COMMENTary: Dodik's Washington-Berlin Checkmate

By Muharem Cero

---

The strategy of generous lobbying and intra-Bosnian acclimatization had almost brought the Republika Srpska project to a peaceful harbor of successful completion. 

Dirty tender money, as well as budgetary funds, had for years followed the path of European centers, Brussels grey eminences, and American lobbying firms with one goal - to get rid of "foreign" influence in the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The targeted points were the OHR and the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The effects of this lobbying were also intended to acclimatize opponents to the project itself. Although slow, these results were bearing fruit. The fragmented political entity of the Bosniak-Bosnian political scene also contributed to this. It moved not in the direction of opposing visions, but of self-serving enmity. Everything played into the hands of destructive intentions to kill Bosnian statehood.

The first reactions to the Security Council's stance following Inzko's report showed the project implementers' surprise, confusion, and arrogant disappointment. Dodik and his phalangists had factored in the reactions of the Dayton Accords' creators, the USA, into the entire project, but they were taken aback by the reaction, primarily from the German ambassador, with the support of the British and Polish representatives in the Security Council. The introduction into the international arena of the possibility of reviving the so-called Bonn Powers of the High Representative, however preventive in nature, is an exclusive reaction of the powerful to Dodik's political actions in the period between the two Inzko reports.

Drawing a parallel between Germany's political actions in North Macedonia (with successful results) and similar actions in Bosnia and Herzegovina aimed at successfully completing the entire process (which was not achieved) is precisely what was not factored into Baji's project. The statement by German Ambassador Christoph Heusgen that the international community's presence through the OHR institution could last for another ten years, if necessary, contingent on successful completion, is what makes Dodik uneasy.

The revival of the Bonn Powers of the High Representative is important, but much more important are the powers of the OHR and the High Representative established by Annex X of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which give him the ultimate authority in interpreting the agreement itself, including Annex IV - the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is precisely the manipulation of the interpretation of the agreement and the Constitution through Dodik's lens that has generated the schizophrenia of Bosnian reality and produced the decay of any possibility of societal renewal and the establishment of the rule of law. Ultimately, the state was quietly dying, and the "desirable" dissolution of BiH was becoming increasingly likely. Dodik and his mentors played a patient but persistent chess game, guided by the hands of grandmasters from Belgrade and other whisperers. However, he did not suspect that there were kibitzers (observers) with more experience in similar games, and in his self-intoxication with his own success, the Washington-Berlin checkmate happened to him. And Dodik's outcry afterwards - a chess game is a chess game, whoever loses has the right to be angry!