Eric Witte September 25th, 2008
Local elections will be held in Bosnia next month, and election season means that although a majority of Bosnians rate their top concerns as jobs and other bread-and-butter issues, their political class again is feeding them a steady diet of ethnic fear-mongering. Nationalist politicians are literally scaring-up votes, and will, as always, be rewarded for it at the polls. It’s a feature, not a bug of the Dayton constitution, which itself was designed by nationalist leaders of all three main ethnicities to suit their interests. The dynamic will remain this way until officeholders are no longer elected from constituencies largely defined as mono-ethnic. Mutual communal fear provides the best chances for Bosniak, Croat, and Serb nationalists to win under these circumstances, so they have a common vested interest in stoking it.
In typical fashion, Tuesday saw Haris Silajdzic, the Bosniak member of the country’s ridiculous tripartite, tri-ethnic presidency, addressing the UN General Assembly, where in thinly veiled terms he called on the world body to abolish the Republika Srpska (Bosnia’s Serb-dominated half). While I share Silajdzic’s view that the RS was born of genocide, ending what Silajdzic termed “ethnic apartheid” will require political compromise with Serbs and Croats. It cannot be done with fist-pounding demands to undo history. Under the logic of Dayton politics, these only provide more fodder for Serb nationalist politicians, whose fierce reactions will scare more Bosniak voters to Silajdzic.
Miroslav Lajcak, the international community’s High Representative and EU Special Representative for Bosnia, made just this reasonable argument to the largely Bosniak readership of a Sarajevo daily yesterday: “You cannot state that you are pro Bosnia-Herzegovina, while treating one half of the country as hostile.” So far, so good. However, Lajcak went on to raise the specter that unless this changed, Bosnia could go the way of Czechoslovakia and Serbia-Montenegro:
“I have seen the same atmosphere that I see today in the Sarajevo-Banja Luka relations twice in my life. I saw it first in the Bratislava-Prague relations, and then in those between Podgorica and Belgrade, and we all know how that turned out.”
This would not be a bad message for Bosniak politicians behind closed doors, but uttered for the media has only encouraged RS Prime Minister Milorad Dodik’s hope for his entity’s secession. So rather than amplify the message that Bosniaks need to think about a future Bosnia that assuages the political fears - and indeed, meets the political needs - of other communities, Lajcak has actually contributed to the tedious, inflammatory campaign debate on RS secession vs. RS-abolition.
In the same interview Lajcak repeated the tired mantra that Bosnia’s politicians need to lead the way out of the crisis: “The international community, especially the EU, expects that 13 years after the war, Bosnia-Herzegovina should take matters into its own hands.” This expectation completely ignores the rewarding of nationalist candidacies ingrained in the Bosnian election system. Thirteen years after Dayton, the people of Bosnia might expect the EU and the broader international community to understand that if a new political compromise is to be achieved, the impetus will never come from Bosnian politicians whose interests are tethered to the status quo. The EU, whose mission soon will be leading the international presence in Bosnia, has yet to demonstrate that it has any workable strategy to address the constitutional crux of Bosnia’s problems. Worse, it often appears that the EU doesn’t even understand the problem.
