11% of the population, compared with 17.5% in 1992. Bosnia’s significantly more prosperous neighbour Croatia will become even more attractive when it joins the EU in a few years’ time. Meanwhile Croat politicians within Bosnia have been discredited by accusations of corruption implicating several officials from the HDZ, which has now split. Although Bosnia’s Croat parties continue to control several of the 10 cantons in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBH), they are now marginalised at national level.
A new Milosevic
According to Srdjan Dizadarevic, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina: “Silajdzic and Dodik are using. . . fear to mobilise their communities. They are another double act like Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic.”
How vulnerable is the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina? For months politicians in Serbia, especially Vojislav Kostunica during his recent premiership, threatened that if Kosovo achieved independence, the RS would follow suit. Dodik took up the call, asking how the Serbs of Bosnia could be denied what was granted to Kosovo’s Albanians. Yet after Kosovo proclaimed independence, on 17 February 2008, nothing happened beyond a few unimpressive demonstrations in Banja Luka and other Serbian towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The main purpose of the threats was rhetorical. Dodik has no intention of proclaiming the RS’s independence, since he is aware that nobody would recognise it. Given his ambivalent relations with politicians in Serbia, he has nothing to gain from closer ties that would leave him a mere provincial governor (1).
Kosovo’s independence was good news for him, since it lent credibility to his threat of secession. But he tempered his aggressive rhetoric by reassuring the West that even if other Serb politicians were tempted towards futile adventurism, under him nothing would change. He strengthened his negotiating position while convincing the Europeans that he remained essential to stability and that nobody should try to pick a fight with him over corruption scandals. Dodik has benefited enormously from his political hegemony and from the absence of any credible opponent.
The system he established has also proved profitable. Dubious privatisations, notably of telecoms (2) and the Brod oil refinery, have made him, his party and his friends very rich. He has extended his control of the media: as well as public television, he now controls the two leading newspapers, Glas Srpske and the previously independent Nezavisne Novine.
Although you don’t hear much criticism in Banja Luka, the journalist Slobodan Vaskovic said: “The Dodik system is worse than that of Radovan Karadzic. He has turned theft and intimidation into a method of government.” The system depends on about 10 people directly linked to Dodik and all, like him, from the town of Laktasi, just outside Banja Luka. Their names feature in the complex network of businesses controlled by the company Integral Inzenjering, established by Dodik in the early 1990s, which now dominates the public sector. According to Vaskovic: “The international community created Dodik, and it has finally realised, too late, that it has created a new Milosevic. The only difference is that he has no interest in ideology or nationalism, just in power and money.”
In business, Dodik has reached understandings with political rivals from the other communities, especially Silajdzic. Both are involved, sometimes as associates, sometimes as rivals, in the energy sector, where Bosnia’s enormous water resources promise enormous opportunities. In a region with a chronic lack of energy, there is a huge temptation to build dams. So far public campaigns have blocked plans to build dams on the Vrbas, above Banja Luka, and on the Tara in Montenegro, near the Bosnian border. But other sites are under consideration.
Despite the potential environmental damage, it is difficult to oppose such projects in a country whose economy is close to collapse. The only significant investment in recent years was the purchase of the Zenica steelworks, in the FBH, by ArcelorMittal. The unemployment rate is more than 40% of the working population. The trade unions, divided along ethnic lines, are incapable of suggesting any alternative or of defending wages. Farmers and pensioners have been united only by their despair: both groups have spent weeks camped out in front of the parliament building in Sarajevo.
Building stability
The recent police “reforms” indicate the degree to which Dodik’s parasitic system has benefited from the political paralysis. Since 1995, police forces have been dependent upon the two entities and this has reinforced the division of the country and often sabotages criminal investigations. The reform and unification of the police has been an unresolved issue in Bosnian politics for several years.
The reforms that Dodik finally approved in April were almost meaningless: the police forces will remain separate, but coordination structures will be established. When the SDA and the social democrats refused to vote for this pseudo-reform, they were accused of radicalism. The international High Representative and European politicians hailed it as a great leap forward and rewarded Bosnia with a stabilisation and association agreement with the European Union, signed on 16 June.
This spurious last-minute compromise fooled nobody in Brussels. But in the absence of any strategy, international policy on Bosnia can now be summed up as stability. The fragile edifices that diplomats have been trying to build in the Balkans since Kosovo’s declaration of independence are based on the assumption that nothing will change in Bosnia. From this point of view, Dodik’s success in neutralising Serb nationalism makes him just the man.
When the Dayton agreement was signed in December 1995, the optimists hoped that time would heal wounds and remove political obstacles. Nothing of the sort happened and without some innovative plan Bosnia will stagnate even further. EU strategy, such as it is, has focused on the imminent accession of Croatia, and upon hastening that of Serbia, which is regarded as one of the pillars of regional stability. Brussels is prepared to sacrifice Bosnia, Kosovo and even Macedonia, although Macedonia has been an official candidate for EU membership since 2005.
Final phase of ethnic cleansing
Although visitors to Sarajevo will notice few visible traces of the war (3) or the siege, the image of normality is deceptive. The population has returned to its pre-war total of 500,000, but its demographic structure has been turned upside-down. Only 20,000 Serbs live there now, compared with 150,000 before the fighting began; many Bosniacs left during or after the conflict. They have been replaced by new arrivals from the countryside and from small towns, driven out of the RS or part of a rural exodus. Some also came from Sandjak, a mostly Bosniac region split between Serbia and Montenegro. A city that once had a powerful urban identity is now the location of potential conflict between the established population and the newcomers.
Three years ago the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees triumphantly announced the return of a million refugees and displaced persons. But these figures are illusory. Most refugees who go back to the area where their community is now a minority sell up and go again. The Helsinki Committee has described such property exchanges as the final phase of ethnic cleansing. In Donji Vakuf in central Bosnia, this has formalised the partition of the town into Croat and Bosniac districts (4).
The nationalist parties continue to exercise exclusive control over each of the mono-ethnic microterritories that now constitute Bosnia-Herzegovina. Officially these tiny nationalist oligarchies, which prospered during the dismal aftermath of the war, share the ambition of EU membership, but only on the essential, tacit condition that accession does not compromise their wealth, power or prerogatives. This situation seems to condemn Bosnia-Herzegovina to paralysis and those who want to change things to despair.
Western diplomats, with nothing to offer, regard Bosnia as a black hole. The perverse effects of international supervision, which deprives Bosnian officials of any real responsibility and leaves them free to enjoy demagogy, are well known, but each new crisis seems to demonstrate the necessity of that supervision (5).
The younger generation shows little interest in politics: in election after election, the turn-out among under-25s has been around 10%. Nobody anticipates greater participation in the municipal elections in October. The ambition of most qualified young people is to leave the country. One described Bosnia as a country too traumatised to return to violence, but too exhausted for its citizens to make real changes.
By Jean-Arnault Dérens
A few days before Bosnia-Herzegovina’s last general election, on 1 October 2006, a handful of activists from an obscure group from the town of Kakanj, in central Bosnia, gathered in Sarajevo. Watched by astonished passers-by, they threw paint bombs at the façade of the state presidency before being hustled away by police. This despairing gesture in protest against the country’s political paralysis aroused sympathy in the city’s democratic circles. But several demonstrations soon after against the brutality of the police reaction attracted only a few hundred people.
The democrats have every reason to be angry. The brutal murder of a teenage boy on a tram earlier this year led to protests about local politicians’ incompetence and refusal to take responsibility. The crowds were mostly the very young and the retired, some waving portraits of Marshal Tito. But this timid manifestation of public concern contrasted with the prevailing lethargy of the political class.
The 2006 election marked the eclipse of the old nationalist political parties: the Party of Democratic Action (SDA); the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS); and the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). But that didn’t improve the quality of political debate.
Although the SDA is still the leading Bosniac Muslim party, its candidate for the rotating presidency, Sulejman Tihic, was beaten by the charismatic Haris Silajdzic, a former prime minister during the war in Bosnia. Silajdzic left the SDA for the Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina (SBH), which campaigns for a reorganised, united Bosnia-Herzegovina “without entities” (see An international mess). This earned him some support among democrats and anti-nationalists. His victory can also be attributed to the open support of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s leading Islamic authority, the Grand Mufti (reis-ul-ulema) Mustafa Effendi Ceric (see Islam in Bosnia).
On the Serbian side, the SDS was swept aside by Milorad Dodik’s Union of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD). During the war, Dodik sat in the national assembly of the Republika Srpska (RS), but he was never an active member of the regime established by the SDS under Radovan Karadzic (extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal in July, after 13 years on the run). After peace was restored, Dodik exploited his relatively clean political record to present himself as a democrat, securing the endorsement of the West, especially the US, as a Serbian alternative.
During the immediate post-war period, Dodik cosied up to the democratic opposition. He went into business between 1998 and 2001 and withdrew from politics. Then, during the campaign for the 2006 elections, he resurfaced to articulate all the traditional demands of Bosnian Serb nationalism, asserting the RS’s right to self-determination and promising a referendum on the subject. This strategy paid off: the SNSD crushed its rivals, winning an absolute majority in the RS, of which Dodik is the prime minister, and establishing itself as the largest party in the national parliament.
Although he is now Bosnia’s most powerful politician, Dodik seldom visits Sarajevo, preferring to remain in his fief at Banja Luka, the RS capital. Bosnian politics has turned into a face-off between Dodik and his direct opponent Silajdzic, with Dodik demanding the devolution of power to the entities, and even the secession of the RS, while Silajdzic calls for their eradication.
This dangerous confrontation has marginalised other political parties: the social democrats have run out of political ideas and the Croatian community has little demographic or political influence. It is estimated that the Croats now represent no more than 11% of the population, compared with 17.5% in 1992. Bosnia’s significantly more prosperous neighbour Croatia will become even more attractive when it joins the EU in a few years’ time. Meanwhile Croat politicians within Bosnia have been discredited by accusations of corruption implicating several officials from the HDZ, which has now split. Although Bosnia’s Croat parties continue to control several of the 10 cantons in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBH), they are now marginalised at national level.
A new Milosevic
According to Srdjan Dizadarevic, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina: “Silajdzic and Dodik are using. . . fear to mobilise their communities. They are another double act like Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic.”
How vulnerable is the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina? For months politicians in Serbia, especially Vojislav Kostunica during his recent premiership, threatened that if Kosovo achieved independence, the RS would follow suit. Dodik took up the call, asking how the Serbs of Bosnia could be denied what was granted to Kosovo’s Albanians. Yet after Kosovo proclaimed independence, on 17 February 2008, nothing happened beyond a few unimpressive demonstrations in Banja Luka and other Serbian towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The main purpose of the threats was rhetorical. Dodik has no intention of proclaiming the RS’s independence, since he is aware that nobody would recognise it. Given his ambivalent relations with politicians in Serbia, he has nothing to gain from closer ties that would leave him a mere provincial governor (1).
Kosovo’s independence was good news for him, since it lent credibility to his threat of secession. But he tempered his aggressive rhetoric by reassuring the West that even if other Serb politicians were tempted towards futile adventurism, under him nothing would change. He strengthened his negotiating position while convincing the Europeans that he remained essential to stability and that nobody should try to pick a fight with him over corruption scandals. Dodik has benefited enormously from his political hegemony and from the absence of any credible opponent.
The system he established has also proved profitable. Dubious privatisations, notably of telecoms (2) and the Brod oil refinery, have made him, his party and his friends very rich. He has extended his control of the media: as well as public television, he now controls the two leading newspapers, Glas Srpske and the previously independent Nezavisne Novine.
Although you don’t hear much criticism in Banja Luka, the journalist Slobodan Vaskovic said: “The Dodik system is worse than that of Radovan Karadzic. He has turned theft and intimidation into a method of government.” The system depends on about 10 people directly linked to Dodik and all, like him, from the town of Laktasi, just outside Banja Luka. Their names feature in the complex network of businesses controlled by the company Integral Inzenjering, established by Dodik in the early 1990s, which now dominates the public sector. According to Vaskovic: “The international community created Dodik, and it has finally realised, too late, that it has created a new Milosevic. The only difference is that he has no interest in ideology or nationalism, just in power and money.”
In business, Dodik has reached understandings with political rivals from the other communities, especially Silajdzic. Both are involved, sometimes as associates, sometimes as rivals, in the energy sector, where Bosnia’s enormous water resources promise enormous opportunities. In a region with a chronic lack of energy, there is a huge temptation to build dams. So far public campaigns have blocked plans to build dams on the Vrbas, above Banja Luka, and on the Tara in Montenegro, near the Bosnian border. But other sites are under consideration.
Despite the potential environmental damage, it is difficult to oppose such projects in a country whose economy is close to collapse. The only significant investment in recent years was the purchase of the Zenica steelworks, in the FBH, by ArcelorMittal. The unemployment rate is more than 40% of the working population. The trade unions, divided along ethnic lines, are incapable of suggesting any alternative or of defending wages. Farmers and pensioners have been united only by their despair: both groups have spent weeks camped out in front of the parliament building in Sarajevo.
Building stability
The recent police “reforms” indicate the degree to which Dodik’s parasitic system has benefited from the political paralysis. Since 1995, police forces have been dependent upon the two entities and this has reinforced the division of the country and often sabotages criminal investigations. The reform and unification of the police has been an unresolved issue in Bosnian politics for several years.
The reforms that Dodik finally approved in April were almost meaningless: the police forces will remain separate, but coordination structures will be established. When the SDA and the social democrats refused to vote for this pseudo-reform, they were accused of radicalism. The international High Representative and European politicians hailed it as a great leap forward and rewarded Bosnia with a stabilisation and association agreement with the European Union, signed on 16 June.
This spurious last-minute compromise fooled nobody in Brussels. But in the absence of any strategy, international policy on Bosnia can now be summed up as stability. The fragile edifices that diplomats have been trying to build in the Balkans since Kosovo’s declaration of independence are based on the assumption that nothing will change in Bosnia. From this point of view, Dodik’s success in neutralising Serb nationalism makes him just the man.
When the Dayton agreement was signed in December 1995, the optimists hoped that time would heal wounds and remove political obstacles. Nothing of the sort happened and without some innovative plan Bosnia will stagnate even further. EU strategy, such as it is, has focused on the imminent accession of Croatia, and upon hastening that of Serbia, which is regarded as one of the pillars of regional stability. Brussels is prepared to sacrifice Bosnia, Kosovo and even Macedonia, although Macedonia has been an official candidate for EU membership since 2005.
Final phase of ethnic cleansing
Although visitors to Sarajevo will notice few visible traces of the war (3) or the siege, the image of normality is deceptive. The population has returned to its pre-war total of 500,000, but its demographic structure has been turned upside-down. Only 20,000 Serbs live there now, compared with 150,000 before the fighting began; many Bosniacs left during or after the conflict. They have been replaced by new arrivals from the countryside and from small towns, driven out of the RS or part of a rural exodus. Some also came from Sandjak, a mostly Bosniac region split between Serbia and Montenegro. A city that once had a powerful urban identity is now the location of potential conflict between the established population and the newcomers.
Three years ago the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees triumphantly announced the return of a million refugees and displaced persons. But these figures are illusory. Most refugees who go back to the area where their community is now a minority sell up and go again. The Helsinki Committee has described such property exchanges as the final phase of ethnic cleansing. In Donji Vakuf in central Bosnia, this has formalised the partition of the town into Croat and Bosniac districts (4).
The nationalist parties continue to exercise exclusive control over each of the mono-ethnic microterritories that now constitute Bosnia-Herzegovina. Officially these tiny nationalist oligarchies, which prospered during the dismal aftermath of the war, share the ambition of EU membership, but only on the essential, tacit condition that accession does not compromise their wealth, power or prerogatives. This situation seems to condemn Bosnia-Herzegovina to paralysis and those who want to change things to despair.
Western diplomats, with nothing to offer, regard Bosnia as a black hole. The perverse effects of international supervision, which deprives Bosnian officials of any real responsibility and leaves them free to enjoy demagogy, are well known, but each new crisis seems to demonstrate the necessity of that supervision (5).
The younger generation shows little interest in politics: in election after election, the turn-out among under-25s has been around 10%. Nobody anticipates greater participation in the municipal elections in October. The ambition of most qualified young people is to leave the country. One described Bosnia as a country too traumatised to return to violence, but too exhausted for its citizens to make real changes.
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