SURVIVING THE PEACE The Struggle for Postwar Recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina

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October 13, 2020
Updates; Elections; The RS and separatism; Crims in Charge

The state of Bosnia-Herzegovina continues to rattle along like a VW on three cylinders. Bosnia's failings are manifested in the usual ways: lack of state-level coordination on most problems, especially the Corona epidemic and the influx of migrants. The bi-annual Festival of Dysfunctionality known as the elections (this time at the municipal level) was postponed a month and will take place on November 15, with attending malversation from all sides. And the country's profiteering, nationalist leaders continue to find ways to keep their constituencies separate from each other, with Dodik leading the way in new separatist pronouncements.

On the migrant scene, it never gets better, but keeps getting worse. The onset of cold winter always portends more misery for the travelers. And lately, tension has led to violence among the migrants.  Local (Bosnian) residents in places where there are concentrations of migrants are feeling high levels of stress as well.

The worst problems have been in the northwest around Bihać and Velika Kladuša, where migrants from Morocco, Iraq, and all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan have gathered in the hope of crossing the nearby border into Croatia and then continuing further into the EU. Some make it, but Croatian police continue to exercise brutality against any travelers that they catch, before pushing them back into Bosnia. There, with the increased density of migrants, crimes against local residents such as muggings and arson have risen. While many Bosnians wish to welcome the travelers and help them, protests calling for greater control of the migrant population have also increased.

With an estimated 3,000 migrants in camps, and over 4,000 outside in fields and abandoned buildings (that's just in the northwestern part of Bosnia, and there are more in the Sarajevo area), it is more than the local authorities can handle, and entity and state-level authorities are not rising to the task. In the Bihać area local authorities have closed one of the main camps, Bira, which they considered to be too close to the city. They moved residents to other camps, principally to the newer Lipa camp, farther away from Bihać. There is supposedly room for more migrants in Lipa and some other camps, but the police do not always allow them to enter. Sometimes people climb over the walls of Lipa at night. They are also forming "wild camps" in the woods, and then going into "the game," that is, attempting to cross to Croatia, as soon as they can.

It is a tortuous situation all around, with migrants saying they are forced to "live like animals."

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Meanwhile, the Corona epidemic rises and falls as it has been doing for months. Currently there is a sharp rise in infections in the Sarajevo area and some other parts of the country, parallel to the spike in much of Europe—especially Czechia, Belgium, and Spain. In Sarajevo, for example, it doesn't help that commuters are still forced to cram into the streetcars at close quarters. They have no other choice of transportation. There are some controls, such as limits to the number of people who can be together in a kafana, a movie theater, or at a wedding; these measures have mixed results. The borders are wide open. But there has been a drain of doctors, with many leaving for central Europe, and others going into politics.

A consortium of 40 Bosnian engineers has declared success in manufacturing ventilators. Those from the scandal that took place last spring are still sitting in a warehouse, unpacked. You'll recall that a raspberry cultivation outfit was commissioned to import 100 machines from China, under shady circumstances (see my April 29 entry on this subject here). And that Federation Prime Minister Fadil Novalić, along a couple of other implicated figures, was arrested for abuse of office and suspected embezzling.

Nothing has been heard of that case since late spring, but recently word has come out that the 10.5 million KM spent on the ventilators was spent legitimately and that the prime minister was acting within his legal rights to disburse the funds. And on top of that, rumors that the ventilators in question were inadequate for hospital use turned out to be false. However, in spite of two tenders fielded, no company wants to taint itself (by association to the scandal) by unpacking and installing the machines. And there's still the question of how the money spent for the ventilators was significantly higher than their market cost, and what happened to the leftover part of that 10.5 million KM. Who received that kickback? Maybe we'll never know.

In other scandals, the RS Tax Administration revealed who received emergency financial assistance tied to the epidemic. Among others, Milorad Dodik's daughter Ivana received 50,000 KM to keep her restaurant "Agape" going, and Dodik's basketball team Igokea received 18,000 KM. Business as usual.

In a side note that resonates for upcoming elections both in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the US, in the southern Romanian town of Deveselu, mayor Ion Aliman died of Covid-19 in mid-September at age 57. But in local elections two weeks later, he was re-elected mayor with 64% of the vote. After the election followers gathered at Aliman's grave, one of them saying, "This is your victory."

ELECTIONS

In mid-September, the preliminary list of nearly 31,000 candidates for municipal positions was announced. The campaign period officially starts a month before the November 15 elections, but the drama has begun. I should note that after the general elections of October 2018, it took about a year for the new state-level government to be formed—and the "new" government in the Federation has yet to be created, two years on.

Just recently Asim Kamber, a prominent politician in the northwestern Krajina town of Sanski Most and member of the leading Bosniak nationalist SDA party, was arrested with two other operators on suspicion of "electoral engineering" during the 2018 campaign. Kamber and his associates are suspected of having arranged for dead people to vote for them, and of using the ballots of living people who were otherwise not voting. Meanwhile it also appears that the SDA and SDP (Social Democrats) in that region had colluded to edge out the SBB, the party of Fahrudin Radončić. When evidence of this plotting surfaced, Radončić said, "This is a small satisfaction for me, but a huge scandal for the thieves ensconced in the presidential seats. The worst thing is that we can expect the same thing during the [upcoming] local elections. With a politicized Central Election Commission, party-run polling-station committees, forged ballots, and the lack of electronic evidence, the elections crimes in the Krajina will just be a drop in the ocean..."

And Mladen Bosić, former head of the Serb nationalist party SDS, says that the Kamber case is just the "tip of the iceberg," and that it is "not just a case of stealing the election, but of endemic corruption." That stealing elections are a public secret in Bosnia-Herzegovina," which "everyone knows about—but no one knows anything." Bosić faults Chief Prosecutor Gordana Tadić for sitting on the accusations in Kamber's case for two years and doing nothing. And recently in Brčko District, three men were charged with election theft, for forging the signatures of voters and voting in their places.

In a recent report, star investigative reporter Avdo Avdić described the widespread manipulation of mail-in ballots that were delivered by mail to pre-arranged recipients who are not the voters who should have received those ballots. In order to request a mail-in ballot, it is necessary to provide the name, birth date, and identification number of the voter, along with the full name of the voter's father. The first three of these items are easy to steal, if one can access records held in places such as banks and insurance offices. It's not unusual for cooperative party operators to work in such places, so that information is in the bag. Then, they make up a father's name, trusting that an investigator will not check that far down the line. Avdić turned up 300 mail-in ballots sent to addresses where the named voter does not live, and that, again, is bound to be a small sample of the phenomenon.

Elections in Srebrenica are a special case, in a municipality where the population is roughly evenly divided between Serbs and Bosniaks. Bosniaks controlled the mayoralty until 2016, when a Serb was elected who denies that genocide took place. I monitored the 2012 Srebrenica elections, famous for a close win by pro-Bosnia candidate Ćamil Duraković. During the process I witnessed people coming in from Serbia, just across the river, to vote with tendered ballots for the Serb candidate. These were not mostly Srebrenicans who had moved to Serbia. Some of them spoke to me with pure ekavian (Serbian speech from Serbia) accents. They did not manage to sway the election, but were better organized in 2016, when the Serb candidate won.

This year it has already been established that games are being played with mail-in ballots in Srebrenica. Avdo Avdić noted that some voters in the municipality are voluntarily handing their ballots over to operators in the Serb coalition to use as they wish. And the local watchdog organization "Moja adresa: Srebrenica" (My address: Srebrenica) announced that of 2,301 registered requests for mail-in ballots, about 900 are from Serbia. Some 60 of these carry the names of Bosniaks who live abroad, but not in Serbia. And others are for Srebrenica Serbs who actually live in Srebrenica and have no need to vote from Serbia. Avdić reckons that these people have either sold their ballots to the Serb coalition, or handed them over in return for some favor. Meanwhile, many of the addresses in Serbia are for places such as butcher shops or other businesses, or are simply non-existent. Moja adressa: Srebrenica has called on the Central Election Commission to cancel the registrations until they can be sorted out for legitimacy. They note that the number of registrations from Serbia has multiplied by 10 in the last eight years. 

Higher up the political food chain, the Croat nationalist party HDZ has been agitating for years to pass an electoral law that will favor Croat separatists and make it impossible for an anti-nationalist Croat such as Željko Komšić to win the post of Croat member of the state-level presidency. Bosniak member of the presidency Bakir Izetbegović has responded to this demand by calling for three things to happen first: 1. the formation of the Federation government based on the 2018 elections; 2. filling the Constitutional Court, which presently only has five out of nine of its members, with appointments being obstructed by the HDZ; and 3. acceptance by HDZ of the SDA's coalition partners, the DF (Komšić's party) and the SBB. Which the SDA plotted against in 2018. Hmm...

And in the RS there is a small party, a splitoff from the SDS, called Ujedinjena Srpska (United Srpska), the US. This party recently aired an advertisement that was a puerile and amateurish depiction of an Albanian, a Bosniak, and a Croat sitting in a kafana and voicing anti-Serb sentiments. After their brief conversation, some members of US burst into the kafana and scare them away. The Central Election Commission decided that this spot promoted ethnic hatred. US was banned from the upcoming elections and its leader fined 10,000 KM.

The last line of the silly skit in question was, "Republika Srpska is united, and will always be united. That is our responsibility."

So who, or what, founded that Serb-controlled entity? Well, one of the founders, Momčilo Krajišnik, died of the corona virus in mid-September. Together with Karadžić, he was co-founder of the SDS party that ran the war and sponsored the genocide. During the war Krajišnik was Speaker of the "People's Assembly" of the RS. This is the body that sanctioned all that ethnic cleansing, mass rape, torture, and expansion of ethnically homogenized territory that was, 25 years ago, legalized by Dayton. Krajišnik was one of the ideologues who stood staunchly behind all these crimes. And after the war he became, for a time, the Serb member of the three-part presidency.

Having lived in Bosnia in that period, I remember how Krajišnik would not even deign to come to presidency meetings in Sarajevo. He was truly an anti-Dayton operator—this, before the Serb separatists figured out that they could get more mileage—and international aid—by being "pro-Dayton" in their own way. That way constituted preserving and enhancing the parts of  Dayton that underscored autonomy for the RS and a weak central government, while ignoring the parts of Dayton, for example, that called for refugee return.

In late 1997 Biljana Plavšić, running on an "anti-corruption" platform, ousted Krajišnik in a race for president of the RS, and she installed Milorad Dodik as prime minister of that entity. In 2000 Krajišnik was arrested and taken to The Hague, and ultimately served 13 years in prison-lite, convicted of "persecution, deportation, and forced transfer" (but acquitted of murder, extermination, and genocide).

After serving part of his sentence, Krajišnik returned to public approbation in the RS and lived as a revered elder statesman there, founding the "Association of the Creators of the Republika Srpska." He maintained that he had known nothing of the crimes of which he was accused, and made fun of the label "war criminal."

RS President Željka Cvijanović and Prime Minister Radovan Višković, together with Dodik, attended Krajišnik's funeral. Dodik praised Krajišnik as a founder of the RS, and proposed that a prominent street in Banja Luka be named after him.

Right around that time, the RS and Serbia observed the "Day of Serb Unity," with Dodik expressing the ambition that the two bodies will one day constitute one country: "We are not Bosnian Serbs. We are Serbs. It is natural that Serbs should live in one state together...we want to achieve this in a peaceful and civilized way...building security for the future of the entire region."

In this vein, Serbia's Minister of Defense Aleksandr Vulin asked how long his president, Aleksandar Vučić, would continue to advocate for the preservation of an intact Bosnia-Herzegovina (Vučić's obligation under Dayton). Vulin, ever the hawk to Vučić's faux-statesman persona, criticized the Croat and Bosniak members of the Bosnian presidency for calling for Bosnian recognition of Kosovo's statehood. He said, "If Bosnia is for an independent Kosovo, then I am for an independent RS."

And some serious dirt surfaced pertaining to the above-mentioned RS prime minister, Radovan Višković. The intrepid Avdo Avdić reported the discovery of testimony in more than one war crimes trial, discussing Višković as a participant in the 1995 genocide that took place upon the fall of Srebrenica. It turns out that Višković, from the eastern town of Vlasenica, was a lieutenant in the RS Army and an assistant commander in charge of transportation, which became a crucial logistical node during the massacres that took place in Srebrenica and the surrounding municipalities in July 1995. People who have studied a little of that history will recognize the name of Nova Kasaba, a place where many captured Bosniaks were held in a sports field before being taken away to be killed.

Višković arranged the transport of captives from Nova Kasaba by bus and truck to the killing fields. He also, according to witness testimony, worked to arrange for the removal of victims' remains from primary to secondary mass graves.

This is the man who is now prime minister of the Serb-controlled entity.

And when there was no reaction to Avdić's revelation, various pro-Bosnia politicians have appealed for an investigation and criticized State Prosecutor Gordana Tadić for ignoring the news.

Oh, but there was one reaction. Within 48 hours of the news breaking, RS media exposed the identity of the witness who had testified in The Hague and in the Court of Bosnia about Višković.

I have a category of people I call "Crims in Charge." I use this to refer to war criminals (or other criminal operators) who are running things at various levels of government in Bosnia or other parts of the former Yugoslavia. It's rather a large club; you could fill a book with their names and biographies.

Here's one that came up recently: Nikola Špirić, former prime minister of Bosnia at the state level, and some-time minister of finance. A couple years ago, the U.S. State Department blacklisted him for corruption. Last month, Špirić was appointed to be a member of the Commission for the Selection and Monitoring of the Work of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption and Coordination of the Fight against Corruption.

(Any similarity between this situation and the US president's Cabinet is purely coincidental.)

I will end this discussion of Crims in Charge and this blog post by conveying an outburst by the commentator Dragan Bursać, who recalls the Serb-run concentration camp "Sušica," near Vlasenica. Some 8,000 Bosniak men, women, and children passed through that camp. Over 1,600 of them were killed.

Bursać asks,
--Did you know that the founder of this camp, Svetozar Andrić, is today a delegate in the Serbian Parliament?
--Did you know that the leader of one of the predatory units that filled up Sušica, Mićo Kraljević, is today the mayor of Vlasenica municipality?
--And did you know that last year, at the entrance to Vlasenica, Ratko Mladić leered from a billboard?
--And you say that crime doesn't pay?

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