Overpaid Demagogues

By Edin Urjan Kukavica

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Half a million marks per MP for four years of shuffling from butt to butt in the halls and corridors of a building that was renovated with donations from foreign governments, besides being sacrilegious, insolent, and pointless, is also an insult to any remaining common sense in this country. That amount makes the elected representatives of the people a cohesive evil group that, for the sake of those half a million privileges, has made any story about even the slightest change completely virtual – and continues to do so...

In other words, on one side of the scale is half a million marks for nothing to change, and on the other, the loss of at least something if anything changes. Their calculation is quite clear... There is no national interest, no common good, no truth, nothing that can compare to half a million marks for four years of idleness, and there is no sacred thing that these people are not willing to sell for that money... For that money, it no longer matters what is true and what is not, what is correct and what is not, let alone who is right and who is not, whether paper is measured in grams, kilograms, or tons, whether a third of the total living population is missing or only nationalists and the dead vote in elections, whether there are 70,000 or 80,000 invalid ballots, how many people were removed from the unemployment register and how many were registered...

On the other hand, that half a million marks per demagogue is the reason why we don't have a single Bosnian, Herzegovinian, or Bosnian-Herzegovinian party, organization, NGO, citizens' association, or even a movement in the country... Everything that resembles it is prefixed with "pro" – meaning, it is and it isn't, it can be and it doesn't have to be... – and as a rule, it relates to the struggle for power and dominance, a piece of the pie, or a share of the spoils in this so-called Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although at first glance it might seem like a linguistic problem or lexical entanglement, the problem is, in essence, fundamental.

Let the naming formula of one of the two Bosnian-Herzegovinian administrative units serve as an example. It seems to me that the obvious fact that perhaps even the name of this entity implies that the Federation is composed(?) of Bosnia and Herzegovina(?) or that even in Dayton the Federation was divided into Bosnia and Herzegovina is somehow eluding us all the time? This would largely explain the behavior of the Bosniak political elite towards the case of Mostar, towards the eastern part of the city that seems to have emerged from the war only yesterday, and towards Herzegovina as a whole...

Regardless, as time goes on, the less I understand about this "Dayton" and, inversely, the more I dislike. The list of "dislikes" is long: from asymmetrical solutions and bureaucratic-administrative conditions to a pile of unnecessary institutions that serve no one and nothing but themselves. But, above all, without competition, there is always the open possibility that anyone, at any time, when any of their personal interests are called into question, can block any institution, process, or decision... to the detriment of all inhabitants of this poor country and present it as the protection of vital national interests.

On the one hand, no one has bothered to define what vital national interests even are through any act, decision, rule, or law, leaving this extremely important issue to a group of sycophantic kleptomaniacs and scoundrels, and on the other hand, when these ethno-national interests take precedence over the general interests of all the unfortunate people still living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The resolution of this issue is left to a few institutions of questionable professional and even more questionable moral credibility.

It should by no means be forgotten that this same system enabled – because it was based on it – the institutionalization of dominant parties, into whose central offices or their affiliated citizens' associations the entire decision-making system has been moved, decisions of crucial importance not for the state but for all its inhabitants and individuals, small (local) deities to whom all conscious and grateful followers should dedicate a year of their lives, as well as the emergence of official irredentist movements led by parliamentary, i.e., de facto ruling parties.

It is clear that in this country, nothing – from jobs and basic existence to fundamental human rights and the budget – has managed to escape the predatory and cruel reach and grip of party influence.

Therefore, one must be extremely naive – not to use a term that incomparably better suits the context – to believe that this body could ever, in any sense or context, be independent of the omnipresent will of parties and their leaders, whose responsibility, as in numerous cases of obvious political and other crimes, will remain unquestioned.

However, the crisis (of truth) in this country's system may currently be the best paradigmatic indicator of the dramatically bad state of the entire state structure and organization, all its institutions and administrative parts. In other words, the catastrophic state of a system that has enabled and ensured, almost guaranteed, the constant and unimpeded rule of three ethno-national oligarchies for over a quarter of a century.

In other words, everything that seemed impossible, illogical, or at least suspicious to anyone with common sense: the regularity of elections, the number of votes won and the victory of those no one (wanted to admit) voted for, narrow last-minute victories with an (unbelievably) large number of invalid and annulled ballots, the formation and non-formation of government... all find their logical explanation with half a million marks.

However, the problem is not so much that the story of elections, institutions, services, laws, and the judiciary rests on that half a million marks, losing the last trace of semantic context even in the nouns used to name them, let alone in their essence... Worse still is that the story of the country begins and ends with half a million marks.