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Milorad Dodik as Adolf Hitler on the cover of Slobodna Bosna
Yesterday morning a startling headline showed across The Guardian’s website. “Bosnia Is on the Edge Again” is the title of Paddy Ashdown’s Sunday op-ed. Ashdown, the former High Representative for BiH, architect of the Dayton Accords, and an outspoken advocate of military intervention during the Bosnian War, said the West has fallen asleep at the wheel in Bosnia, letting a nationalist demagogue “aggressively reverse a decade of reforms”.
Ashdown is referring to Milorad Dodik, the current prime minister of the Bosnian Serb “mini state” Republika Srpska, whose nationalistic policies have cost the RS its financial support from USAID and other Western organizations. Dodik is a member of a resented class: war profiteers (there is even a phrase: “nekum brat, nekum rat”, or, “someone’s brother is someone else’s war”). During the war he managed several cigarette brands in Bosnia and Croatia, earning him the nickname “Mile Ronhill“. Dodik has made RS autonomy and allegiance to Serbia his central platform, seeking to separate the entity from BiH financially, politically, and culturally. When Kosovo declared independence this year Dodik responded by calling for the RS to secede from BiH. The international community had none of it.
As sensational and empty as Dodik’s calls for RS independence are, perhaps Ashdown is not crying wolf by giving Dodik’s rhetoric a second thought. In 2005, two scholars, one Bosnian and one American, published a paper assessing reconciliation efforts in the former Yugoslavia. Offhandedly, the paper stated “if NATO and EU peacekeepers were to withdraw from Bosnia today, there would be war tomorrow”. A shocking claim given the trauma of the war and desire for “peace above all else” that it had created.
I asked my colleague what she thought about the claim and she agreed in full. If the international community didn’t hold the RS in BiH, then it would rapidly secede and civil war would break out. Dodik himself displays childish anti-Bosnian behavior, removing a Bosnian flag from a table at a press conference and saying “I do not love Bosnia” in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Dodik’s behavior in this respect is unique. There are few public figures in the former Yugoslavia who espouse an expressly anti-Bosnian ideology. Most opt for the more muted position of quibbling over whether or not Srebrenica was genocide, or whether the war was a civil war or a war of aggression. Few take a wholesale stand against the nations that emerged from the conflict, against the idea of the Bosnian nation, as Dodik has.
