LOCAL PRESS
Vulin: Government insists on release of all Serb detainees pending trial (RTS)
Transferring Oliver Ivanovic from a detention unit in Pristina to a detention center in northern Kosovska Mitrovica would represent an act of elementary decency, outgoing Serbian Minister without portfolio in charge for Kosovo and Metohija Aleksandar Vulin said. While in detention in Kosovska Mitrovica, Ivanovic will at least not have to fear for his safety when leaving his cell to go for a walk, Vulin told reporters in Pozarevac. “The fight for the rights of Ivanovic and other Serb arrestees does not end with the decision to transfer him. The Serbian government has provided guarantees to ensure that all Serbs who have been detained in Kosovo and Metohija are released pending trial and it will continue to insist on this,” Vulin said.
SLS calls Kosovo Serbs to vote for Vucic (Politika/Beta)
The Independent Liberal Party that is in coalition with Hashim Thaqi’s PDK in the Kosovo government called yesterday its supporters and members to vote for the coalition gathered around the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and Aleksandar Vucic at the Serbian parliamentary elections on 16 March. This is the first time that the Liberals openly called followers to support one of the options at the Serbian parliamentary elections, while Beta reports that the SLS leader Slobodan Petrovic, Kosovo deputy prime minister, told a press conference in Gracanica that the coalition around the SNS is a European option that should be supported. Although five days remain until the 16 March elections, there is practically no intensive election campaign in Kosovo and Metohija. Party activists are mostly distributing election flyers from door to door, while in Mitrovica one can see only billboards of Aleksandar Vucic and Vojislav Kostunica. Election rallies in Kosovo were only held by Vucic in Leposavic and the Radicals in Kosovska Mitrovica and Strpce, where their activists were arrested. Pristina prevented through the Kosovo police Vojislav Kostunica and Slobodan Samardzic from the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) to enter so they were forced to hold the election rally at the Jarinje integrated crossing where hundreds of followers, supporters, members of this party and revolted citizens gathered. On Sunday, Borislav Pelevic, the leader of the Patriotic Front was also denied entrance at the Jarinje crossing. On the same day, outgoing Minister of Health Slavica Djukic-Dejanovic was also denied entrance at the Merdare crossing. “The election campaign south of the Ibar River is conducted from house to house over fear from detention, while platforms are organized at the municipal and district levels,” members of the SNS executive board Vladeta Kostic tells Politika. “We don’t want the SNS activists to be arrested, and it is more than obvious that Pristina is violating the Brussels agreement, resolved to intimidate the Serbs so they would turn out for the 16 March elections in smallest possible numbers. Still, no threats and intimidations will stop us from remaining faithful to the Serbian homeland,” says Kostic. Many were surprised by the support of the SLS representatives to the SNS, also confirmed by Vladeta Kostic. “Regardless of the party they belong to, Kosovo Serbs are sufficiently politically mature and wise to see that only Vucic can ensure survival to the Serbs. I call on members of the Socialist Party of Serbia and other political subjects in Kosovo and Metohija to vote for the SNS, because only this way a peaceful future to the Serbs in this region is guaranteed,” said Kostic.
Pelevic: Why was border set at Jarinje (Politika)
Borislav Pelevic, who has been on a hunger strike, sent a letter to outgoing Prime Minister Ivica Dacic asking him why was a border set at the Jarinje crossing between Serbia and the so-called Republic of Kosovo and not an administrative line, as the government has been explaining to the Serbian public? “Proof that there is a border is the decision whereby I was banned from entering Kosovo and Metohija. That decision carries the coat of arms of the so-called Republic of Kosovo and the name “Republika e Kosove”, Ministry of Interior Affairs. This decision also carries the stamp that says “Kosovo border police” in Albanian, English and Serbian. The decision was issued to me on 9 March 2014 at 11:15 a.m. after I was held for one hour. From that time, I started a hunger and thirst strike at the Jarinje crossing in my car. I will not stop the strike until I receive a written explanation from the Serbian Government,” reads Pelevic’s letter.
The Brussels disagreement (NIN)
The transformation of the Security Forces into the Kosovo Army has commenced with the decision of the government in Pristina whereby, among other things, the Ministry of the Kosovo Security Forces will be renamed into the Ministry of Defense. Thus, Agim Ceku, who has so far signed several bilateral agreements on military cooperation (with Albania, Turkey, Macedonia, Croatia, U.S. and Great Britain) in accordance with Ahtisaari’s plan, and in violation with UNSCR 1244, will have in his jurisdiction armed forces for implementing these agreements. It is expected that 8,000 soldiers, 3,000 of whom reservists, will serve the army whose primary goal is according to Hashim Thaqi, to defend the territorial integrity of Kosovo, and the second, in the interpretation of Enver Hoxhaj, to integrate into NATO. Reacting to that decision, Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said it was not in accordance with the Brussels agreement, and that Serbia had guarantees that the Kosovo army, whenever it occurs, will not have the right to enter the north without KFOR’s permission. KFOR was also supposed to be a guarantor for the conduct of 2,500 members (and 500 reservists) of the Kosovo Security Forces whose activities have been limited to civilian needs.
REGIONAL PRESS
Ashton’s clear message to B&H officials expected (Nezavisne Novine)
The EU Special Representative in B&H Peter Sorensen has assessed that the visit of the EU High Representative Catherine Ashton to Sarajevo is very important because she will be able to have direct contacts with the officials and receive an impression on the situation in B&H. The SNSD MP in the House of Representatives of the B&H Parliamentary Assembly Lazar Prodanovic told the press that Ashton’s visit is an important message for everybody in B&H and that he expects it to be clear. “Nevertheless, the key is in the readiness of B&H political leaders to achieve agreement through compromise that would be acceptable for all and an optimal solution for B&H’s progress towards the EU,” said Prodanovic. The Presiding of the House of Peoples of the B&H parliament Dragan Covic also expects Ashton’s clear message. “The EU has its own elections in the next two months and these people will deal with their own activities, just as we will deal with our own, but the message will be clear – if we want to join the EU we must realize that this is our job, that nobody from abroad will be offering solutions that we will refuse,” said Covic.
INTERNATIONAL PRESS
Serbia set to swallow bitter pill after snap election (Reuters, by Ivana Sekularac, 10 March 2014)
SMEDEREVO, Serbia — The steel mill in this Danube river town has fed three generations of Milos’s family. But the 17-year veteran believes he will be the last.
“The plant will close down,” he said. “There’s no business and we won’t get salaries for much longer.”
Milos, who declined to give his surname, is one of 5,000 workers at the Smederevo Steel Mill who face a growing threat of redundancy following an election this weekend in Serbia.
The former Yugoslav republic’s likely next rulers promise a dramatic overhaul of the economic order, a costly and chaotic hybrid of Socialist-era central planning and fledgling capitalism that experts agree is no longer sustainable.
Facing the chop are dozens of factories and firms on state life support, Smederevo among them. The public sector employs nearly 800,000 people, or around half the Serbian workforce, and is a huge drain on the meager eight-billion-euro ($11.1 billion) budget.
Successive governments since Serbia’s emergence from isolation with the fall of strongman president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 have shied away from reforming the public sector for fear of being punished by voters.
But if opinion polls are to be trusted, the center-right Progressive Party (SNS) of Aleksandar Vucic will win big on Sunday, and enter power on an unprecedented mandate to stabilize Serbian finances.
The stakes are high, as the biggest market to emerge from old federal Yugoslavia embarks on talks on joining the European Union within the next decade.
“I didn’t come to Smederevo to tell you that you will live easy, that milk and honey will flow, that flowers will bloom if you vote for us,” Vucic said last month during campaigning in the town. “Reforms will be difficult and painful. Those who say cancer can be cured with aspirin are not being honest.”
For decades, public sector jobs were coveted for security, higher-than-average salaries and generous holidays. They were a rich source of political patronage, doled out to the party faithful with each change of government.
Now, pensions and public sector wages amount to the equivalent of nearly a quarter of Serbian national output. Sixty percent of state budget revenues are paid out in pensions and wages. By comparison, affluent EU member state Austria last year devoted some 32 percent of budget revenues to pensions, social security and health sectors.
Serbia’s consolidated budget deficit, which includes municipal finances and support for public companies such as Smederevo, has soared to 7.5 percent of gross domestic product, and by some estimates will reach 8.5 percent this year.
Public debt has climbed by 30 percentage points since 2008, hitting 69 percent of GDP last year, higher than the International Monetary Fund recommends for similar emerging economies.
“STARK CHOICES”
It is testimony to the rapid rise in Vucic’s personal popularity – mainly on the back of a much-publicized fight against crime and corruption – that his mantra of reform has not hurt the party’s chances in the March 16 election.
The outgoing government, in which he is deputy prime minister, debated an overhaul of the labor market and public sector, but backed down in the face of coalition tensions.
Forcing a snap election, the SNS said it needed a stronger mandate to push through tough structural reforms. If it does so now, it faces a public backlash, but to put off such measures risks even greater economic consequences, economists warn.
“Serbia’s political and economic leaders face some stark choices,” Tony Verhayden, the World Bank’s top official in Serbia, told a business forum last week in the Serbian ski resort of Kopaonik.
Without reform of the public sector, “one does not have to look too far south to see the potential consequences which, for a country still outside the EU, are extremely dire,” he said, alluding to debt-laden Greece.
According to the Belgrade-based Economic Institute think-tank, Serbia needs to attract 1.6 billion euros of foreign investment per year to secure a growth rate of 4 percent by 2020 and catch up with regional peers and EU members Croatia and Slovenia, two other ex-Yugoslav republics.
Last year, 700 million euros of foreign direct investment (FDI) entered the country. Smederevo was once a shining example, sold to U.S. Steel for $23 million in 2003 in the biggest post-Milosevic era privatization. But U.S. Steel sold it back for a token $1 in 2012 as the state stepped in to prevent the mill’s closure after years of losses.
Other investors have been put off by suffocating red tape, widespread corruption and political turbulence.
The lack of an IMF safety net since early 2012 has also unnerved investors. That may change quickly after the creation of a new government, with SNS-chosen Finance Minister Lazar Krstic now in talks with a visiting mission from the Fund.
The IMF will seek spending cuts through structural reforms. The outgoing government has already raised value-added tax and cut into public sector salaries, which triggered a protest by doctors on Monday. Further measures may meet resistance in the streets, testing Vucic’s mettle.
“Even if the government would be ready to start painful reforms, it would be difficult,” said Zoran Cirjakovic, a media and communications analyst at Singidunum University in Belgrade. “People working in the public sector are not ready for reforms. They don’t think they should be the ones to sacrifice.”
Or, as Milos in Smederevo put it: “As soon as we stop getting paid, we’ll take to the streets and block the roads.”
Kosovo to form army 15 yrs after war, Serbia reacts (Anadolu Agency, by Fatjon Prroni & Satuk Bugra Kutlugun, 10 March 2014)
The decision has been taken in consultation with NATO, Kosovan Ambassador in Ankara tells Anadolu Agency
Six years after declaring its independence from Serbia, the Kosovan government announced its intentions last week to start a ten-year-long process to establish an army. However, Serbia reacted by threatening to call an emergency session of the UN Security Council to debate the issue.
“The army will have a defensive character as Kosovo has no territorial aspirations,” Kosovo’s Ambassador in Ankara, Avni Spahiu told Anadolu Agency calling it a step towards “supporting peace and security in the region”.
But the Serbian government called the actions of Pristina “unacceptable” as they believe only the U.N. force, KFOR, which has kept the peace since the war ended 15 years ago, have a mandate for all military aspects of security in Kosovo.
Serbia believes the decision goes against Kosovo’s status as a “UN administrated territory,” says Serbia’s minister without portfolio in charge of Kosovo, Aleksandar Vulin. He reacted by threatening to call an emergency session of the UN Security Council Thursday to debate the issue.
However, Spahiu contends that it’s time that Kosovo, which declared its independence in 2008, has its army “just like any other country”. He is backed up by the U.S., which supports Kosovo’s goal of joining NATO, a precondition of which is to have an army.
“The decision to establish an army has been taken in consultation with NATO and our partners,” Spahiu said.
A Kosovan army is always going to be a sensitive issue for neighboring Serbia, who do not officially recognize Kosovo, unlike the 106 countries including United States, Turkey, Germany, France and the U.K.
The Kosovan war resulted in nearly 15,000 Kosovans dying at the hands of the Serbian regime forces between 1998 and 1999.
The Kosovo army will have five thousand soldiers and three thousand reservists, says the Kosovan Security Forces Minister Agim Ceku.
The Minister foresees that an army for the territory will be up and running in 2024.
Despite the two states signing an agreement considered as ‘breakthrough’ by EU leaders, Serbia insists that it will never recognise Kosovo as an independent state.
The agreement, hailed by EU, provided the organisation of elections in all parts of Kosovo, the establishment of an association of Kosovo-Serb majority municipalities, and the progressive integration of justice and police structures in northern Kosovo into Kosovo’s legal and administrative framework.
Thanks to this agreement, Serbia was rewarded with EU membership talks and Kosovo with negotiations on Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA). Kosovo is also in the process of visa liberalization talks with EU countries.
Spahiu hopes that Serbia will recognise Kosovo in the not so distant future and that their relations will be normal, as two neigboring states in the EU.
He said that Kosovan government is fully committed to move forward with other reforms and actions required by the EU membership process.
“It is very encouraging that the message we hear constantly from Brussels is that the future of Kosovo and of our region is in the EU,” Spahiu said.
Gerhard Schröder finds understanding with Putin (Zeitonline, 9 March 2014)
The former chancellor stated that Russia’s actions in the Crimea are illegal under international law, but warns against the Western demonization of Putin; Schröder will not be a Mediator
Russian President Vladimir Putin, if you follow a lot of comments and debates on the Internet among the Germans, has a surprising number of supporters in the conflict over Ukraine. While most Western media and politicians unanimously condemn the occupation of Crimea by Russia, expressions by numerous readers and members in social networks have understanding for the Russian invasion in the Black Sea peninsula and its planned connection to Putin’s kingdom.
Gerhard Schröder, reputed to have a particularly close relationship with the Kremlin chief, tried in Hamburg to provide a contrast, rather than be a “Putin-understander”. So the former SPD leader and German Chancellor stated that he had not spoken with Putin over the Ukraine conflict. “I can only imagine what drives him,” Schröder noted. Putin is keen to consolidate Russia, to develop economically and to “keep it big and strong – on par with the U.S.”
As a historically-minded person of the Russian President had a certain “fear of being surrounded.” After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia had to accept the new realities, and that there was “unwelcome developments” at the edges of the former Soviet Union. “However, whether the means used are correct, I too, would doubt,” Schroeder said, without naming Putin directly.
Kosovo as a “blueprint”
The former chancellor called Russia’s actions a violation of international law. With a raised finger, however, he noted that one should be careful, “because I made it myself,” he said, referring to the German participation in the war against Serbia over Kosovo, during his reign. For what is currently passing in the Crimea, Kosovo was the “blueprint”. Both cases are “formally” in violation of the Charter of the United Nations.
Also the Crimean government scheduled for the 16 March a referendum on the region’s secession from Ukraine and its association with Russia, which Schröder equated to the declaration of independence of the province of Kosovo from the state of Serbia.
Schroeder called it a failure of the EU to successfully get Ukraine to sing up to an association agreement. Given the culturally Europe-oriented and nationalist Ukrainians in the west, and the Russian thinkers in the east and south of the divided country, we have before us an “either-or” situation. The Ukraine had thus had no choice but to opt out of its strong connections to Russia. According to Schröder, a more reasonable approach would be a “both-and” situation, since the former Soviet republic needs to have stable partnerships with both sides.
“Sanctions hurt Germany”
The ex-chancellor supported his successor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in seeking further talks with Russia, instead of descending into a “spiral of sanctions”. Germany would pay for such penalties more than other countries, Schroeder said. For this reason, in the talks with Putin, the West should take its time. Maybe they could succeed only after the election of a new government in Kiev which could “represent the entire population.”
In his view, it should not be members of Ukraine’s nationalist-conservative Swoboda Party, which uses “Nazi symbols” and has contacts with the NPD. This party currently controls the Ukrainian Minister of Defense and the Attorney General.
Schröder has refused to mediate in the conflict, as had proposed by the leader of the left, Gregor Gysi. For this you need an organization behind you, such as the OSCE. “I cannot try as an individual to act as an agent.”
Croatia v Serbia: The International Court of Justice (The Economist, 11 March 2014)
WITH Ukraine possibly on the brink of armed conflict and Crimea occupied by Russia it is only a matter of time before the International Court of Justice is called upon to make a ruling. Yet if the Croatia v Serbia case now being heard in The Hague is any indication, hearings would likely begin in 2037 at the earliest.
The case in which both Balkan states accuse each other of genocide, is widely regarded as utterly idiotic, benefitting only the handsomely paid lawyers of either party, many of whom are British. The hearings, which began on March 3rd, refer to events that took place in Croatia during the war years between 1991 and 1995. In 1991 local Serbs, backed by Serbia and the Yugoslav Army seized control of a third of Croatia. Local Croats fled, were ethically cleansed or murdered. In 1995 Croatia retook most of the territory, and some 230,000 Serbs fled or were ethnically cleansed. Many of those who risked staying behind were murdered.
In the meantime war ravaged Bosnia and Hercegovina. In 1993 the Bosnian government appealed to the ICJ, accusing Serbia (then still officially the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) of genocide. Behind this move was a specific aim, namely to get the United Nations Security Council to lift its arms embargo on the country.
The court only decided on the matter 12 years after the war had finished. In 2007 it ruled that genocide had taken place in only one instance, in Srebrenica, in 1995, when 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered in a few days. Significantly it ruled that Serbia, as a state, as opposed to Bosnian Serb leaders, was not guilty of this crime, though Serbia was faulted for not having prevented it.
Although the conflict ended in 1995, Croatia filed its suit against Serbia for genocide as late as July 1999. Croatia’s wartime leader, Franjo Tudjman, was by then almost at his deathbed. He was said to be obsessed with the issue.
Few noticed when it was launched three weeks after NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia during the Kosovo war. Some speculated that this was an opportunistic kick at Serbia while it was down. It also contained the allegation that Serbia was guilty of genocide against Serbs in Croatia because it had encouraged them to leave as Croatia attacked and retook Serb-held areas.
In 2010 Serbia filed a counter-suit against Croatia alleging that Croatia was actually the genocidal party. More than that, what happened during the 1990s had to be understood in the context of the real genocide of the Serbs at the hands of the quisling Croatian state during the Second World War.
“Unless the court has a collective aneurysm,” says Marko Milanovic, an international lawyer at Nottingham University, “the outcome (of the case) is already predetermined. There was no genocide, full stop.” Almost certainly, he adds, the ICJ will find “that terrible atrocities were committed, but that none of them qualify as genocide”. In an opinion in 2008, Peter Tomka, now the president of the ICJ, even gently tried to dissuade the parties from continuing with the case.
For the last few years Serbian and Croatian leaders have said they wanted to drop the case, but for political reasons they have been unable to do so. The current Croatian government, which does not have a nationalist background, found itself unable to drop the genocide claim for fear of being branded as weak by the opposition. Likewise the Serbian government (which has nationalist credentials) has also been unable to drop the case unless Croatia did so. Both sides, says Mr Milanovic, “are wasting millions in taxpayers money for nothing, and a public airing of the atrocities of the 1990s will have no impact on public opinion, beyond solidifying what people already believe and want to believe.”
An assassin divides his native Bosnia 100 years on (Reuters, by Matt Robinson and Daria Sito-Sucic, 11 March 2014)
SARAJEVO – The woman paused before a photograph of a young man with dark eyes and a tightly trimmed moustache.
“That’s that Serb terrorist those Chetniks (Serb nationalists) are praising,” she said to a journalist inspecting the image. “He started that war. They started all the wars.”
Gavrilo Princip stared down from the outer wall of a museum at the riverside spot in Sarajevo where on a summer’s morning in 1914 he opened fire on the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, lit the fuse for World War One, turning out the lights on an age of European peace and progress.
Empires crumbled and more than 10 million soldiers died. The world order was rewritten. Yet 100 years on, in Princip’s native Bosnia, time, in many ways, has stood still.
A hero to some, a harbinger of destruction to others, the assassin is being fought over anew as Sarajevo prepares to mark the June 28 centenary of his act.
Two rival sets of events are being planned, and accusations of ‘revisionism’ are flying at a time of renewed Cold War-style tensions between East and West.
The row goes to the heart of Bosnia today, a country still affected by big-power divisions and still arguing about the past, divided by the present and uncertain about the future.
“We haven’t moved on,” said Bosnian historian Vera Katz. “It’s like we’re 100 years before 1914, not 100 years after.”
Sarajevo bookended the 20th century, opening with Princip’s Browning revolver and closing with the sniper rifles and mortars of his ethnic kin besieging the city from the hills during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.
To some, like the woman at the museum, the two events were part of the same arc of Serb nationalism.
According to that narrative, Princip was a ‘terrorist’ bent on uniting Orthodox Serb lands at the expense of Bosnia’s Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats.
Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladic attempted just that eight decades later.
Sarajevo mayor Ivo Komsic, a Bosnian Croat, noted the city’s role in the two wars that framed the last century when unveiling plans for the centenary last month.
“The eyes of the world will be focused on Sarajevo once more and it is important that we send messages completely different from the messages of war sent in 1914 and 1992,” he said.
RIVAL EVENTS
Such comparisons have riled Serbs in Bosnia and neighbouring Serbia, for whom Princip is a pan-Slavic hero, the shot he fired marking the death knell for centuries of foreign occupation over Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks alike.
This was the official narrative for decades in socialist Yugoslavia, when Princip was venerated as a freedom fighter for all the nations and faiths gathered together by Josip Broz Tito.
Schools and roads took the assassin’s name. His footprints were enshrined in the pavement at the spot from which he fired.
In his native mountain region of Bosansko Grahovo, a plaque erected in 1949 still stands above the doors to the local school, hailing Princip’s “fearless” fight for the “national freedom of our peoples”.
Today, the plaque is blackened, licked by the flames that razed the school in 1995 as Yugoslavia crumbled.
Sarajevo, now inhabited largely by Bosniaks, plans to mark the centenary of the assassination with a series of cultural events sponsored in large part by France and also with the help of Austria and possibly the European Union.
It will take place at a sensitive time in international relations, with Western nations accusing Serb big power backer Russia of preparing to annex Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow arguing it is defending Russians from Western stooges in Kiev.
Organisers of the Sarajevo commemoration, who are hoping to get funding from the EU, say it will steer clear of the issue of whether Princip was terrorist or hero.
The centrepiece will be a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic in the city’s much-loved Vijecnica, Sarajevo’s city hall-turned-National Library that burned down at the start of the 43-month Bosnian Serb siege of the city. The concert will mark its reopening.
On June 27, French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, who supported the Bosniak call for Western intervention to halt the war in Bosnia, will premiere his latest play in Sarajevo, which deals specifically with the 1992-95 conflict.
Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic has refused to participate, except in a leg of the Tour de France cycling race in the capital on June 20-23.
Instead, the Serbs plan their own ceremony in Visegrad, a town made famous by Ivo Andric’s 1945 novel ‘Bridge on the Drina’, and infamous by Serb paramilitaries who tossed their victims from the Ottoman bridge in 1992 as the first waves of the war washed through eastern Bosnia.
“WE BUILD AND WE DESTROY”
The Serb events will be choreographed by filmmaker Emir Kusturica, a Sarajevan born into a Bosniak family but who later took on the Serbian Orthodox faith, who plans to stage an opera about the assasination and show a documentary about Princip.
Authorities in Serb-controlled East Sarajevo say plans are in the pipeline for a statue of the assassin.
“We once all lived in one state (Yugoslavia), and we never looked on it as any kind of terrorist act, as some historians try to present it today,” said Nenad Samardzija, the Serb mayor of East Sarajevo.
“We looked on it as a movement of young people who wanted to liberate themselves from colonial slavery.”
The contradictions are inevitable, said sociology professor Slavo Kukic.
“Through no fault of his own, Gavrilo Princip is the result of all those political conflicts and differences on the territory of the former Yugoslavia … over the past quarter of a century,” he said. “We’ve had many Gavrilo Princips in our recent past.”
The demands of each side in Bosnia have changed little since its war – while the Bosniaks want a more centralised, unified state, the Croats say they need their own entity like the Serbs.
Serb leaders, meanwhile, look east to Serbia, saying they have little need for Bosnia at all, much as pro-Moscow forces now in Crimea are looking to Russia and rejecting Ukraine.
The political system put in place in Bosnia by a U.S.-brokered peace deal in 1995 divvied up power along ethnic lines, fuelling corruption, stifling development and triggering unrest last month unprecedented since the war.
The historian Katz, her office unheated since the war because the state History Institute can’t afford the bills, said all the centenary plans were inappropriate given the far more pressing economic and political problems facing Bosnia.
“It’s like putting on makeup when you haven’t even had a bath,” she said.
Princip’s house is one of hundreds of gutted homes scarring the bleak plateau, untouched since they were sacked by Croat forces on the heels of fleeing Serbs at the end of the Bosnian war. The Sarajevo footprints have gone.
Spared the death sentence because he was not yet 20, Princip died of tuberculosis in his jail cell in 1918.
The turbulent century that he set in chain scattered his relatives around the globe. But one who was given his name, Gavrilo, still resides in East Sarajevo, where he runs a hotel.
Serbs who fled Princip’s native region are collecting money to rebuild the family home in time for the centenary. The house was razed three times, during the two world wars and again in 1995. They’re wasting their time, said Gavrilo.
“It will be burned down and destroyed again,” he said. “We build and then we destroy. That’s how things are in Bosnia.” (Writing by Matt Robinson; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
Croatia Ex-President presents ‘Dayton 2’ for Bosnia (Balkan Insight, by Elvira M. Jukic, 10 March 2014)
Former Croatian President Stjepan Mesic put forward a new constitutional model for Bosnia and Herzegovina based on multi-ethnic cantons in a bid to deal with the country’s political stagnation.
Mesic said in Mostar on Friday that it was a time for an international conference on a new constitutional make-up for the country to replace the one imposed under the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the war – but his proposal was immediately rejected by the Bosnian Serb leadership.
The former Croatian leader argued that the Dayton accords had stopped the war but the political system they left in place was not functioning anymore and was impeding Bosnia and Herzegovina’s progress.
“In the current circumstances, Croatia has to react and has to come out with an initiative to change the Dayton peace accords and the constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Mesic said, adding that the EU could be a partner in the initiative.
Mesic said that one of the possible solutions could be an international conference which would be called ‘Dayton 2’, and would redraw the country into multi-national cantons with a central government, in which Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, as well as other ethnicities, would be equals.
He said that the conference could be held under supervision of the United Nations in the presence of the countries that signed the original Dayton peace accords. Bosnia would be represented by its tripartite presidency members, while three former High Representatives would preside over the event – Wolfgang Petritsch, Christian Schwarz-Schilling and Paddy Ashdown.
People would vote in a referendum on the new constitution while at the same time the country’s authorities would negotiate to join the EU, Mesic proposed.
But the president of Bosnia’s Serb-led entity Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, dismissed any idea of a ‘Dayton 2’, saying that the original 1995 accords, which guaranteed Republika Srpska’s existence, should be upheld instead.
Dodik insisted that Republika Srpska could block any potential abolition of its status: “Republika Srpska has enough ability to defend its constitutional positions,” he said.
Meanwhile wartime Bosnian parliamentary speaker Miro Lazovic argued on Sunday that the current constitutional situation was impeding the country on its road towards the EU.
Lazovic told a meeting of the Alliance of Independent Intellectuals Circle 99 in Sarajevo that the country was still far from the vision set out in the 1992 referendum on independence which spoke of “a state of equal citizens and nations of Muslims, Serbs, Croats and others who live in it”.
“Nowadays Bosnia and Herzegovina is an economically and socially destabilized country, politically disoriented and [its people are] in a perpetual relationship which does not allow a way out,” Lazovic said.
“It is torn between Dayton and Brussels,” he said.
