Bosnia’s “Historic” Elections: The Usual Tensions, Plus a Seed of Hope

By Peter Lippman


	Mostar’s historic Stari Most, originally built under Ottoman rule in 1566, has been rebuilt after being destroyed during fighting between Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats in 1993 (Photo P. Lippman).

PREDICTIONS were that the general elections that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina Oct. 1 would be of “historic importance.” With next year’s scheduled withdrawal of the international community’s Office of the High Representative (OHR), which has governed Bosnia as a semi-protectorate, Bosnia’s new leaders would, for the first time, exercise complete sovereignty over their state—and, theoretically, guide the country toward membership in the European Union.

Unfortunately, however, if the candidates’ campaign behavior is any indication, Bosnia’s politicians are less ready than ever to transform their state into one that protects and advances the interests of all its citizens. Ever since the end of the war in 1995, electoral campaigns have been a period of exaggerated rhetoric and heightened tensions. But this most recent campaign has been the most extreme of all, fraught with declarations and threats that recalled the tense period of ethnic polarization which preceded the war.

Electoral Tactics

While it could be described as a morbid circus with many sideshows, the electoral campaign focused on disputes about Bosnia’s political setup as arranged by the 1995 Dayton agreement, which brought the war to an end. The Dayton Constitution legalized the two war-created entities of Bosnia, the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska (RS) and the Croat-Muslim Federation. It also set up a weak central authority run by an ethnically based three-part presidency. Real power resides in the separate entity governments and at the level of cantons and municipalities.

Given that most of the 36 political parties that participated in the recent elections are ethnically identified, citizens have almost no choice but to vote as Croats, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), or Serbs. Thus voters are not in fact voting as citizens, but as members of ethnic groups that, in most cases, are led by corrupt individuals. The most well-developed skill of these leaders is the ability to manipulate their ethnic constituencies through fear. Generally the last thing on their minds is promotion of citizens’ actual needs, such as employment (in a country where around 40 percent of the population is out of work), better pensions, better schools, better health coverage, and many other similarly concrete needs.

The most compelling example of manipulation during the recent campaign was that of Milorad Dodik, prime minister of the Republika Srpska and head of the Party of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD). Over the past year, that relatively “moderate” party has gained ascendancy over the previously dominant, extreme nationalist SDS, founded by fugitive war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Although Dodik has been regarded as a non-nationalist, the tactics he employed to win the recent elections placed him on a par with the late Slobodan Milosevic. Namely, he threatened that if the Federation’s Bosniak parties continued to call for an abolition of the entity system, as they have done sporadically during the last half-year or so, he would conduct a referendum in the RS to consider secession from Bosnia.

While Dodik knew that a referendum would be illegal under the Dayton Constitution, he also knew that secession is a popular idea among much of the entity’s Serb constituency. The result of this and other campaign tricks was that the SNSD rode a strong wave to victory, and Dodik’s party colleague Nebojsa Radmanovic won the presidential seat as Serb representative.

On the Federation side, Dodik’s mirror image, former Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic of the Party for Bosnia (SBiH), won the presidential seat as Bosniak representative. As clever and charismatic a politician as Dodik, throughout the campaign Silajdzic agitated for a “Bosnia based on citizenship, not ethnicity.” This is a fine goal, but the tragedy is that it is not an achievable one without the participation of a majority of Bosnians—and most Serbs are headed the other way. Realistically, then, Silajdzic can be seen as a false moderate who, practically speaking, encourages the country’s polarization. In de facto collaboration with Dodik, in other words, Silajdzic provokes the Serb population of Bosnia into a nationalist reaction against reunification of the country.

The election-period polarization of Bosnia and Herzegovina did not take place in a vacuum. Bosnia’s economy is falling behind even that of neighboring Albania, a country that, until recently, was known as a basket case. Bosnia’s leaders are generally notorious for placing their party favorites in managerial positions where they can oversee crooked privatization. Flouting common sense, the current High Representative has been experimenting with a policy of leniency toward these leaders, in the hope that they will behave more seriously and prepare for self-government—but to no avail.

In this context, this past spring Bosnia and its international handlers prepared a draft of a new constitution that would have brought the country at least a couple of steps toward citizen rule, and away from ethnic polarization. The measure was defeated in parliament by two votes from Silajdzic’s party. He was dissatisfied because the new constitution retained Bosnia’s entity-based structure, which his militancy urgently requires to be abolished. As explained above, given the polarization created by the war, this is not presently a conceivable option. Thus, the breakdown of the constitutional reform process and the resulting frustration led directly to an electoral campaign in which arguments about the political organization of Bosnia achieved a feverish tone.

An Electoral Surprise

In one unpredicted turn of events, however, Zeljko Komsic, candidate of the non-nationalist Social Democrat Party (SDP), won the presidency’s third seat as the Croat representative, defeating the hard-line nationalist Croat party, the HDZ (Croat Democratic Union), and other Croat fragment parties. Since before the war started in 1992, HDZ had all but monolithically represented Bosnia’s Croats, but its prospects were damaged by a split earlier this year over disagreements about the new constitution.

The remarkable thing about Komsic’s victory is that he was elected not only by Croats from the HDZ’s traditional constituent regions, but also by Bosniaks who did not wish to vote for Silajdzic. Many view the latter as a careerist and egotist and—especially after his blocking of the constitutional reforms—as someone willing to sell off Bosnia’s future in order to further his own political fortune. In effect, then, Komsic was elected by people voting as citizens, rather than as Croats and Bosniaks. If this manner of thinking and voting were more prevalent, it would be the most positive step in the last two decades years toward reasonable politics in Bosnia. Unfortunately, it is not yet a trend—but it may represent a first step.

Meanwhile, the defeated Croat nationalist candidates have been making themselves look like consummate sore losers by saying that Komsic does not and cannot represent Bosnian Croats, and even threatening to boycott governmental functions.

Prognosis

Political time in Bosnia and Herzegovina can be divided into pre- and post-elections. One could say that Dodik, Silajdzic and the SDP did a good job for their respective parties and can now move on to statecraft. Although polarizing rhetoric reached worrisome proportions during the campaign, maybe—just maybe—the “moderate,” “civilized” politicians who were elected will now sober up and act like leaders. There is, in any case, more possibility of this happening than if the old, hard-line parties of Karadzic and other defunct warlords were still reigning. It remains an open question, however, whether their underlying politics of divide and conquer, and of ethnic cleansing and secession, really are a thing of the past. The answer should become clearer during the coming months of coalition-building and renewed constitutional negotiations.

Peter Lippman is an independent human rights activist based in Seattle.