na engleskom

We are sending this special edition of our newsletter because we may be about to witness a final blow to any meaningful police reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We have some very interesting news about the process that may help you decide who is sabotaging the three principles of police reform. First, we remind that the three principles are conditions of effective police reform that the Council of Europe has set for Bosnia and Herzegovina before the country can join the EU: 1. the police must have a budget at the state level, 2. the organization of police regions must be set according to functional (and not ethnic) criteria and 3. the police must be outside of political influence. The entity "Republic of the Serbs" (RS) is opposed to the principles because they effectively weaken RS in favor of the state Bosnia and Herzegovina, and has used all its faculties to delay and subvert any past steps of the reform, including refusing to honor the binding decisions of a panel of experts formed by a past agreement to which the RS was party to. Yet that stance by the RS is not a surprise to anyone. What may be surprising to some is who has actually been most instrumental in helping RS to avoid having to give in to the pressure from Europe to reform the police -- the Bosniak member of the Presidency, Mr. Haris Silajdzic. In the past we have written about how Mr. Silajdzic, despite his public vows to fight for the dismantling of the genocidal RS police, actually negated the previous agreement and the binding decision by the commission of experts mentioned above, and returned the process to the phase of negotiations, restoring the power of veto that RS has. We also commented on the subsequent proposal by the High Representative to BiH, Mr. Miroslav Lajcak, which already presented large concessions to RS at the expense of the three principles, but apparently not large enough. Therefore, we do not discuss those developments in detail. Instead we focus on newer developments. First, we have found out that a negotiator on the Bosniak side, and member of Silajdzic's Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina (SBiH), Mr. Damir Arnaut, played a key role in the police reform negotiations of last week with arguments in defense against further subversion of Europe's three principles for police reform. Subsequently, Mr. Arnaut, who is a lawyer, was interviewed on Bosnian television, where he shed some light on the negotiations, and made a convincing and publicly well received case as to why any agreement reached must respect the three principles. The stance that Mr. Arnaut held both in negotiations and in the public promptly provoked a response by Mr. Milorad Dodik, Premier of RS, that the only two people who matter in the negotiations are himself and Mr. Haris Silajdzic, the Bosniak member of the Presidency (also from SBiH), and if the two of them reach an agreement, even Mr. Lajcak has to respect it. Why does Dodik want to push everyone else out of the negotiations, including Lajcak, and have only Silajdzic as his partner? Clearly, although Lajcak is bending to the demands by the RS, his proposals at least offer some progress on the three principles. Therefore, Dodik would rather leave him out of the talks completely, because he knows that only Silajdzic will deliver whatever he wants, despite Silajdzic's hard line public stance. Lajcak's response to Dodik's statement is that any agreement is acceptable as long as it is respects the principles set by the European Comission. Now, Mr. Arnaut has been taken out of the negotiations and sent off to the UN, to participate in the global warming discussions, until October 5. Mr. Arnaut does not hold any official government post in Bosnia and Herzegovina, other than negotiator for his party and advisor to Mr. Silajdzic, nor does he have any expertise on environmental policy. His is effectively in exile, so that he does not blow the whistle on the coming agreement between Silajdzic and Dodik. And the only person who has the authority to send him there is his party boss -- Silajdzic. "Coincidentally", another person that is under fire, is Mr. Safet Halilovic, Minister of BiH for Human Rights and Refugees, a VP of Silajdzic's party (SBiH) and someone who has been critical of the treatment of non-Serb returnees into RS by the RS police, and a proponent of police reform that would take the police out of the hands of the RS. Namely, Mr. Lajcak has stated, on the weekly TV program in Bosnia named "60 Minutes" that he has spoken to Mr. Halilovic's party boss (Silajdzic) about his not fulfilling his duties as Minister. Yet, the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees of BiH, a country with about one million refugees and displaced persons, does not have a budget. Mr. Halilovic only has his empty title at his disposal to help the refugees, and his office -- four walls and a desk. His involvement in the process of police reform and his desire to ensure a police structure that will not harass and instead will protect those refugees is about the best he can do for them. Yet, in some way, all this is good news. It means that even in his own party Silajdzic does not have absolute authority, and that people question and resist when he tries to sabotage the three principles in favor of the RS. That gives hope that even if he succeeds in removing the few key players like Arnaut and Halilovic from the negotiations, he might have trouble to get an agreement which does not respect the three principles passed through the parliament. Muhamed B., Sven R, Amar D.