The Last Year of the Dayton Accords

The Council of Ministers has shown that Bosnia & Herzegovina still cannot operate on the principles of a civil society, especially not in the year when all ethnic groups wish to take the best possible positions on the eve of the international conference which will determine the destiny of the Balkan in the coming decades

AIM Banja Luka, June 6, 2001

Turning the Council of Ministers of Bosnia & Herzegovina into its government and the threat from Republika Srpska that it will pass a vote of no confidence to the existing one, the new election law in which the voters and the elected will be slightly more Bosnian than Serb, Croat and Bosniac, Croat self-administration, demands for abolition and cantonisation of RS, then the veto of Bosniac members of the Constitutional Committee of RS on the hollow special relations of RS with FR Yugoslavia, the controversy about the union of electric companies of B&H - all this shows that all the teams in Bosnian political field have got the command from their respective benches: to play pressing. Of course, it remains without an answer what has forced two (or three) such exhausted teams to play so furiously, to stop to count personal errors and to aim only at sending the other team's players on the bench and scoring as many goals as possible. The last time pressing was played in Bosnia in 1992 when all the teams were getting ready to get hold of as many elevation points as possible from which they would shoot in the next three and a half years. After that pressing was played in Bosnia in the summer of 1995 when everybody tried to the last atoms of strength to place in the play-off that was played in Dayton that autumn.

ON THE EVE OF BALKAN CONFERENCE: This time, all three - the Bosniacs, the Serbs and the Croats - are fully aware, although they will not admit it even under most terrible torture, that they are nibbling on the last year of the Dayton accords which might never be officially cancelled or amended, but certainly will become part of a more comprehensive and superior solution for the entire Balkan preparations of which are well under way and which will happen by the middle of next year at the latest. That is why there is no functional sense in the allegation coming from Banja Luka that legal transformation of the Council of Ministers into the central government is violation of the Dayton accords: it has happened so many times on both sides that referring to Dayton accords which most frequently the Serbs resort to just shows the frivolous demagogical legalism and lack of political inventiveness. The problem is, of course, elsewhere.

Bosniac and Croat politicians who are manifesting a much larger quantity of obedience towards Zagreb than they are ready to admit, wish to end the last year of the Dayton Accords with the least possible quantity of RS. The Serbs, naturally, wish just the opposite. Perhaps Bozo Matic indeed wishes broader authority of the Council of Ministers in order to revive the economy and improve the quality of life, but regardless of his intentions, his wish to be the president of an integrating government which will reduce the jurisdiction of entity governments is experienced by the Serbs with plenty of reason as a blow stricken against RS. Practically the same impression is made by the intention from Sarajevo that from now on we should vote in future elections more like Bosnians than as members of nations and ethnic groups; Croat self-administration is interpreted similarly which is gradually transforming from a separatist into an integrative movement without having essentially changed anything by raising its question of Bosnia as a state community formed of either three or no entities.

The essential problem, however, is not of formal and legal nature, it is not a matter of who is violating the Dayton Accords (more), who is rejecting and who is preserving it, who insists on the constitution and who only wants power. The problem can be brought down to the story to what extent a Bosnian, who the election law insists on instead of a Bosniac, a Serb and a Croat will be citizens, or to what extent a kind of a post-Dayton child of Dr. Frankenstein in whose brain, instead of the gray and the white cells, the green, blue and red-and-white will equally be represented. This story has already happened in former Yugoslavia: the same Belgrade “democrats” who wished to organise Yugoslavia in the beginning of the nineties according to the principle one voter one vote later turned out to be extreme nationalists. There is no true answer to the question why the same would not happen again in Bosnia. But the appearance, the manner and the method of the Council of Ministers offers something that is very close to an answer.

IS THE COUNCIL ANTISERB: Matic's Council which will reach decisions for itself and on itself by outvoting will not, as it would like it to appear, promote the Bosnian as a citizen but on the contrary as a character cut up in three unequal parts in ethnic colours. Such a principle promoted when the Alliance for Changes that forms the Council was established, which gathers persons such as Sefer Halilovic, Kresimir Zubak or Jadranko Prlic, whose war records are much more controversial than that of, for example, Nikola Poplasen who was “wise” enough to have his picture taken holding a knife between his teeth and who not without reason is considered to be a Serb extremist.

The very pragmatism which required that members of the Alliance become all those who are not from SDA, SDS and HDZ resulted in two controversial moments: first, that in Bosnia everything that is outside the nationalistic trio is innocent (wrong), and second, that the (semi) coalition membership of Mladen Ivanic and Milorad Dodik in the Alliance along with Halilovic and Silajdzic who are opposed to the Dayton Accords, means that there are nice and less nice nationalists in Bosnia.

Immediately afterwards, defending itself by the lack of constitutional authority and incompetence, the Council of Ministers refuses to declare its stand concerning the demand of Croatian Prime Minister Ivica Racan for the abolishment of RS, but just a few days prior to that it readily supported Lagumdzija's condemnation of the nonsensical (indeed later denied) statement of Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica that certain mosques and churches should not even be constructed because that made the people in Bosnia nervous. Finally, Matic and the team are demanding that Svetozar Mihajlovic supports the Council, turning him in this way into a new tragic version of Vladimir Srebrov, since he has neither the support of the government of RS nor of the electorate, because he had become a member of the Council as the product of Ivanic's compromise with the foreigners, but also of the tragic mistake of the leadership in Banja Luka that the Council ranks lower than the prime minister of the entity so they delegated persons they did not wish to watch in Banja Luka.

The fact that in the hundred days of its existence the Council of Ministers has done nothing except that it has survived and that it is a kind of a Croat-Muslim coalition does not make the Serb party innocent. Nobody in Banja Luka has responded to the serious questioning of the existence of RS by the only logical invitation to Bosniac and Croat refugees to return; nobody dared open the question of brutal crimes of and against the Serbs; in jails and media there are no names of those who are blowing up and setting on fire houses of Bosniac returnees although in each of those places in front of the general store where men drink warm beer everybody knows who has done it; nobody is concerned about the fact that in RS crime still yields more fruit than potatoes, but the question whether Cvjetin Nikic, member of SDS from Bijeljina, should be appointed to the post of the director of Ugljevik was treated as an essential issue of state significance.

TALK MEEKLY, ACT ROUGHLY: In other words, just as the Alliance does not show any sincere intentions towards the Serbs, the Serbs have done nothing to discourage Lagumdzija and Matic from forming the front against Banja Luka. Just as there are few in the Alliance who truly think about Bosnia as the state of the citizens, in RS, regardless of constitutional amendments, there are even less of those who do not consider RS a state of the Serbs in which the Bosniacs and the Croats can live only if they hold their tongues and do not play and sing their religious songs in public on Serb holidays. And what is the result: just as on May 7, near Ferhad Pasha's mosque the Muslim believers sought protection from Lagumdzija, the Serbs are nowadays asking Ivanic whether he will protect them from the abolishment of RS. The problem is that back in 1992 they both sought the same from Alija Izetbegovic and Radovan Karadzic, that they promised them this and that they later saw for themselves how it all ended. For the time being Lagumdzija and Ivanic have just given promises.

Although a compromise on the Council of Ministers is discernable in the idea that its jurisdiction should not be broadened, but that eight-month rotation of its chairman be prevented, this is not a solution but just a reflection of impotence of the two deeply confronted teams. Such and similar polemics in which political confrontation recedes because of ethnic one, create an atmosphere where the difference between ethnically unbending and mild politicians in Bosnia. Unlike their predecessors, they will act firmly and roughly, but they will speak meekly and mildly (in conveying messages they are increasingly replaced by the media, even those controlled by the government). This opens the broad field of confrontations which will go on during the whole year on ethnic grounds. The confrontations will stop only when the foreigners think of a final solution for the restless Balkan which Bosnia is nervously waiting for in order to be able to start doing something for itself and when Ivanic and Lagumdzija (or somebody else instead of them) become capable again of showing their civil selves.

That solution will, of course, be reached far from Sarajevo and Banja Luka, and just in order not to completely deprive local politicians of any influence, those who establish greater control of their re-aroused ethnic groups will have better starting positions; in other words those who do less foolish things.

Zeljko Cvijanovic

(AIM)