Milorad Dodik imitates Slobodan Milošević

By: Muamer Bandić

So many articles and comments have already been written about Milorad Dodik and his political transformation from a fake liberal into a fake radical that it is no longer worth spending time on. However, what we must never lose sight of are the consequences of his populist policies for our society, especially since political populism in the Balkans brutally engages in inciting the people to the point of complete burnout and societal collapse.

Although to many the course of life and events in our surroundings seem like something completely new, when we dig a little into history we will see that the human race has actually not invented that many patterns of behavior and action, so that in most cases today's people apply the same patterns that have already occurred in the past, only we, trapped within the perspective of our current lives, often attribute different meanings to them and have different interpretations. Ideological concepts create their own organizational culture, which implies a certain pattern of action in reality that is difficult to change and easily recognizable.

In short, that pattern of action shows us how they actually do things here, and based on that we can predict both the goals and the results of their actions.

Viewed through this model, the current political actions of Aleksandar Vučić and Milorad Dodik faithfully follow the same pattern of action as Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić from the late 1980s.

My generation certainly remembers Milošević's so-called "anti-bureaucratic revolution" and the "happening of the people" from that time, which marked the beginning of the end of Yugoslavia. This process began with a quasi-scientific work known as the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) from 1986, which provided an appearance of scientific legitimacy for ideological and political goals. Today it is almost forgotten that there is also a SANU II Memorandum, whose set goals are faithfully followed by the current political actions and processes initiated by the authorities of both the Republic of Serbia and the Republika Srpska.

That late 1980s is also known for the active role of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) in mobilizing the masses from below through the famous carrying of the relics of "Tsar Lazar" across our former state, and today's counterpart to that are the litije (religious processions) that, for now, are taking place in Montenegro. Milošević's then "anti-bureaucratic revolution" began the disintegration of the constitutional and legal system of Yugoslavia as a "yogurt revolution", and ended as a "log revolution" with brutal aggression against four neighboring countries, bringing destruction, looting, monstrous crimes, genocide, and misery and poverty for everyone in the Balkans, except for narrow circles of ethno-national elites, who emerged from this series of horrors with enormous wealth.



Today, Milorad Dodik faithfully follows and repeats the same pattern used by Slobodan Milošević. From aggressive and arrogant disregard for state institutions, judicial system institutions, the OHR, and attacks on the constitutional and legal order of Bosnia and Herzegovina through the adoption of unconstitutional and anti-state laws, disregard for the law, to the protests announced for today at the entity lines.

For all of us who grew up in the 1980s of the last millennium, this is a déjà vu, something already seen, and we witnessed the "happening of the people" organized by the State Security Service of Serbia and lived with its consequences.

For us today, the only question is whether this mimicry of Sloba's "yogurt revolution" will also end with logs? We must ask ourselves this question first, because just as no one was ready to stop Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić in their mad campaign, equally today no one is ready to stop Aleksandar Vučić and Milorad Dodik on that same path.

Just as the main actors of that madness were perceived as a "factor of stability" and "people ready for agreement", we hear the same mantra today from both the international community and domestic rulers, but one thing is clear: primitive madmen do not give up their dangerous intentions and set goals. It is high time we take them seriously and not make the same mistake as our predecessors by telling the people to sleep peacefully. History teaches us that in states where there is no rule of law, peaceful sleep is an illusion of fools.