Members of the Presidency of BiH are directly elected every four years, and each of the three constituent peoples has its representative in the institution that represents the country at the highest level.
According to the results of the general elections of 2012, the position had been assigned to Bakir Izetbegovic as the representative of the Bosniak people, Mladen Ivanic as the representative of the Serbian people in BiH, and Dragan Covic as the representative of Croat people. All of them have been on the political scene for a long period of time, Ivanic the longest, and given the fact that they come from strong parties, there is large variety of their impact on processes in this country. Moreover, meeting that was held a month ago in East Sarajevo between Izetbegovic and Milorad Dodik, President of the RS entity, have nothing to do with the state Presidency. The first man of SDA is going to these meetings as the first man of SDA and leader of the party.
But this is not diminishing the importance of this institution, especially its impact on the formation of awareness of potential voters because there are huge opportunities that membership in the Presidency offers. It is important that those who sit there have impeccable resumes which was not the case before – those who once sat there received charges for various types of economic crimes, war crimes and even genocide.
There are not many stories about the war past of Dragan Covic. These are mostly information that Covic, Ivanic and Izetbegovic wrote on their own – just those that are known to the public. There was some sporadic attempts by media to pull some stuff out of the closet, and they partially succeeded in the case of Dragan Covic.
The media reported that Covic, as the CEO of Mostar giant SOKO, asked manager of Heliodrom ‘to cede” ten prisoners of war in mid-1993 for the needs of the company SOKO. Although he proved innocence on several occasions before the courts on charges of economic crimes and abuse of power, he was never prosecuted by these circumstances in June ’93.
Covic was the first man of SOKO for six years, from 1992 to 1998. He spent the entire period of the war in the same collective, and he stepped into the politics in 1994. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, he worked as a senior assistant to professor of economics and organization of production at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Mostar from 1994 to 1996.
The current Chairman of the Presidency of BiH, Bakir Izetbegovic, worked as a consultant in the company Konsalting until 1992. In his biography that is published on the website of SDA, is stated that he was hired as a private secretary of the first president of the Republic of BiH, Alija Izetbegovic, in the period from 1992 to 1994.
During the period from 1992 to 2003, he was a member of the Cantonal Board of SDA Sarajevo, and the last year of the war, he became a member of the Board of the football club Sarajevo, where he stayed until 1997. There are many stories about his role in the war, and the public remembers the television conflict with his then-colleague from the State Presidency Zeljko Komsic, who said that ” he was sitting in the office of his father during the war”.
There is only few information about the biography of Mladen Ivanic. Experienced politician, he patiently built his reputation of moderate politician with his primary one, academic. He was teaching at the Faculty of Economics in East Sarajevo, between 1992 and 1998, and in the midst of the war, he founded the Serbian intellectual forum in 1994. He was not in the spotlight with some severe political assessments and inflammatory speeches during this period. He maintained the status of serious politician who is doing great in all political stunt to this day.
(Source: Emir Aletic/N1)
