Former Serb member of Presidency sees no hope for Bosnia's survival as state
BBC Monitoring Europe (Political) - July 26, 2006, Wednesday

Text of commentary by Nenad Kecmanovic, prewar Serb member of Bosnian Presidency, entitled "Last dictatorship in Europe" published by Bosnian Serb newspaper Glas Srpske on 25 July

If the Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims] could not find a way to live together before the war, if they fought one another for three and a half years over it, and if a decade of peace has not been enough for them to try to achieve a compromise without an intermediary, this means that we can forget about Bosnia-Hercegovina [B-H] as a state.

There is no democracy in the world that can keep people under the same roof who do not want to be there. This can be achieved only by force, whether you call it occupation, colonization or a protectorate.

Some Western analysts have already called the regime of the Office of the High Representative in B-H "the last dictatorship in Europe" and rightly so. All this has been seen before in Bosnia-Hercegovina. For half a millennium Bosnia-Hercegovina has existed only as a "dungeon for people". When it occasionally changed the guard in the course of history, the Bosnians and Hercegovinians were at each other's throats along religious and national lines, as they had been the previous time.

I repeat again: the West and the East have been deluding each other to a high degree. Neither side has ever truly believed in that delusion, because under the table one side was holding Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations", while the other had Alija Izetbegovic's Islamic Declaration. However, their mutual interests forced them to keep up the game of mutual pretence and we know what the result was like.

People often ask me: "Do you go to Sarajevo? Do you follow the Sarajevo media? What reactions do you get from Sarajevo to your political analyses?"

I almost regularly read their weeklies; I occasionally read their dailies and I watch television. My public reactions are partly a reaction to what I hear or read in their media.

The reactions to my reactions are malicious and without any depth, because our neighbours are used to looking at themselves in a magic fairytale mirror, while I remind them of some unpleasant truths.

The fact that neither Banja Luka nor Belgrade shows much interest in the political scene in the other entity, where the joint institutions are located, makes it sometimes look as if I am the only one who spoils their fanciful picture of themselves.

Quite often I meet old acquaintances, colleagues and friends, Bosnians in Sarajevo, but that is something completely different. Despite certain disagreements and endless debate, they know what I could have really said or written, what was taken out of context, and what was suppressed or simply made up.

In any event, they know that I am not responsible for the problems that Bosnia has got itself into nor do I have bad intentions towards Bosniaks. On the contrary, I have lived my life in that environment and those are the people with whom I lived for almost half a century. Therefore, I cannot be indifferent, nor am I ignorant; my professional interest is focused on researching politics.

Many things that I find out as an analyst do not make me happy as a human being, so I would not mind if I turned out to be wrong.

Source: Glas Srpske, Banja Luka, in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian 25 Jul 06 p 2
Copyright 2006 British Broadcasting Corporation

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