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Naslov: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 17 kol 2012, 15:28 |
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Pridružen/a: 18 kol 2009, 17:38 Postovi: 1101
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The latest from Matthew Parish. I know he has fans here on the forum and who knows maybe he reads it. Source: http://www.transconflict.com/2012/08/bo ... emise-158/Bosnia’s ragged demise With international interest in the country having dissolved, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s politicians can now start pulling apart the political architecture imposed by the US Government at Dayton, bringing the state ever closer to irretrievable collapse. By Matthew Parish Bosnia’s High Representative has not issued a single order of significance since March 2011, and now seldom even makes public statements of significance. Embroiled in Middle Eastern crises, the international community no longer cares a jot about the Balkans. The international pressures now buffeting the region are financial. Bosnian economic contraction is driven not only by global recession, but also by Croatia’s impending membership of the EU, whose consequent increased regulatory standards for imports drive down Bosnian exporters’ profit margins. The domestic political consequences of economic turmoil in a country so heavily reliant on public sector employment are biting austerity. Hence the need to divert the population’s attention from the economic to the political is pressing. Thankfully a propitious instrument to achieve this is at hand. International interest in the country having dissolved, Bosnia’s politicians can now start pulling apart the political architecture imposed by the US Government in the Dayton Peace Accords. The principal dynamic of this wrecking project is Serb exploitation of Bosniak-Croat divisions. Until recently, the foremost pretence of inter-ethnic Bosnian unity was an uneasy axis within the country’s Social Democratic Party between two people. One is Zlatko Lagumdzija, the party’s Bosniak President and Bosnia’s Foreign Minister. The other is Zeljko Komsic, the party’s Vice-President who serves as Croat member of the tri-partite Bosnian Presidency and (rarely amongst Croats) supports a centralising political agenda. Yet these two individuals have proven incapable of getting along, despite mutual political benefits to their doing so. On 23rd July 2012 Komsic quit the SDP, citing objections to Lagumdzija’s proposals for constitutional reform. His objections were unsurprising: the reforms anticipated would have rendered his own re-election unimaginable. Hence his resignation was an act of political self-preservation. One might wonder why constitutional reform has again become a salient theme in Bosnian politics, when frequent past attempts all failed so abjectly. To understand this, we must look to a final feeble effort by the Europeans to press their preferred vision for the country upon Bosnia’s intractable ethnic politics. In its December 2009 judgment, Sejdic and Finci v Bosnia and Herzegovina, the European Court of Human Rights declared Bosnia’s constitution to be unlawful. That is because the constitution requires the tri-partite Presidency to be populated by one Bosniak, one Croat and one Serb. Yet some people in Bosnia, including Messrs Sejdic and Finci (Roma and Jewish respectively), belong to none of these groups. Hence they are disenfranchised from Presidential candidacy. The same reasoning was applied by the Court to the House of Peoples, Bosnia’s upper legislative chamber that likewise works on the basis of ethnic quotas. This debate might seem theoretical. The number of Roma is post-war Bosnia may be as few as 7,000 (0.17% of the population); the number of Jews as low as 500 (0.015%). Political allegiances in Bosnia being strictly divided upon ethnic lines, no Roma or Jew has the remotest prospect of being elected President in the near future, even if legally (s)he were able to stand. Nevertheless the European Court held that disenfranchisement is undemocratic in principle, and Bosnia’s constitution must be reformed. The European Union duly latched onto the ruling, stipulating constitutional reform as a precondition for further steps towards EU accession. Perhaps it was too much to hope that a Court ruling would succeed where OHR dictates and over a decade of diplomatic pressure had failed. This was not the first time the international community had tried to wield EU membership prospects as a tool to force constitutional reform. Those with longer memories will recall the failures of police reform, the constitutional amendments negotiated by Don Hayes (a former American Permanent Deputy High Representative) and “Dayton II”, all internationally driven constitutional reform projects using the same political tool of conditionality for EU accession. Every Bosnian politician appreciates that EU membership for Bosnia is a remote prospect, even in the medium term. The European Union is collapsing under the weight of its current disorganised and impoverished Balkan members, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. The notion of soon admitting so dysfunctional a country as Bosnia strains all credibility in the hallways of the European Commission, where minds are focused on mitigating the consequences of premature monetary union. Nevertheless none can be seen to admit that Bosnia’s chances for proximate EU membership are zero. Bosnia’s population still fantasises of EU accession as the sole prospect for relief from its perpetual economic misery. Hence EU membership for Bosnia is a game of smoke and mirrors. The EU pretends to offer accession negotiations, premised upon conditions that Bosnia’s politicians find collectively unpalatable. Bosnia’s politicians pretend to believe them, and pretend to negotiate to meet the conditions on which they all know they cannot agree. The Sejdic-Finci judgment is just the latest example of this pattern. The reason the reforms mandated by the Sejdic-Finci judgment are impossible is because any amendment compliant with the ruling will undermine the Croats, who already perceive themselves as an endangered minority. If ethnic quotas are removed from Bosnia’s electoral system, it is inevitable that the smallest group will suffer. If (as is currently estimated) Bosnia’s population is something like 50% Bosniak, 40% Serb and 10% Croat, then on any system of suffrage stripped of ethnic affiliation it is unlikely that there would be a Croat member of a tripartite Presidency at all. Komsic’s identity is illustrative of this problem, for he is a Croat in name only: he was elected by a majority of Bosniaks due to his ardent unitarian views. Most Bosnian Croats harbour thinly veiled contempt for him as unrepresentative of their devolutionary political interests. Were Bosnians granted suffrage for the Presidency without ethnic quotas, Bosniaks would have no need to vote for a heterodox Croat as a second proxy representative of Bosniak interests. Instead they could just vote for a second Bosniak. Hence there would be no Croat member of the Presidency, and no role for Zeljko Komsic either. One possible reform, of which several variants have been proposed, is for voters each to declare themselves a member of a group that forms an electoral college, the three largest of which vote for their favoured member of the Presidency. In principle if not in practice, the number of Roma might one day exceed the number of Croats in which case the Roma electoral college might prevail over the Croat one and Mr. Sejdic could be elected to the Presidency. The problem for Mr. Komsic with this model is that he is unpopular amongst Croats and hence he would not be elected while Croats remain one of the three biggest groups (unless his current Bosniak supporters declared themselves Croats for the purposes of a Presidential election, something which cannot be excluded when viewing events through Bosnia’s warped political lens). Hence the irony of the constitutional reforms entailed by the Sejdic-Finci judgment is that the biggest loser from them, if implemented, is Zeljko Komsic, arguably Bosnia’s most genuinely multi-ethnic politician. Enter now Milorad Dodik, President of the Bosnian Serbs. His agenda is to promote detachment of Republika Srpska from the rest of Bosnia. Hence he would delight in annihilating the political power of the State Presidency, arguably the most functional institution of Bosnia’s central government. As a matter of principle, he cares little about how the members of the Presidency are elected. But as a matter of politics, he will take any opportunity to exacerbate Bosniak-Croat relations and thereby divide and conquer, cementing his own separatist agenda. Hence he purported to agree a set of constitutional reforms to implement the Sejdic-Finci judgment with his hitherto arch-rival, Zlatko Lagumdzija. Komsic, foreseeing the death of his own political career if Dodik and Lagumdzija cemented their deal, resigned from SDP. He did this not once but twice, the first time on 20 March 2012 (subsequently retracted). His more recent resignation appears permanent. He now plans his own multi-ethnic party to compete with SDP. Komsic being genuinely popular with Bosniak SDP voters, Dodik split his principal Bosniak opponents down the middle and paralysed the operation of the Presidency in a single stroke. This was all achieved in the name of pursuing a strategy for European integration agreed as an ostensible compromise with his foremost political opponent. With the central government fatally weakened, Dodik is now pushing to finish SDP as a political force. Lagumdzija is in a spin, and he needed to make only the mildest misstep for Dodik to deliver the fatal wound. The misstep was delivered on 3 August 2012, when Bosnia’s Ambassador to the United Nations voted in favour of a UN General Assembly resolution criticising Syria. Lagumdzija as Foreign Minister was apparently responsible for the instruction to vote in favour of the resolution. Dodik does not care for Syria one way or the other and still less for the UN General Assembly, a mostly irrelevant body whose resolutions carry no more than moral force. Nevertheless Dodik suddenly emerged as a constitutional scholar, complaining that the Foreign Minister is only entitled to act on the instructions of the Presidency. Lagumdzija has no mandate to act on a frolic of his own. Faced with such an affront to Bosnia’s constitutional order, the Bosnian Serbs withdrew from the central government, paralysing it, until Lagumdzija and all of SDP resign and head into opposition. This is something Lagumdzija will never do, for it would ruin his own career as SDP subsequently removed the leader who had brought upon it such calamity. Dodik managed to perpetuate paralysis in Bosnia’s central government for 14 months after the October 2010 elections. After just five more months in which the government was ostensibly functioning, he has again achieved the same result. Even better for him, the Croat member of the country’s Presidency is now a member of no political party, and Dodik’s principal Bosniak political opponents, SDP, are cast to the winds. All this is achieved while the international community in Sarajevo is on its summer holidays. This is a convenient situation for the Bosnian Serb leader given the economic cards he currently has to play. His people are hungry and poor, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. In the medium term, Bosnia’s economic development can come only from exporting agricultural products to the EU. But amidst financial turmoil it is hard to see how investors will risk participation in corruption-laden Bosnia, trade barriers will be lowered or EU consumers will absorb increased supply when their own wallets are tighter. Nevertheless Dodik has managed to fill the economic vacuum with extraordinary political success. Slowly but surely, he is persuading his European interlocutors that a central Bosnian state is not a credible project. He is not doing this by stomping his fist as a secessionist bogeyman. Rather his tools are supporting constitutional reform along the lines of the Sejdic-Finci judgment; manipulating Bosniak-Croat divisions inherent to the Bosnian political structure; and serving as a constitutional guardian of the separation of powers between the country’s Presidency and Foreign Ministry. The learned Judges of the European Court of Human Rights should be commended for their political acumen in intervening in so dense a thicket. Amidst their own economic crises, the Europeans have grown weary of Bosnia’s travails and the Americans long ago lost interest. The jungle has grown back, and the logic of the Dayton constitution is playing out its inexorable course. Dayton gave the Serbs disproportionate political leverage: their entity would be unified in the post-war government structure, while Bosniaks and Croats would be left bickering between cantons amidst the temperamental balance of the Federation’s devolved political structures. The corollary of this model is that sooner or later, the Serbs would be able to pull it apart. Eventually the Europeans will acquiesce in the fait accompli, because they are unwilling to invest the diplomatic or financial resources to prevent it from happening during an era where so many more serious global problems predominate. Amongst diplomats and commentators, a consensus has emerged that the Bosnian state is now close to irretrievable collapse. The question remains whether this breakdown will entail a return to violence. The threat of renewed hostilities is periodically hoisted as a warning flag to maintain the meagre persisting level of international interest in the country. Yet like EU integration, the threat of renewed civil war may also be a mirage. Unlike in early 1992, no side is prepared for violence. They are too concerned about how to feed their families to be bothered buying guns. Moreover the course of the Bosnian war had its own unseemly logic. By separating the country’s three different groups by geography, often forcibly, it foreclosed the mutual fear of domination that drove the prior conflict. Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats no longer much intermix. In their day-to-day dealings, they have forgotten about one-another. They are each mere distant monsters to the others, who go about parallel lives. It will not be easy to persuade the ordinary man to go to war and risk his life and that of his family, just to reopen territorial divisions settled some twenty years ago. Hence renewed warfare is unlikely amidst the biting poverty of contemporary Bosnia. With the threat of violence ever more remote, the final glue holding Bosnia together as a functional state has likewise dissolved. The country will be cast to pieces – hopefully peacefully – amidst the waves of Europe’s second Great Depression. Matthew Parish is an international lawyer based in Geneva, Switzerland. He was formerly the Chief Legal Advisor to the International Supervisor of Brcko, a post “suspended” by the Office of the High Representative in May 2012. He is a frequent writer and commentator on Balkan affairs. His first book, A Free City in the Balkans: Reconstructing a Divided Society in Bosnia, was published by I.B.Tauris in 2009. His second book, Mirages of International Justice: The Elusive Pursuit of a Transnational Legal Order, was published by Edward Elgar in 2011. www.matthewparish.com
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 20 kol 2012, 18:49 |
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Pridružen/a: 18 kol 2009, 17:38 Postovi: 1101
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Ouch.... Source: http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/ ... osnia-7365Forgotten Failure in Bosnia John R. Schindler August 20, 2012 Twenty years ago this August, there was no hotter story in the emerging global media than Bosnia and its terrible civil war, which was unfolding gorily in near real time. CNN in particular made great copy on the conflict, and worldwide its emerging star Christiane Amanpour became an icon with her “live from Sarajevo” pitch. Just how accurate much of the reportage out of bloody Bosnia was that fateful summer remains an open question. The war’s position as the first extended conflict to take place in the context of 24/7 global TV coverage before the rise of Internet fact-checking seems historically important. Yet there can be no doubt that “advocacy journalism” did a magnificent job at forcing Western governments to pay attention and eventually intervene militarily in Bosnia. Even the masterful politico Bill Clinton, who initially professed minimal interest in foreign affairs, least of all Balkan conflicts which few Americans understood, wound up pushed by the media and advocates to get involved in Bosnia’s fratricide. Soon, it became America’s and NATO’s problem. By the autumn of 1995, the United States was brokering a deal to end the fighting, the so-called Dayton Accords, and almost sixty thousand NATO troops soon headed to Bosnia to keep a then-fragile peace. What a difference two decades makes. Bosnia remained front-page news around the world through much of the 1990s, particularly with spikes like the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre and subsequent NATO military intervention in the conflict. But by the end of that decade, CNN and others had moved on to other trouble spots: Kosovo, Sudan, East Timor, eventually Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, Bosnia rarely generates news coverage in the West, much less on the front page. As a result, most foreigners have little sense of how dismally failed a state Bosnia and Herzegovina actually is in 2012. Matthew Parrish, an attorney who played a part in helping to rebuild the shattered country, has just published an article detailing Bosnia’s “ragged demise”—a piece which is as depressing as it is accurate. The always-weak Bosnian edifice built at Dayton is on the edge of complete collapse under the weight of its own dysfunctions, local corruption and politicking, and Western indifference. As a legion of critics has pointed out since the ink was still moist in Ohio, Dayton paved paths for trouble by enshrining two substate entities—the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska—under a weak, more or less notional, Sarajevo leadership, which has been ruled in quasi-colonial style under a European-appointed high representative since the war’s end. The federation was from the start an unhappy marriage of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats; the latter were ambivalent about being joined to the Bosniaks, whom they fought a nasty war against in 1993–1994 (one of the underreported aspects of the conflict since it did not easily fit the CNN version of events). Now most Croats, who feel they were shanghaied into this arrangement by the Americans and NATO, want out of the federation, where they are dominated by the majority and therefore politically superior Muslim population. Yet the Dayton structure allows no such modifications, and Bosniak-run Sarajevo would resist any changes mightily. Similarly, the mere existence of the Republika Srpska, seen as a national home by Bosnia’s Serbs, is regarded at best as an affront by Bosniaks, at worst as “a reward for genocide.” In such a rhetorical climate, it’s hardly surprising that the two entities have moved further apart since the guns fell silent in late 1995, and the Serb leadership in the capital of Banja Luka continues to do its level best to obstruct any Bosniak moves to create a functional state-level apparatus run out of Sarajevo. While Muslims see the Republika Srpska as a temporary measure, for Serbs it is the bare-minimum requirement for their remaining in any sort of Bosnian state, however marginally. Independence is spoken of openly in Banja Luka as an option, though NATO and the EU have made clear that is not on the table, while not clarifying why Kosovo can be separated from Serbia but the Republika Srpska must not under any circumstances leave Bosnia. Dayton and its colonial overlords can claim some successes. The warring factions have been disarmed and disbanded, having united gradually in a Bosnian military which is small and underfunded and no threat to anyone. A return to fighting in 1990s fashion is impossible now, since there simply are not enough weapons in the country, especially heavy weapons, to sustain a serious war. In that limited sense, NATO can claim success, though one wonders whether such a limited goal could have been achieved at lower cost than was required, particularly the maintenance of tens of thousands of NATO troops—about a third of them U.S. forces—in the country through 2004, when the mission was handed over to EU peacekeepers. In every other area, however, Dayton-created Bosnia has been a failure, and in some ways a dismal one. Promised interethnic reconciliation never got off the ground, and enmity among Serbs, Croats and Muslims is as deep now as twenty years ago, as nationalist views have been passed on to the next generation. Hopes that wartime refugees—something like half the population—would return to their prewar homes never panned out on any scale. This disappointment came despite massive efforts by NATO, the EU and NGOs, who were slow to accept the war’s clear lesson: most Bosnians do not want to live among people not of their ethno-religious group. Above all, Dayton’s promise to rebuild some sort of functioning civil society and economy in Bosnia has been a huge disappointment. While late Communist Bosnia was troubled by all the same challenges of governance and economics found across Eastern Europe at the time, the flawed conditions of 1990 seem like paradise compared to the swamp of crime, corruption and poverty to which Bosnia has become under Western leadership. Official unemployment stands around 50 percent, but that may be too optimistic, while post-Dayton Western investments in the country have dried up in the face of intractable corruption and theft. Smart estimates state that at least one-fifth of the billions of dollars in Western aid after 1995 was simply stolen, off the top, by politicos and mafiosi, who are often the same people. While the black and grey sectors are thriving, just as they did during the war, the legal economy can be said to hardly exist at all, beyond Western handouts which have been evaporating in recent years as attentions have dwindled and bigger wars have taken aid money away from the Balkans. The human toll of “peace” in Bosnia, in what a generation ago was a reasonably developed and prosperous European country, is difficult to express. There is ample blame on all sides to go around, and the Bosnians themselves must bear a major portion of the responsibility for the crime, corruption and thievery that rule lives and institutions. Yet it is the elites in all entities who benefit from the institutionalized criminality, while average Bosnians suffer daily amidst poverty and exclusion, all under nominal Western leadership. And nominal it is, as the EU’s high representative has essentially ceased to function. What America, NATO and the EU have wrought in Bosnia presents a cautionary tale, particularly for the many commentators who hail Bosnia as a rare win in the Western intervention column. At root, Dayton imposed a neocolonial model without neocolonial benefits. While NATO and the EU took it upon themselves to run the broken country, nominally and in a sometimes arbitrary fashion, this leadership made little difference, as local politicos stayed in place. The example of Bosnia raises awkward questions about the efficacy of Western “nation building” in broken societies, even relatively small and developed ones which should be easy to fix compared with much bigger and more damaged places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Average Bosnians saw little change, and little reform, but a lot of aid money—which in most cases enriched corrupt elites without helping the population very much. Dayton, behind an illusion of change, empowered the criminal cadres that led Bosnia into a terrible war while doing little for the victims of that war and doing even less to reform a very damaged and sick society. Today, Bosnia and Herzegovina—Dayton’s ramshackle, quasi-colonial creation—is approaching a complete collapse, as political paralysis mounts and economic woes worse. The Bosnians cannot save themselves, and the saviors of the 1990s seem uninterested. Will anyone in the West, distracted by wars and crises unimaginable when NATO intervened in Bosnia in 1995, take notice? John R. Schindler is professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer with the National Security Agency. He has written widely on Balkan affairs and blogs at The XX Committee. The opinions expressed here are entirely his own.
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 20 kol 2012, 19:43 |
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Pridružen/a: 05 lis 2010, 12:48 Postovi: 108338 Lokacija: Županija Herceg-Bosna
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So simple, so true.
_________________ Spetsnaz, a force for good.
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 20 kol 2012, 20:23 |
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Pridružen/a: 01 stu 2009, 23:53 Postovi: 413 Lokacija: Toronto
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The positive trend in these analyses written up by foreigners is that they see the Federation as the most dysfunctional unit whereas before FBiH was only mentioned in passing in favour of focusing on the existence of RS and how lack of unitarism was "hobbling" BiH.
RS is inherently more stable and this last piece that Stecak posted has the author pointing the finger squarely at Muslim politicians for being the most active in siphoning off aid money.
Nor are we witnessing any more "solutions" like forced unitarism by dismantling RS. These western analysts/experts are now clearly stating that BiH is a failed state and can collapse at any moment.
_________________ Salo - Chic Nihilism
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 24 kol 2012, 15:51 |
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Pridružen/a: 18 kol 2009, 17:38 Postovi: 1101
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Another perspective Source: http://www.transconflict.com/2012/08/bo ... ctive-248/Bosnia from a peacebuilder’s perspective Posted on August 24th, 2012 Reverend Donald Reeves, a peacebuilder with substantial experience in the Balkans, offers five observations on Bosnia and Herzegovina, emphasising that the intervention of ‘experts’ must be on the invitation of the people themselves. By Reverend Donald Reeves MBE Reading carefully all the contributions and comments on constitutional reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I would like to offer a different perspective. I am not a diplomat, lawyer or academic. I am no ‘expert’; I do not speak Bosnian. I am a peacebuilder. The Soul of Europe, a modest NGO, has worked in both Bosnia and Kosovo, since 2000. - On the basis of this experience, I would like to offer the following observations. It is easy to forget how politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) are regarded with contempt – not to be trusted, and experienced as self serving . In 12 years in the Balkans, I have not met one person expressing any hope in politicians and thus in politics. Civil society has been marginalised, particularly when the identity of ethnic groups is threatened. I am an Anglican priest so I have a special interest in Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy; there is no wish for the different religions to work together beyond making occasional solemn statements. The US and Europe have lost interest in the Balkans. This is good news. At last something like a Bosnian spring might have a chance. Already there are those who are saying – “That’s it. We have had enough. We are fed up with our politicians and internationals who promise this and that and never keep their promises’. Look at the fragile but hopeful signs – such as the ‘chocolate revolution’ in Mostar and the protest against the development of Pico Park in Banja Luka – which have turned into into a protest against all political parties. So it is just conceivable that some people will find their voice, and begin to organise. There are many models of citizenship to draw on (I was in Chicago as a student in 1968 – the year of Civil Rights – and learnt about citizenship through the work of the organiser Saul Alinksy). As such a movement grows then there will be a need for the ‘expert’, but his or her intervention will be at the invitation of the people. Meanwhile the expert should stay on the side lines, encouraging. But there will come a time when a new movement will want all the allies it can find. This may seem too idealistic. Whatever happens will be messy, difficult, and confused; but it is hoped not bloody. The communist heritage destroyed personal initiative. The powerful will be threatened and will do all they can to destroy these fragile shoots. But Bosnia has one great asset – its people, particularly those who were teenagers during the war and are now in their thirties. Many had experience of international NGOs, and have a European perspective. This where Bosnia may begin to be born again. Reverend Donald Reeves MBE is the founder of the Soul of Europe. The Soul of Europe works as catalysts and mediators to ensure a peaceful resolution to conflicts, particularly in the Balkans.
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 24 kol 2012, 15:56 |
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Pridružen/a: 05 lis 2010, 12:48 Postovi: 108338 Lokacija: Županija Herceg-Bosna
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Stecak je napisao/la: has worked in both Bosnia and Kosovo, since 2000. -
Nice CV, good references. Kosovo and Bosnia still most problematic areas of Europe, and the world. He is missing Palestina and Sudan as reference.
_________________ Spetsnaz, a force for good.
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 24 kol 2012, 16:03 |
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Pridružen/a: 18 kol 2009, 17:38 Postovi: 1101
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max soldo je napisao/la: The positive trend in these analyses written up by foreigners is that they see the Federation as the most dysfunctional unit whereas before FBiH was only mentioned in passing in favour of focusing on the existence of RS and how lack of unitarism was "hobbling" BiH.
RS is inherently more stable and this last piece that Stecak posted has the author pointing the finger squarely at Muslim politicians for being the most active in siphoning off aid money.
Nor are we witnessing any more "solutions" like forced unitarism by dismantling RS. These western analysts/experts are now clearly stating that BiH is a failed state and can collapse at any moment. I think we know the reason that the RS is stable and that is because it is the Serb entity. They dominate and they can thumb their nose at the rest of the politicians in Sarajevo. Which understandably drives the Sarajevo political establishment nuts. I'm also sure that it drives Sarajevo nuts to think that that the West now sees Bosnia as a failed state and that the politicians in Sarajevo have the finger pointed squarely at them for this failure. I guess the larger question is if Bosnia is destined to collapse then what is the best way to facilitate the collapse and at that point the Dayton Agreement would be pitched in the trash so would all bets be off regarding who gets what?
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 24 kol 2012, 16:12 |
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Pridružen/a: 18 kol 2009, 17:38 Postovi: 1101
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BBC je napisao/la: Nice CV, good references. Kosovo and Bosnia still most problematic areas of Europe, and the world.
He is missing Palestina and Sudan as reference. BBC agreed. I think the West likes to say that "we can't change borders" but when it suits them they will like with South Sudan. I don't know if the West would let three states to form in Bosnia especially when they are concerned about turning the Muslims into the Palestinians in Europe. But the West may not have a choice...
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 24 kol 2012, 16:18 |
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Pridružen/a: 05 lis 2010, 12:48 Postovi: 108338 Lokacija: Županija Herceg-Bosna
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I meant something different. How can he say he did something good at his work, when his references are nothing but disasters.
_________________ Spetsnaz, a force for good.
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 24 kol 2012, 17:49 |
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Pridružen/a: 18 kol 2009, 17:38 Postovi: 1101
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BBC: sorry about the misunderstanding
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 25 kol 2012, 01:11 |
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Pridružen/a: 01 stu 2009, 23:53 Postovi: 413 Lokacija: Toronto
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Citat: The US and Europe have lost interest in the Balkans. This is good news. At last something like a Bosnian spring might have a chance. This Anglican Priest is just another outsider without a clue. He thinks that multiethnic liberal democracy will 'bloom' in BiH because 'people are frustrated by their politicians and politics'.
_________________ Salo - Chic Nihilism
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 26 kol 2012, 23:12 |
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Pridružen/a: 03 svi 2009, 11:29 Postovi: 76975 Lokacija: Institut za razna i ostala pitanja
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Note a comment on Konjic killings and massacres that I posted (will be visible on Monday after moderator's approval): http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article ... his-target
_________________ Fun fact: I HDZ i SDA su osnovani u Zagrebu.
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 04 ruj 2012, 18:04 |
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Pridružen/a: 18 kol 2009, 17:38 Postovi: 1101
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Source: http://www.heraldextra.com/news/opinion ... 4cf33.htmlThe shaky state of Bosnia While the United States understandably focuses on the Middle East and Central Asia, democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, once onsidered a rare transatlantic success story, is in danger of unraveling. The 1995 Dayton accords that ended Bosnia's three-year bloody war did not quell the virulent disagreements among the country's three largest nationalities: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. Moreover, Dayton bequeathed Bosnia a dysfunctional and excessively redundant constitutional structure. The international community's representative to Bosnia noted a few years ago that the country of 4 million people has "two entities for three constituent peoples; five presidents, four vice presidents, 13 prime ministers, 14 parliaments, 147 ministers and 700 members of Parliament." Nonetheless, in the first decade after the war, Bosnia made notable progress. It even attempted in 2006 to reform its constitution. But after that initiative failed by two votes, interethnic relations and, indeed, governance went into steady decline. The European Union, eager to atone for its fecklessness during the war, persuaded the United States to end its peacekeeping role. An E.U. force replaced the United Nations' blue helmets, and the Americans went home. Although a succession of E.U. officials has tried to induce the feuding groups to cooperate, it has become increasingly clear that, successful or not, Brussels is determined to close the office of the international high representative and to wind down its own political and peacekeeping involvement in Bosnia. A lawsuit that two Bosnian citizens took to the European Court of Human Rights has brought the situation to a crisis point. In 2009 the court found that certain provisions of Bosnia's constitution and election laws discriminate against minorities. Bosnian civil society groups and international human rights organizations rejoiced, expecting swift remedial measures as the European Union, to which Bosnia aspires, made amending the constitution and electoral laws a condition for membership. But nearly three years later, the ruling is being turned on its head as part of a backroom deal. In late July the Social Democratic Party, which garnered the largest number of votes in the 2010 parliamentary elections while running on a secular, multiethnic platform, abruptly pulled out of a coalition with the Party of Democratic Action, the principal standard-bearer of Bosniak Muslims. The Social Democrats formed an electoral alliance with HDZ, the largest Bosnian Croat party. Advertised as a positive response to the court ruling, the deal is actually the opposite, as it reinforces Bosnia's growing ethnic and religious tribalism. The draft electoral law, included in a complex set of constitutional amendments, would lock in representation of each of Bosnia's three constituent peoples in areas where they compose a majority at the expense of the "others" -- Roma, Jews, other ethnic minority citizens and the large number of Bosnians who choose not to identify with any single ethnic group. The Bosnian Croats living in areas governed by the HDZ would be most favored, receiving a virtual veto over national legislation. This division of spoils would be especially inequitable since Bosnia's next census, in 2013, is expected to show that the country's "others" group is as least as numerous as the Bosnian Croat community. The leader of the Serb entity, Republika Srpska, sees the law as furthering his own separatist ambitions. Opposition to the draft law has been furious. The Croat member of the country's tripartite presidency, whose family -- like those of many Bosnian citizens -- transcends ethnic and religious lines, resigned from the Social Democratic Party in protest. The two minority citizens who brought the 2009 court case publicly came out against the draft law, as did the largest Bosniak party. Civil society organizations are mobilizing to defeat the legislation, slated for a vote in the coming weeks. In early August the groups wrote to U.S. lawmakers, likening the legislation to the three-fifths counting of slaves that preceded the 14th Amendment and asking for support to defeat it. One would expect the European Union, which is never shy about extolling its commitment to "European values," to support the opposition. But E.U. officials have watered down standards for implementing the court's decision to making a "credible effort" to do so. The United States, reluctant to undermine transatlantic cooperation that has been fruitful elsewhere in the Balkans, appears willing to defer to Brussels. It is difficult to see how this electoral law would enhance stability in Bosnia. Cementing the power of ethnic fiefdoms runs directly against the tide of 21st-century European history. Cutting large segments of the population out of meaningful political participation will exacerbate tensions, not foster a unifying attachment to the state. The contrast with two of Bosnia's neighbors could not be greater. NATO member Croatia will join the European Union next year. Montenegro, which has integrated large Albanian and Slavic Muslim minorities into its national life, reached the negotiating stage of its E.U. membership in June and is well on its way to joining NATO. Meanwhile in Sarajevo, political life revolves around shabby agreements among party bosses, and the country's larger interests, including its NATO and E.U. candidacies, languish. Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose citizens have suffered so grievously and in which the United States and its allies have committed significant resources for two decades, presents a sorry spectacle.
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Naslov: Re: Bosnia’s ragged demise Postano: 04 ruj 2012, 21:08 |
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Pridružen/a: 03 svi 2009, 22:11 Postovi: 24068 Lokacija: Multietnička federalna jedinica sa hrvatskom većinom
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Stecak je napisao/la: Source: http://www.heraldextra.com/news/opinion ... 4cf33.htmlThe shaky state of Bosnia While the United States understandably focuses on the Middle East and Central Asia, democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, once onsidered a rare transatlantic success story, is in danger of unraveling. The 1995 Dayton accords that ended Bosnia's three-year bloody war did not quell the virulent disagreements among the country's three largest nationalities: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. Moreover, Dayton bequeathed Bosnia a dysfunctional and excessively redundant constitutional structure. The international community's representative to Bosnia noted a few years ago that the country of 4 million people has "two entities for three constituent peoples; five presidents, four vice presidents, 13 prime ministers, 14 parliaments, 147 ministers and 700 members of Parliament." Nonetheless, in the first decade after the war, Bosnia made notable progress. It even attempted in 2006 to reform its constitution. But after that initiative failed by two votes, interethnic relations and, indeed, governance went into steady decline. The European Union, eager to atone for its fecklessness during the war, persuaded the United States to end its peacekeeping role. An E.U. force replaced the United Nations' blue helmets, and the Americans went home. Although a succession of E.U. officials has tried to induce the feuding groups to cooperate, it has become increasingly clear that, successful or not, Brussels is determined to close the office of the international high representative and to wind down its own political and peacekeeping involvement in Bosnia. A lawsuit that two Bosnian citizens took to the European Court of Human Rights has brought the situation to a crisis point. In 2009 the court found that certain provisions of Bosnia's constitution and election laws discriminate against minorities. Bosnian civil society groups and international human rights organizations rejoiced, expecting swift remedial measures as the European Union, to which Bosnia aspires, made amending the constitution and electoral laws a condition for membership. But nearly three years later, the ruling is being turned on its head as part of a backroom deal. In late July the Social Democratic Party, which garnered the largest number of votes in the 2010 parliamentary elections while running on a secular, multiethnic platform, abruptly pulled out of a coalition with the Party of Democratic Action, the principal standard-bearer of Bosniak Muslims. The Social Democrats formed an electoral alliance with HDZ, the largest Bosnian Croat party. Advertised as a positive response to the court ruling, the deal is actually the opposite, as it reinforces Bosnia's growing ethnic and religious tribalism.The draft electoral law, included in a complex set of constitutional amendments, would lock in representation of each of Bosnia's three constituent peoples in areas where they compose a majority at the expense of the "others" -- Roma, Jews, other ethnic minority citizens and the large number of Bosnians who choose not to identify with any single ethnic group. The Bosnian Croats living in areas governed by the HDZ would be most favored, receiving a virtual veto over national legislation. This division of spoils would be especially inequitable since Bosnia's next census, in 2013, is expected to show that the country's "others" group is as least as numerous as the Bosnian Croat community. The leader of the Serb entity, Republika Srpska, sees the law as furthering his own separatist ambitions. Opposition to the draft law has been furious. The Croat member of the country's tripartite presidency, whose family -- like those of many Bosnian citizens -- transcends ethnic and religious lines, resigned from the Social Democratic Party in protest. The two minority citizens who brought the 2009 court case publicly came out against the draft law, as did the largest Bosniak party. Civil society organizations are mobilizing to defeat the legislation, slated for a vote in the coming weeks. In early August the groups wrote to U.S. lawmakers, likening the legislation to the three-fifths counting of slaves that preceded the 14th Amendment and asking for support to defeat it. One would expect the European Union, which is never shy about extolling its commitment to "European values," to support the opposition. But E.U. officials have watered down standards for implementing the court's decision to making a "credible effort" to do so. The United States, reluctant to undermine transatlantic cooperation that has been fruitful elsewhere in the Balkans, appears willing to defer to Brussels. It is difficult to see how this electoral law would enhance stability in Bosnia. Cementing the power of ethnic fiefdoms runs directly against the tide of 21st-century European history. Cutting large segments of the population out of meaningful political participation will exacerbate tensions, not foster a unifying attachment to the state. The contrast with two of Bosnia's neighbors could not be greater. NATO member Croatia will join the European Union next year. Montenegro, which has integrated large Albanian and Slavic Muslim minorities into its national life, reached the negotiating stage of its E.U. membership in June and is well on its way to joining NATO. Meanwhile in Sarajevo, political life revolves around shabby agreements among party bosses, and the country's larger interests, including its NATO and E.U. candidacies, languish. Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose citizens have suffered so grievously and in which the United States and its allies have committed significant resources for two decades, presents a sorry spectacle. I've got a feeling that I read Oslobodjenje, Avaz or klitorix.
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