The Government's Misunderstood Artists

Worse than the Sarajevo Canton government's justification that it did not pay the newly established Institute for Culture and Art 200,000 KM, but that the money was only planned in the budget, is the way the government is being dragged through the mud on social media, because the problem is seen as an exception, not a continuity of political practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Allocating money from the public budget of Bosnian and Herzegovinian taxpayers on a crony-political basis is not at all an unprecedented move by Edin Forte's government – on the contrary, it is a kind of fashion for almost all previous governments in Sarajevo. If civic conscience had awakened twenty or more years ago, we would not be in a situation today to discuss the financing of misunderstood artists.

For example, to better understand what the predecessors of the Institute for Culture and Art were, it is enough to look at the audit report of the Ministry for Veterans' Affairs of Sarajevo Canton from 2017. That report explicitly states that the 'Pravda' Foundation was established only two months before the public call for financing/co-financing projects providing legal and other assistance to suspected and accused former members of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in war crimes cases, and that it is suspicious that the Ministry for Veterans' Affairs simply paid that foundation a full 200,000 KM of budget money.

However, even that is not a mere exception, because during the earlier mandate, and even earlier than that, the 'Pravednost' Foundation operated, which also received several hundred thousand marks of budget money just a few months after its establishment. Both foundations were awarded money by the then ministers for veterans' affairs in Sarajevo Canton, Faid Hećo and Muharem Fišo, who were delegated to those positions by General Sefer Halilović's party BPS, while one of the founders of the 'Pravednost' Foundation was the general's son, Semir Halilović.

Patria's report that money from the Ministry was distributed along political lines ended up in the Sarajevo Municipal Court following a lawsuit by Semir Halilović against the journalist, after which the judge assessed that she really did not understand why we doubted Halilović's sincerity and imposed a hefty fine of 1,000 KM on us.

Or, for example, the Sarajevo Cantonal Prosecutor's Office, supported by the media and social networks, is practicing strictness on three Sarajevo doctors from the former Military Hospital and one nurse, because they took gifts and money from patients, while at the same time there is not a single indictment for multi-million criminal activities that inevitably led to the collapse of the healthcare system in the country. Why are prosecutor's offices in BiH dealing with doctors who take Jadro from patients, before they have solved the problem of clinical center managers, directors of health insurance funds, or health ministers who invest millions of KM of public money in projects doomed to fail from the start? The impression is that Bosnian and Herzegovinian society is asleep, and then it wakes up and lynches the first unfortunate person it comes across, and usually that is the smallest offender, while the big fish remain in the shadow of political and judicial protection. It turns out that in BiH it is currently easier to defend million-dollar crimes than minor criminal offenses.

Below is an addendum to help the Sarajevo Canton government and Minister Kurić, created with the help of one of the best Bosnian and Herzegovinian directors: If you want an institute for culture and art, then it must be a kind of scientific-research institution in the full sense of the word. And if something is at the level of a scientific-research institution, then the leaders of the institute must be the most eminent experts in that field, not party associates. Institutes cannot be of a social but of a developmental character. In addition, public money is given only for projects that have a precise name, clear goals, approximate expectations, full names of responsible persons and their associates, a description of individual tasks, the price of each individual item... No serious government will finance 'God willing projects.'