In the last few months, Bosnia and Herzegovina has returned to the spotlight of world powers. The reason for that is not the sudden interest in solving the problems in BiH, but rather the fact that BiH has become a firing range for the East and West. If we had elected capable leaders, it could have been positive for the citizens, but given that the country is ruled by a bully, an ignoramus and a beggar, this interest of world powers has not proved good for BiH. With its indecision and negotiations with the self-proclaimed national leaders, the international community has only worsened the situation because it has given them even more importance and thus raised their rating among voters. Until when will BiH seek help from the international community for every single change? When will BiH politicians finally show maturity and start making decisions independently and take responsibility for them? Until when will voters choose politicians who have been promising them for decades something, which they are unable to fulfil and who are unable to agree on any issue important to citizens?
Sanctions Are Not Announced, They Are Imposed
We often hear calls to the international community to sanction or remove Dodik. However, the question is whether it would be useful or counterproductive. Dodik spins every attack on him, in public, as an attack on all Serbs. Sanctions that only threaten him, he spins as sanctions against the RS. Dodik has been on the black list of the American administration for a long time, and we do not see that it has damaged him in any way. Especially since senior U.S. officials are meeting and negotiating with him regularly. Some strong sanctions! It is important to emphasize that he was on that list, not because of nationalism, but because of corruption. EU sanctions would not be a heavy blow for him either, because he neither travels to the West nor does business with the West. He would only be effected by the sanctions of Serbia and Russia, and it is clear that this will not happen. After all, he has enough resources in BiH to maintain the well-being of him and his family.
Monthly announcements of sanctions against Dodik only harm us. The public gets the impression that the Western powers are afraid of Dodik and that is why they are announcing sanctions, and they do not dare to impose them. Sanctions should not have been mentioned until they had a consensus on their imposition. In this way, they are only helping Dodik to build an even better image among his voters. Dodik should be removed and sanctioned by opposition politicians and the people in the elections. Any other shift would only strengthen him. He is aware of this and therefore secretly hopes that the international community will try to remove him or impose a law because it would further strengthen him and give rise to new radical moves. Exactly what he did after Inzko’s law, which was a great reason for him to block the parliament, for more than half a year.
Dodik is a wounded beast, who is aware that its (political) end is approaching and that is why it attacks everyone around it, trying to keep its (political) life at all costs. He did not care so much about politics, and he did not particularly care about the interests of the citizens. For him, politics is a means to an end. He can’t just retire now and enjoy retirement life. His name is mentioned in the context of too many murky affairs and that is why he is rightly afraid of what will happen when he loses power. Political functions are important to him only in order to maintain absolute power, because they provide him with impunity. This primarily refers to protection from legal persecution, because those who have political power and money, keep control over other spheres of life, especially the judiciary. Maybe he would withdraw from politics if someone guaranteed him that he would get a guarantee that the judicial apparatus would not investigate the way he and his family members got rich. Since no one can guarantee that, he must stay and survive in politics, because for him it is a question of remaining at large.
Help From Loyal Partners
Dodik would not have been able to create this chaos alone, without the help of loyal and long-standing coalition partners who return his flammable balls. Thus, they contribute to raising national tensions, which help all three, and their parties.
In the first place, there is Čović, whose support for Dodik is unquestionable, even when it is harmful for Čović himself and his party, such as the vote to repeal the law on punishing genocide denial and war crimes. They did not want to protect Croats who deny war crimes committed by criminals from their ranks, although the top of the party did just that on several occasions. This is about giving unquestionable support to Dodik for a reason known only to Čović, for which he has suffered numerous harsh criticisms from Croatia. It is especially strange that they voted against this law because it is not only about banning the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica, but also about banning the denial of all war crimes and crimes against humanity. This would give the green light to all those who deny war crimes committed against Croats. It is obvious that for HDZBiH in this case, too, there is support for Dodik, in his clash attempt with the OHR, was more important than the interests of Croats.
Čović’s policy is based on an ignorant attitude towards everything that does not directly concern Croats, namely Croats from western Herzegovina. Čović is not touched by the stories about the war and the mutual threats between Serbs and Bosniaks, as if that can in no way affects Croats. As if this alleged war not concerned the Croats and as if it were not their war either, because many of them live in parts that are not mono-ethnic. Or Čović is aware that this is one of Dodik’s bluffs, who suit the leaders of all three nations.
Conscious or Unconscious Help
A great help to Dodik is the policy pursued by the SDA, and thus the DF. Had they had wise answers to his provocations, he would not have been able to do what he does. It is not clear whether Izetbegović is doing this consciously or out of ignorance. He could have chosen SDS and PDP as partners from RS, whose ministers were the most active in the last convocation of the BiH Council of Ministers. But he chose the SNSD. If he had been wiser and thought about the consequences of his bad decisions, he could have known that by giving the HDZ BiH and SNSD the fourth delegate in the clubs of the House of Peoples of BiH, they will enable them to block everything they want. If he had allowed those two places to belong to some other party, we could all have slept more peacefully. Had he reacted more quickly to Dodik’s moves, he could have avoided such negative consequences for BiH, but he did not, he decided on a verbal confrontation with Dodik’s instead of hiring smart people to help him find a way to stop Dodik’s stunts. The SDA is not doing this for Dodik, they are doing it for themselves because they also have more to cover up than to brag about. So it suits them to divert the public’s focus from real problems, to these fabrications of the war story.
Politicians in BiH act more like mobsters than politicians. Here the people serve the politicians, not the other way around. The goal of politicians is to occupy as much territory as possible for themselves and their partners, where they will win all tenders, where their people will be the best in all competitions, where judges and prosecutors will play as they play, where they will buy people’s loyalty and threats and beatings. To silence critics. Here, politicians travel at the expense of citizens, taking children with them to carry their bags or women to keep them company, buy luxury cars and visit exclusive restaurants where they can’t even pronounce the name of the dish. They would also buy yachts, but most of them do not know how to swim. They would also buy planes, but they are afraid of flying.
No wonder then that they are afraid of how they will end up exactly the way mobsters usually end up. By being killed by a new, younger mobster, who managed to take over their area and bought the support of people whose support they themselves used to buy. The mobsters do not have a pension and a peaceful withdrawal from business. This is especially true of those mobsters, who during their rule were especially ruthless and cruel to people, who took more than they gave. They are rightly afraid of how these people will treat them when they lose power. They do not have a real authority, but they pull it out of the positions they have taken, so they will lose the admiration and respect of the people around them, by losing their function.
