Croatia’s president Stipe Mesic has informed Bosnia’s Serbs that if they attempt to secede from Bosnia then he will despatch Croatian troops to crush them. At the moment, Bosnia is federated into two regions, one for ethnic Serbs and one for ethnic Croats and Bosniaks*, but the country remains grossly dysfunctional and still under international supervision. President Mesic of neighbouring Croatia seems to believe that the sulky Serbs of Bosnia plan to organise a referendum on secession, after which they will seek to unify with their pals in Serbia proper. Should they try such a thing, his plan is not to launch an all out war against them, but to send forces to cut the narrow corridor that links the two sub-units of the Bosnian Serb region.
Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb region, has reacted angrily to Mesic’s threat.
I do not know how likely the Bosnian Serbs are to declare independence, nor if Mesic is serious about intervening militarily against them. Mesic is coming to the end of his term of office, with his successor already elected, and he may be engaging in a bit of sabre rattling to give posterity something to remember him by. At the same time, Mesic has hitherto demonstrated an interest in maintaining the integrity of Bosnia, forcibly rebuffing the pretensions of Bosnian Croats who wished for a closer union with his country.
Even if the former Yugoslavia is not quite ready to descend into another bout of war, the incident also demonstrates the problematic nature of the Bosnian state. Its constitution seems based on a series of externally imposed compromises that ended the war of the early 1990s but did not create anything approximating to viable institutions of governance. How to get the country into some kind of shape that allows it to govern itself will be one of the great conundrums of the years ahead.
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*you know, Bosnian Muslims
Showing posts with label Bosnia and Herzegovina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bosnia and Herzegovina. Show all posts
24 January, 2010
18 August, 2009
The Mayor of Mostar
I have been reading a recent International Crisis Group report about the municipal politics of Mostar, the well-known town in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is very interesting, but I think I need to read more about recent developments in that former Yugoslavian country (fortunately the Crisis Group have another report on just that subject).
Mostar's politics seem to be ethnically based. At the moment, the city has a Croat majority, with a large minority of Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks, as people now seem to call them) and a teeny tiny minority of Serbs. The city has been without a mayor or budget since the last local elections in October 2008. The mayor is meant to be elected by the town council, but they have been unable to elect a candidate.
To become Mostar's mayor, a candidate needs the support of two-thirds of the council, something no candidate has been able to obtain. However, the voting rules also state that if two mayoral candidates are tied, then the younger candidate wins. As mayoral elections are done by role-call vote of the councillors, there have been all kinds of disputes over what order the councillors should vote in, as the supporters of the younger candidate could tip the election to him by engineering a tie.
These eccentric mayoral election procedures seem to have been bestowed on Mostar by the Office of the High Representative, the international body that ultimately rules Bosnia-Herzegovina. They strike me, though, as having more in common with a Reiner Knizia boardgame than with anything intended to balance democracy, protection for minorities, and the need to provide a functioning civic government.
above: Mostar's ironic bridge
* * *
More generally, I have been finding anger rising in my heart when I read about Bosnia-Herzegovina, both from details contained in the Crisis Group's report on Mostar and other recent news report's on events in eastern Bosnia during the country's civil war. Before the war, Mostar had a three-way split in its population, albeit with a strong plurality of Bosniaks. Now Croats form a substantial majority, largely by running Bosniaks out of town during the war and forcibly preventing their return thereafter.
Other news reports recently focussed on the reburial of victims of the Srebrenica massacre (in which Serbian forces killed some eight thousand Bosniak men and boys while UN forces stood around ineffectually). I was reminded of how eastern Bosnia was brutally purged of its local majority population, to the extent that it is now a somewhat desolate land of shame and half-remembered horror. Terrible things were done during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I know that some of the monsters who played a leading role in that conflict's horrors have found their way to the Hague, but it does seem like there has not really been a true reckoning or any serious effort to restore the rights of the victims.
image source
Mostar's politics seem to be ethnically based. At the moment, the city has a Croat majority, with a large minority of Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks, as people now seem to call them) and a teeny tiny minority of Serbs. The city has been without a mayor or budget since the last local elections in October 2008. The mayor is meant to be elected by the town council, but they have been unable to elect a candidate.
To become Mostar's mayor, a candidate needs the support of two-thirds of the council, something no candidate has been able to obtain. However, the voting rules also state that if two mayoral candidates are tied, then the younger candidate wins. As mayoral elections are done by role-call vote of the councillors, there have been all kinds of disputes over what order the councillors should vote in, as the supporters of the younger candidate could tip the election to him by engineering a tie.
These eccentric mayoral election procedures seem to have been bestowed on Mostar by the Office of the High Representative, the international body that ultimately rules Bosnia-Herzegovina. They strike me, though, as having more in common with a Reiner Knizia boardgame than with anything intended to balance democracy, protection for minorities, and the need to provide a functioning civic government.
above: Mostar's ironic bridge* * *
More generally, I have been finding anger rising in my heart when I read about Bosnia-Herzegovina, both from details contained in the Crisis Group's report on Mostar and other recent news report's on events in eastern Bosnia during the country's civil war. Before the war, Mostar had a three-way split in its population, albeit with a strong plurality of Bosniaks. Now Croats form a substantial majority, largely by running Bosniaks out of town during the war and forcibly preventing their return thereafter.
Other news reports recently focussed on the reburial of victims of the Srebrenica massacre (in which Serbian forces killed some eight thousand Bosniak men and boys while UN forces stood around ineffectually). I was reminded of how eastern Bosnia was brutally purged of its local majority population, to the extent that it is now a somewhat desolate land of shame and half-remembered horror. Terrible things were done during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I know that some of the monsters who played a leading role in that conflict's horrors have found their way to the Hague, but it does seem like there has not really been a true reckoning or any serious effort to restore the rights of the victims.
image source
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