The great Carthage waged three wars.
It was still powerful after the first,
still habitable after the second.
It was untraceable after the third.
B. Brecht
Will there be war again? For the past two months, this is the question on everyone’s lips in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The current political crisis has made this question ubiquitous, asked by children of their parents and by parents of their children, friends pose it to each other, people inquire with acquaintances, what are they doing over there, are any preparations under way. More information is sought, everyone has someone, or at least believes they have someone smarter, better positioned, someone who should know more and be able to produce a better, deeper, keener analysis. War has worked its way into ordinary, quotidian conversations, not to mention the media: there, it has already started. Most people don’t even try to hide their fear, and attempts at humour tend to fall flat, such as: we should have let THEM know we were planting trees today, if they see 200 of us in the woods like this, they’ll think we’re headed into battle.
Will there be war again? It would be fair to say that the one asked knows less than the one asking. As related to me by a Bosnian-Herzegovinian reporter, it is hardest to find the right balance, a measure between dismissing the current political crisis, which is serious and which could escalate into open violence, at one extreme, and adding fuel to the fire by seeing war behind every corner, alarming people that it has already started, or is just about to start, and that all that stands between us and another massacre is lobbying in the corridors of the US Congress, at the other extreme. Traumatised by the previous war, fearing for yourself and your loved ones, feeling objectively helpless as an ordinary citizen scrambling to make ends meet at the edge of a possible abyss that seems to be opening up, it is hard to keep a cool head.
Will there be war again? To us in BiH, it seems like the current crisis is the ultimate question in the world and that everyone is informed about its genesis, current state and possible outcomes. In reality, the issue is not even a priority for our neighbours in Croatia and Serbia, even though their politicians are involved in much of what is happening in BiH. In mid-October, when I was following Serbian media more closely, both the opposition and government media, topics from BiH were relegated to the second half of the evening news, and made it onto the front page only when the Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, after days of radio silence, received Milorad Dodik, member of the BiH Presidency, for an official visit.
Ongoing Crisis
For those who have not kept up, which is the world at large, it might be useful to explain the causes and origins of the crisis, its course and possible outcomes. But, at a time when every event is a crisis in itself, it’s hard to know where to start and when to stop. The crisis has been ongoing for at least the past ten years or so, but this brief overview will focus only on the period from the summer of this year, because not everything can be included in the limited space of this article.
Will there be war again? started cropping up as of July 2021. First, Valentin Inzko, the High Representative in BiH, on the penultimate day of his mandate, imposed changes to the BiH Criminal Code that criminalise the denial of genocide and all war crimes adjudicated by courts, of which there are several hundred with perpetrators from all the once warring sides. In response to the imposition of this law, political representatives from Republika Srpska, from both the ruling majority and the opposition, announced that they would withdraw from participating in the work of BiH institutions. The new High Representative Christian Schmidt, proposed by Germany and appointed by the Peace Implementation Council that is made up of 15 ambassadors in BiH, had this hot potato land in his lap and had to deal with both the imposed law and the challenges from Republika Srpska, claiming Schmidt was unacceptable because his appointment had not been confirmed by the UN Security Council. The crisis simmered until the end of September, when two significant political events brought it to boiling point.
First, the Constitutional Court of BiH ruled that the forests not in private but in state ownership in the territory of Republika Srpska are actually owned by the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Constitutional Court of BiH is in itself a stumbling block because, as the highest court, its decisions significantly determine many processes. For Republika Srpska, its decisions are unacceptable because, according to the Dayton Agreement, the Constitutional Court is made up of three foreign judges and two judges from each of the constitutive peoples: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. It rules by a simple majority, which representatives from RS claim allows Bosniak and foreign judges to outvote the Serb and Croat judges. Although some decisions were made possible thanks to the votes of the foreign and Bosniak judges, the Constitutional Court of BiH, which does not disclose how each judge votes in a given case, has always insisted that it takes most of its decisions unanimously and that even the non-unanimous decision do not always follow the model alleged above. Also, at the end of September, the opposition in Republika Srspka, otherwise sharply opposed to the ruling SNSD of Milorad Dodik in all matters save those seen as a vital national interest, launched the oxygen affair. Namely, during the pandemic, authorities in Republika Srpska procured industrial oxygen for use as medical oxygen on the severest COVID cases, which, according to the opposition, contributed to RS having the highest mortality rate in all of Europe. This was a complete political knock-down for Dodik, who had managed to sail through previous scandals fairly smoothly, but now had nowhere to go and instead of the usual fare of him dictating the tempo and actions to be undertaken, he was forced to answer and follow the beat and topics set by the opposition. Additionally, when the opposition published morbid photos of Prijedor’s SNSD mayor, Dodik was forced to ask for his resignation, thereby losing for his party the mayoral position in the third biggest city in RS, having already lost Banja Luka and Bijeljina.
The other prong of the crisis, dating further back and being more constant, relates to reforming the BiH Constitution and Election Law in order to provide all citizens with the right to vote and stand for elections, something that had been made impossible by the complicated ethno-territorial election system. More than just removing discrimination, this opens up the complex issue of the relationship between the ethnic and the civic. Since in RS Serbs make up the absolute majority, this relationship between the ethnic and the civic is most consequential for Bosniaks and Croats in the Federation of BiH where the Croats, accounting for around 25 percent of the FBiH population, demand ethnic mechanisms to protect them from being outvoted, as happened, for instance, with the election of the Croat member to the BiH Presidency, while Bosniaks demand the minimising of ethnic mechanisms to remove the possibility of blockades, such as the current three-year-long blockade by HDZ preventing the appointment of the FBiH Government. The deep distrust and fears are not just forces guiding political processes, but are also present among ordinary people. The dominant fear of Serbs and Croats is that, when Bosniaks become 50 percent of the population, they will be outvoted and reduced to minorities in any model save the ethno-territorial one, while the dominant fear of Bosniaks is that the country will be torn apart by a Serb and Croat alliance with the support of Serbia and Croatia. Paradoxically, it is from these fears that, while alleging self-protection, they have embarked upon a kind of pre-emptive political violence: Bosniaks vote en masse to decide the Croat member of the BiH Presidency, while HDZ and SNSD reinforce their alliance, insisting on the exclusivity of the ethno-territorial principle. This is what drives a vicious cycle that only brings forth more fear and greater distrust.
Heightened Tensions
Milorad Dodik, as member of the BiH Presidency, heightened tensions in mid-October by announcing that Republika Srpska would withdraw from all state institutions save those foreseen by the Dayton Agreement. Some of these institutions had been formed when competences were transferred to the state level by decisions of the high representatives, while some were formed by decisions of official BiH institutions in whose work representatives of Republika Srpska had participated and had, in fact, supported such decisions. Dodik announced that any such transfers of competences from the entity to the state level were invalid because they had been made either by a high representative or by politicians from RS, including Dodik himself, but under pressure from the international community. Apart from withdrawing from the customs and taxation policy, Dodik has also announced the dismantling of the BiH Armed Forces and the establishment of the Army of Republika Srpska, as well as banning state-level judicial and police institutions from acting in the territory of RS. If these state institutions, including the army and the police, were to refuse to retreat from the territory of RS, Dodik has threatened them with the Slovenian scenario of commandeering the barracks.
As his first move, Dodik revealed what his real priorities were when he secured a tight majority in the RS National Assembly for a law establishing the RS Agency for Medicinal Products and taking away the competences of the existing state-level agency headed by a director from RS with ties to the opposition, an agency that had a direct role in denouncing the oxygen affair.
This time, the opposition in RS refused to follow Dodik, explaining that his policies were reckless and put RS itself in danger and that his aim was to draw attention away from current scandals. The opposition stuck to its position and managed to bolster its political identity, while the Church remained on the side-lines and Serbian president Vučić continued with his earlier policy known as both/and (both BiH and RS) and refused to unconditionally support Dodik, which left Dodik completely isolated at times.
If we look at this crisis as a web of twine, we could say that one end is firmly in the hands of Dodik, while others are in the hands of the political elite from FBiH, the opposition in RS, the political leaderships of Serbia and Croatia, and the last in the hands of a vague group of big powers defined as the international community. Whenever one side pulls on the twine to the point that it may snap, another loosens its grip: Thus, at one point of complete isolation, Dodik demanded a new law on state property as the only precondition for de-escalating the crisis, but just a few days later, after having met with representatives of the EU and the US, he once again upped the ante. The president of SDA, Bakir Izetbegović, has also given at least five different statements about whether he would be prepared to negotiate about the current crisis and with whom, while the international community, or at least the EU and US, have alternated between threatening sanctions and negotiating with Dodik as an equal partner, pretending nothing out of the ordinary was going on.
Consequences
Ordinary people are scared of what will happen if the twine is pulled so taut that it snaps and their fear produces different reactions: from jokes and irony to constantly worrying about tomorrow and trying to protect themselves and their loved ones. People avoid travelling to parts of the country where they would be the minority, some have temporarily sent their families to stay with relatives abroad, returnees, who are a minority everywhere, are particularly fearful… In an atmosphere where the potential for war is constantly invoked, be it real or imagined, it is difficult to engage with ordinary but in normal settings, in peacetime, vital topics. All other topics, from pollution, energy supply, utilities policy, inadequate schooling, hundreds of people dying of COVID every day, countless others leaving BiH in search of more stability, absolutely everything else is relegated to the background.
It is especially challenging to work on building trust between people and communities. In moments of fear, people naturally seek security, and the readiness to cross borders simply diminishes. Paradoxically, memory of the last war, which left everyone, at least in BiH, defeated, is one of the key deterrents against a new war.
Perhaps one of the most visible consequences is that people are tired of constant crisis, uncertainty and insecurity. At least three things become apparent as a consequence of this fatigue. The first is a lack of motivation to work towards any kind of change, the other is that parents are unfortunately raising their children on stories of leaving BiH as the only solution. Finally, there is a particularly dangerous feeling among increasing numbers of people who, tired of a crisis with no end in sight whose beginning they can hardly remember, are calling for any kind of (dis)solution, believing that even a bad solution is better than none. But bad (dis)solutions are just bad (dis)solutions, we know that much at least from our oft-repeated past.