Konaković's refocusing turned BiH into a hotbed of terrorism: Don't focus on us anymore, for God's sake!

By: Rasim Belko

We have returned the focus of the international community to Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina Elmedin Konaković (NiP) just over a month ago, in the hope that he would be able to boast that he, as a graduate of FASTO, is a better head of diplomacy than his predecessors.

Although no one understood him at the time of this statement made from New York, as this focus could neither be seen nor felt in concrete actions, it is clear today that Konaković was right.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is in focus, but as a terrorist threat to Europe. And all this at the worst geopolitical moment in which a clear redistribution of power is evident. The image we have acquired with Konaković's refocusing of BiH on the international stage could ultimately cost us more than all the bad policies of the past decades.

Because, Bosnian Muslims will again, thanks to this focus, be a persecuted species at international airports and border crossings under the prejudice that they are terrorists.

This will be greatly contributed to by yesterday's article in Bild, in which the allies of NiP and the Troika from the CDU, i.e., Konrad Adenauer, directly link the fact that a large number of Muslims live in Bosnia, Albania, or Kosovo with the terrorist threat.

Sven Petke, head of the Sarajevo branch of Konrad Adenauer, particularly emphasizes Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Bild article, focusing on it as a terrorist threat.

However, the story about Bosnia and Herzegovina began long before the article in Bild. The source of this story for wider international application has been known for a long time, it resides in Zagreb. Through the coordinated action of Croatian policy and intelligence services, the story about terrorism coming from Bosnia and Herzegovina began. Everything that followed is a taken and embellished version of that story. Therefore, it is not surprising that CDU politicians and associations, through a close tabloid, are promoting the same view of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Zagreb.

That connection has been known to everyone for a long time.

However, what is unknown in this whole story is why the head of BiH diplomacy is not reacting. Konaković perhaps does not know, but he should know that his task is not to run a campaign for municipal mayors, but to defend the international interests of the state whose diplomacy he leads.

Therefore, the minister who boasted about bringing BiH back into the international spotlight should have been the first to react to the propaganda, unless he himself was working on such a refocusing of our country on the international stage.

Konaković should have reacted the moment propaganda about the terrorist threat of radical Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina started from Croatia. Instead of press conferences where he justifies the failure of the state coalition to the media, Konaković, as head of diplomacy, should have resolutely rejected the claims about terrorism and reacted to everything that was disseminated in Croatia after the search of the migrant center in Blažuj, which the media under the jurisdiction of the Government of the Republic of Croatia presented as an anti-terrorism operation, even though the operation yielded results solely related to drug trafficking.

But haven't we already seen that Konaković does not dare to respond to Croatia, just as he did not dare to state the judicially established facts on HRT television that Croatia was an aggressor on BiH and an accomplice in the Joint Criminal Enterprise.

Konaković did not dare to respond to the propaganda about terrorism disseminated by his partners in the Council of Ministers of BiH. Nor to Nenad Nešić, who opened the story about a potential security threat. But Konaković did not respond to the positions of the HDZ regarding Bosniaks as terrorists either.