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Dodik Hostage to His Own Promises

12 10 2006  The new Bosnian Serb leader will have a hard time fulfilling the extravagant pledges he has made to his allies.
By Gordana Katana in Banja Luka (Balkan Insight, 16 Feb 06)

Milorad Dodik is promising radical change in Bosnia's Serb entity, after a parliamentary crisis toppled the government of Pero Bukejlovic of the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS.

Having engineered a vote of no confidence against Bukejlovic, the leader of the opposition Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, is due to take over as prime minister of the Republika Srpska, RS, on February 27.

Bukejlovic's majority began to crumble last November, after his coalition partner, the Party of Democratic Progress, PDP, withdrew support.

For the next two months, the SDS - the dominant party among Bosnian Serbs since the early Nineties - fought an increasingly desperate struggle for survival.

Humiliatingly, the government withdrew its draft budget for 2006 from parliament twice within the space of a month, each time fearing that it wouldn't manage to muster enough votes to pass it.

When Dodik forced the issue in the no-confidence vote on January 26, he received backing from several opposition parties.

The Bosnian Serb president, Dragan Cavic, named him the prime minister-designate on February 5.

But while Dodik has promised sweeping reforms in the RS, which has remained economically retarded and isolated since the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995, experts warn that he has neither the time nor the political clout to see them through.

The next general election to be held throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina takes place in October, leaving him a window of just seven months. In addition to opposition from within parliament, he may also face obstacles from international representatives in Bosnia.

Dodik's key pledges have centred on the botched privatisation process in the RS, which he has promised to revise, the creation of a special court to tackle organised crime and corruption and the foundation of an investment and development bank to help small and medium-sized companies get off the ground.

His smaller allies in parliament, representing Bosniaks and Croats, meanwhile, expect him to deliver on a law on local self-government which was passed back in 2004 but has not yet been implemented.

This would guarantee greater equality to non-Serb communities in the RS. Principally, staff in local government would have to match each municipality's ethnic composition in the pre-war 1991 census, before widespread ethnic cleansing drove most Bosniaks and Croats from their homes in the RS.

On another front, the Alliance of RS Trade Unions wants Dodik's government to sign a new collective bargaining contract on employment and triple the welfare budget from 19 million convertible marka (9.5 million euro) to 60 million convertible marka (30 million euro).

Unions say the hike is needed to cushion thousands of workers who will be laid off after a number of big state companies are declared bankrupt.

But local analysts doubt Dodik can deliver so many costly and complex pledges within the time frame.

Starting with privatisation, Dodik has repeatedly argued that the SDS sold off state assets to satisfy its own political clients.

But Branko Todorovic, who works for the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in the RS, says it will be hard to back up these claims in a court. "It will be difficult to prove the law was broken in the sale of state-owned companies and so start retroactive proceedings," Todorovic told Balkan Insight.

"And a more significant barrier is that most of the controversial privatisation deals were conducted in 2000 to 2004, when the Party of Democratic Progress was in power," he added.

Miodrag Zivanovic, a professor at Banja Luka's philosophy faculty, agreed that Dodik will face an uphill struggle to meet his privatisation promises. "Revising the privatisation process would be tantamount to declaring full-scale war on organised crime and war profiteers," he said. "Accomplishing such a task in only a few months is next to impossible."


Businessmen warn that it will be every bit as difficult to set up an investment bank at entity level. Miodrag Jaric, director of the government bonds department, said such a project could only succeed with backing from the International Monetary Fund, IMF. But IMF support for an entity-based bank is highly unlikely.

The initiative to set up a special court for organised crime and corruption has been met with similar scepticism from lawyers.

The RS Bar Association told Balkan Insight that setting up such a court would require amendments to the law on the Bosnia and Herzegovina High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, which neither Bosnia's state bodies nor the international community would welcome.

Lawyers are also wary of special courts in general, saying they are inappropriate in a democracy. They would prefer to see greater efficiency in the existing judicial bodies.

Meanwhile, the nine Bosniak and Croat representatives in the RS parliament want to see action at local-government level on ethnic minority representation.

But Vesna Jokic, of the Croat cultural association Danica, said she did not foresee any real change in this field. "You can count the number of Bosniaks and Croats currently working in local administration on one hand," she said. "I don't expect the new government to change anything [as] the law hasn't been implemented in any municipalities controlled by the SNSD, Banja Luka being the best example," she added.

Delivering on promises made to the trade unions and pensioners will be just as complex. Although the RS 2006 budget is yet to be adopted, the new government will have to act within the limits that the IMF set for the previous one.

"All the balancing in the world can't allocate money that's not available, so it's beyond my understanding how the new government can provide for all [its pledges] within the restrictions imposed by international financial institutions," Zivanovic said.

Damir Miljevic, chair of the RS Employers Association, said the initial effect of the introduction of VAT may boost the budget, but the improvement would be short-lived.

Branko Todorovic believes Dodik was unwise to promise so many costly reforms to such a wide variety of interest groups. "Instead of making big promises… Dodik would have been better off saying the new government was determined to start resolving the problems that have plagued the RS for more than a decade," he said.

Nevenka Trifkovic, a PDP representative in parliament, insisted she trusted Dodik but said, "He has been out of power since 2000 and therefore hasn't had total insight into how a lot of things work in the RS." She said the new prime minister would be entering "uncharted territory".

Todorovic said he suspected Dodik's real agenda was simply to win the October general elections rather than genuinely try to fulfil his raft of extravagant promises.

"It is easier for those in power [in the RS] to win the [general] elections than for the opposition," he said. "That's what prompted Dodik to take over the RS government seven months before the vote".

Gordana Katana is a regular Balkan Insight correspondent. Balkan Insight is BIRN's internet publication.