Bosnian Serb Leader Damps Hopes of Post-Vote Accord

EUROPE NEWS OCTOBER 1, 2010

By MARC CHAMPION
(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia and Herzegovina—Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik damped hopes that elections Sunday could help to end a deadlock over the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina, describing the country's creation as "a mistake" and ruling out a coalition with a moderate Bosnian Muslim party.
Mr. Dodik has emerged over the past four years as this fractured nation's strongest politician, dominating its political agenda and blocking international efforts at state-building. Sunday's vote, Western diplomats and analysts say, is largely about whether he'll be able to go on doing so.

Bosnians will cast votes in a maze of races that mirrors the complexity of this state, created in the wake of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. They will elect Bosnia and Herzegovina's three presidents—a Bosnian Muslim, a Bosnian Serb and a Bosnia Croat—and its two houses of parliament. They will also choose representatives in a multitude of races in the two ethnic entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina—the predominantly Serb Republika Srpska, and the Bosnian-Croat Federation.
Mr. Dodik will run for election as Republika Srpska's president, a contest he is all but certain to win. How strong he remains, however, will depend on whether his party, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, or SNSD, can renew or increase its share of the parliamentary votes, Western diplomats say. Some also held out hope he might join a coalition with a moderate Bosnian Muslim party expected to perform well.
In an interview Thursday with The Wall Street Journal, however, Mr. Dodik took a tough line.
"Bosnia Herzegovina was a mistake," Mr. Dodik said at his office in Republika Srpska's new steel-and-glass government complex in the entity's capital, Banja Luka. He said Serbs want to secede, though peacefully. In the meantime, ethnic Serb legislators sent to the country's parliament in Sarajevo after the election "won't be very interested in building up Bosnia," he said. "It isn't our policy."
Bosnia and Herzegovina's structure was created by the 1995 Dayton agreement that ended a 3 1/2-year war that left at least 100,000 people dead here, the largest number Bosnian Muslims. The agreement created the three-headed presidency to represent the country's three main ethnic groups, and split the population into the Republika Srpska and the Bosnian-Croat Federation.
The Federation alone has three levels of government, 13 prime ministers and 14 legislatures. Federation voters will have four separate ballot sheets to fill out Sunday.
Bosnia's bureaucratic tangle has helped make it the worst place in Europe to do business west of Ukraine, even as it seeks to join the European Union. Bosnia this year ranked 116th in World Bank's ease of doing business index. Large public payrolls and transfers to war veterans, coupled with political deadlock and a global economic crisis, have helped cripple the economy, economists say. The International Monetary Fund forecasts the country's economy will grow by 0.5% this year.
A squabbling multi-party coalition led by nationalist parties has left the Bosnian-Croat Federation in especially bad shape. Federation plans to privatize energy and telecoms assets collapsed amid political wrangling. Mr. Dodik, by comparison, privatized Republika Srpska's telephone company and oil-refining business, raising more than €600 million ($818 million) for projects including his new government offices.
A recent survey by the National Democratic Institute of the U.S. suggests that voters on both sides of the ethnic divide are sick of nationalist rhetoric and despondent about the country's future. Asked what politicians talked about too much, the top choice of the survey's 2,000 respondents was nationalist and ethnic issues. The most important issue, they said, was jobs.
Among Bosnian Muslim voters, the shift away from nationalist themes appears likely to have an impact Sunday. The Social Democrat Party has campaigned almost exclusively on economic and social issues, says party strategist Reuf Bajrovic.
The NDI poll predicted the SDP would win 20% of votes in the country's parliament and 29% for the federation parliament, making it the country's top vote-getter and more than doubling its performance in 2006.
But polls suggest Mr. Dodik's Alliance of Independent Social Democrats will remain the strongest Serb party. Asked if he would consider a coalition with the SDP under any circumstances, Mr. Dodik said: "No, because they have done everything to Satanize our party."
Dr. Bakir Nakas, director of Sarajevo's Public Hospital throughout the war, said he had little hope Serb and Muslim politicians would compromise in the elections that came shortly after the war ended. "You couldn't expect that people who had been looking at each other through rifle sights to work together," he said.
But more recent elections, he says, have come as a disappointment. "We really are like a Frankenstein country," he said, adding that he didn't expect real change until the country's many-headed structure is pruned.
Mr. Dodik agrees with the diagnosis, but says the cure is not to rescue Bosnia, but to carve it up. He said he would press for all 56 areas of competence that have been transferred from the two ethnic entities to the Bosnian government following the Dayton agreement to be returned.
Another 15 years from today, he said, "I don't think Bosnia Herzegovina will exist."
A spokesman for the Office of the High Representative, the international body set up to enforce the Dayton agreement, said that should Mr. Dodik prevail, it would mean "an ultimate victory for [former Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic and [former Bosnian Serb President Radovan] Karadjic, and a vindication of their policy of ethnic cleansing."
Mr. Dodik argues that his first responsibility is to the people who elected him in Republika Srpska, who feel that any move to a centralized state threatens them because Bosnian Muslims will always have a majority to outvote them—the reason why the Dayton accord created such an unwieldy polity in the first place.
"One day everyone will just see [Bosnia] has failed and when everyone understands that there will be no need for violence," said Mr. Dodik, adding that it would be done by agreement.
Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications Bosnians on Sunday will elect three presidents to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina's three main ethnic groups—Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat. A previous version of this article incorrectly identified these groups as Bosnian, Serb and Croat.

the wall street journal

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