Good morning. It is a great honor to be here with you today to share what is an incredibly special moment for you the graduates, and for your families. Many thanks as well to the President of the American University of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Esmir Ganić, and all of the faculty and staff. We are pleased to be able to cooperate with your university and support your efforts to provide an American-style education to the young people of this country.
I am generally optimistic about the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina and your prospects—eventually—to find work and a better life. The young people of this country are clever and hard-working, resilient in the face of obstacles. But I have to be frank about the obstacles: they are enormous. The recent past has been brutal to this country and to this region.
Allow me to zero in on one aspect of this recent history that explains so much the destructive pathologies that continue to weigh on this country and to prevent it from moving into the 21st century, and prevent it from going down a reform path—a path that is so urgently needed to bring prosperity and jobs.
I’m talking about ethnic politics.
Over the centuries this region has seen more than its share of ethnically motivated death and destruction. I won’t name all the battles and all the atrocities that have visited the people of this region, but they are countless, and there is plenty of guilt and there are plenty of victims on all sides.
During Tito’s time the ethnic grievances between peoples were kept in check. Citizens were restricted in how much they could talk about them. It’s not for me to judge that approach today. Ultimately, the enmities were not addressed and they reemerged when conveniently encouraged.
Slobodan Milosevic was not the first, but he was the most effective political leader in post-Tito Yugoslavia to tap into these ethnic grievances, first to take power and then to consolidate his hold on power. In March 1991 hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs took to the streets of Belgrade to protest the corruption and the misrule of those in power. These were heady times, coming so soon after the great liberation of eastern Europe symbolized when the Berlin Wall came down, and the Belgrade leadership was increasingly seen as the old guard out of touch with the democratic spring.
And the then-Serbian President, Milosevic, found himself on the receiving end of angry crowds frustrated that a country that once had been so far ahead of other eastern European states was falling behind. Economic mismanagement and corruption were rife. With the help of the JNA, Milosevic put down those crowds and then he embarked on a course that would propel ethnic politics—and, more importantly, ethnic hatreds—to center stage, a tactic he had first used in Kosovo in the eighties.
Milosevic harnessed the media to gin up tensions. A communist-era banker himself, an apparatchik, he borrowed the virulent language of nationalists—including people he could probably scarcely understand, such as Dobrica Cosic—to curry the support of his tribe, while others in Sarajevo and Zagreb followed a similar approach to bring their tribes in line. And because of the long history of ethnic tensions and unrest in the region, the strategy of stirring a sense of victimhood and anger had resonance.
Four wars followed—in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I lived in Belgrade in the late nineties and watched as Milosevic used the same ethnicity-based formula he used in 1991 to distract peoples’ attention after mass protests erupted in Belgrade in 1996-97 and other Serbian cities over attempts to reverse major opposition victories in municipal elections.
Why am I dredging up all this gloomy history now? Because it matters in order to understand Bosnia and Herzegovina’s problems today. As you know, more so than in Croatia, or Slovenia, or Kosovo, ethnic politics drive this country’s fate—nobody denies that this part of the world has seen horrible inter-ethnic violence over the centuries and if people fixate on the past their passions can be easily manipulated. This manipulation of ethnic grievances in the modern era is the legacy of Slobodan Milosevic and the ethnic hatreds that he—and “nationalists” of other ethnic stripes—tapped into in the late eighties and early nineties to get to power and stay in power.
Tragically, today in BiH some 19 years after Dayton, ethnic politics dominate this country’s political landscape. Just as Milosevic, the former Socialist era banker, tapped into ethnic hatreds and started wars to distract people from the corruption of his rule, politicians in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina tap into the same pathologies and reinforce it in their rhetoric and in the education curricula they often control.
The good news is that they have figured out a way, using the Dayton structures, to maintain ethnic tensions without actually launching wars. Today’s ethnic wars, a senior politician told me recently half-jokingly, are “virtual—like video games.” And let’s not minimize this feat. This country has been at peace for almost two decades and this is a very good thing.
The bad news is that the political leaders and their parties have been able to stay in power despite doing scant little to improve the conditions of citizens. The country is in economic ruins. There has been little restructuring after socialist times. Unemployment is over 25 percent, youth unemployment is almost 60 percent. Young people have grown up in schools divided along ethnic lines. Corruption at all levels of government is endemic. Cynicism has metastasized.
The political leaders inherited a system after the war that allowed them to turn the institutions of this country into a money-making machine—not for the voters, not for the citizens, but for themselves. And when political leaders feel the anger and heat of voters, they push ethnic buttons. In February we saw angry citizens outraged at the fecklessness of the political class, but nothing in the way of a reform agenda emerged. Corrupt leaders in the Serb community and the Croat community said the anger was Bosniak in nature.
And yet there is nothing further from the truth. The anger is of the have-nots against the haves. Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats, Others—it doesn’t matter. The corruption and the absence of economic opportunity cut across ethnic lines. People suffer. Full stop. And they will go on suffering as long as they agree to be manipulated by a political class that taps into the enmities that Slobodan Milosevic rediscovered in the eighties.
The United States stepped in to stop a war in 1995. Unfortunately, we encountered a country with ethnic relations at their worst in history. And that says a lot, given the history. Working with a political leadership on all sides problematic at best, criminal at worst, we arrived at a compromise framework that locked in ethnic divisions at their worst moment in the country’s history, giving each ethnic group effectively a veto over efforts to move the country forward. This “collective responsibility” mutated into “collective avoidance of responsibility.”
It is easy in hindsight to criticize the U.S. role in developing today’s constitutional structures. I do it myself. But it is pointless to look backwards. We all need to work to develop constitutional structures that move this country—after being stalled for so long—into the 21st century. And I am confident that we can arrive at new structures that make politicians in power responsible for their successes and failures and leave people of all ethnic groups better off than they are today.
We live with deep, artificial ethnic divisions today not because they fit the needs of citizens, but because they enable political leaders to divide and conquer their constituents. We see this in Mostar where citizens on both sides of the Croat-Bosniak divide seek compromise to live in peace, but the two largest political parties are locked in a battle over the economic spoils of the city. Corruption in Mostar has scared away private businesses and jobs—a trend which has reinforced the power of the ruling cliques. Citizens who dare to protest are told they may lose their public sector patronage jobs. Mostar is today’s flashpoint, but any town could be the next.
There is seething dissatisfaction in Republika Srpska aimed at the endemic corruption of the leader of the entity, the cronyism, the deals that enrich family members, the stories about luxurious real estate holdings in Belgrade or Cyprus, the screws being turned on RS judges to ignore graft and ensure that corruption cases never see the light of a court room. And rather than address the issues at hand, the RS leader changes the subject.
He conjures up fake stories and promotes fear, suggesting vaguely that some are out to eliminate Republika Srpska, encouraging the paranoia of citizens. The most recent twisting of reality out of Banja Luka was the refusal to support amendments to the criminal code at the state level to enforce a money laundering bill. We have to pause and reflect and ask ourselves, who could possibly be opposed to an international obligation to fight money laundering? And to suggest that defending the RS is behind the decision shows chutzpah; ordinary citizens in the RS want to fight money laundering as strongly as anybody else.
Cynical use of ethnic politics is driving this country backwards. Watching the best and the brightest of this country’s youth pack their bags and move to the West in search of jobs has become too common a story. Families of all ethnicities are being divided along generational lines not because of some unavoidable trend. They are divided because the country’s political leadership has failed to develop a business climate that creates jobs that can keep these young people in the country where they grew up.
The choreography of elections here is such that incumbent political parties need to be shown as embroiled in bitter ethnic disputes. Too often elections amplify intolerance. But in back rooms the leaders, in the spirit of “brotherhood and unity,” get along famously well together. Some of the recent high profile cases under investigation show how elites do not have a problem working across ethnic lines to steal from the budget.
At the same time some of these same politicians were alarmed by inter-ethnic cooperation after the recent floods. They condemned people who cooperated with their neighbors of different ethnicities—people whose courage and humanity threatened to unravel the narrative of ethnic tension the political leaders have spent their careers trying to maintain.
The good news is that citizens are waking up to the problem. They recognize that a political system that celebrates ethnic divisions is one that, in the current structures, leaves political leaders unaccountable to the public. This cannot continue. In order to fix a whole range of problems, what this country most urgently needs is institutional reform that promotes accountable government, where elections have greater consequences and bad politicians are voted out of power.
And political leaders must not be rewarded based on how well they can create ethnic tension or talk about it—or how well they can “defend” their respective nations. Political leaders should be judged on how well they deliver jobs and prosperity. They should be judged on how well they build and fix roads without skimming off public works contracts. They should be judged on how well the hospitals deliver medical care and how well the schools teach children reading and arithmetic.
It’s time to bury the ethnic-based, corruption-enabling politics that Slobodan Milosevic resuscitated in the eighties and which the political leaders in this country—Milosevic’s heirs—inherited and still cling to almost 20 years after the war. As a caveat, of course, I should note that there are honest politicians from parties with nationalist platforms, just as there are dishonest politicians from parties with multi-ethnic platforms.
I am optimistic, based on the young people I have met while traveling in this country, that the citizens of BiH—in both entities—are increasingly disgusted with ethnic politics and the unaccountable system that ethnic politics have helped to create. This is a beautiful country, with a breathtaking landscape, populated by a clever, hardworking, and I may add witty people. There is so often a forlorn quality to the people I have met, owing to their own difficult experiences, but I am also so often impressed by their honesty and genuineness.
I am optimistic because your generation is poised to reject the Dark Age nationalism of so many politicians who peddle empty slogans while they pick your pockets. As you graduate, your generation is demanding accountable institutions that contribute to prosperity and not ethnic tensions. I am optimistic because I see NGO activists, journalists, artists, intellectuals, ordinary citizens, who no matter how lonely sometimes they seem, stand against divisions, corruption, and manipulation.
I’m hoping you will demand that political leaders focus on what really matters to the lives of citizens: fighting corruption, creating good jobs, and getting this country back on the right course. Only with your active involvement, and the involvement of other young people of your generation across the country, will a cleaner, more accountable, less corrupt political system emerge. And a renaissance will finally bring this country into the 21st century.