SURVIVING THE PEACE
The Struggle for Postwar Recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina
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November 13, 2020
Elections; Dayton Anniversary; brief updates on Corona, Migrants
There are two important dates pertaining to Bosnia-Herzegovina this month. One
is the municipal elections, scheduled for this Sunday, November 15. Elections
usually happen in October, but this year they were postponed because of the
pandemic. The other date is the anniversary of the Dayton agreement, which was
initialed in that city on the first of November in 1995, and formally signed in
Paris on December 14. A variety of commemorative events are scheduled for this
whole month.
First, the elections: Some 3.2 million people are eligible to vote for
nearly 31,000 candidates from about 130 political parties, running for mayor of
most of the cities and many municipalities.
As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, party operators have recently been
refining techniques of identity theft in order to perpetrate electoral fraud.
The political parties have access to the voter rolls and can identify voters who
have not participated in the elections for a cycle or two. With that
information, people working for the party can use the personal information of
those inactive voters to register them falsely abroad. Bosnian Serb nationalist
parties, in particular, have been registering phantom voters at addresses in
Serbia.
Some of the inactive voters are simply people who have emigrated and, perhaps,
missed participating in the last election. For example, many Bosnian Serbs from
the
north-central town of Teslić have emigrated to
Italy, Austria,
and Germany. So it happened that suddenly this year, there are a thousand newly
registered voters from Teslić.
They have been registered to vote by mail from addresses in Belgrade and Novi
Sad. There are individual addresses where from 20 to 60 voters have been
registered at the same location.
Clearly, some busy political operators have registered inactive emigrant voters
in places in Serbia where they do not live, and are planning to receive their
ballots at those addresses and use them to vote for the candidates of their
choice. Lately some of the said inactive emigrant voters have looked at the web
site of the Central Elections Commission (the CIK) and noticed that they have
been re-registered to vote in places where they don't live, and they have
complained about it. So what did the CIK do? In some cases, the CIK eliminated
all double registrations, thereby denying the legitimate voters the right
to vote.
The practice has expanded to such a degree that the number of suspicious cases
of registration around the country has risen to 150,000. The state prosecution
has, to date, done nothing about this crime. And one of the perpetrators is
certainly the SNSD, the party of which Milorad Dodik is leader. With his
popularity down in the RS capital, Banja Luka, reports have it that the SNSD has
had to resort to buying votes and illegal registrations. And the recently
announced increase in pensions in the RS certainly appears like a pre-election
bribe.
In related news, Transparency International has noted that Dodik has illegally
used a helicopter belonging to the RS government at least seven times to attend
campaigns.
Local elections will be held in Mostar for the first time in 12 years—not this
month, but on the 20th of December. For all these years party leaders, primarily
the Bosniak nationalist SDA and the Croat nationalist HDZ, have been unable to
agree on electoral rules pertaining to power-sharing, and there has not even
been a city council for the last eight years. Since 2012, the mayor and
vice-mayor have been in position as "acting" officials.
The stalemate has hurt the quality of life significantly on both sides of the
divided city as infrastructure and public services, such as garbage collection,
have been neglected. Finally, in June of this year the two main parties agreed
on a power-sharing arrangement, bringing back the opportunity of the citizens of
Mostar to vote for the first time since 2008. But while commentators tout the
elections as a "return to democracy" in the city, Mostar will still be ruled by
the two nationalist parties that care more about their entrenched power than the
well-being of their constituencies.
Meanwhile, the most blatant "electoral engineering" in all Bosnia-Herzegovina is
taking place in Srebrenica. There, for the last couple of months citizens of
neighboring Serbia have been streaming across the river and applying for Bosnian
citizenship. Many of them were born in Serbia of parents who came from
Srebrenica. They have been receiving citizenship the same day they applied for
it, and have then gone directly to the police station to receive local
identification documents.
Members of the "Coalition for Srebrenica," which supports the incumbent Serb
Mayor Mladen
Grujičić, have
organized this
operation to try to ensure that the genocide-denying
Grujičić will receive a second mandate as mayor. They have arranged for official
vehicles from the Serbian government to transport people across the Drina River
to Srebrenica every day—and the Srebrenica municipality has hired ten temporary
employees to handle the rush.
All of this is taking place in close collaboration between municipal agencies in
Srebrenica and the RS police department (the Ministry of Internal Affairs). The
state prosecutor has ignored the registration racket.
People with freshly minted local i.d.s must vote with tendered ballots (which
are inspected and counted after the election). But just recently, the CIK
declared that people who received such i.d.s less than 45 days before the
election, that is, after the beginning of October, will not be allowed to vote
even with tendered ballots. But it appears that Grujičić's machine is not taking
this seriously. Grujičić himself was in Serbia at the end of October,
campaigning among the citizens of the neighboring country. He declared that if
the Bosniak side wins the elections, they will "return Srebrenica to the 1990s,
and declare Serbs and the Republika Srpska 'genocidal.'" Grujičić also announced
that he would organize transportation for people to come across the border and
vote on the day of the election.
All this hearkens back to 2012, when the first elections were held that did not
allow absentee voting for all who had lived in Srebrenica before the war. In
that year there was a widespread campaign by the pro-Bosnia side to elect Ćamil
Duraković, and the campaign won. I was on site, monitoring the elections, and I
observed several hundred
voters who had
come over from Serbia. The practice increased in the next elections—alongside
suppression of the right of Bosniaks to vote through various means —to the
extent that a Serb candidate (Grujičić)
was able
to win for the first time. It will be surprising if the same result does not
take place again this month.
And for icing on the corruption cake, this week the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje
published scans of lists of about 50 dead people who have been registered to
vote in Srebrenica. More than 90% of the names were Serb names.
In a pithy critique of Bosnian politics, an anonymous commentator for the
Sarajevo daily "Oslobodjenje" wrote, "Although it has existed for 30 years,
democracy in Bosnia-Herzegovina is Bolshevik; citizens/voters are directed to
serve one party and one leader. Political parties all basically behave in the
same nationalist way. The parties are organizations led by one person without
democratic processes." In other words. the Titoist model of one party ruled by
one man has proliferated; with some variation, nearly all the political parties
that have risen out of the ruins of the war years replicate the authoritarian
pattern.
All this leaves those who would participate in Bosnian politics is a choice of
which local or regional autocrat to follow. Voters think they have a choice, but
it's not much of one. Parties vie for their loyalty by criticizing the
ubiquitous corruption of the party in office, while hoping for the same
opportunity to practice corruption if they win the next contest.
This predicament is built into the Dayton system as crafted by Bosnia's
constitution, Article IV of the agreement. Dayton defined voters as members of
an ethnicity, rather than as individual citizens, thereby cementing ethnic
division and leaving power in the hands of those who are able to exploit and
profit from those divisions. The political structure designed by the Dayton
constitution has enhanced collective identity and politics to the detriment of
individual rights and citizen-based politics.
So every two years the country launches into the democratic charade—better
defined as "electoralism" rather than democracy—as if there's a possibility of
some change. Even on the local level, only minor, symbolic changes are liable to
happen.
***
Dayton:
Since it is the anniversary, I have been asked here and
there to comment on the influence of Dayton on life in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The
question directs to my main interest: ordinary folks and grassroots activism,
and their effect on the possibility for change. So here I will share some
thoughts I have put together.
*
I remember someone in Sarajevo telling me, shortly after the war, "The
international community must change the mentality of those people who are
dividing us and fomenting hatred." This told me that the old Yugoslav habit of
looking to a powerful, charismatic leader (Tito, etc.) for solutions had simply
become internationalized. In that way, personal agency remained trivialized.
However, I soon found that there were indeed plenty of people who understood
that only they could fight for their own rights, and that the burden of recovery
rested on them. These were, and are, the pozitivci, the ones who have
fought through the obstructions, have refused to accept the possibility of
failure, and have at times reached out to former enemies.
Activists have led their communities in a number of campaigns over the years:
for refugee return; against apartheid; for memorialization; and against
historical revisionism. They have had to overcome many obstacles. In addition to
the resistance put up by the wartime leaders and their political heirs, there
have also been the built-in hurdles created by the Dayton political structure,
which left those corrupt and divisive leaders in place.
The Dayton constitution created a bloated government that has been wide open to
clientelism and corruption. In treating individuals as members of ethnicity
rather than citizens, the Dayton setup forced people to follow their
ethno-nationalist leaders. This left the entrenched leadership able to continue
pursuing the wartime goals of divide and conquer by other means. Dayton did not
create ethnic division and partition, but the international officials who
drafted it, in their desperation to stop the fighting, enshrined war-created
facts on the ground. Ultimately Dayton cemented yet another "stabilocracy"—a
favorite of international leaders who can't see the difference between peace and
the absence of war—or they don't care.
It's true that the international community donated over $5 billion for
reconstruction and recovery just in the first five years after the war. At the
same time, it supported regular biennial elections that just contributed to the
entrenchment of the ethno-nationalist parties. Rather than "democracy," this
charade is better called "electoralism"—the stance that regular elections alone
are sufficient to constitute democracy.
In the matter of refugee return, it took international officials nearly four
years to figure out that they could impose rule of law regarding property
return, so that ultimately, most people who applied for it were able to recover
their prewar property. But that did not amount to actual return, because more
often than not, people traded or sold their properties so that they could either
emigrate or remain in areas where they were not newly minted "minorities."
Discrimination and unemployment were true deterrents to return.
In spite of these obstacles, activists Bosnia have compelled international
officials to pay attention many times. By marching, blocking roads, setting up
tent encampments, and generally giving international officials a headache if
necessary, people have compelled the international community to assist with
return, to locate mass graves, to set up memorial cemeteries, to remove
obstructionist politicians, and more. Much of that would never have happened
without grassroots action.
For nearly 15 years, the international community has pursued a studied policy of
sleepiness regarding Bosnia. Europe has its own problems, and the US has its own
distractions. This withdrawal leaves the stage open to Russian intervention,
particularly in Serbia, Montenegro, and the RS.
International officials who once hoped to help Bosnia switched their strategy
from active intervention to one of "fostering domestic ownership," which was
tantamount to leaving the foxes to guard the chicken coop. The idea that a
corrupt domestic political structure was going to cut short its own racketeering
and nepotism in order to build an egalitarian nation with prosperity for all was
delusional.
That strategy didn't work and, on the 25th anniversary of Dayton, it is time for
international officials to start over and adopt a robust plan of action that
will help decent, positive-minded Bosnians—and they are the majority—throw out
their dishonest leaders and create a functioning state that has hope to join the
community of thriving nations.
The kind of grassroots activism that the international community should support
continues, in waves. In a rare development, in recent years activists built
collaboration across entity lines when people traveled between Banja Luka and
several Federation cities in joint protests against street violence. This has
been a disturbing and galvanizing factor for many years in the postwar period.
It sounds unpolitical, but people understand public safety—and the inaction, or
at times even collusion in the violence by the police and the judiciary—to be
very political. There was the killing of Dženan Memić in 2016 in Sarajevo, and
the mysterious murder of David Dragičević in 2018 in Banja Luka. These unsolved
incidents rattled people and mobilized them to protest.
Leaders of the international community, from the High Representative on down,
have shown that they have exquisite understanding of the ills of the Bosnian
system. They regularly issue evaluations accurately acknowledging that the state
they have supported is dysfunctional and admitting that they put their trust in
nationalist leaders who have only intensified divisiveness. (see "Bosnia and
Herzegovina: Some politicians still ignore ‘core European values’ 25 years after
peace deal,"
here.)
Seeing such accurate critiques from international officials, one wonders, "Do
they think that making such pronouncements is their only job?"
It is time for international officials who speak of "European values" to
re-focus and to clarify what those values are. At the very least, they should
include honesty in government and egalitarian civil status. The international
community must find ways to use its neglected but formidable economic and
political leverage to put a stop to the profiteering, divisiveness, and
separatism that have reigned in Bosnia-Herzegovina ever since the Dayton
agreement was signed.
***
Note: I'll be speaking on a panel for (but not at) St. Andrews University in
Scotland on Tuesday, November 24th. The event is titled "Balkans Backwards and
Forwards: Crippled in Triage – Dayton Saves and Hobbles Bosnia and Herzegovina."
For more information on the discussion and to join, click
here.
The discussion takes place between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. local (Scotland) time,
which probably translates into some west coast time so dreadfully early that I
don't even want to think about it. But if you're an early bird, or you're
situated a little further east than Seattle, maybe it'll work for you.
*
Other items:
Covid: The epidemic continues to spike in Bosnia-Herzegovina as in the
rest of Europe and in the US. To date over 1,750 people have died from Covid-19.
Emergency care units at the hospitals are full or at near-full capacity. Masks
have been made compulsory in the RS, and live music has been banned in indoor
settings. In the Federation high school classes are being held remotely. A
maximum of 30 persons may participate in indoor events, and with recent
tightening of the rules, 30 persons outdoors as well. A "restriction of
movement" starting at 11:00 p.m. every night was announced this week in the
Federation.
Migrants: In the first seven months of this year some 9,000 migrants
entered Bosnia. This is nearly 60% fewer than in the same period in 2019. The
most numerous are people from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Morocco, and
Iran. The Bosnian government recently negotiated an arrangement with the
Pakistani government to deport stranded Pakistani travelers back to their home
country. Pakistanis constitute some one-fourth of the population of migrants who
are registered in Bosnia.
Meanwhile, it was also announced this week that the Office of the European
Ombudsman for Human Rights investigate the "possible failure" of the European
Commission to ensure that the Croatian authorities respect fundamental rights in
conducting border operations while trying to prevent the entry of migrants. The
European Union has donated over 100 million euros to Croatia for management of
the migrant crisis, but Croatia border patrols have perpetrated atrocious crimes
and violence against people trying to cross into their country from Bosnia, as I
have discussed many times in this blog and in my reports on the
Balkan Witness site. Now the European Ombudsman has finally responded to
complaints from Amnesty International and many other sources about the brutality
at the border.
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