What's English for "Muljanje"? (by Zeljko CVIJANOVIC, Dani, Sarajevo, Federation Bosnia-Hercegovina, B-H, November 10, 2000) - full, English

Translated on November 8, 2000

SDS Ban

What's English for "Muljanje"?

The pile of foreign aid hasn't improved the life in the Republic of Srpska (RS) a whole lot, all democratic norms advocated by the foreigners have been violated in RS by their favorite Dodik since, my God, he is on his own and on the other side are the SDS, Milosevic, Alister Crowley and the rest of evil in this world. When they allowed Dodik to rule in spite of a lack of majority support in the Parliament, the foreigners actually very hypocritically avoided the responsibility for, if they do not want the SDS, compromised by its behavior in the war, proclaiming a full protectorate in RS and taking the responsibility for their actions

by Zeljko CVIJANOVIC

Dani, Sarajevo, Federation Bosnia-Hercegovina, B-H, November 10, 2000

The worst of all the mistakes foreigners have made in the Republic of Srpska in the last three years was published a week before the elections under the headline War Criminals in RS: Do You Know Your Neighbors? Why? Because, by putting forward the demand for the ban of the SDS, the political party most likely to win the elections in RS, they tried not only to influence the election results but again did a favor to all those among Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks who claim that the international investigation of war crimes has above all a political role, rather than a legal, moral or historical role.

Everything started about a month ago when Milorad Dodik's headquarters leaked that Richard Holbrooke was coming to Bosnia and that he was going to destroy the SDS. "I will be the president of RS, because the Americans want that," self-confident Dodik said at the time. Somewhat later, discussing his chances in the elections, Dodik concluded: "I have already won." About ten days before Holbrooke's arrival, foreign diplomats in Sarajevo and Banja Luka received a report of the International Crisis Group (ICG) that demands that the SDS be banned because that party is still maintaining links with Radovan Karadzic and because its wartime officials, involved in crimes, are still active in government and parallel structures that control the illegal flows of crimes and politics. According to James Lyon, the chief of that ICG project, the report is the result of seven months of investigation in the field in 18 municipalities in Bosnia-Hercegovina (BH) and lists names of 75 politicians who were allegedly involved in war crimes under the auspices of the SDS.
Then Holbrooke arrived and in an exceptionally (even for the RS media) servile and obsequious interview published in Banja Luka weekly Nezavisne Novine stated that "the SDS is a criminal organization and it should be disbanded. Many war criminals are free and some of them are even in the local government as, for example, in Bratunac." This was Holbrooke's message from his Balkans tour. He was above all referring to Milan Deronjic, one of the leaders of the SDS in Bratunac who, after the unprecedented crime against Bosniaks in July 1995, was appointed the representative of that party for Srebrenica.
Who are the people from the ICG list?: Milan Deronjic and the remaining 74 names mentioned in the ICG report are actually the extended version of the list of the RS Defense Ministry, published in Banja Luka weekly Reporter two months ago. "Our investigation showed that that document was planted by Dodik and an official of his intelligence-security service," was the belated wisdom demonstrated by one of the officials in the RS Defense Ministry who commented on the ICG list for Dani. And really, the company on the list is far from pleasant. Besides already mentioned Deronjic, there is Vojkan Durkovic, Arkan's wartime representative in Bijeljina better known as Major Vojkan, whose chief business venture was the trade with Bosniaks from Bijeljina; then there is Milan Ninkovic a former RS defense minister, a Doboj warlord and founder of the paramilitary organization "Mice", which became infamous because of its crimes; the list also includes the trio from Foca, Velibor Ostojic, Petko Cancar, and Vojislav Maksimovic; then Bozidar Vucurovic, who in the summer of 1992 ordered deportation of Bosniaks from eastern Hercegovina; Milan Lukic, perhaps the worst murderer from the war in BH and as of last week officially a war-crimes suspect with an indictment in the Hague...
Of course, it is difficult to defend the wartime role of most of the people from that list. However, the ICG list does not include any of the currently influential SDS politicians, apart form Milan Tupajic, the chief of the SDS group of deputies in the RS Parliament, Milovan Bjelica, one of Sarajevo-Romanija kings of war profiteering and Momcilo Krajisnik's accountant, and Ninkovic, the SDS official with probably the most credit for preventing Biljana Plavsic's virus form spreading east from Doboj.
On the other hand, Biljana Plavsic's Serb People's Party (SNS) is far better represented on the ICG list. Besides Plavsic, the list mentions Petko Cancar, a former Minister of Justice in Dodik's government, Drago Ljubicic, a SNS deputy in the BH Parliament, and Rajko Dukic, the powerful lord of Birac and the chief financial supporter of the SNS. Dukic even admitted that a ban of the SDS for the reasons advocated by the ICG "would imply the ban of a few more parties". "The ultimate goal of such proposals is to say that RS was established by terrorist and banned parties, and bring into question its existence as an entity within BH," says Dukic.
Even Lyon does not see anything paranoid in Dukic's analysis: "In RS they cannot admit crimes because that would reveal the foundations on which the entity was built and simply destroy their concept," he says accusing RS of lack of cooperation with the Hague Tribunal for war crimes.
Cooperation With The Hague: Of course, that brings up three questions. First, war crimes and the Hague; second whether the SDS has, as it claims, reformed itself; and third, what is the motivation and true goals of the demands for the ban of the SDS? When he accuses SFOR of lack of enthusiasm for arrests of war-crimes suspects, or when he assesses that RS does not cooperate with the Tribunal and that it is not even discussing the crimes, Lyon forgets several things. Above all, why should SFOR even need to arrest war-crimes suspects in RS, when RS has a government that is, to say the least, considered to be friendly and cooperative by the foreigners?
Secondly, it is not true that the government does not cooperate with the Hague Tribunal, but that cooperation is not transparent and legally regulated, so that it merely affirms an underground paralegal set of relations. For example, three years ago the RS Government, in cooperation with the Belgrade secret police, managed to extradite to the Hague Tribunal three war-crimes suspects from Samac. Then, didn't the RS Government let SFOR in the Banja Luka prison Tunjica to pick up Zoran Zigic, who was serving a sentence for a murder? Doesn't Dodik's triumphant proclamation after one of the visits to the Hague Tribunal that he was promised that members of his cabinet would not be arrested as long as they are in the Government, constitute a form of cooperation? It would be cooperation only if Carla del Ponte demanded from Ivica Racan to put a banana peel in front of some of Croatian generals so that they can accidentally slide all the way to Scheweningen without spoiling his chances in the elections. Or if they asked Vojislav Kostunica to tell Mira Markovic that she would be inducted in the Dutch Academy of Sciences and Arts if she convinced her husband to turn himself in.
Of course, that is not real cooperation, but illegal muljanje [messing around]. The true cooperation would be reflected in the adoption of a law that specified the institutional relationship between RS and the Hague Tribunal. A proposal of such a law, according to which the RS Police and local courts would be obliged to arrest and extradite suspects, was put together by a former minister of justice in Dodik's government, Milan Trbojevic, a year ago. But the law never made it to the RS Parliament, and the Hague tolerated that and continued to mess around lest it harmed Dodik's chances in the elections. And all of that took place in RS, which since September 1996 has been either in the pre-election phase or a fragile phase of post-election stabilization of the government. And what happened? Foreigners, praise the truth, did not harm Dodik's chances, but he can today beat the SDS candidate only by cheating on a big scale or appearing on the TV screens after the elections and addressing the citizens with: "Hello, my name is Mirko Sarovic [the SDS candidate for the president of RS]."
Has SDS been reformed? Therefore, it is not difficult to agree with Lyon, but the question is whether it is worth arranging the election results in advance and excluding the SDS only to have Dodik opt for "cooperative lack of cooperation" until year 2002 until he stabilizes his government, and then go on in the same manner until year 2004, this time in the pre-election phase. On the other hand, as far as the media in RS are concerned, apart from several microphones hanging from a tree that like to ambitiously refer to themselves as local radio stations, all media in RS are controlled either by Dodik or the foreigners. During all this time these media informed us that the Ferhadija Mosque [in Banja Luka] could not be built until the collected documentation and bricks needed for the reconstruction reach the ratio of 1 to 1, or that RS was represented at the commemoration in Srebrenica by Thomas Miller [U.S. ambassador in BH].
The second question is whether the SDS has been reformed. This is not an answer [sic]. Ever since the SDS has existed, Holbrooke and the ICG never had less reason to accuse that party. When Dodik was busy with Holbrooke's ban of the SDS, he said that "it may not even be democratic". "If the SDS wins, all international economic relations with RS will be severed," explained Dodik contributing to unprecedented low-class rhetoric of the sort "either me or destruction", only comparable to "Self-determination of extermination" [slogan used on HDZ posters], and "Vote for your kind" [SDA slogan].
Unlike Dodik, who in the ban of the SDS sees his only chance to remain in power, that political party very meekly reacted to the accusations. Convinced that he and the SDS will win the elections, Sarovic said for the people on the ICG list that he did not think "that they were members of the party" and that the SDS is not any more the party that Holbrooke knew a few years ago and that its leadership consists of young and flexible politicians. Mirko Banjac, a SDS official, was even more explicit. He said that he did not expect any sanctions but also that "we are not stubborn". "The SDS is prepared for a reasonable discussion of mistakes made by some people in the past or any mistakes made in the future," said Banjac and demonstrated that the SDS did not want to spoil its chances of an election victory with a debate with the international community. Indeed, the SDS ran a very meek campaign, in which it mostly criticized Dodik's wasted economic policy, while the pinnacle of their "patriotic" statements was reached by requests "for special links with FR Yugoslavia, all according to the Dayton Agreement".
Such things should not be neglected, but they do not reveal whether the SDS has truly been reformed. Even its leaders cannot answer that question, about a political party that hasn't been deciding about anything for more than three years, with many arguments. But the reply will quickly come. If the SDS wins enough votes to form a government with Ivanic (since the foreigners will not allow them to form a government on their own), it will have to answer several test questions, the first one of which will be the Hague Tribunal. But, not the cooperation with the Hague Tribunal in the manner proposed to Dodik (for example, an incidental forest fire in all of the eastern RS that would somehow catapult Radovan Karadzic in the guise of a burning pine cone all the way to the Hague). Rather, a legal basis of the cooperation including a law passed by the Parliament. There are reasons to believe that this dilemma could lead to a breakup of the SDS, but neither of the groups would include more than three persons mentioned in the IGC list.
Why do foreigners like Mafia style democracy? Petritsch and Barry advocate such a course of action. The IGC and Holbrooke have humiliated both them and their capability to assess and verify the candidates for office with their mistrust. Besides, those who propose a SDS ban do not bear responsibility for the future events. They come and go, while Petritsch and Barry would be left behind to struggle with chaos on the political scene.
The last problem related to the SDS ban is the role of foreigners in RS during the last two years. The pile of foreign aid hasn't improved the life in RS a whole lot, all democratic norms advocated by the foreigners have been violated in RS by their favorite Dodik since, my God, he is on his own and on the other side are the SDS, Milosevic, Alister Crowley and the rest of evil in this world. When they allowed Dodik to rule in spite of a lack of majority support in the Parliament, the foreigners actually very hypocritically avoided the responsibility for, if they do not want the SDS, compromised by its behavior in the war, proclaiming a full protectorate in RS and taking the responsibility for their actions. But, believes Lyon, the SDS should be blamed for everything. No matter how much one tries, that does not make sense. The amount wasted on the democratic project Dodik could have been used to cover all of BH with a network of non-governmental organizations promoting democratic principles.
But, the foreigners did not need democracy in RS. They needed Dodik, who was supposed to clean up the scene, destroy the SDS and nationalism, carry out economic reforms... And what has he done? He destroyed at least two political parties stronger than his own, that tried to organize in RS something that would differ from the former SDS one-party democracy, he took control of most media outlets that conduct his election campaign using the democratic lessons learned from venerable Enver Hoxha [Albanian communist dictator]; he destroyed the Parliament and degraded the political discourse to the level of the market talk in his hometown Laktasi; he has reformed the economy in such a manner that for more than two years blue collar workers, pensioners and state employees have been coming out in front of the government buildings in large numbers to thank him, although it is not clear why they have been doing that by cursing his mother. He has done everything but cured the society of nationalism. On the contrary, whenever he needed voter's support he switched to the nationalist discourse. And he hasn't destroyed the SDS, so that the worst nationalists in RS see their relationship with Dodik as that between a tragedy and a farce.
When on the eve of the elections the foreigners realized that their project Dodik has fallen through, it was expected that, after his possible departure from power, they would be forced to for a few months listen to what the naughty boy has done playing the Prime Minister, how much he spent, how much he lost on the way home, how he made illegal Balkan-style personal deals with certain foreign officials signing secret documents, lying to the Parliament and the public. Namely, the Mafia style nationalism has become a mold for the society, both destructive and a logical outcome of Dodik's actions. Mafia style democracy is not only destructive, is it the best way to totally discredit democracy.

Naturally, that least resistance approach backfired against foreigners, Dodik, and Serbs. What now? The suspect SDS will win and instead of Dodik it will most likely face uncompromised Zlatko Lagumdzija. Of course, that dualism, according to which the citizens of RS will have to pick between brain cancer (SDS) and lung cancer (Dodik) is not the domestic invention, but a gift from abroad. Similarly, Ivanic will have to make the same choice after the elections. The question is, of course, absurd, but Lyon thinks that it makes sense to give an answer. The problem is that his answer will be harmful to Bosnia, RS, and Dodik, and potentially useful for a foreigner or two who is convinced that in the election race in RS the solution is to kill all the good horses to ensure the victory of an old and decrepit horse, into which so much money has been invested.