Balkan Style

We live in a world that is changing fast—as a rule for the worse. One of the less obnoxious trends in this whirlwind is pop-culture phenomena that disappear soon after they appear. In the meantime they are everywhere. Gangnam Style, the ice bucket challenge, the fidget spinner, without which for a while we couldn’t imagine life—and which we still find today forgotten under the bed or in the most remote corner of the kitchen drawer. Although we often attribute such transience to the internet and social media, similar phenomena existed in analog times too.

Decades ago, in metro stations in Western Europe, you would regularly be greeted by groups of South American musicians wrapped in colorful blankets, cheering passersby with Andean tunes. Then they suddenly disappeared. I always had the feeling that they were just hanging around, smoking and goofing off, and only started playing when I appeared around the corner—and stopped as soon as I disappeared from view. It probably wasn’t true, but I trust you know what I mean.

I had a similar feeling a few times during my professional career when I met political representatives from Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the late 1990s, soon after the signing of the Dayton Agreement, a delegation of Bosniak, Croat and Serb representatives from BiH came to Strasbourg at the invitation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I no longer remember all the names, but I know that Republika Srpska was represented by Momčilo Krajišnik, who was known for his bushy eyebrows, for which he would almost have needed a firearms license, and for going to The Hague a few years later.

At the time there were only two staff members in the Council of Europe building who understood all the delegation’s languages. Besides me, there was Amar Osim, son of Ivica Osim, the last coach of the Yugoslav national team. Since Amar played football in a nearby club in the afternoons, I took over accompanying the delegation. Although I introduced myself properly, it evidently didn’t dawn on them that I understood everything they were saying. While we waited in the meeting room for the parliamentarians to arrive, the politicians from BiH stood around, smoked (back then you could still smoke on Council of Europe premises) and joked among themselves: “How’s your son? Do you still have that weekend house near Trebinje? Where did you buy those shoes?” and the like. The whole thing resembled a scene from Danis Tanović’s film No Man’s Land.

But when the door opened and the delegation of European parliamentarians came in, their behavior changed in an instant. With an energy the South American musicians at the Berlin railway station would have envied, the politicians from BiH began insulting each other and strutting like roosters, each in defense of the interests of his own people. After a few hours of wrangling, the European representatives had had enough and left. First there was silence, then the question: “Where are we going for dinner?”

I watched similar scenes fifteen years later, during the negotiations led by the then European Commissioner for Enlargement, Štefan Füle. To give him credit, he put a great deal of energy into securing implementation of the European Court of Human Rights judgment in the Sejdić and Finci case. In 2011 the Strasbourg court ruled that the Dayton Constitution violates human rights because it allows only representatives of the three constituent peoples to stand for the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sejdić, as a Rom, and Finci, as a Jew, belonged to the “others” and could forget about running for the highest political offices in the country. The length of a column does not allow me to go into all the legal details of this complicated case; suffice it to say that, despite all efforts, the judgment remains unimplemented to this day, fourteen years later.

It was then that I first met Milorad Dodik. He arrived at a meeting in Brussels several hours late, accompanied by the then Prime Minister of Republika Srpska, Željka Cvijanović. Instead of apologizing, he put his arm patronizingly around her shoulders and asked:

“Do you know the joke about the blonde who walks into a pharmacy and asks if they have a pregnancy test?

“‘We do,’ the pharmacist replies.

“‘Are the questions hard?’”

The Bosniak representatives laughed, the Croats laughed, Mile held his belly laughing. His Prime Minister smiled too, if rather sourly. Whoever guesses the color of her hair gets a cookie.

The last time I experienced a similar scene was in Sarajevo, at the headquarters of the European Commission delegation. The talks lasted all day and all night; at one point, probably out of exhaustion, it even seemed we were close to an agreement. The chief entertainer was again Dodik. He proposed replacing the ethnic criterion in the Constitution with a territorial principle: two from the Federation, one from Republika Srpska. “As far as I’m concerned, even a Chinese guy can run in our entity,” he said, holding his belly with laughter, “if my Serbs vote for him, I won’t have a problem with it.” Then he marched out in front of the building, where frozen and hungry journalists had been waiting for long hours, and sent his driver to get ćevapčići for everyone. “Mile is a tough nut, but he’s the man,” a Sarajevo journalist confided to me with his mouth full.

Such are my experiences with Milorad Dodik. What it means, I don’t know. A cynic might suspect that the tensions and blockages in BiH are less a consequence of unsolvable issues among citizens than of the personal interests of those who are supposed to represent them. Who knows. Bosnia, after all.

Fortunately, in Slovenia we have a much higher level of political culture and integrity. Politics here is transparent; all connections and alliances—as well as tensions and quarrels—are open and in full view. We can be grateful that it never occurs to anyone to stage a conflict out of calculation and self-interest. We’re not in the Balkans, after all.