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

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June 10, 2020
The epidemic and accompanying scandals, continued

For many of us, contending with restrictions stemming from the corona pandemic, work or no work, and widespread protests, it's a busy and complicated time. It is a time of change throughout the world, and possibly even in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The numbers of infected and of fatalities in Bosnia have risen roughly 60% since I last wrote: today they stand at 2,775 infections and 161 deaths. For a country whose population is probably about twice that of the greater Seattle area, it could be a lot worse. Here in King County, the latest death count (growing very slowly) is approaching 600.

After a fairly strict clampdown on movement and social contact throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina, most parts of the country have started to open back up. Since the middle of May restaurants have been allowed to serve a limited number of customers on site, with accompanying hygienic restrictions. People over 65 have been restored their freedom of movement, and day-care centers were reopened as well. At the mosques, all five daily prayer sessions are permitted again, with an accompanying argument about the "authenticity" of praying while wearing a mask.

The enforced quarantine of travelers was discontinued in favor of self-isolation at home. Various "korona zakon" (corona laws) continue to be modified, with the government carrying on subsidies of insurance, suspension of interest payments, and delays of legal procedings. Public gatherings, use of pools and spas, and sports activities are still prohibited. Sarajevo's open-air auto market was reopened, and public transportation has began running again. More recently, the Sarajevo airport opened for flights to a half-dozen connecting hubs.

Narghile bars, of which there are more than 325, employing 4,000 people, remained closed. Owners protested that they were being discriminated against. They called upon the European Convention for Human Rights and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights to support their case but, so far, to no avail.

Hygienic restrictions are still in place, but they have been enforced awkwardly. In Dobrinja a man was fined 1,000 KM for failure to wear a mask—by a cop who was not wearing a mask. And there was a spate of "Corona parties," with local elites celebrating in crowded kafanas without protection. The mayor of Bosanski Petrovac municipality and ten of his best friends received infraction citations for holding a lamb roast.

And at kafana "Golf" in Sarajevo, Dr. Jusuf Šabanović, director of the abdominal surgery clinic at Sarajevo's university hospital, organized a grand birthday party for himself. Present were the dean of the veterinary department, state-level Minister of Foreign Affairs Staša Košarac, and high-end folk-pop stars Halid Bešlić, hari Mata hari, Semir Cerić Koke, and others. Šabanović was suspended from his job; Košarac narrowly escaped the end of his political career in a parliamentary vote; and 19 party-goers were fined 500 KM each. The kafana was fined 6,500 KM.

In the face of the recent relaxation of constraints, epidemiologists have declared that the opening was happening too fast and that there would be new clusters of infection. And indeed, especially after the end of Ramadan and the Bajram visits and celebrations that go along with it, there has been an uptick in infections, resulting in some renewed clampdowns.

Nevertheless the rate of infection overall has not come close to that of much of western Europe, and some research shows that there are genetic differences between inhabitants of that part of Europe and the Balkans—and Scandinavia, as well—that point to greater resistence to the virus.

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Meanwhile, Bosnia has yet to make headway in its resistence to corruption. Every conflict and every bout of chaos is another opportunity for graft and cronyism. In the present case, tourism agencies, bakery outfitters, and other operators without qualifications—and without permits—have become importers of masks (paying under 3 KM and selling them for 25 KM), personal protective equipment, and medical equipment. Their only qualifying criterion for receiving taxpayer's money to import is family or party connection with those who disburse the money.

The biggest resulting scandal remains the import of 100 ventilators by a Srebrenica-based agricultural firm. You'll remember from the previous blog that Srebrena Malina received 10.5 million KM from the Federation government to import a hundred ventilators from China. Eighty of them arrived in late April, and the other twenty in late May. In both cases, Srebrena Malina, headed by Fikret Hodžić, lacked the necessary permits to import the equipment; those permits were granted after the arrival of the ventilators. And those ventilators are not designed for hospital use, but only for emergency use such as in medical aid cars.

Questions about the case remained in the air throughout May, primarily asking who ordered the procurement of the equipment. "Where is the invisible hand?" asked one columnist. How far up the political/profiteer food chain the operation goes is still in question, but Hodžić is clearly linked to Fahrudin Solak, director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FUCZ), which was authorized to allocate the 10.5 million KM for Srebrena Malina's use. In May, Solak was suspended from his position with full pay. He and Hodžić were arrested later in the month, after the Bosnian state prosecution and SIPA (State Investigation and Protection Agency, Bosnia's FBI) raided the offices of FUCZ and Srebrena Malina.

SIPA also confiscated the cell phone of Federation Prime Minister Fadil Novalić in late May, and soon afterwards arrested him as well. There is evidence showing that Novalić pulled strings to secure funds for Srebrena Malina's purchase of the ventilators.

Novalić, Solak, and Hodžić were released pending further investigation, and were ordered to refrain from contact with each other. Meanwhile, the Civil Protection Administration was called upon to document its expenditure of more than 23 million KM over the last months: out of some 80 Federation agencies, bureaus, ministries, and other institutions, it is the only one that has not gotten around to providing documentation of all its allocations.

Early in May journalist and commentator Vildana Selimbegović described the dynamic of Bosnian corruption as one in which the "private, party-approved pockets were filled with budget money" in a classic paradigm of corruption. She accused Hodžić, a "fancy TV personality," and "valued partner of the SDA" (the leading Bosniak nationalist party) of profiteering from human tragedy. Hodžić's company employs ten people in Srebrenica, and is financially in the red, but has the connections to swing a 10.5 million KM deal—from which his company earned a clear 1 million KM.

Another writer pointed out that the present scandal is only the current, most prominent example of the work of a "dark social/political machine," taking place by chance "in a critical moment to break through our senses that have been dulled to the horror that has been around us for the last three decades"...if it had taken place in a less tense moment, it would not have stood out in such great contrast. "Someone would telephone someone else," he wrote, and "would have smoothed it out, saying, 'drop it, he's our guy,'" and the whole run-of-the-mill affair would have been forgotten.

As it happened, to date the scandal has spread to the heights of Federation politics—but only on the Bosniak side. And as soon as Prime Minister Novalić was arrested the SDA screamed bloody murder, saying that chief prosecutor Gordana Tadić, a Bosnian Croat, had it in for the Bosniaks, that this arrest amounted to a coup and the manifestation of a plot to wipe out the Federation's Bosniak leaders and to engineer the "takeover of the government and life in the Federation" by the HDZ, the Croat nationalist party.

I should note that by contrast, in other nearly simultaneous statements, SDA leader Bakir Izetbegović has complained about the fact that a new government of the Federation has not been constituted ever since the general elections of 2018, and that there should be no obstacle to the formation of a coalition government between the SDA and HDZ.

It is also accurate, as Bosniak commentators were quick to point out, that SIPA and the state prosecutors do seem to have focused primarily on corruption cases in Sarajevo, Zenica, and other localities where the corrupt operators were Bosniaks. Prominent cases that were thus left to go stale included the graft case of Milan Tegeltija (a Serb), president of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council; the scandal of forged diplomas; and many other affairs.

The charge of discrimination against Muslims doesn't quite hold water, however, since the majority of prosecutors involved are themselves Muslims. But beyond the possible influence of Novalić, one must also question how the Federation opened up its treasury to Srebrena Malina without approval of Federation Minister of Finance Jelka Miličević, a Croat. She has so far evaded an accusation of participation in the scandal, but the suspicion is there.

People in Bosnia have pointed out that the present scandal is not unique; the director of the Agency for Public Procurement said that "Srebrena Malina is not the only one." There was an operation perpetrated in the RS to the amount of 300,000 euros just for personal protective equipment. And the RS's boychik gadfly Draško Stanivuković (see my January 11 entry, "Fun and games...") quipped, "Don't laugh at the Federation; you'll see that the RS has its scandals too." And he went out to photograph a "field hospital" for which the RS paid 4.5 million KM, and found a large, empty tent in a field of weeds.

It strikes me that Bosnia-Herzegovina suffers from the same problem as does the US: lack of coordination from above in the present crisis. The difference is that the US won't, and Bosnia can't. That is, the US government could control the spread of the corona virus vastly better than it has, but it is not disposed to do so at the top level. But Bosnia has no effective, law-abiding top level, and the cronies who run the country have no interest in curtailing the corruption which is their own.

In this vein columnist Gojko Berić wrote, "That we have the most corrupt government and legislature in Europe is known: it is already a boring story. It was known from the beginning of the pandemic that there would be profiteering and money laundering. But the greed and primitivism that has surfaced exceeded all expectations."

Another dimension was added to the scandal when it came out that Fahrudin Solak (the now-suspended director of the Civil Protection Administration) had swung millions of KM worth of business to his lawyer, Kadrija Kolić. For example, Kolić's phantom company sold a device to measure people's temperature to the FUCZ for 40,000 KM, when it should have cost between $300 and $600. The phantom company sold FUCZ personal protective equipment such as masks and visors at inflated prices as well.

Just to illustrate what kind of culture all this corruption takes place in, it's worthwhile to share one instance of how Mr. Solak spends money—not his own, but that of the FUCZ. (One KM converts to $0.58.) At the Zlatni Lav (Golden Lion) restaurant, between last December and March of this year Solak spent 5,700 KM, or nearly $3,300. Average monthly earnings in the Federation run about 900 KM per (employed) person...with somewhere between 30 and 40% unemployment (in the current crisis unemployment has increased in Bosnia overall by about five per cent).

Where does the scandal and its investigation stand now? Prosecutors are interviewing dozens of people. Novalić, Solak, and Hodžić are at the top of the pyramid—so far. It remains to be seen whether more high-end players will be pulled into the investigation. There are a few, such as the head of the crisis staff and the secretary of the Federation government, whose cell phones are being examined, but they aren't prominent actors.

Gojko Berić stated that Bosnia is on the brink of a political crisis, and possibly on the brink of chaos. This is because in a sense, any next step in a serious investigation that gets to the bottom of the current scandal can only drag in higher and higher members of the Bosniak political structure—and beyond that, prominent politicians of other ethnicities. An unwrapping of the entire scandal could also implicate the judicial and prosecutorial infrastructure as well, since that system is also riddled with corrupt operators.

It would be very un-Bosnian for the investigation to get beyond the recent arrest of the Federation's prime minister, because all of the players involved support each other and all are participants in the same or similar crooked operations. So why would they undermine a good thing?

This is Bosnia.

These weeks, we are seeing that change can happen in the US when a lot of people get mobilized and exercise power in one of the only places they have it: in the streets. That could, in theory, happen in Bosnia as well. It has been tried before with some effect. And as it happens, several thousand people staged a demonstration against corruption in Sarajevo on Saturday, May 30—the same day that mass protests really took off in the US. People wore masks, carried babies, and protested dishonesty in government. But it will take a lot more to change things in Bosnia.

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