Schmidt's departure and BiH alone with him

(Peščanik.net)

There is an interesting thing about the public trying to follow everything that is happening in the post-Yugoslav region. Despite the devastating experience, both from World War II and the 1990s, from which it is clear that all the problems, political fractures, and opposing ideologies in this region ultimately conflict and manifest themselves in Bosnia and Herzegovina, leading to unimaginable casualties, somehow news from that country remains at the tail end of public interest. And now, the truth is that all this that has been happening in Serbia for a long time and is heating up again is not unimportant or uninteresting, just as the social gap in Croatia is neither unimportant nor harmless, along with the growth of neo-Ustashaism and Plenković's increasing tendency towards establishing autocracy.

However, all of this is still actually benign news compared to the fundamental change in US policy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has forced the current High Representative, Christian Schmidt, to resign. The tectonic disruption that has been taking place in and around Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past year, since Donald Trump returned to the White House, is comparable only to the former collapse of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia at its 14th Congress. Hopefully, the consequences will not be the same. But, no one can currently know how the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina will develop.

Before anything else, it should be said that today's Bosnia and Herzegovina is the result of enormous violence, embodied in genocide, ethnic cleansing and post-war pressure on people who remained in the minority in their communities or tried to return to the places from which they were expelled, on the one hand, and in the structural cynicism of the Dayton Peace Agreement on the other. That agreement, which became the Constitution of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina, nominally sought to achieve an unresolved outcome of the war, but in fact it recognized the goals that stood behind the worst crimes, amened the creation of a state within a state, allowed wartime policies and parties to remain on the scene, left the state only an empty shell with borders and only a few common functions, did not even open a huge number of questions, and did not foresee an even greater number of potential problems. In addition to all this, it nominally returned the right to decide to the citizens of that country, but again with the establishment of the OHR and the High Representative who could impose any decision and in fact sent the message that the country was under a protectorate. Such an unfinished country, torn between radically opposing policies, which nevertheless did not fall from Mars, because its citizens with about 80% of the vote persistently choose ethno-nationalism as a way of life and as a policy, was in fact completely dependent on the international community and national leaders. In reality, it was and remained a protectorate of the USA.

Which somehow could only function as long as the support and supervision of the USA were unquestionable and as long as the geopolitical constellation that made that agreement possible existed. Aware that they had rewarded crime, that Bosniaks suffered the most and that Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina was essentially dysfunctional and unusable, the international community, through pressure and decisions of the High Representatives of the first decades, did a lot to create a more functional state and mitigate the consequences of crimes and injustices. Ultimately, a lot of common things were established, from car plates, to currency, to border police and administration, every attempt to create a Croatian entity was prevented and the Republika Srpska was disempowered in some respects, while the restoration of demolished religious monuments and the return of property to expelled people were guaranteed. But that's about where it stopped, especially after the April reform package that would have made the state more functional failed to pass, after which they set about maintaining what had been achieved and the eternal status quo.

This stalemate, as far as the ruling nationalist parties were concerned, could have lasted forever. Citizens protested against the ultimate consequences of such a state of affairs, but they continued to elect the same people and policies, while civic parties painfully realized that the system was designed to make them meaningless. So the first SDP remembered to elect a Croat member of the Presidency on a civic platform and against the will of the majority of Croats, which was legal, but it destroyed the reason and principle for which there are three members of the Presidency, which was an introduction to the agony of Bosniak-Croat relations. In addition, Milorad Dodik never essentially gave up on the destruction of the state, nor did Croatian politics ever give up on some form of autonomy, while the most serious pluralism came to the Bosniak political scene, which was facilitated by the existence of civic-liberal-left parties that tried to maintain some kind of different vision of the country and had the support of a certain number of Serbs and Croats, and certainly those who consider themselves Others. However, realizing that they could not harm the Republika Srpska, nor fight with Dodik, and again realizing that they could not harm even the HDZ, which always held the most lucrative ministries in the Federation, Bosniak politics started within the system, using the frustrations of the Bosniak and civil public, to win positions in the Federation of BiH, using the small number of Croats and gaps in the ethno-national representation, with the idea that in addition to the position of a member of the Presidency, the HDZ, but actually the Croats as a political community, the possibility of control over the House of Peoples emerges. Relying on the traditional help of the international community and the High Representative.

But then circumstances changed rapidly. First, the international order collapsed, with Russia becoming an enemy of the European Union and a key factor in the destabilization of BiH and the region. Then the entire EU took a right turn. Christian Schmidt, from the German Christian Democrats, close to the HDZ, was appointed as the new High Representative. Croatia then took advantage of this fact, as well as its own geopolitical advantages, which include membership in NATO and the European Union. All this was followed by real Islamophobia in the West, and on election night, Christian Schmidt did suspend the Constitution for 24 hours and allow Croats to control the House of Peoples, de facto creating the current government, introducing civil-liberal parties and the national opposition among Bosniaks into it. This further revolted Bosniaks as a political community.

Finally, the final blow came with a fundamental change in US policy after the arrival of Donald Trump. It immediately shut down the very important USAID in BiH. Then it withdrew the ambassador and has not yet appointed a new one. Then it lifted sanctions on Dodik and said that it would no longer engage in state-building. In the end, the US pressured the entire parliament to vote for the construction of a gas pipeline through Croatia so that countries could buy expensive American gas, and they are also pressuring them to give the Sarajevo and Mostar airports under concession. In addition to all this, the US forced Schmidt to step down. All of which plays into the hands of Serbian and Croatian politics, which have long advocated the departure of the OHR, produces additional anxiety among Bosniaks and realistically leaves a huge dose of uncertainty about what to do and expect now. Because on paper and in essence, BiH is still a protectorate, but a protectorate of a world that no longer exists. Which means that it is impossible to expect any agreement on the issue of a possible new High Representative, let alone his effectiveness, if he were to be elected. Because what and whose policies would this new man pursue?

Bosnia and Herzegovina is actually finally left to its own devices, but in the real sense of the word, the Bosniaks and the remnants of the civil left-liberal public, which accounts for about 15% of society, are left to their own devices, since political Serbs and Croats have Serbia and Croatia behind them. With all the ideas of the Serbian world and the RS as the only compensation for the horror they unleashed in the nineties, and on the other hand with part of Herzegovina and Mostar as the remnant of Tuđman's dream of fattening the Croatian pretzel of borders.

What many of those two publics, who are now left to their own devices and their own artifice, have finally realized, or will soon realize, is that the war ended more than thirty years ago and that no one is really interested in Bosnia and Herzegovina in today's world of diplomacy and the collapsed world of the victory of liberal democracy. This is a reason for fear of what is to come, but it also provides an opportunity for a new beginning.