Radovan Karadzic, Sarajevo is not your city, and you have no right to say that it is, just as you do not have the right to say in public, even if it’s in court, that someone has dug up bones around Bosnia and brought them to Srebrenica to make a fake graveyard. This is insulting.
What the – Bleep - Does Dodik Want?
Sarajevo | 22 October 2009 | By Srecko Latal
Srecko Latal
Browsing through endless articles about the collapse of the latest attempt to overcome Bosnia’s political crisis, a corner of my eye caught a brief report about a bus that had crashed in northern Bosnia.
Was there some strange symbolism in these parallel events? Was it forecasting some new spins and turns in the fog of Bosnian politics?
The bus belonged to a small local company, Dodiktours, from the northwestern town of Kozarska Dubica. It bore the same name as the man who for the past three years has had a crucial say in Bosnia and Herzegovina and who almost singlehandedly rules the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska.
The Dodiktours bus crashed on the same day that the Republika Srpska Prime Minister, Milorad Dodik, brutally rebuffed a Western proposal and made a move that could have lasting effects on his reign and political career.
Dodik is the first politician in post-war Bosnia to assume simple majority control both at entity and state level. His role in the country has become so dominant that every analysis about the country and its fate boils down to a simple, billion-dollar, question: “What the - bleep - does he want?”
Many believe that whatever he wants will eventually happen. Dodik established his power base by combining two seemingly irreconcilable elements: radical nationalist rhetoric and Western support.
Between 1998 and 2000, Dodik was an American darling, supported politically, financially and even militarily in his quest to oust the old wartime leaders of the infamous Serb Democratic Party, SDS.
But Western support, as so often before, proved the “kiss of death” electorally. In the next elections, Dodik lost to SDS. But by 2006 the tables had turned. The SDS, by then weakened by Western sanctions and reformed under a new leadership, proved easy prey for Dodik. He secured victory with his unprecedentedly hardline rhetoric and by making bullish appearances that appealed especially to Bosnian Serb rural voters.
The Americans and the rest of the West were flabbergasted as the lamb shed his woolen coat to reveal a wolf’s skin. He then started, and has never since stopped, tearing down all those fancy institutions, procedures and mechanisms that the international community had introduced over the years while trying to create its utopia, OHRstan, a country run by foreigners and populated but not owned by locals.
For three years, Dodik has shocked the country with his robust appearances and almost uncontrolled and conflicting statements. His explosive temper was highlighted in an incident more than a year ago, when he stopped his motorcade and jumped out of his limousine to chase a peasant who’d dared to flip a birdie while he was driving by. The poor guy managed to find refuge in the nearby cornfield but other citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina have either not been that lucky, or the cornfield was not big enough.
His hot temper and brutish attitude have brought Dodik popularity among some citizens but have inspired fear, disgust and even hate among most others. It has also finally derailed the historic purpose that Dodik could and should have had in Bosnia.
Before Dodik came along, many local and international officials thought that Republika Srpska, an entity created through the blood and gore of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rapes, should not be allowed to exist. Many of those officials expected that Republika Srpska would eventually cease to exist and the country would take on the form of a centralised republic.
They never saw Dodik coming. From the moment he took up his throne in Banja Luka Dodik stubbornly insisted on the legal and constitutional equality of both entities and all three ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
With his mission, Dodik actually returned the country and its people to the state it was in in 1991, when Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia with a referendum that was boycotted by most Bosnian Serbs.
From then on until today, the country somehow failed to learn the lesson and pass a test of basic democracy that requires that the minimum interests of any of the ethnic groups in a given country must be taken into account in decision-making.
But after playing his high-stakes political poker game for three years Dodik has finally been defeated – not by any of his local or international counterparts, which he outplayed with ease, but by his own temper and ego.
What once looked like a quest for the equality of Republika Srpska has turned into a struggle for political, economic and personal domination. Constantly raising the stakes, Dodik now openly threatens to declare the Republika Srpska’s independence.
The last example of this shifting attitude was his rejection of the latest EU-US package. Even some Western diplomats admit that the requirements and incentives set out in Butmir were tailor-made to be acceptable to Dodik, as the toughest negotiator of the lot. In April 2006, Dodik had already accepted so-called April package that included wider and deeper constitutional changes then those proposed over the last few days.
As in April 2006, the changes proposed at Butmir were far less acceptable to the majority of Bosniak and Bosnian Croat politicians. This means that Dodik has missed out of a rare opportunity to come out of political tussle with the tag as the “good guy”.
Dodik not only ignored this opportunity but rejected the Western proposal in a way that belittled high-level EU and US officials. It gave the impression that the package – however flawed and ill-prepared it may have been – was more unacceptable to the Bosnian Serbs than anybody else.
Many of Dodik’s previous moves – however nasty they seemed to some – usually had some obvious or hidden benefit either for Republika Srpska or Dodik himself. But Dodik’s latest snub brings no apparent benefits and may even result in future threats for both Dodik and Republika Srpska.
In light of these thoughts, I decided that once again it is a time to ask the billion-dollar question “What the - bleep - does he want?” Is it really the independence of Dodikstan? The crash of the Dodiktours bus at the same time as Dodik’s new offensive may contain some hidden symbolism that goes well beyond the importance of a small traffic accident.
2009-10-22 18:40:08