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The Last Man Standing
Bosnia is not a “normal” country and the process of choosing a leader doesn’t stop with the vote count.
by Tihomir Loza 20 January 2011
You may have noticed that Bosnia held general elections in October, so as the honeymoon period draws to a close you might wonder how the new government has done. Except there is no new government and it is doubtful that there will be one soon.
Long periods between elections and the formation of new executives have been common in postwar Bosnia, though things feel a bit more ominous this time. The country’s complicated constitutional structures are partly to blame, as is the culture of unaccountability as a byproduct of international tutorship of Bosnia’s political class. Politicians in today’s Bosnia hardly ever feel a sense of urgency. They simply take their time.
Most of the country’s postwar state-level governments were formed of parties that had emerged strongest among their respective ethnic group. So even if they didn’t agree on many key things, such parties co-existed in government. This time, however, the party that won the most votes, the Social Democrats, refuses to be pigeonholed along ethnic lines.
The party claims to simply represent Bosnia’s citizens, regardless of ethnicity. Its opponents, however, point out that nearly all votes for the Social Democrats came from the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) territories and argue that it is therefore a Bosniak party.
The Social Democrats don’t, for they really can’t, contest that point. Instead, they say voters’ ethnic background is irrelevant, and therefore party president Zlatko Lagumdzija, as leader of the biggest party in parliament, should become chairman of the Council of Ministers.
But the two parties that won the majority of Serb and Croat votes reject this. Milorad Dodik of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats and Dragan Covic of the Croatian Democratic Union argue that the next prime minister should be an ethnic Croat and not Lagumdzija, who is Bosniak. More precisely, the two, who have developed a strong personal bond as well as a political partnership in recent years, say that Croat should be Covic himself. In their view the most important state-level government posts should be distributed among the three ethnic groups on a rotating basis. The last two prime ministers were a Serb and a Bosniak, so now it’s the Croats’ turn.
Lagumdzija strongly disagrees. He has now gathered a Social Democratic-led alliance that includes two minor Croat parties as well as the formerly strongest and now second Bosniak party, Democratic Action, as a nucleus of what he says should become the governing majority. He has also drafted a rather strong reformist platform for government that, unusually for Bosnia, goes beyond ethnic issues. This alliance is, however, far from a workable majority. Theoretically, it can form the next government of the Bosniak-Croat Federation entity, one of the country’s two semi-autonomous provinces, but would be unable to do much, as the population and local officials in the Croat areas would certainly boycott it.
To form a government at the state level, which is what he really wants, Lagumdzija needs Dodik. And Dodik he can have only in a bundle with Covic, as the two men now see the unofficial alliance between their parties as a tool to stop any attempt by the Bosniaks to dominate the smaller Serb and Croat constituencies.
As with so many other problems in Bosnia, the questions of what the country is about and how it should be constituted are at the heart of this issue. And you also guessed well that arguments here are far from being uncontaminated by personal rivalry and animosity.
Like most other Sarajevo-based politicians, Lagumdzija articulates the view, mostly held by Bosniak citizens, that government function should be more centralized, with many decisions made according to the one-person-one-vote principle. The term often used is “normal” – Bosnia should become just a normal state, one often hears, and if it was not for separatists such as Dodik and Covic, it would easily do so.
While most Serbs and Croats are automatically suspicious of any such argument from Sarajevo – they fear being locked in a constitutional arrangement that would always see them outvoted – most Social Democratic leaders, including non-Bosniaks, are sincere when advocating a more centralized Bosnia of equal citizens, free from ethnic prejudice. While their position inevitably overlaps in some elements with the views of more nationalist Bosniak politicians whose idea of a “normal” Bosnia is really about a Bosniak-dominated Bosnia, ethnic competition is probably the last thing on the minds of key Social Democrats. What many of them, including Lagumdzija, are perhaps guilty of is a certain lack of sensitivity for and interest in Bosnia’s diversity. As a party that draws much of its postwar experience from big urban centers such as Tuzla and Sarajevo, the Social Democrats often fail to note that their good intentions may not carry the same level of credibility outside these places. What’s more, the party has done little to reach out to other parts of the country.
While unsurprising and in many ways understandable, the desire for a more centralized and less ethnically driven country is also unrealistic. In circumstances of sharp ethnic divisions, manifested in the existence of three parallel societies, ethnic identity of public figures is not something you can bypass. In other words, Bosnia is not really “normal,” and not only because of its constitution. If, for example, the biggest party were always to name the prime minister, that prime minister will nearly always be Bosniak, because the party for which the majority of Bosniaks vote will nearly always also be the biggest party. Even provided that such a prime minister-designate is able to form a majority, he or she would lack credibility in much of the country.
Besides, the rotation principle, as a formal requirement or a firmly established practice, is not an invention of the makers of the Dayton peace accords. The Bosnian branch of the Yugoslav Communist party, of which the Social Democrats are a successor, based much of its approach to building ethnic cohesion on the premise of an equitable distribution of key posts in public life among Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups.
Yet, to do as Dodik and Covic demand almost inevitably leads to a weak state-level executive. If the state government is always going to be only a sum of the strongest parties from three ethnic camps not bound by a joint platform then such a government will always be just a talking shop capable only of decisions based on the lowest common denominator. No wonder this is frustrating for a politician as ambitious as Lagumdzija.
No wonder, either, that the situation doesn’t frustrate the equally ambitious Dodik as much. He’s repeatedly said he wants as small a central government as possible. He is saying that all he is truly interested in is Republika Srpska, the country’s highly centralized Serb-majority entity that his party now governs at all levels. Ambitious Bosniak politicians don’t have such an outlet. The government of the Bosniak-Croat Federation does have significant powers but presides over a highly decentralized entity. It achieves only limited visibility in the context of the Bosniak political scene in Sarajevo, which is primarily focused on issues concerning Bosnia as a whole. In other words, while top Serb politicians tend to view top Republika Srpska’s posts as most desirable, their Bosniak counterparts aim for state-level positions, an aspect of Bosnia’s current constitutional arrangement that should be carefully looked at in any future talks on constitutional reform.
The current impasse, of course, has a lot to do with personal animosities. Lagumdzija and Dodik both came from the non-nationalist corner of Bosnian politics and, in fact, used to be friends. Things started to sour when in 2006 Dodik began to assume a more nationalist position. The Social Democrats have since been part of a rather hysterical and often brutal response to Dodik’s separatism, with Sarajevo-based media outlets under Lagumdzija’s influence regularly leveling obscene allegations against Dodik. Lagumdzija also mounted an international campaign against Dodik, lobbying the Socialist International to exclude the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats from its membership. Carried away by his election success in October, Lagumdzija threatened to prevent Republika Srpska’s secession by “physical force.”
Until very recently Dodik’s response was if anything more unguarded. He often picked fights with journalists close to Lagumdzija, not shying from showering them with obscenities, and continued to toy with independence for Republika Srpska in increasingly provocative ways. But since the October elections he seems to have toned down his approach, perhaps realizing that he now holds one weapon that can really hurt Lagumdzija. Saying that he does want a government with Lagumdzija’s Social Democrats and the Croatian Democratic Union, he repeated earlier this week that Lagumdzija was unacceptable as either prime minister or foreign minister, though he “can perhaps be the minister for refugees.”
The irony – a very Bosnian irony – about all of this is that not a lot of political imagination is required to find convergence among the three parties. In 2006, they were part of a deal to reform Bosnia’s constitution. The U.S.-sponsored package struck a good balance between the need for more efficient state-level institutions and decentralizing elements but was narrowly defeated in parliament thanks to a peculiar alliance of extremists on all three sides. There would be no such problem this time. If things depended only on parliamentary math, the three parties and their allies would now command a majority capable of passing any type of constitutional or legislative measure.
Source:
http://www.tol.org/client/article/22106 ... nding.html
