20 Sep 2011 / 14:51

Serb Machiavelli Has Bosnia's Future in His Hands

Having fanned the flame of Croat-Bosniak discord, the canny Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, has Bosnia just where he wants it - on its knees.

Matthew Parish

Just before Bosnia's October 2010 election, I predicted that the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, would do everything he could after that election to frustrate the formation of a new state government for as long as possible. My pessimistic forecast has been proved all too right.

Dodik's masterstroke was to notice irreconcilable divisions between Bosniaks [Muslims] and Croats that emerged after the SDP's respectable victory amongst Bosniak voters.

The Social Democratic Party purports to be multi-ethnic but in reality is overwhelmingly Bosniak. The party stole an electoral march on the Croats by a quirk of Bosnia's lop-sided electoral system.

In theory, Bosnia's constitution treats Croats as one of the country's three constituent peoples, entitling them to representation equivalent to as much as a third of the positions in the country's public institutions.

In reality Croats may represent only 10 per cent or less of the country's current residents. Hence, quotas in theory reserved for Croat interests in practice may be expropriated by Bosniaks.

This happens when Bosniaks vote for Croat politicians sympathetic to the Bosniak position. Because there are far more Bosniaks than Croats, Bosniak votes carry the day over those of Croats and the officials occupying quotas reserved for Croats end up representing Bosniak, not Croat, points of view.

The country's tripartite Presidency is the most glaring example of this outcome. Bosnia's constitution provides for three presidents: a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb. Since the country is ethnically partitioned into two entities, the Serb President is to be elected from Republika Srpska and the Bosniak and Croat presidents are to be elected from the Federation entity.

But 80 to 85 per cent of the population of the Federation is Bosniak. Thus, if a Bosniak political party fields a Croat candidate sympathetic to Bosniak goals, Bosniak votes may elect two members of the Presidency, Serb votes one and Croat votes none.

This happened with the Croat incumbent for the last two Presidential terms, Zeljko Komsic. Having fought for the Bosniak army in the war and been awarded the Golden Lily in recognition of his services, it is hard to imagine a Croat more sympathetic to the Bosniak cause.

Komsic's candidacy in both 2006 and 2010 elections was supported by the SDP, and he was elected by Bosniak, not Croat, votes. This infuriated the Croats who felt disenfranchised, with some justification.

In the meantime, the SDP used Komsic's election and its support in the polls amongst Bosniaks as evidence to the international community of its commitment to multi-ethnic ideals. It thereby insisted on the right to take the position of State Prime Minister in the coalition government, which needed to be formed after the October elections.

At this stage Dodik played his trump card. Appealing to the notion of inter-ethnic rotation of senior government positions, Dodik decreed that the Prime Minister must be a Croat.

This is because the former Prime Minister (who remains as caretaker) is a Serb; prior to that the officeholder was a Bosniak. Hence, Dodik reasoned, it was the turn of the Croats. Nevertheless this principle of rotation is without foundation.

No strict rules have been applied in determining the nationalities of Bosnian prime ministers, the question turning in each case on the vagaries of coalition negotiations rather than on a rigid ethnic formula.

Nevertheless Dodik's political positioning yielded immediate dividends. It was open to him to insist that, as the largest parliamentary party, his Serb-dominated Alliance of Social Democrats, SNSD, should again appoint the Prime Minister, as it had done after the 2006 elections.

But this would have caused Bosniaks and Croats to align against him. By conceding the Prime Minister's job to a Croat instead, he stoked Bosniak-Croat tensions already inflamed by the Komsic affair.

As the party with the second largest number of seats, the SDP then took the position that it had the right to appoint the State Prime Minister, and would nominate another Croat in the vein of Komsic to occupy the role. At that point the Croat Democratic Union, HDZ, and its sister party, HDZ-1990, for whom the vast majority of Bosnian Croats had voted, objected.

Seeing themselves as representatives of mainstream Bosnian Croat opinion, they interpreted Dodik's remarks as annointing their candidate for the post of Prime Minister. Thus Bosniaks and Croats were immediately split and they remain so.

For as long as Dodik can keep the two non-Serb peoples of Bosnia divided, he can rule the whole country. Dodik's man, Nikola Spiric, a member of the SNSD, remains State Prime Minister.

Under Spiric's watch the state institutions have a plentiful excuse for doing nothing: pending the formation of a new government, they represent the results of the 2006 elections and have no democratic legitimacy.

This is what Dodik wants, as his goal is to strengthen Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb federal entity of which he is President, at the expense of the multi-ethnic central government.

By keeping the state weak, he demonstrates to the world that multi-ethnic Bosnian democracy – which for Serbs means a democracy dominated by Bosniaks – cannot work. He thus gradually strengthens his case for dissolution of the central state and its replacement with a radically different constitutional model.

It is in this context that we must understand the failures of the interminable negotiations between Bosnia's principal political parties to form a new government. The most recent discussions were in Mostar and towards the end of the month another negotiation will take place in Brcko.

Dodik's agenda is to ensure that no government is formed for as long as possible, while pretending to maintain Olympian distance from the issue. Dodik's rhetoric is that it is a dispute between Bosniaks and Croats in which he plays no role. Dodik understands that the SDP is the most dangerous of the Bosniak parties for his agenda.

Under pretence that multi-ethnicity remains a realistic political goal in modern Bosnia, the SDP can perpetuate the international community's illusion that the country has a viable multi-ethnic future. The unrealistic vision embraced by foreign diplomats is the main, or maybe the sole, constraint on Dodik's political freedom of action.

He would far rather deal with the SDA, the Bosniak Party for Democratic Action. The SDA, while ideologically more uncompromising in practice, is more pragmatic in reality. It tacitly accepts the ethno-territorial division of territory that ended Bosnia's war.

The now mostly forgotten "Prud Agreement" in 2008 between Dodik and the SDA leader, Sulejman Tihic, anticipated a constitutional reorganisation, devolving power to regions in each of which one ethnic group would dominate.

This was anathema to the SDP's agenda of a Bosniak-led central government and to the international community's goals for the country. Hence Bosnia's colonial governor, the Office of the High Representative, scuttled it.

Now that the SDP has an ascendancy over the SDA within Bosniak politics, Dodik's strategy has changed.

Rather than negotiate his way towards an impossible agreement with an adversary whose ideology is diametrically opposed to his own, he aims to demonstrate that the SDP's goal is hopeless. This is achieved by supporting Bosnia's Croats in their efforts to preserve genuine representation of their political interests (like Serbs, for the most part centrifugal) in the central government.

He thereby simultaneously denies the SDP their crown of Prime Minister, and indefinitely holds Bosnia's state political institutions in stasis. An advantageous by-product of this policy is that it makes Bosnia's High Representative, Valentin Inzko, look effete.

Inzko had hoped to depart from Bosnia by the end of August, quietly abandoning his gubernatorial powers and leaving the remainder of his mission, assisting preparation for the non-existent EU accession process, to the new EU Ambassador, Peter Sorensen.

But with no prospects of a government being formed, Inzko's premature departure would give the impression of a hands-down political victory for Dodik over international resolve. So Inzko hangs on reluctantly in his diplomatic prison, frustrated by the ruthless logic of Bosnian politics in his endeavours to retire to Vienna.

How can Dodik be stopped? Should he be? Most opinion among independent scholars outside the Balkans now is that the experiment in Bosnian state building was misconceived from the start. The 1995 Dayton peace settlement, imposed by American diplomatic and military force, came too late to prevent ethnic partition.

The Constitution, drafted by American lawyers, was irremediably defective in balancing competing groups' interests. The temptation to resort to oppression, exemplified in endowing the High Representative with dictatorial powers, was foolish and unsustainable.

The desire on the part of outsiders to steer Bosnian politics through financial support for and targeted sanctions against selected political parties, has backfired.

Back in 1998 Dodik was a darling of the international community without whose support he would never have come to power. It is long forgotten that US diplomat Richard Holbrooke nurtured the monster who now threatens his Dayton creation.

Now we see the inevitable end game in a series of chapters of shocking mismanagement by the international community. Further intervention cannot hope to succeed where earlier attempts have proved so misguided.

While Dodik's politics may result in the country's eventual disintegration, it is not clear that any credible strategy remains open to the international community to prevent it. 

Dodik must feel grimly self-satisfied as he keeps his unloved country, of which he is the de facto premier, on its knees. In the midst of the global financial crisis, no European leader has more than the most tangential interest in Bosnia.

The country remains the Serb leader's plaything, and will continue to do so for as long as Bosniak politics remain so irreconcilably divided and the international community disinterested. The international community created the constitutional structure that allowed Dodik to manoeuvre into this position.

Rather than condemning him, they should perhaps condemn themselves for having immersed this tragic country in a political maelstrom and then carelessly turned their backs on the results.

Matthew Parish is an international lawyer based in Geneva, Switzerland. He was formerly the Chief Legal Adviser to the International Supervisor and is a frequent writer and commentator on Balkan affairs. He has written three books: A Free City in the Balkans: Reconstructing a Divided Society in Bosnia (I.B.Tauris 2009); Mirages of International Justice: The Elusive Pursuit of a Transnational Legal Order (Edward Elgar 2011); and Ethnic Civil War and the Promise of Law (Edward Elgar 2012, forthcoming). www.matthewparish.com  

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