The summer break and the empty halls of state institutions are coming to an end. Tomorrow, the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina will meet after a month. Laws and reforms are not on the agenda, but an attempt to solve the problems of BiH transporters is. Will they also be victims of political relations between state ministers, who have been waging battles among themselves for months, and where has the EU optimism of those who promised to lead us into a community of European values disappeared?
The calendar – the ministerial, the working one – is empty. Obligations, laws, reforms pending. Road blockades are announced. The budget coffers are empty, and so is the map of European reforms. EU money is not the government’s motive for working quickly either. After a month of break, the ministers have not agreed on the final version of the Reform Agenda, and the money for our country, according to the decision of the European Commission, is hundreds of millions of marks less.
“What were we waiting for when there was a warning that funds for Bosnia and Herzegovina would be cut again? That was, I think, July 17. Now we are at the end of August and nothing has been done. So I do not believe that anything has been agreed upon, coordinated. It is only possible that we will see – and that may be – the budget for the year that is already running out,” believes economic expert Svetlana Cenić.
“We see a constant standstill that has been happening for over a year now. We can say that there has been no significant progress, there have been flashes in the form of the adoption of some European laws, but along the way we have not achieved the desired result. All the deadlines that we were given and that officials promised to meet, have not happened,” emphasizes Dalio Sijah, editor of the Istinomjer portal.
The government is used to working under ultimatums, it did not take the latest one from Brussels seriously. Improving the rule of law, fighting corruption, preventing conflicts of interest, institutional and other reforms have been put on the back burner, and political disagreements and blocking of processes have completely exposed the intentions of the destroyers of the constitutional order from the RS, that the EU is no longer desirable, not even as an ATM to save the entity that they are unconstitutionally trying to make independent.
“Milorad Dodik has openly said that he is no longer interested in the EU, that it will fall apart, that it was a mistake. Therefore, without him and the SNSD, it is difficult to adopt and agree on anything. Because he has the ability to block,” notes Cenić.
This is also the case for BiH transporters who, under the threat of blocking major cities with trucks, have been demanding from the authorities for more than twenty months to amend and supplement the Regulations on Licensing, recognize the EU CODA 95, ease at the borders, return part of the excise duty on fuel, discounts on road tolls, but the key demand is to abolish discrimination in the Schengen zone. As a solution, the government offers the formation of a Committee for Facilitating International and Inter-Entity Traffic.
“As in many other matters, the state does not stand behind its citizens and those groups that it is supposed to protect. And as for the problem of exports and the problem of the transition of BiH citizens and residence in the EU, I believe that this will probably not happen until Bosnia and Herzegovina finally takes some greater momentum towards the EU and gets close to membership,” says Sijah.
Civil servants also suffer from the sluggish pace of work of state ministers, because we are a state that does not yet have a budget, and without it there is no increase in salaries, which is an obligation that must now pass both houses of the state parliament. And here too, the same pace, the same blockades, the same actors. Masters of blockades preoccupied with their own political survival, Federalna writes.
