Post by theblackswans on Jul 27, 2008 14:49:27 GMT -5
Making light of Srebrenica and threatening secession,Milorad Dodik, the self-aggrandizing prime minister of RS,is paralysing the country, according to a report translated from 'Süddeutsche Zeitung' (Munich)
The times are over when one could park a car on the sidewalk in Banja Luka. In the centre of the ‘capital’ of the Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated part of the Bosnia-Herzegovina, the local authorities have installed parking metes and have brought order to the chaotic traffic. The streets are sparkling clean, the parks are free of trash, and in-line skaters breeze through the pedestrian throngs with breathtaking speed. Signs of renewal can already be seen at the outskirts of town. Austrian and Slovenian firms have opened new gas stations, local representatives of Western automobile firms are enticing customers with the latest model cars, and foreign contractors are building a motorway all the way to the Croatian border. Starting in 2009, the Republika Srpska is to be joined to the European freeway network. But no one dares to predict whether Bosnia-Herzegovina will thereby move closer to Europe.
Relations between politicians of the two parts of the country - the Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation - have reached a low point. Hardly a day goes by without polemics and provocations. The leading sources of these are two politicians whose parties won the most votes in the 2006 elections - and who ever since have brought the country to a standstill. The strongman in the Bosnian-Serb republic is Milorad Dodik, a former basketball player and businessman. who during the Bosnian war became wealthy by trading in all kinds of merchandise, including, it is said, cigarettes and gasoline. Dodik is the prime minister of the Serb ‘entity.’ He is opposed by Haris Silajdzic, who lives in the country's capital Sarajevo and represents the Bosniaks (Muslims) in the tripartite state presidency. Silajdzic, who served as Bosnia's foreign minister and head of government during the Bosnian war, views the abolition of the Republika Srpska as his life's work. The Serb ‘entity’ came into being through strategically planned massacres of the Muslims and the genocide committed by the Bosnian-Serb army at Srebrenica constitutes the very basis of this ‘quasi-state’ in Silajdzic's view. Dodik reacts to such charges with unrestrained indignation. Ever since Kosovo declared itself independent of Serbia, Dodik has taken advantage of every opportunity to call Bosnia's future into question
The rhetorical battle is making a real debate on reform of the Bosnian state impossible. Foreign experts assess that the state's present structure is an obstacle to EU integration. According to the terms of the Dayton Peace Accord, which ended the war in December 1995, Bosnia consists of two entities; the central government has very limited powers. A recently-adopted reform of the police forces is hardly deserving of the name reform, since in both parts of the country the law enforcement agencies will be able to continue operating separately.
And that, according to Dodik, is how it should remain. ‘I do not love Bosnia,’ he says. And he shows this quite openly. During an official visit to the town of Trebinje last week, he removed and threw away a Bosnian state flag that had been put on the table. Shortly thereafter, he sought to downplay the mass murder of an estimated 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica as merely ‘a local genocide.’ This despite the fact that the International Court of Justice in The Hague has judged the tragedy in the small town in eastern Bosnia as genocide. At a public appearance in Zagreb, Dodik angered the hosts with his statement that Croatia owed its existence to the largest ‘ethnic cleansing’ since World War II. By this, he was alluding to Croatia's ‘Operation Storm’ in the summer of 1995, during which around 300 thousand Serbs were forced to flee. Meanwhile, Dodik did not mention the fact that during the war in Bosnia some 2.3 million people, most of them Muslims and Croats, were forced to flee. After being chided by Miroslav Lajcak, the High Representative of the international community in Sarajevo, Dodik was unimpressed. He would go on repeating his accusations against Croatia ‘like a parrot,’ he said.
Now resistance to Dodik's autocratic style of leadership has begun to stir even in the Bosnian Serb Republic. Representatives of civil society are accusing the RS government of corruption and complaining of police harassment. An example they cite the sale of the oil refinery in Bosanski Brod to the Russian company Zarubezhneft. Up to now, the public has not been informed whether and when the Russian state-owned enterprise has paid the agreed sum of 121 million euros for the sale, they say.
A critical press barely exists in the Republika Srpska. The main newspapers all support Dodik unconditionally. ‘Whoever does not follow the official line will lose the government advertising contracts,’ says the head of the employers' association, Damir Miljevic. For weeks now, the pro-government media have been conducting a campaign against the local office of the anti-corruption organization Transparency International in Banja Luka. The attacks have forced the organization to temporarily suspend its operations. Bosnian media have published excerpts of a plan, according to which Dodik allegedly wanted to discredit the unloved NGO. Boris Divjak, head of the Transparency International office in Banja Luka, says that people from the Republika Srpska government have offered him money if he keeps quiet about corruption cases.