Do you remember a time when there was not some crisis? Me neither.
The crisis has become a permanent category in our region. Problems are not solved, they are just made, new ones are invented, and previous crises are swept under the carpet or left to be forgotten. Like the pain you get used to living with, so you don’t feel it anymore. Thus, we no longer take seriously the announcement of a crisis in the work of the BiH Parliament.
After all, the Parliament has not been working for at least two years, and I don’t remember it doing anything serious before, except that the parliamentarians took large salaries and lump sums and retired for a few days to take tens of thousands of marks of unearned money.
The Government of the Federation has been in a technical mandate since 2018, and as it seems, it will be until 2022.
And, as if we did not have enough of various crises, the outgoing High Representative Valentin Inzko brought amendments to the BiH Criminal Code and a ban on genocide denial, which served our politicians to create another crisis. Some of them have decided to stop working and thus keep state institutions under blockade.
It is known that during the eight-month presidency, Milorad Dodik scheduled only two regular sessions of the Presidency of BiH, which shows that he had kept this institution under blockade before.
So what will really change due to the new blockades? Nothing, except for additional inflammatory rhetoric in public space because of which we will not deal with real problems. People will live equally bad as before, and perhaps harder because economic analysts are announcing inflation and the economic crisis in the fall.
Let’s be clear – I fully support the imposed Law on the Prohibition of Genocide Denial. It could have been better written, but even this is better than nothing. I think Inzko should have passed this law at the beginning of his term, not at the end, but it is what it is. Such a law will also bring BiH closer to EU legal norms and values outlined in the EU Council Framework Decision from 28 November 2008, which requires members to ensure the punishability of public approval, denial, or trivialization of the crime of genocide.
We see that the outgoing High Representative is now more courageous in his statements as well. He says his successor needs to be more determined and work to establish the rule of law. Well, my dear Inzko, you could have done it all if you were only a little bit braver.
And in a day or two, we will have a new High Representative, Christian Schmidt. He is sent to us by Angela Merkel from Germany. We hope he will be better for us, and he doesn’t have to last longer than this outgoing one. Let’s keep it short but effective!
I expect him to have German accuracy in detecting problems and solving them. Corruption and the lack of the rule of law are cancer that eats away our society. He should know how to solve these social problems and should not be afraid to deal with them. I expect that he will have the support not only of Germany but also that of Quinte (USA, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy).
Only in this way will Mr. Schmidt be able to break the spiral of crises in which we are stuck, and stop the decline of BiH society and at least partially curb corruption and crime. If he would, let us say, cut off the flow of money for these ethno-cartels of ours and somehow their fear-mongering of their peoples – I hope we would see the light at the end of the tunnel.
But we will also have to roll up our sleeves and do our part. Everyone will have to make a decision for themselves that they no longer want to live in a poor and stolen society and refuse to support corruption and ask for (party) concessions and connections for employment or tendering.
We will need another law, the one on the protection of whistleblowers at the federal level, and the state of BiH could also protect its citizens, not just civil servants. Otherwise – mark it as failed! And we could do all this because we are not worse than our European relatives, only the system doesn’t work for us. And we can’t fix that on our own, no matter how hard we try. We still need help to get out of the network of crime and corruption.
With the systematic approach of the German diplomat and the courage of our people, in which I still believe, I hope that a new chapter begins in BiH in which crises will be resolved, not created, and problems solved for the benefit of society, not the individual.
