What the SDP Doesn't Know About Their Tuzla Candidate: Jasmin Imamović's Closely Guarded Secret

 

Compared to all other candidates for the SDP leadership, Tuzla Mayor Jasmin Imamović has the least ideological connection with this party, whose positions he won through his long-standing tenure as mayor of Tuzla, writes the Patria news agency. 

Namely, when his fourth term ends, starting from 2001, he will have been at the helm of Tuzla for 16 years, which is beyond all democratic standards. Can someone who considers it normal to be at the head of a city for 16 years even understand the imperatives of change?

Many in both Tuzla and the SDP wanted something to change in Tuzla, for someone else to come, on behalf of the SDP or another party, but that was unattainable because Jasmin Imamović had more than successfully mastered all the currents of staying in power. Precisely because of this fact, his winning the leadership position could push the SDP into another multi-year morass of stagnation under the dictate of one man. But, let us return to Imamović's unknown and carefully hidden past.

It is little known that Jasmin Imamović is a „parachutist“ in the SDP, insofar as he came into this party from the Reformists, i.e., the UBSD which merged with the SDP. Imamović was the wartime secretary of the Tuzla Municipal Assembly, and several scandals are associated with that period, which any SDP member would be ashamed of. As the chief municipal legal officer, Jasmin Imamović pushed through the abolition of all anti-fascist symbols in Tuzla's schools and institutions.

As early as 1992, the names of Tuzla's schools, which until then were named after Tuzla's anti-fascists, were abolished. The name of the cultural-artistic society „Mitar Trifunović Učo“ was abolished, the name of the hospital „Dr. Mustafa Mujbegović“, etc., etc. Jasmin Imamović personally oversaw the removal of Tito's pictures from municipal institutions. All in order to curry favor with the then-burgeoning Bosniak nationalism and revanchism in Tuzla.

The culmination of the abolition of anti-fascism in Tuzla was the cessation of marking October 2, 1943, the Day of the Liberation of Tuzla, which was not observed until 1995, when this date was reaffirmed by non-governmental organizations and SUBNOR, but not by the Tuzla Municipality, which only joined later.

As the chief municipal legal officer, Jasmin Imamović never protected the constitutional order, regarding calls for the liquidation of loyal Tuzla Serbs, which came from the newspaper „Zmaj od Bosne“, the voice of Bosniak clerico-nationalists, and which the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Tadeusz Mazowiecki cited – „as the only example of human rights violations in wartime Tuzla“.

Thus, Jasmin Imamović did not use his right and obligation, as secretary of the Tuzla Municipality, to request a reaction from the public prosecutor, even to make a statement, regarding these – well-documented – public calls for the killing of Serbs in Tuzla. („Every Muslim must have a Serb whom he vows to kill“ – was written in one such text.) At that time, Jasmin Imamović was flirting with Bosniak nationalists.

With the end of the war, Jasmin Imamović will reorient himself into an „anti-fascist“ and „anti-nationalist“, although during the war he did not raise his voice in a single sentence against specific cases of threatening Tuzla's anti-fascist and anti-nationalist credibility.

Only at the end of the war did Jasmin Imamović become a member of Bešlagić's Reformists, i.e., the UBSD, and then, with the merger of this party with the SDP, he became an SDP member. He came to power in February 2001 when Selim Bešlagić, the then-mayor of Tuzla, left for the position of governor of the Tuzla Canton.

It is little known that Imamović came to the position of municipal mayor under criminal circumstances. Namely, the future mayor of Tuzla could, by law, be elected from the legislative body, only from the position of a councilor in the Tuzla Municipal Council, and Jasmin Imamović was the municipal secretary. The OSCE, for reasons known only to itself, remained silent on this violation of the law. This allowed Jasmin Imamović to extend his absolutist rule over Tuzla for the next 16 years. And to sweep away many wartime cadres in both the Municipality and the SDP.

The first concrete consolidation of power occurred with the construction of Panonsko Lake in 2003, for which he falsely claimed was his idea, which many later denied, because the construction of the lake at Pinga was planned as early as 1997, as seen in many municipal documents.

Later, Imamović's absolutist rule over Tuzla would expand and strengthen, to the point that Radio Tuzla began its program with a song written by Jasmin Imamović, or, to the point that on the Square of Srebrenica Victims, next to the Čaršijska Mosque, there is a plaque with engraved thoughts of Jasmin Imamović.

All this has been removed from critical judgment, insofar as Jasmin Imamović has very successfully suppressed all media sources from which someone could critically observe his rule. As soon as a scandal would appear (regarding the rule over literary gatherings, regarding the suspicious granting of land for Mercator, regarding criminal complaints sitting in prosecutors' drawers, etc.), it would all be quickly hushed up.

The logical question is – is Jasmin Imamović a suitable person for the imperative of refreshing an important political alternative such as the SDP? Can Jasmin Imamović, with such mortgages from the past, create an atmosphere of freedom within the SDP itself, but also more broadly. Perhaps he can, but he would have to explain to the public his wartime role, which is contrary to the ideological foundations of the party he wants to lead.