Bosnia and Herzegovina without diplomacy: Why the state failed to capitalise on the arrival of world stars in Sarajevo

By: Haris Ljevo

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a completely dysfunctional country regardless of the area of society in question, and when it comes to diplomacy, it is a special story.

Thanks to political connections, people who do not even have basic knowledge of any foreign language have been sent to the most important ambassadorial posts in the world, and people who publicly advocate for the division and destruction of the state have been appointed to defend the country's interests...

In many countries around the world, Bosnia and Herzegovina has no ambassadors or consular representations at all, and there are a large number of countries with which we have almost no diplomatic ties. When, at a certain moment, a situation arises where we need something from that country, we usually blame others.

Let us recall the situation regarding the failure to adopt the proposed British Resolution on the Srebrenica genocide in the UN Security Council in 2015, when Venezuela and Angola did not support the Resolution. At that time, many in Bosnia and Herzegovina accused these countries of supporting the genocide in Srebrenica, but no one took into account the fact that Bosnia and Herzegovina has no relations with these countries, while Serbia, thanks to its diplomacy, has developed excellent relations with them. It is not about denying or accepting the fact that genocide occurred in Srebrenica, but simply about who had more diplomatic influence over these countries.

When the Bosnia and Herzegovina national football team qualified for the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, a problem immediately arose regarding the accommodation of players and fans in this country, because Bosnia and Herzegovina has no embassy in Brazil, even though it is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. A consular representation was hastily opened in Brazil so that our people could have support during the championship. So, this is one of the largest countries in the world, and we have no embassy there.

Bosnia and Herzegovina in Italy, one of the most important European countries, was once represented by Ambassador Željana Zovko, who today, as a Croatian representative in the European Parliament, works exclusively against Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e., the country on whose account she once lived well in Italy.

Every year during the Sarajevo Film Festival, people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are divided into those who are wholeheartedly ready to defend the idea of the festival and those who are ready at any moment to find a thousand and one flaws in it. What is unquestionable is the fact that the SFF has done more for this country on the diplomatic front than all the ambassadors of this country combined, but the state has not capitalised on this at all.

The SFF has hosted the biggest stars from the world of film production, such as Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Danny Glover, Benicio Del Toro, Robert De Niro, Oliver Stone, and many others, who, by their very arrival in the city of Sarajevo, showed the world that normal people also live here, ready to live the life of people in a civilised world, and not just to kill, slaughter, and rape, as we are often portrayed.

The arrival of the last two Oscar winners, De Niro and Stone, in Sarajevo is a special story precisely from a diplomatic standpoint. In the last few years, Serbian media have written that De Niro allegedly, although they never had confirmation of this, stated that he actually feels Serbian and that his greatest wish is to make a film about Slobodan Milošević in which he would personally play the former Serbian president, most responsible for the war in the 1990s and the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Then De Niro arrived in Sarajevo without much prior announcement and visited the largest sites of mass killings in and around Sarajevo, from which Milošević's men sowed death across Sarajevo for four years. In this way, De Niro showed everyone what he thinks about "the life dream and film role of Slobodan Milošević", about which he never spoke publicly.

These days, one of the world's greatest directors, Oliver Stone, who received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, is in Sarajevo. Stone is known in the film world for making anti-war and anti-corporate films, and he is a great opponent of international military interventions. He has excellent relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which, if Bosnia and Herzegovina had the will and knowledge to use it, could be turned to its advantage, especially at this moment when Russian influence in the region is extremely present.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has almost no diplomatic influence in the world. Our embassies serve exclusively for the placement of suitable party cadres. If there had been any will and knowledge, the arrival of such people in Sarajevo could have been used in the right way for the benefit of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but unfortunately, that did not happen.

We did not have a diplomacy that could influence the prevention of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the beginning of the 1990s, or at least accelerate its end, and the situation more than twenty years after the war is no better.