Resolution and helicopters

(oslobodjene.ba)

At its last session before the collective annual vacation, the Croatian Parliament, with 83 votes in favor, composed of the ruling majority and the right-wing opposition, and with two abstentions from representatives of the Serbian minority, with the also abstention of Armin Hodžić, a representative of the Bosniak minority, with one vote from Dalija Orešković against, and with the Home Guard abstaining from voting from the left-wing opposition, adopted the now famous resolution on the position of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Which was logically welcomed by the civil and Bosniak public in BiH as not at all good-neighborly interference in the internal affairs of the state, and which Nino Raspudić at the same time called watered-down lemonade.

Realistically, this resolution will not change anything, nor did its adoption and the practical unanimity of Croatian politics, which seeks the legitimate election of a Croatian member of the Presidency, surprise anyone. After all, the Parliament, long ago, and out of necessity, during the government of Ivica Račan, adopted the Declaration on the Homeland War, which also meant nothing, nor did it have any legal consequences, and in which any negative role of Croatia in Bosnia and Herzegovina was glossed over. At that time, Vesna Pusić left the hall during the vote, but that act, regardless of the fact that it is formally identical to what the left-wing opposition has now done, is much more similar to this gesture by Dalija Orešković. Because the left-wing opposition would now vote against the proposal of the right-wing, HDZ government, and Pusić left so that she would not be forced to vote against her own government. Frankly speaking, the only thing that is absolutely astonishing is that Armin Hodžić, despite being part of the ruling majority, abstained, instead of voting against.

It is worth returning here to a kind of degradation of knowledge about Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Croatian public and politics, which does not include the HDZ and the right, since they have been doing and saying the same thing, ever since they founded the Bosnian-Herzegovinian HDZ and Herceg-Bosna, and until today. Namely, while during the war, especially after Mostar and Dretelj, the entire liberal and left-wing public clearly condemned the policies of Franjo Tuđman and Herceg-Bosna, and so did Cardinal Kuharić, as did Mesić and Manolić who left the HDZ at that time, this is no longer the case today. Because after the cult of Franjo Tuđman developed over time, which was equally built by Milanović and Bernardić's SDP, together with the HDZ, the Croatian public has, in fact, consciously forgotten what happened in the nineties, which is why it was dismayed by the Hague verdict against the leaders of Herceg-Bosna. This unquestionable support for the demands of the right comes from this complete ignorance and mythologizing of the Tuđman era.

As for the election of a Croatian member of the Presidency, I have written many times that Croatian politics is fundamentally right about this and that insisting on overriding the will of Croats, instead of getting a fourth member of the Presidency, who would legitimize the position of a citizen's choice, can only be counterproductive for the state, society and interethnic relations.

However, what I personally no longer believe is that abolishing this practice, legally or otherwise, would fundamentally affect the destructive coalition of Dodik and Čović, or Serbian and Croatian nationalism, directed primarily against the idea of ​​Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state that is not essentially ethnically divided.

This was demonstrated this week in Mostar, with Dodik's helicopter arrival for talks with Čović and his blabbering about how Christians are threatened by Muslims. From that perspective, he would need to ask an interesting question about where exactly they are threatened. They certainly are not in Republika Srpska, even less so in areas where the HDZ is in power, they are also not in federal and state institutions, and if he was possibly referring to Christians in predominantly Muslim areas, he wrote them off as Alija's Serbs a long time ago. However, the fact that nothing Dodik says is logically sustainable, just as Čović's European course, with a coalition with the pure anti-European Dodik, is not logically sustainable, does not mean that they will stop doing it.

The key problem is that there is no way out of this stalemate until their voters massively reject these two parties and until civic politics stops trying to compete, as a rule, among Bosniaks.