Analysts: Čović is calculating between Belgrade and Zagreb

The President of HDZ BiH, Dragan Čović, is accused of working more for Serbian than for Croatian interests in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is closer to Belgrade than to Zagreb.

During a recent official visit to Croatia, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić openly stated that Serbia's relations with the political representatives of Croats in BiH are exceptional. 

"Dragan Čović is a welcome guest in Serbia, and always welcome," Vučić said in Zagreb. On the other hand, Serbia and Croatia cannot boast of any special relations.

Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarović stated during that meeting: "Relations are burdened by history, and today we did not touch upon it, nor did we discuss it. It prevents us from calling the relations between the two countries friendly."

Ivica Đikić, in a column for Al Jazeera, writes that during Vučić's visit to Zagreb, Aleksandar Vučić's political show took place, "in which the highest representatives of the Croatian government, including Grabar-Kitarović, appeared as extras, because they were simply not a match for the political-dramatic talent of the most powerful Serb and because they did not know what they wanted to achieve with that meeting: moreover, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and his government practically obstructed Vučić's visit."

Croatian philosopher and analyst Žarko Puhovski, in a comment for Patria, also speaks about the paradox that the Croatian side in BiH is strongly tied to Dodik, while at the same time Croatia has completely different views towards the president of the BiH entity Republika Srpska.

"Dodik is certainly an authority for the Croatian side in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There is no doubt about that. And this puts Croatia in an uncomfortable position, because on the one hand, it would like to be against Dodik, and on the other hand, it cannot be against 'its own' in Bosnia and Herzegovina," says Puhovski.

Some analysts, however, remind that one should never forget the political structures in Serbia and Croatia that have pretensions to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina, so the relations between official Zagreb and Belgrade can very easily align in that regard. Such a policy was advocated not only in the 1940s between Cvetković and Maček. It was very clearly continued in the 1990s between the first president of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, and the Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević. It is very noticeable today, as Croatia often interferes in the internal affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, just as Serbia interferes equally through the political representatives of Serbs in BiH.   

Some authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina seriously fear the imposition of a new conflict between Bosniaks and Serbs, which Croatian politicians in BiH would use to revive the idea of Herceg Bosna to its full capacity. They would present this to the domestic and international public as the only way to protect Croats in BiH. Something similar was done during the last war in BiH. The leaders of that Herceg Bosna were convicted two decades later by the Hague Tribunal for war crimes, but HDZ did not reject such an ideology even then. Hundreds of Croats from Central Bosnia and Bosnian Posavina were direct victims of that policy.

The answer to why Dodik and Čović are working in sync to weaken BiH, while the Bosniak side, burdened by internal divisions, lacks the strength to oppose them, may lie in the fact that homogeneous ethnic units would serve as an alibi for both of them with their own people for the financial crimes they are accused of. They are only trying to further commercialize the current Islamophobia and pressure on Bosniaks.

"There will always be deranged minds, blinded by nationalism and illuminated by crime, who will dream of new borders, new wars, because that is the environment that suits them best. But the job and obligation of healthy, normal, democratically oriented people, politicians and citizens, both in Serbia and in Bosnia and everywhere in the region, is to ensure that these deranged dreams never become reality," assessed Zoran Živković, former Prime Minister of Serbia, now president of the New Party, in one of his newspaper interviews. /A. A./