Western Aid for Bosnia: Real Progress, or Just a Façade?

By Peter Lippman

A visitor who returns to Sarajevo after a few months always sees progress. The center of Bosnia’s capital city, battered by almost four years of war, is probably in better shape now than it was before the war, as one building after another gets a new façade. But is Bosnian society likewise being repaired? The most recent elections tell a different story.

In the Nov. 11 general elections, the third since the war ended five years ago, members of cantonal assemblies and entity parliaments were selected, as were delegates to the Bosnian House of Representatives. A new president and vice president were chosen for the Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia’s two entities (the other being the Muslim-Croat Federation).

The 44 parties that took part in the elections can be divided roughly into nationalist and non-nationalist parties. The nationalist parties have controlled most of Bosnia since the 1990 elections, the last ones to be held before the war began. During the war and since Dayton they have pursued separatist goals, simultaneously enriching their leaders and impoverishing their constituencies.

The representatives of the international community in Bosnia, headed by the Office of the High Representative, looked forward to the latest elections with great hopes, expecting that Bosnian voters finally would rid themselves of the politician-profiteers who caused such damage over the last 10 years. The election results, however, were profoundly disappointing.

Of the three main ethnicities in Bosnia, the Croats and Serbs overwhelmingly voted in their hard-line parties—the HDZ and the SDS, respectively. Only the Muslims produced a different result, splitting almost evenly for the nationalist SDA and the non-nationalist SDP (Social Democratic Party), which ran candidates of all three ethnicities.

The arithmetic is confounding, because overall the nationalists retook a majority of the votes. However, the SDP took the single largest plurality in the Federation and in Bosnia overall, while several other non-nationalist parties collected a few votes here and there. So in the post-election period, hope still exists that, at least in the Federation and on the state level, the non-nationalists will cobble together a coalition.

Blame for the disappointing results can be spread widely, because in many instances the non-nationalist forces made mistakes and played into the hands of the nationalist parties.

In many instances the non-nationalist forces played into the hands of the nationalist parties.

First, looking at the domestic politicians, one obvious shortcoming of the non-nationalist opposition was that it did not unify its ranks into a coalition prior to the elections. This is exactly what plagued the opposition in Serbia for so many years as well, until their surprising victory of this fall. Political parties in Bosnia apparently are not yet sophisticated enough to understand the need to unite.

Secondly, certain maneuvers by representatives of the international community gave ammunition to the nationalist parties. For example, in October the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which administers the elections, decreed a change in the way representatives to the upper house of parliament would be elected. This change was intended to dilute the power of the Croat nationalist party, the HDZ.

As if on cue, the HDZ held a Croat congress in Central Bosnia and drafted a declaration of equal rights for Croats in Bosnia. They then called a referendum to support this declaration, to be held on the same day as the elections. The promotion sign pasted all over the Federation read, “DETERMINATION OR EXTERMINATION,” clearly insinuating that Croats were mortally threatened, and only the HDZ could save them. No one really knew what the contents of the referendum were to be, but the intent was obvious: Croats should have their own entity.

Of course, no Croat politician could admit this, even though underground organizations throughout the Croat-controlled part of the Federation have been advocating it for years. The Dayton peace agreement explicitly forbids the creation of a third entity. But the referendum was a clever way of getting Croats out to vote (their turnout had been low in the April municipal elections), and rallying them behind the HDZ.

The OSCE declared the referendum illegal, but dared not sanction it, especially before the elections, as that would have thrown the Croat electorate even more solidly into the arms of the HDZ. As it turned out, the HDZ collected a strong 80 percent of the Croat vote.

Another mistake on the part of the West was to publicize the statement that the SDS—the Serb nationalist party formerly headed by indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic—was a “criminal organization” and should be banned. This pronouncement came from two directions at once: the respected International Crisis Group, and the crafter of Dayton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke.

As with the decision to change the election law in the lower house of the Bosnian parliament, it was the timing of the call to abolish the strongest Serb party, rather than its substance, that was problematic. For, again, it provided ammunition to the nationalists with which to frighten their constituency by saying, “See, they’re all against us!”

Furthermore, the mid-sized Party for Bosnia, headed by former Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, certainly added fuel to the nationalists’ fire by running a campaign whose main slogan was “For Bosnia Without Entities.” While this, too, is a good idea, not only is it also forbidden by Dayton, but it was, logically, interpreted by politicians in the Republika Srpska as a call to abolish that entity.

The Republika Srpska

The Republika Srpska now is more strongly in the grip of hard-line nationalists than at any time in the last three years. A scramble of coalition-forming in early December should show who comes out on top in the Federation and the national parliament. As is the case in the United States, the post-election show is more interesting than the event itself.

Both the Muslim nationalist SDA and the non-nationalist SDP are courting other parties. The SDP and the other non-nationalist parties, however, have declared that they will not collaborate with the SDA. The SDA, in power for the last 10 years and desperate to remain there, said that it would cooperate with the SDS and HDZ, presumably its greatest enemies. Then, after a few days, it backtracked, stating that it would not form a coalition, but would “collaborate” if the HDZ and SDS clearly declared that they were behind Dayton.

This is an easy condition, because the OSCE requires all political parties to declare support for Dayton in order to be allowed to participate in politics. But Dayton is like the Bible: one can swear by it but interpret it in a thousand ways. Support for Dayton has not stopped any of the nationalist parties from enriching themselves, obstructing minority refugee return, and committing dozens of other infractions against a civilized state.

Meanwhile, the SDP has been holding serious discussions with Party for Bosnia leader Silajdzic and a small moderate Croat party, and it appears that this will lead to a coalition. The SDA’s reaction was to criticize this as an “unprincipled alliance” for political purposes. That, after declaring itself prepared to cooperate with the party of Karadzic.

If the SDP succeeds in creating a coalition with Silajdzic, it will lead to the first non-nationalist government in Bosnia in 10 years. Given that it will represent roughly only half of the voters, however, it will need strong support from the international community in order to function.

The new leaders of the Republika Srpska have been rehearsing some new lines themselves. While SDS leaders swear that they are “devoted” to Dayton, party president Mirko Sarovic gave an interview to a Russian newspaper in which he declared that if Kosovo were to gain independence, the Republika Srpska would hold a referendum on secession from Bosnia. This is directly in conflict with Dayton, and led some international representatives to ask, “Which is the real Sarovic?”

High officials from both Serbia and the Serb entity, meanwhile, have been increasing the volume of their calls for a “special relationship” between the two populations. This would include dual citizenship for Bosnian Serbs, allowing them to have Yugoslav passports. While innocuous in itself, when coupled with Sarovic’s statement it points to a revival of the push for annexation to Serbia of the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia—that is, creation of a “Greater Serbia.”

Why, after five years of “peace” and almost five billion dollars of foreign donations, does Bosnia remain at the mercy of separatist forces? The West halted the war, but failed to create peace. It repaired building façades, but did not rebuild an economy. At the end of the year 2000, Bosnia’s industries are producing at 20 percent of their pre-war capacity, less than half the adult population is employed, and pensioners receive their 100 DM or 200 DM pensions four or five months late. Furthermore, more than a million displaced persons and refugees still wait to return to their pre-war homes.

Disappeared Funds

While Bosnians in both the Serb and Muslim-Croat entities scrounge to get by and wonder how they are going to pay their heating bills this winter, the politicians and their friends grow ever richer. The international community does not know what happened to all of that $5 billion, but some of it went into the pockets of the profiteers. OSCE head Robert Barry recently accused the SDA of spending thousands of dollars from a fund for widows and orphans on vehicles to be used during the election campaign.

This is but one of a thousand examples of the bleeding of Bosnia’s economy. It doesn’t help that, according to a recent article by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 80 percent of United States funding has been used up by U.S. NGOs in administrative costs!

Roofs and bridges have been repaired, as have government buildings. Several glitzy Western-style shopping malls now grace Sarajevo. But no large factories have been brought into operation, no train lines run for more than a few hundred kilometers, and people who can do so are leaving Bosnia—100,000 since Dayton.

In this depressing atmosphere, politicians continue to swear by Dayton, and international officials utter the habitual post-election praises of a “smooth and successful process.” But those who understand the corrupt nature of the Bosnian regime and are not willing to leave the country sharply criticize the international community that controls Bosnia as a semi-protectorate.

Their strongest complaint is that the causes of the war were left to fester afterward. That is, there was no postwar “de-Nazification.” The nationalist movement of Milosevic and Tudjman was after all essentially a fascist one, and it obviously has not been eradicated. In its eagerness to get Bosnia up and running, the international community pretended that the signers of Dayton would arrest themselves. This, naturally, never happened.

Instead, Bosnia was legally partitioned into two parts (and, de facto, into three parts), with an army corresponding to each part, one supposedly multiethnic entity named after only one of its ethnicities, and with the warlords left in charge. The Dayton mélange includes three presidents, two entity presidents, more assemblies, parliaments and houses of representatives than you can shake a stick at, and more government ministers than the U.S. president has cabinet posts.

Jacques Klein, head of the U.N. Mission to Bosnia, recently called Bosnia a “mental case.” Klein can leave, however, while most Bosnians are not able to do so. They deserve to be given back the future that was taken from them during the war. The international community has the ability to do this but, so far, international officials in Bosnia have performed like amateurs.

For real change to occur, the Office of the High Representative would have to get serious and remove the separatists and profiteers from politics—not only among the Serbs and Croats, but among the Muslims as well. This would solve the problem of rampant corruption, as well as obstruction of refugee return. The army then could be unified, solid investment take place, and central government institutions strengthened. The pivotal question is whether the international community has the will to take these measures, or instead merely will continue constructing façades?

Peter Lippman, a native of Seattle, Washington, is a staff writer for the Advocacy Project (www.advocacynet.org), an association that supports advocates in countries of crisis or in transition. He has spent most of the past three years in Bosnia and Kosovo.