Matthew Parish – Blog

Although I have written more about international law, it is my writings on post-war Bosnia that have attracted by far the greater level of attention. Bosnian politics remain in a state of perpetual mortal struggle, even some 15 years after the end of the country’s war. Bosniacs, Croats and Serb politicians harbour dramatically different visions of their country’s future, and attack vociferously those who argue for a view at odds with their goals. International officials engaged with the country also have strong vested interests in advancing a narrative that comports with their efforts. My writings have challenged the conventional international community narrative in particular. I have argued that international community state building efforts in the country were both politically naive and incompetently executed. These works have hastened the now inevitable and permanent collapse of the country’s central government. Republika Srpska will become “independent” in some form or other. Indeed in many ways it already is; and the west is in great measure responsible for this result.

I cannot therefore be surprised when others criticise what I say. For international officials involved in Bosnia’s state building exercise, my analysis must be discomforting. What does surprise me, however, is the intemperate tone in which my critics convey themselves. Consider the following unsolicited message, that I have just received from a former senior diplomat in Bosnia, a man whom I had never met or spoken to before:

“Dear mr Parish,

“It was very interesting to read your book on Brcko. What made it so worthwile was to get so intimately acquainted with the state of mind of an midlevel civil international servant posted in a tiny city in an tiny country. It reminded me very much of stories from the colonial era about povincial representatives of the colonial power who compensate their frustration about the limits of their horizon in their opinions on those who are placed on higher levels behind their own horizon. It constitutes good stuff for stories, even novels. It becomes more problematic however when this kind of frustrations are reflected in books which pretend to be of a objective political and/or legal character.

“Your book is supposed to deal with Brcko, but it had in fact more to do with settling accounts with the IC in BiH in general and with the OHR in particular. So far so good, but it is written with so much of emotion, not to say frustration and bitterness that it becomes more a caricature of reality than a compilation of well considered observations and opinions. The term “absurd” is the most frequently used adjective for everything done in or coming from Sarajevo. What is particularly disturbing that almost every “episode” or “incident” starts with this qualification followed by the “facts” to support it rather than first giving a thorough and objective analysis and then draw the conclusion. The result is a book full of twisted truths, half-truths and blatant lies. The only sensible story (I am not talking about what you write on Brcko since my knowledge on that phenomenon is rather limited) I could catch you on is that on police reform. The rest is humbug in various degrees. My glosses go from question marks to the frequesntly used word “nonsense”. Just one example: Ashdown has punished the Constitutional Court (in fact the entire juducial system in BiH) by decreasing theri salaries, affecting especially the international judges and prosecuters. First of all, there is no relation with the case you mentioned (Tadic/Covic). The decreasing of salaries was already for quite some time on the agenda because of the widening discrepansies between the salaries paid to the officials in the judicial system and the general level of government salaries and the increasing burden they had become on the budgets of the various courts. Furthermore, is is untrue that the measure affected the internional judicial officials. They were all appointed on the basis of secondment and paid by their respective governments according to the standards prevailing in their own countries. This is just one example, but your book is full of them.

“Conclusion: a missed chance. There is good reason to hold the actions of the IC in BiH against the light and analyze their good and bad sides. I am afraid that your book does not contribute to the formulation of a balanced and objective opinion on the IC presence in BiH.”

The Gentleman who wrote this – a former Ambassador to Sarajevo of an important European country involved in Bosnia during the war – had participated in the international community’s failed efforts on police reform. In my book I am sharply critical of those efforts. It is therefore little surprise that he did not like my book, and I cannot expect him to be an objective reviewer. Moreover, his allegations of factual inaccuracy are unfortunate: had he asked me to document my assertions (of which I had first hand experience), I would happily have done so. I stand by the veracity of every one of the (admittedly extraordinary) factual narratives my book offers. I may have many faults, but I write only about subjects with which I am genuinely familiar.

Yet what I found hardest to understand is why this gentleman wrote to someone about whom he knows nothing in such unpleasantly personal, even nasty, terms. What did he hope to achieve by this? He is supposed to be a diplomat, yet he apparently lacks the ability to be diplomatic. Perhaps this goes to my thesis about international community incompetence. After the memories of war faded, the best people were not sent to Bosnia.

Dragan Kalinic, former President of SDS

Richard Holbrooke, the US’s principal negotiator of Bosnia’s peace agreements at Dayton, Ohio in November 1995, commented that Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s then leader, combined masterful grasp of tactics with atrocious understanding of strategy.  I have often wondered whether this curse inflicted all the politicians of the region, domestic and international. In the most recent events occurring within the walls of the Office of the High Representative, some further evidence in support of this hypothesis has emerged.

 Dragan Kalinic was – some time ago – a very popular hard line Serb politician. He was President of SDS, the wartime Serb political party; and President of the Republika Srpska National Assembly. He was loathed by the international community within Bosnia and Herzegovina for his uncompromising hostility to its agenda of building a unified state, and so – as OHR has a want to do, he was dismissed from public office, and banned from returning to public life, on the flimsiest of pretexts. High Representative Paddy Ashdown’s decision removing him  from office in June 2004 accused him of unspecified cooperation with the support network for then fugitive Radovan Karadzic, but failed to present any evidence, to offer any opportunity to respond to the allegations against him,  or any right of appeal or review. Ashdown was unhappy with many Serb politicians at the time; he dismissed some 59 of them, all on the same day, in an attempt to cleanse Bosnian Serb political life of its secessionist elements.

Valentin Inzko

To his credit, Mr Kalinic, the most senior of those dismissed in Ashdown’s purge, did not take matters lying down. He complained all the way up through the Bosnian Court system, to the Constitutional Court. Although lower courts, their Judges in fear of the same fate as that which befell Mr Kalinic, ruled that they had no jurisdiction to review decisions of the High Representative, the Constitutional Court, in a decision to which its three international Judges (themselves Law Professors) assented, was not so timid. It held that the High Representative’s dismissal of Mr Kalinic without due process contravened the European Convention on Human Rights, and in the absence of any other forum to correct this wrong the Bosnian courts had to review the decision to dismiss him. OHR was so enraged that it issued a new decision annulling the ruling of the Constitutional Court. It is surely an outrage that Europe’s principal international representative overruled a Court decision upholding the rights set out in Europe’s highest human rights instrument.

Now, the new High Representative Valentin Inzko, a Slovene, has decided to lift the ban on Mr Kalinic returning to public office. But everything has changed since 2004. Ashdown’s decision to decimate SDS with dismissals (and a raft of other measures, including freezing of their bank accounts) paved the way for the rival Serb political party SNSD to come to power in Republika Srpska in early 2006. It was thought that SNSD would prove more moderate than SDS, but because it was clean of wartime associations OHR had less leverage over it. Its leader Milorad Dodik became involved in a series of public spats with OHR, and now the perception amongst the international community is that Dodik is part of the problem, not part of the solution, to Bosnia’s interminable problems. In the mean time, SDS has faded into obscurity, the greater bulk of its prior leaders banned from office, in prison or on trial. So what better way to undermine the ever-troublesome Dodik, than to resurrect his principal political opponent and create a credible Bosnian Serb opposition party?

Naturally OHR pretends otherwise, and says that it is taking this measure in the interests of justice and because no further evidence exists against Mr Kalinic. But that response is belied by the fact that of all the people Ashdown dismissed in his purge, only a handful have been rehabilitated. Mr Inzko did not want a wholesale whitewash of hardline SDS politicians. He wanted to create just enough gremlins to cause Mr Dodik some serious difficulties.

In the short to medium term, this strategy may work. Mr Kalinic is genuinely popular with many Serb voters, appealing to the many who feel the conventional history of the Bosnian war is one-sided. If he returns to SDS politics, he might inject the party with a new lease of life. Mr Dodik’s near-monopoly on power in the RS may be loosened, and national politics may become easier as rival Serb parties in the Bosnian parliament can be played off, one against the other, pulling them into alliances with Bosniac and Croat parties to get legislation enacted.

But in the longer term, it must not be forgotten what Mr Kalinic represents. To assume he is a moderate liberal, content to live in a single multi-ethnic Bosnia with a centralised state and power shared between a Bosniac majority and Croat and Serb minorities, as the international community would like, seems absurd based on his record. High Representative Ashdown dismissed him for a reason. This was an uncompromising hard-liner, and there is no evidence to suggest that has changed. 

And so, true to Richard Holbrooke’s analysis, Mr Inzko has proven himself shrewd in tactics, but blind in matters of long-term strategy. If the aim is to promote a strong and stable Bosnia, the potential rise to the fore of politicians of Mr Kalinic’s hue will not help matters. Mr Inzko may think he can keep Mr Kalinic on a short leash for the time being, and has already threatened to ban him again if he puts a foot wrong. But Mr Kalinic will remain in Bosnia long after Mr Inzko has gone home. All of Bosnia’s people know this about all international officials that pass through the country’s revolving diplomatic portals.

And what will Mr Dodik do? He has two potential strategies. One is to befriend Mr Kalinic. There is an argument that SDS was so damaged by Ashdown’s assaults upon it that it cannot be resurrected, even if Mr Kalinic can be. So he could offer Mr Kalinic a place in his own party, and a government job, where he will be content but not a danger. The other option, if Mr Kalinic is feeling competitive, is for Mr Dodik to shun him and do a deal with the current leader of SDS, Mladen Bosic, to keep Mr Kalinic down. Mr Dodik is not a push-over. He runs the RS with an iron fist, and virtually every organ of government is fiercely loyal to him. He is not himself going to let Mr Kalinic wander around unleashed to cause him problems, even if Mr Kalinic would like to try (which he may well not).

RS politics may become more interesting as a result of this latest move, but they are unlikely to become more moderate in the way Mr Inzko hopes. Whoever rules them, the Bosnian Serbs crave their autonomy, independence, or separation, call it what you will. The difference between the different Bosnian Serb leaders is the ferocity and single-mindedness with which they will push their devolutionary goals to their logical extremes at the expense of other policy considerations. It is far from clear that, measured by this metric, Mr Kalinic is better placed to meet international community goals than Mr Dodik.

OHR’s visible and aggressive Principal Deputy High Representative,  Raffi Gregorian (left), has been engaged in a very public and personal dispute with the RS Prime Minister, Milorad Dodik (right), for the past two years. After once counting Dodik as his ”friend”, Gregorian came to round upon Bosnia’s most powerful politician as the source of the country’s woes, in both the domestic and international press. Dodik has been uncompromisingly scathing in response, in a series of personal attacks on the American envoy through the domestic media. But this surprisingly undiplomatic spat conceals a relationship between the two men more complex than one might at first glance imagine. 

Although their mutual personal loathing is manifest, their public animosity serves purposes useful for them both. For Gregorian, keen to stay in Bosnia in his elevated position and thus to prolong OHR’s mandate, painting Dodik an enemy of reform and progress, and of the USA’s goals in the region, helps him make the case for continuing OHR’s presence. For Dodik, OHR is now so politically weak that it has become a useful plaything. He can use its actions (often strategically inept) as excuses to harden his own line towards the international community and the central Bosnian state. Indeed he sometimes goads OHR into acting foolishly, just to paint himself as a hero of the resistance against their tyranny, as the dispute in May and June 2009 over the RS National Assembly’s Conclusions on the competences of the central Bosnian state (subsequently annulled by High Representative’s decision) illustrates. Through creating a confrontational relationship with an enfeebled international organisation, Dodik has manipulated Bosnian politics to revolve in perpetuity around a single issue on which he always has the upper hand. As Gregorian makes ever more impetuous (but inevitably ineffective) moves against Dodik, Dodik can use his actions to justify increased recalcitrance, which in turn feeds into Gregorian’s continued justification to the US Government for funding and support of his own position. 

It turns out that the two men are rather useful to one-another. Like Hegel’s master and slave, the slave has become the master, who now wants the other weakened, but certainly not dead. Perhaps he should be kept around, purely as a reminder of how things used to be. 

Edo Maajka is a Bosniac hip-hop rapper from Brcko, who currently lives in Zagreb. His music has acquired some popularity, due to its distinctive Balkan reworking of an American style. The video below shows a song called “Golden Valley”. It is the soundtrack to a film entitled “Summer in the Golden Valley”, with a depressingly predictable theme about a dying father’s debt cursing the surviving younger generation. The song includes a suggestion that it is easy it is to bribe OHR. Its lyrics are also highly obscene, but unless you speak Serbo-Croat the subtleties will be lost upon you. You can find the song on Youtube, at:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO8hdKvVoig&feature=PlayList&p=0D5ECDA250B632F8&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=3

He has another song which contains a reference to Camp McGovern; he is quite the post-modern observer of Bosnian reconstruction.

These are US APCs. I believe this photo dates from early 1997. US troops were based in Camp McGovern,  in the Zone of Separation just north of Brka, from 1997 until 2004. They also had a smaller checkpoint on the main road from Tuzla to the Croatian border at Orasje, on the Inter-Entity Boundary Line. That location had been a meeting-point for people divided by the war during hostilities, and the security lent by the presence of US forces there led to development of a vast, informal market, that came to be called the Arizona Market. US troops had named various principal roads in Bosnia and Herzegovina after US states, and the Arizona Market took its name from the Arizona Road.

Quite a mess. This was in the seediest (and most lucrative) days of the Arizona market, when drugs, prostitution and gun-running were all rife. Please e-mail me on matthew@matthewparish.com if you would like any more pictures of this kind.