In the piano bar of the Hotel Bosna in Banja Luka’s center, the former finance minister of Republika Srpska, Svetlana Cenic, offered a bleak vision of life in Bosnia’s Serb entity.
“I’m living in the most corrupt part of Europe, in a kind of dictatorship with no human freedoms,” she said, smoking the first of a series of long, brown cigarettes. “I can’t work here. The few times I have had interest from companies, the government has intervened. I’m described on the news as a traitor and a spy. I’m even approached in the street by people and told I should be arrested.”
Cenic’s “offense” was to have questioned what she calls the “crazy” and corrupt economics of the largely autonomous Republika Srpska, which is a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a place, she says, where politics have also been corrupted to a dangerous degree by the rhetoric of ethnic identity.
Three hours’ drive away in a restaurant in Sarajevo, in the heart of the Muslim-Croat federation that makes up the rest of Bosnia, Danis Tanovic, Bosnia’s Oscar-winning director, was just as gloomy. No Man’s Land, which Tanovic wrote and directed, won the Academy award for best foreign film in 2001.
He is now as passionate about transforming his country’s politics as he is about making films, last year co-founding the Nasa Stranka — Our Party — movement. whose aim is to break the grip of ethnic politics on Bosnia that continues to imperil the country.
“I’m a father of four,” he says. “I have a house in France as well. The main reason I got involved in politics is that I won’t be able to stay here if the country sticks on the course that it is on. It is a selfish interest. I want to be able to be here. Bosnia is stuck,” he adds bitterly. “Everyone is talking about it being in crisis. But how do you take it forward?”
Bosnia’s “crisis” is so much talked about these days, yet so difficult to define. Bosnia is not a failed state. Not yet at least. Instead, it is more like a zombie state. Like Afghanistan and Iraq, Bosnia has been reanimated out of conflict following external intervention. Outwardly it appears to be in possession of the institutions of democracy, but those institutions, say critics, are moribund in most respects.
It is a country, warns Paddy Ashdown, the former UN High Representative for Bosnia — the country’s internationally appointed administrator — that if not tackled will become “a black hole of dysfunctionality, corruption and tension in the midst of the EU.”
It was not supposed to be like this. The country’s war, which occurred during the break-up of Yugoslavia, pitted the three national identities against each other — Orthodox Christian Serb against Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Bosniak against Catholic Croat — with many secular Bosnians from all sides fighting with the Bosniak-dominated government for the dream of a multi-ethnic state.
The conflict ended with the Dayton Agreement of 1995, which was designed to usher in reconciliation and reconstruction under a complex structure that gave Serbs their own largely autonomous entity, Republika Srpska, which, with a Bosnia-Croat federation would exist under a tripartite presidency, representing all the ethnic groups.
“After the war, the international community placed a lid on what had been happening,” says Ivan Lovrenovic, a prominent author and critic, sitting in the Sarajevo offices of the magazine Dani.
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