Post-Electoral Analyses: Why Did Dodik Fail?

AIM Banja Luka, November 17, 2000

Even before the official results were announced, practically everything was clear: Prime Minister of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik lost the presidential race in the first round against SDS candidate Mirko Sarovic, while the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) is the absolute winner at all levels of government.

Dodik's electoral headquarters are in a mess. He is nowhere to be seen, has refused to issue any statement to the press and has cancelled all his visits. He did not go to Belgrade for the Stability Pact Conference and cancelled his visit to Dayton for the fifth anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, where he was invited as Prime Minister under the explanation that he was ill!

The scandal-thirsty public is talking that in his electoral headquarters, after hearing the first party results, Dodik smashed his mobile phone cursing everyone and then ordered all "suspicious" documentation to be removed from the Government.

Dodik's failure became the main post-electoral topic in Republika Srpska. While his fierce opponents gloated, plotting the ways of getting back at him for all the humiliations and insults, the more moderate public tried to find an explanation for the failure of the democratic option. Dodik's headquarters, which appear to be in a total chaos, claim that the party is on the rise. The latest results show that SNSD will come second judging by the votes it has won in the RS Parliament. Expressed in statistics: the party is registering an ascending trend, characteristic for parties of this profile under conditions of slow democratic transition.

Milorad Dodik has most reasons to be dissatisfied. His electoral defeat has placed him among tragic figures of the democratic transformation of the Republic of Srpska. Biljana Plavsic suffered almost the same fate at the previous elections against SDS and Radical Presidential candidate, Nikola Poplasen. Both Plavsic and Dodik ran as champions of democratic changes and economic prosperity, with not negligible results.

What are the reasons for his defeat? One of numerous theses draws attention to the fact that the national parties have stabilised their position successfully producing fear of endangerment. Messages about the national endangerment were decisive in the electoral propaganda and have proved a very efficient tool of homogenisation. Intentional production of fear of others in every ethnos, has re-established the required balance of national charge. Votes of the overwhelming majority of B&H electorate showed that the choice made is based on that fear in hope that it would provide adequate protection against such endangerment.

What did Dodik signify for thus oriented electorate? Noting else but a puppet system which is building mosques, monuments to victims of Serbian crimes (Srebrenica), strikes out entity names from passports, introduces state border services and joint police forces, multi-ethnic schools, common textbooks and curricula, prepares joint army and so on and so forth. And on top of it, as the cherry on the cake, comes the electoral slogan of the Party for B&H - "Bosnia without entities" - to which the international officials reacted quite benevolently.

Dodik had no possibility to neutralise Silajdzic's party message, same as he couldn't neutralise HDZ's call to Croats to come to referendum. Both these messages were a call for the national homogenisation of Serbs and the most efficient electoral propaganda for SDS. Had SDS done nothing else in its electoral campaign, Silajdzic and Jelavic would have been enough. And that much was the Croatian President Stipe Mesic right when he justified HDZ's success with the fear of Croats that Serbs in RS might get an independent state.

The international community failed to efficiently sanction this kind of HDZ and Silajdzic's messages, thus turning its attitude into practically identical message. The Serbs interpreted this as yet another reason for their fear knowing well that leaders of national parties in RS were removed from lists on account of much more benign statements (Cavic, Lazarevic). By tolerating Silajdzic's, SDA's and Jelavic's inflammatory statements, the international community has assumed a large share of responsibility for election results.

According to some analysts the main reason for Dodik's failure was the inability of his Government to eliminate society's growing criminalisation. This is a fact. Both Biljana Plavsic and Milorad Dodik have one thing in common: they have turned the war declared against crime into a war against themselves.

Dodik's apparatus did not manage to fulfil its promise that it would arrest all war profiteers and eliminate crime inherited from the previous authorities. Instead of declaring war against growing crime, corruption and grey economy, Dodik declared war on directors, coalition partners, the National Assembly, pensioners, teaching staff, etc. By removing directors of state enterprises he showed that he was doing the same thing as SDS used to, and that the technology of his rule was no different from the previous one. By claiming that there was no crime in the top levels of state authorities, he threw down the gauntlet to the public which was showered by daily press reports on scandals in "Oil Refinery", "Telekom", Commodity Reserves Directorate, as well as to the international community which called upon voters to vote against corruption.

Why is this thesis incorrect? Because voters in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina have not toppled the identical authorities there. And the authorities of F B&H were no better and different from those in RS. They were criminalised and corrupted to the same extent. For years scandals involving power holders or people close to them, have been shaking those same authorities. International officials repeatedly drew attention to the proportions of organised crime in B&H Federation, not to mention the campaign of the federal media which much earlier devoted most of their time and pages to the disclosure of the spider web of crime. Despite all this, the electorate voted for SDA and Silajdzic's Party for B&H which scored practically the same results as SDS in the Republic of Srpska.

The conclusion is like putting two and two together. Neither have voters in RS nor those in B&H Federation recognised economic programmes, employment projects or better life in their political parties and their leaders, but rather national leaders who offer national ghettoisation. AIM's source, close to electoral headquarters of the Party of Democratic Progress of Mladen Ivanic, claims that this party has succeeded only because Ivanic, reacting to the announced Croatian referendum, said that following the same logic the Serbs could demand the holding of a referendum on their independence.

In other words, Milorad Dodik failed not because he ruled badly or because his opponent was Mirko Sarovic, but because he had against him on the other side Haris Silajdzic and Ante Jelavic. Five years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, this kind of leaders and political options has perfected its tune and slapped in the face all those who relieved that the democratic changes in Croatia and Yugoslavia were enough for carrying out a democratic overthrow in B&H. For them the election results should serve both as a great lesson and a message.

Branko Peric

(AIM)