Bosnia-Herzegovina
Report #9 – Prijedor and vicinity, part two By Peter Lippman
August 2013
2013 Report index
Report 1: Kosovo, mid-July, 2013 Report 2: Sarajevo, July 2013 Report 3: Sarajevo, continued July 2013 Report 4: Tuzla, July 2013 Report 5: Mostar, July 2013 Report 6: Srebrenica, August 2013 Report 7: Srebrenica, continued, August 2013
Report 8: Prijedor and vicinity, August
2013
Report 9: Prijedor and vicinity,
part two, August
2013
Report 10: Tomašica,
December 2013
To contact Peter
in response to these reports or any of his articles,
View of region around Kozarac from Kozarački Kamen
One
evening in Kozarac I sat with Satko and his parents, Huse and Nadja,
at for dinner at a restaurant. Other members of his family were
present, along with the young Geerlof.
Satko told me that his two younger brothers, his mother, and his
baby sister were taken to Trnopolje, while he and his father, then
48, were taken to Omarska. When they arrived there, he and his
father agreed that if one of them had to die, it should be Satko,
because his father was responsible for the whole family.
The two of them somehow sent a letter, via a man named Mirko, to
Nadja, who in the meantime had managed to get to Prijedor. Mirko was
supposed to return in three days, but he did not.
During this time Satko was sick with dysentery and was lying on the
bathroom floor. Once during this period he was beaten by the guards.
After six days Mirko came back with things for Satko and his father.
He brought a letter from Nadja, along with fifty Swiss francs. Mirko
also gave them a honey sandwich of his own. The man could have made
off with the Swiss francs, but he didn’t, and he saved Satko’s life
this way. Satko’s father bought food and cigarettes with the money,
in the period when Satko was too weak to walk or even to talk.
A few days later Satko felt that he was strong enough to go into the
line for food. He was walking towards the food with his father when
he felt bad, and said to his father, “I can’t see, I can’t move,
hold me up.” His blood pressure was dropping. If he were to fall,
chances are that the guards would have killed him on the spot. Huse
held up Satko by one arm and they continued.
At this point an older guard came up and began harassing Satko and
his father, saying to Huse, “You’re the older one, shouldn’t he be
holding you up? Let him go!” Huse said, “Ne mogu, sin mi je –
I can’t, he’s my son.” The guard commanded him to let Satko go
again. Huse responded, again, “I can’t, he’s my son.” Satko was
praying to himself that Huse would let him go, in order not to
incite a beating. Huse did not let him go. But the guard just cursed
them both, and then walked away.
Over in Trnopolje, Huse’s brother Osman was being held. There was a
guard there who apparently knew that something vicious was going to
happen the next day. That was August 21st, when the buses
of people were taken and shot at the cliffs of Korićanske Stijene.
That guard made sure to put Osman on a different bus, in an earlier
convoy, leaving for safety in central Bosnia.
One day Satko, his brother, Geerlof and I walked up the hills to
Kozarački Kamen (Kozarac Rock), a viewpoint in the hills high
above Kozarac where there's a big flag of the Republika Srpska on
top. Satko and and his brother were talking about the “nagon
zapišavanja,” a slightly vulgar phrase referring to the drive to
mark territory in a nationalist manner.
It took us about an hour and a quarter to walk up the hill. At the
top there was a fine view of Kozarac, Prijedor, and the valley
surrounding them. You could see a vast fish farm in the distance and
the hills behind the two towns. At the top there was, indeed, a
flagpole with the RS flag on it.
Peak of Kozarački
Kamen with RS flag
Afterwards we drove to Kevljani, where we showed Geerlof the bigger
mass grave. The remains of the victims at Omarska were buried 4.8
meters down at Kevljani II. That is the depth where the first
remains were found; the rest were below that. Satko said, “Of all
these people who were found here, I must have known 200 of them.”
Standing by the gravesite, Satko winced and said, “I was supposed to
end up here. Back in Omarska, I had had a vision of the future, that
I was going to end up as bones, under the ground. Someone was
pulling on my bones, pulling me apart. I said, ‘Stop, I don’t want
to die. I don’t want to end up as bones in a mass grave.’ ”
*
While I was in the Prijedor area a commemoration was held at
Hrastova Glavica, near Sanski Most, a city somewhat south of
Prijedor. It lies across the inter-entity borderline in the
Federation, but still in the Krajina. Hrastova Glavica is the
location of a pit where, on August 5th 21 years ago, 124
captives from Omarska and Keraterm were executed. These people had
been removed from these camps, supposedly for a prisoner exchange,
which did not take place. Instead they were brought to the pit,
shot, and thrown in. One man survived to tell what happened.
The pit was excavated in 1998, and at that time, the remains of two
missing persons who had been killed during World War II were also
discovered.
Commemoration at Trnopolje
On Monday night, August 5th, a commemoration was held at the wartime
camp of Trnopolje, in the village of the same name, not far from
Kozarac. On this day in 1992, foreign journalists discovered the
existence of this and other concentration camps in the Prijedor
area. Images of emaciated prisoners at Trnopolje, prominently
including that of the young Fikret Alić, horrified the world and
brought back dreadful memories of the Nazi concentration camps of
less than 50 years before. (See this article
by one of those journalists, Ed Vulliamy) In the photos you could
count Alić’s ribs.
As a side point, I note that, while the visit of journalists to
Trnopolje alerted the world to the existence of the Serb-run
concentration camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina, information stemming from
that visit also prompted an ongoing wave of atrocity denial by Serb
extremists and their sympathizers in the West. For more information
on the “denier industry,” click
here and
here.
The commemoration, organized by activists from the Prijedor-based
Izvor, the Kozarac-based Optimisti, and other friends of good will,
was held on the grounds of the devastated Dom Kulture
(cultural center), immediately adjacent to the school that was the
Trnopolje prisoner camp. The event was designed to be something
different from the yearly gatherings of survivors and families of
the missing, although their presence was welcome – for that matter,
Fikret Alić attended. The evening’s presentations included, among
other things, an interactive lecture, a poetry reading, and a film
screening. Prijedor activist and returnee Emir Hodžić officiated.
Goran Šimić, a Sarajevo attorney and law professor, gave the first
presentation. His specialties are criminal law and “transitional
justice,” a phrase used to refer to one thing that takes forever
(the transition from a socialist society to a “prosperous”
capitalist one) and another thing, justice, that is generally
delayed and often denied. But here’s Šimić’s take.
Presenting his recently-finished book, Suđenja za ratne zločine u
Bosni i Hercegovini (Prosecution for War Crimes in
Bosnia-Herzegovina), Šimić
started out by saying, “I’m not promoting this book, but offering
it.” And, “I was never a member of a party, so that’s why there’s
been no money for my book.”
Šimić talked about his mother, who is 80 years old and has lived
through two wars. Referring to Trnopolje, he asked, “Will we forget
what happened here, and turn this place into a factory, or a farm?
People study the history of wars, but few study how to prevent a
war.”
Šimić focused on the court proceedings, both at The Hague and in
Bosnia, pertaining to war crimes. His main message, coming on the
heels of the Hague court’s acquittal of Momčilo Perišić and Jovica
Stanišić and Franko Simatović, was that we expect too much from the
courts. He said, “The
courts are not involved in establishing the truth. They are involved
in establishing whether there are sufficient facts to judge someone
as guilty. We believe in the magic that the court will establish
justice. But the court is involved in establishing guilt and
responsibility.
“Finally, in the whole legal process, there is no victim taken into
consideration. The prosecutors think of these processes as cases
with a number. But the victims do not think of it that way – no,
these cases are part of our lives. “It
is not sufficient to judge the war criminals. We will get a maximum
of ten percent of what we wanted from the courts. From the court
proceedings we acquire something like a mosaic that should have
6,000 pieces, but only has 300. There is no picture there.
“And what is with the punishments that people are receiving? They
are inadequate. Is this justice? …There could be harsher
punishments. They were raping 12-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 6-year
olds. The punishments given are like prescribing aspirin for a
broken leg. There is no real punishment. The guilty should be
required to pay into a fund that would help with reconstruction.”
“Meanwhile,” Šimić added, “there is denial. All sides are
responsible for some crimes – there were crimes committed by
Bosniaks in central Bosnia.” He pointed out that people who actively
participated in the war are now in political positions. Exhorting to
activism, he said, “There are around 100,000 people in political
positions, but there are more than 3.5 million of us.”
In that vein, he continued, “We don’t want real confrontation with
the past, but just the kind of confrontation where I was the victim
and you were the war criminal. A real change would start with us,
ourselves. It is easy to criticize. We don’t want to wait before
getting to work on this change, because the potential for another
conflict exists now.”
Scene at Trnopolje during commemoration – demolished Dom Kulture,
with high school (former prison camp) in background
Almir
Alić, liaison officer for the ICTY based in Sarajevo, gave an
interactive presentation. He had a reader read a section from
Selimović’s Tvrđava. It recounted a scene during a war
between the Russian Empire and the Ottomans in the 17th century,
where soldiers attacked civilians and one woman was raped. The
passage talks about the behavior, conversation, and thoughts of the
participants afterwards, and what happens to them.
After the reading, Alić walked the audience through a legalistic
discussion of the incident, obviously as a metaphor for the
proceedings of the ICTY. He presented a legal definition of rape,
and then described exacerbating factors and mitigating factors. He
discussed the meaning of command responsibility. Step by step, he
asked the audience: was there rape? “Yes.” Were there mitigating or
exacerbating factors? Was there command responsibility? Finally, he
asked if what happened was a war crime. He provided his own answer:
“No.” Because there was no law against rape as a war crime at that
time. He quotes the Latin: “Nullum crimen sine lege” (no crime
without law – see
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/nullum_crimen_sine_lege).
It seems to me that this is, by analogy, an illustration of Šimić’s
point: you can’t expect too much from the court.
*
The most moving moment of the evening was when Izvor presented an
award to the Belgrade-based organization the
Women in Black. Izvor representative Edin Ramulić presented the
award to the president of Women in Black,
Staša Zajović,for
the organization’s exemplary struggle against genocide denial.
Receiving the award,
Zajović spoke of personal responsibility, stating, “Justice
comes from acting upon one’s responsibility to one’s fellow people,
and from saying, ‘These things shall not be done in our name.’ I
strongly rebel against the fact that I am a citizen of an aggressor
state that changed the region into a concentration camp…Participants
in the crimes have now come to power in my country.”
In this vein, in an interview on the day of the commemoration at
Trnopolje, Zajović said, “We know that that state, I mean Serbia, is
responsible and that it committed aggression against
Bosnia-Herzegovina, that it organized, maintained, and offered all
kinds of military, financial, and political support to those who
committed countless crimes.” Further addressing the question of
personal responsibility, she said, “Our obligation is to express
empathy and solidarity with those who withstood horrible suffering
and to express our deepest admiration for the fact that they have
decided to struggle for justice...there, we are on the same path, to
create a culture of peace, justice, and trust.”
One of the things that made Zajović’s presentation all the more
powerful was that she used a form of public speech rarely heard in
this patriarchal society. Referring to her colleagues as
“feminists,” she consistently used the feminine ending of each verb
form. Her acceptance speech was met with great appreciation by this
special audience, which included not only local people and
survivors, but also young people from various countries brought to
the Krajina by the Sarajevo-based
Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC – for their Facebook site click
here).
Dinner was shared by locals, presenters, and foreigners all
together, numbering a couple hundred people. It was presented as
“Iftar (the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast) for those who were
fasting, and dinner for everyone.” Afterwards the evening’s events
continued. Some thirty-five people, including those from the PCRC,
camped overnight at the venue.
With
the event due to go on well into the night, I hitched a ride back to
Kozarac around 11:00 p.m. A man named Hase drove me back to town,
and on the way he told me, nearly in a matter-of-fact way, that he
had been held in Trnopolje for four months.
There’s no one around this area who was not touched by the
atrocities of the war.
Commemoration at Omarska
The
next day, August 6th, a commemoration was held at the
Omarska mining complex near the out-of-the-way village of the same
name. I caught a ride there with a member of Women in Black. There
was a very slow line of cars going out in the hot sun. We parked
about a kilometer from the site and walked the rest of the way.
As we were walking towards the Omarska mining complex I met an
elderly woman named Mejra, who introduced herself to me as “Majka
(mother) Mejra.” She showed me two pendants around her neck, which
bore the names of her son and daughter. She said that they had both
been killed and that she had no grandchildren. She was living alone
with her husband. The son and daughter’s names were Edvin and Edna.
Their remains were found in mass graves. Mother Mejra was fasting
for Ramadan. As we walked, she was carrying some roses that she was
going to lay in Omarska, in memory of her children.
We arrived at the “Red House,” the center of the mining complex,
which is a large and long building covered by red metal siding. In
front of it stands the notorious “White House,” where people were
taken to be killed. Somewhat off to the side is another mining
facility that the survivors call the “restaurant,” where people were
fed. Kemal Pervanić pointed out to me the balcony of the restaurant
and explained to me that people were taken to that upper level to be
interrogated.
There was a crowd huddled up in the few feet of shade offered by the
Red House. As I arrived a speaker was intoning the names of those
killed in Omarska. Afterwards a recording of the national anthem,
still without lyrics twenty-one years after Bosnia’s independence,
was played, and then people said a silent prayer for the dead. There
was a heaviness in the air.
The Red
House at Omarska
Sudbin Musić speaking to crowd at Omarska
Approximately six thousand prisoners passed through Omarska, and
some seven hundred of them were killed. One of several great
scandals associated with the mining complex is that 51 percent of it
was purchased by the international steel company ArcelorMittal.
Mittal has promised to allow a memorial center to be constructed on
the grounds of Omarska, but this has been blocked by the mayor of
Prijedor, and Mittal has not in fact lifted a finger to help make
the memorial happen. Meanwhile, it gives preferential hiring to
Serbs over Bosniak returnees.
Some 1,500 people were gathered at the site on this day. Sudbin
Musić, activist with the “Prijedor 92” organization of camp
survivors, was speaking, leading the proceedings and introducing
each speaker.
I looked at the crowd in the shade and saw Fikret Alić. Early in the
war he had been captured and taken to the concentration camp at
Keraterm, near Prijedor. He had just been transferred to Trnopolje
very shortly before the journalists’ visit that exposed the
existence of the camps to the world. In an interview, Alić said,
“For 21 years we are searching for justice and the truth that says,
clearly, that genocide took place here – which they, on the other
side, deny. No one of ours imprisoned us; the Serb army did
that…history and humanity were murdered here. I do not like to
remember that picture” [referring to the shocking photograph of Alić
behind the barbed wires of Trnopolje camp].
Alić and I made eye contact. He smiled a little smile at me. Just
that little smile of a survivor in this place of horror reminded me
that survival is possible, that people, though wounded, could find
ways to function after trauma and to lead productive lives. Hope is
everything.
Mirsad Duratović, also of Prijedor 92, was speaking. He talked about
how the groups of concentration camp survivors may not and will not
stop fighting for memory and memorialization. That people have the
right to truth, to commemoration, and to visit the place of their
torment and their memories. This, as opposed to having those
memories erased from history. Mirsad called for the construction of
a memorial center at Omarska. He also called for the punishment of
every war criminal.
He quoted a line from the Croatian poet Vladimir Nazor: “Njih
mrtvih ja sam živi spomenik” – Of those dead, I am the living
memorial.
Mirsad Duratović speaking
The
president of the national association of concentration camp
survivors, Jasmin Mešković, spoke. “It is a sad day as we remember
those killed. The other night we visited the pit at Hrastova Glavica,
20 meters deep, where people were shot in the heads and dumped. The
truth comes out, it comes out from the mass graves. The truth must
be told not only about Prijedor but also about Batkovići, Lukavac,
Vlasenica – and Čelebići. In all these locations, the intent was the
same: to kill. Only the numbers were different.
“The biggest problem in marking these dates is that we are talking
to each other, but unfortunately, few people are coming to hear what
we have to say.
“In Bosnia there are laws. There are laws to protect dogs and
horses. That is good. But it is sad that there is no law regarding
the concentration camp survivors. There is no concern about us. For
eighteen years we have been struggling for this, so that nothing
like this can ever happen again in this country.
“All of the former camps, regardless of whether they held Croats,
Serbs, or Bosniaks, are places to be marked.”
It is significant to me that Mešković mentioned not only the
Serb-run camps at Lukavica and the other places, but also Čelebići,
a camp in central Bosnia run by pro-government forces, where Serbs
were held and abused. There was no reaction in the audience when
this was mentioned.
Sudbin spoke again, winding up the presentation and particularly
thanking the Serbs – local people and visitors – who attended the
commemoration.
The White House at Omarska
Afterwards, before the crowd dispersed, people were laying flowers
in front of the White House. Then the organizers of the
commemoration handed out hundreds of balloons each with the name of
one victim of the camp attached. On the count of five, we all
released the white balloons into the air.
Releasing balloons in front of the White House
Name tag of one of the missing, attached to a balloon
Release of the balloons
As
people were leaving to go home, I ran into Mirsad Duratović. He
asked, “How are you?” I answered, “Ok...da ne kažem” (It’s
better not to say). He responded, “Razumije se” – (it’s
understood).”
Mother Mejra laying flowers in memory of her son and daughter Edvin
and Edna
On
the night before I left the area, I had the opportunity to chat with
my friend Švabo (Ervin Blažević), whom I’ve written about before
(see
here, and
here). We talked about activism. He said, “We need to do
long-term, grassroots work in our communities. Never mind the Pavićs
and all those other politicians. The political parties are always
splitting, but in fact they are the same. The SDA becomes the SBiH
and then the SBB. The SDP becomes the Democratic Front.”
On the recent memorials, Švabo said, “The Trnopolje event was good
because it brought in young people from Banja Luka and elsewhere.”
And he felt that it was appropriate that Čelebići should be
mentioned and that those guilty should be prosecuted, because “they
brought shame upon me and my people, and the fight that I fought.”
I asked Švabo, an effective activist around Kozarac and a
religiously observant person, for his opinion on the Bebolucija. He
criticized the demonstrations’ organizers, some of whom were
outspokenly secular. He said, “If you don’t believe in God, why
bother to criticize Him? I could have brought some Vehabije
[militant Islamists] to Sarajevo and encouraged them to participate,
because it was a universal issue. But not when the organizers are
behaving like that. That message alienates the farmers, village
people, and religious people.”
Of the March 1st Coalition, Švabo expressed that he would
support them, but complained that “they are confrontational. They
bring heat onto my organization, and they set us back.”
Peace and Love
On the day before I left the Prijedor area I was reading the local
newspaper while waiting for an appointment. I read a couple of
articles about the big brass band festival in Guča, Serbia. The
event happened to have just taken place on the past weekend, while I
was in Prijedor.
As is customary, the master of ceremonies for the event was a
national literary figure, in this case a poet. The article told
about how the poet was speaking to the massive crowd of visitors.
Referring to the first Gay Pride parade in Podgorica, Montenegro,
just held that weekend, he announced, “There will never be a parade
of shame – excuse me, a pride parade – in Guča. People in the crowd
responded, “Never, never!”
An adjacent article also covered the festival, this one conveying
the enthusiastic reactions of tourists, including a Polish visitor
and an Israeli one. Having just discovered Guča this year, they were
very excited to hear the brass music. One of them was quoted as
saying, “It’s clear to me that the message of this festival is a one
of peace and love.”
Dubioza Kolektiv
I want to introduce to you the popular rock band Dubioza Kolektiv,
from Zenica (central Bosnia). In this band, activism and music meet
without clashing. The band was formed about ten years ago. The name
of its latest album, “Apsurdistan,” demonstrates yet again that the
members of the band not only have a sense of outrage about the
clunky, failed state that they live in (alongside an
anti-nationalist patriotism and devotion to their land), but also a
sense of humor. I think that in Bosnia-Herzegovina you wouldn’t
survive, or at least not very well, without humor. And you won’t
thrive without the impulse to fight for something better.
The introduction on the band’s
website reads, in part, “Apsurdistan is the generic name for a
dystopian state in which everything borders on the absurd. Our
post-transitional society every day more and more resembles a Monty
Python sketch in which there is no trace of logic or rational
thinking. The territory of Apsurdistan is very flexible, and its
borders expand or contract in proportion to the quantity of
stupidity that is present.”
Other promotional information says that the band combines reggae,
rock, hip-hop, and folklore, and that they know how to use their
instruments as weapons against negativity.
Dubioza Kolektiv sings songs that promote peaceful relations among
the peoples of former Yugoslavia, and that address difficult
contemporary issues. The band rejects nationalism and the adoption
of their music by any politician or party. They have become one of
the most popular bands regionally, recently performing in Zagreb for
an audience of 10,000.
In a recent interview, the band’s members were asked whether its
music can help to pull people in Bosnia out of their “dubiosity,”
that is, out of the political and economic swamp that the country is
stuck in. One member said, “I’m sorry, but our music won’t do this.
I would like it if we were Superman or Captain Bosman, but we
aren’t, and there is no one like that. If we don’t all make
ourselves Superman and Bosman, if we aren’t aware of that every day,
then we won’t escape from the present situation…we are waiting for
someone to come pull us out of this swamp. And no one is coming. I
am sorry, but no one will come. Learn to swim!”
In the same interview one member says that the purpose of the band’s
work is for people to learn to think for themselves. “It is hard to
measure how effective our message has been. But it seems to me that
what we have been seeing during our concerts is that people are
getting what we are saying. The most important thing to us is that
people will work with our ideas, and that they will go back home
with these ideas and our message, after the concerts.
“…We don’t think that one set of elections changes something, or
that the romantic ideas about Che Guevara and revolution hold water
either. We have in front of us a truly very long process of learning
what democracy means and understanding social solidarity and civil
society. As a society, we still need to learn a lot of things.
“…In fact, the biggest problem among our people is that we are
always waiting for some Messiah, some hero, some new Tito, who will
lead us to a better tomorrow. Every time, that comes back to slam us
in the head. That is one of the lessons that we have to learn. We
are all that Messiah, for ourselves; we will only succeed if we lead
ourselves somewhere. I don’t know why we are waiting for someone
else to take us by the hand. In fact, they are already leading us,
but it looks like the Messiahs have really multiplied, because it is
very profitable...”
Politics
The last year and a half has been one of political paralysis in the
Federation. The party that emerged dominant out of the 2010 general
elections, the SDP, last year jettisoned its parliamentary coalition
with the otherwise strongest Bosniak party, the SDA. (I wrote about
this last year at more length
here.) In lieu of that coalition the SDP tried to form one with
the Croat nationalist HDZ and the SBB, the party of the Bosniak
tycoon and newspaper magnate Fahrudin Radončić.
Since the SDP’s attempt at forming a government in the Federation
with the “new (cobbled-together) parliamentary majority,” that
government has looked more and more dysfunctional than people had
previously imagined was possible. The SDP has not been successful in
ousting the SDA from all of the positions it held when the old
coalition was operative; thus the “new coalition” has not been able
to take over, and it has been falling apart at the seams, especially
in the last couple of months. The SBB has started sniping at the SDP,
and the HDZ has been flirting with the SDA. I refer back to Švabo’s
statement: “The SDA becomes the SBiH and then the SBB. The SDP
becomes the Democratic Front.”
These are all the same politicians that have been failing in their
jobs since 1992 or 1996 – except that they aren’t failing in their
goal, which is simply to stay in power and to line their pockets.
One of them, member of the state presidency Željko Komšić, has even
admitted all this and said that the whole lot of them should be
cleared out and replaced. It has been pointed out, however, that he
did not resign after making this statement.
What makes all this tragic instead of funny is that meanwhile,
corruption goes on; pensions remain small; war criminals are
finishing their prison sentences early and returning as heroes; and
the government will not even arrive at a simple compromise to
resolve the EU Strasbourg Court of Human Rights demand to make it
possible for anyone – not just a Serb, Croat, or Bosniak – to run
for president. Thus Bosnia’s progress towards the EU remains at a
roadblock.
The only ongoing functional alliance that the SDP has maintained is
the one with Dodik’s party, the SNSD, and this is functional in a
manner that has entirely negative implications for
Bosnia-Herzegovina. As I described last year and in some parts of
this series, this alliance has been responsible for faulty and
conniving laws on conflict of interest, closed electoral lists, the
law on residency (not yet passed), and other self-serving
instruments of corruption.
In the last few months the SNSD has emulated the SDP by trashing its
coalition in the Republika Srpska with the other main party there,
the SDS (founded by accused war criminal Radovan Karadžić, now on
trial at The Hague). The SDS has simultaneously been an opposition
party in the RS, and a member, here and there, of the governing
coalition. Now the SNSD has felt that it could set out on its own,
and has maneuvered to remove all SDS members from their positions as
ministers in the state level government. Even including one or two
who, notwithstanding their criminal past, were actually trying to do
something good for Bosnia.
There have been rumors that Dodik’s party is in for a defeat in next
year’s general elections. Even though they gave Dodik a hearty slap
in last year’s municipal elections, I take this with a grain of
salt, because voters have a short memory.
As a transparent effort to scare his constituency and rally voters
behind him, Dodik and his flunkies recently came up with a new
bogeyman. According to his calculations, the Muslim rulers in the
Federation are planning to skew the population of Bosnia by allowing
the immigration of half a million Arabs. There is a plan to
“Islamicize Bosnian society,” says Dodik. As proof he asserts that
the Kuwaiti government is paying for the construction of 30,000
apartments, “and that’s 100,000 people,” he says.
In response, someone from the PDP, another opposition party in the
RS, said that “instead of joking about 500,000 Arabs, Dodik should
work to open new places of work.”
This reminds me of what a member of the PDP in Srebrenica said to
me: “The PDP is corrupt, but they (the SNSD) are more corrupt.
