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Bosnia and Herzegovina | No 3 | May to June 2007

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Bosnia and Herzegovina | No 3 | May to June 2007 Bosnia and Herzegovina | No 3 | May to June 2007 Bosnia and Herzegovina| Trends in Conflict and Cooperation May and June brought no relief from the ill-tempered exchanges between supporters and opponents of further centralization in Bosnia-Herzegovina as demanded by the European Union integration process. On the one side is the government of Republika Srpska (RS) under Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, which adheres to the literal and static reading of the 1995 Dayton peace accords and insists on the RS retaining as much real power and as many attributes of sovereignty as possible, notably including its own police force. Police reform, a precondition for a preaccession Conflictive International and Domestic Events in Bosnia and agreement with Brussels, remains stalled for that reason. On the other side are Bosniak Herzegovina (Bosnian Muslim) leaders such as Haris Silajdzic, the Bosniak representative of the country’s tripartite presidency who publicly advocates scrapping the RS based on the fact that genocide was committed by the RS army in Srebrenica in July 1995. Because Silajdzic is not interested in considering constitutional changes falling short of a massive loss of power for the entities, attempts to amend the Bosnian constitution have not materialized ever since a package of modest amendments was defeated in parliament in April 2006. The most serious disagreement came in June, when Silajdzic and his Bosnian Croat counterpart Zeljko Komsic wrote a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to demand that the RS be abolished. The third presidency member, a Bosnian Serb representative (and current presidency chairman), Nebojsa Radmanovic, denounced the letter and said he had not been consulted about it. The international High Representative subsequently warned Bosnian Source: FAST event data politicians that anti-Dayton activities would not be tolerated by the international community – a thinly veiled threat to Silajdzic and his campaign of using the status of Srebrenica to provoke a constitutional crisis and have the international community abolish the entity system. This development is depicted on the adjacent graph: both domestic and consequently international conflictive events have risen in June 2007. Former U.S. ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina Clifford Bond was named special envoy to Srebrenica on 3 May to coordinate international assistance for the town. The international community as well as the RS authorities, which have declared Srebrenica a special economic zone and announced an economic support package, are hoping that the increased development will defuse calls for its political status to be changed. How sensitive and open to manipulation the whole Srebrenica issue is became clear once again at the end of June. The High Representative imposed a law handing management of the Potocari memorial site, which includes a cemetery of victims whose remains have been found and identified, to a public body. Previously, the site was managed by a private group. The law could not be passed by the Bosnian parliament because the Serb deputies walked out during the debate. The RS authorities promptly denounced the imposition calling it “anti-constitutional” and said they would boycott the High Representative and block the state-level budget. In June the lower house of parliament passed a law on higher education that had been stalled for many months. The legislation, which aims to bring Bosnia’s higher education in line with European Union standards, was among the preconditions for the signing of a preaccession agreement with Brussels. At the end of June, international High Representative Christian Schwarz-Schilling handed over his office to successor, Slovak diplomat Miroslav Lajcak. Schwarz-Schilling was widely seen as an ineffectual and hapless High Representative on whose supervision Bosnia went through some of its most difficult moments since the war. Here again, reactions are divided – with relations with Bosnian Serb politicians being generally cordial and those with Croat or Bosniak politicians generally tense. Lajcak has announced that he would downsize and restructure the OHR and abolish the system of having two deputies, one European and one American, by retaining just U.S. diplomat Raffi Gregorian, a key player in the police reform process. He also stressed that he would not impose a new constitution unless there was consensus among Bosnia’s politicians. In March the Bosnian Constitutional Court ruled that entity symbols should not be ethnically divisive, which prompted the federation and the RS to adopt new flags, coats of arms, and anthems. RS politicians objected when the federation temporarily adopted the Bosnian state flag, while Bosniak lawmakers in the RS National Assembly vetoed a May 31 resolution to make the Serbian anthem (minus its lyrics) the anthem of the RS. Bosnian Croat politicians stepped up activities in pursuit of a third entity, often referred to as the “federalization” of Bosnia. They met several times to discuss possible scenarios but the results have not been made public. FAST Update | Bosnia and Herzegovina | No 3 | May to June 2007 Serbia’s telecommunications company, Telekom Srpske, took the reins of the publicly-owned Bosnian Serb mobile operator by buying a 65-percent majority stake for 646 million Euros in December 2006. It is the largest such privatization in Bosnia and the largest direct foreign investment of any Serbian company to date. In June, Telekom Srpske appointed a new general director, renamed the company M:Tel and offered free roaming throughout Serbia and Montenegro to its customers. Prime Minister Dodik gave the sale a populist angle by earmarking some 100 million Euro from the privatization proceeds for a development fund managed by the Republika Srpska government. The entire transaction has attracted increasing criticism in recent months, as has the takeover of most of Bosnia’s oil industry located in the RS by a Russian state-owned conglomerate in February. Following a series of strikes in the health sector of the federation, the governments of several cantons and unions representing health care staff struck new collective agreements and ended the strikes. In late May the former intelligence chief of the Bosnian Serb army, General Zdravko Tolimir, was arrested and transferred to the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Tolimir was one of several senior officers indicted for war crimes committed in Srebrenica in 1995, and the third-most senior ICTY indictee still at large. Some two weeks later, Vlastimir Djordevic, a Serbian police commander and deputy interior minister indicted for his role in Kosovo, was arrested in Montenegro and transferred to The Hague. With the two arrests, the only remaining war crime fugitives wanted by the ICTY are now one Croatian Serb (wartime political leader Goran Hadzic) and three Bosnian Serbs (Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, and wartime police chief Stojan Zupljanin), which might conceivably relieve some of the international pressure on Belgrade and increase the pressure on Banja Luka. Tolimir’s arrest was later reported to have been staged by the Serbian security forces, which had allegedly arrested him in Serbia proper and then transferred him to the custody of the Bosnian Serb police, thereby scoring a public victory for both forces. In June a prominent SDP parliamentarian and wartime mayor of Tuzla, Selim Beslagic, was detained for questioning by the Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina, acting on an arrest warrant from a Belgrade court in connection with the 1992 ambush by local militias on a convoy of retreating Yugoslav People’s Army soldiers in which dozens of soldiers (according to some international reports around 150) were killed. The ICTY had already investigated the matter and had not found sufficient evidence for an indictment; since Bosnia does not extradite its citizens to other countries, Beslagic and two others questioned with him were released. The incident caused great concern about the possibility of frivolous war crime prosecutions. On May 25, Radovan Stankovic, the first Bosnian Serb war criminal convicted by the ICTY to be transferred to Bosnia for his prison term, escaped from Foca prison in Eastern RS. Stankovic had been sentenced to 20 years for running a rape camp in Foca. Observers criticized the fact that Stankovic, a high-profile war criminal whose crimes were especially grave, was allowed to serve his prison term in the town where he had committed his crimes and where he had many friends in the local police force. The newly elected leader of the opposition Croatian Social Democratic Party, Zoran Milanovic, touched off debate in Croatia and Bosnia about the right of Bosnian Croats (most of whom are dual citizens) to vote in Croatian elections. President Mesic supported Milanovic’s proposals, which were denounced by the ruling HDZ, whose traditional power base lies in Western Herzegovina. Tensions between the “federalists” who want to leave as much power with the entities as possible and the “centralists” who want to strengthen the central government or in some cases, even scrap the entity system altogether, is unlikely to abate in the near to medium term. The prospect of closer ties with the European Union has failed to dampen the hostility between RS politicians and everyone else over police reform, and there is no reason why this fundamental dynamics should change. In the short term, tensions over Srebrenica may increase in the run-up to events on the anniversary
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