Weekly Briefing, Vol. 44. No. 4 (BH) October 2021
Croatian President Zoran Milanović and Bosnia and Herzegovina
Summary
This briefing will present the president of Republic of Croatia Zoran Milanović’s attitudes, reactions, statements and actions regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had recently raised many questions. What for Milanović is standing up for the rights of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats, for many other political actors is simple intervention to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internal affairs.
Introduction
Since the beginning of his term as the President of Republic of Croatia, Zoran Milanović shared his opinion regarding the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina on numerous occasions. His reactions and statements can generally be divided into two main groups: a) support of preservation of political structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina based on the Dayton Agreement, and b) safeguarding of the political rights and status of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats. Although in both of these two cases, president Milanović acts firmly, one can notice that the two categories overlap just enough to seem that at times they stand in contradiction to one another. In this briefing, we will analyze Milanović’s statements, contextualizing them with specific Bosnia and Herzegovina’s, Croatia’s and European Union’s issues, conditions and viewpoints.
The last presidential election in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina
According to the current estimates, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats, who live mostly in the south-east part of the country, number around 570,000 (little over 15 % of the total population of Bosnia and Herzegovina). It is estimated that around 87 % of them hold Croatian citizenship, which allows them to participate in the Croatian parliamentary and presidential elections. Out of the total of 3,854,747 of eligible voters in the last Croatian presidential election, held in December 2019 and January 2020, 92,663 belonged to Bosnia and Herzegovina (approximately 50 % of the entire Croatian “diaspora” voters). During the elections, around 35,000 of them went to the polls, 32,467 of which gave their vote to now former President Kolinda Grabar Kitarović in the last round. Zoran Milanović, despite of receiving only 2,701 votes from Bosnia and Herzegovina, won the elections and became the 5th President of Croatia. The political orientation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croat voters during the last presidential elections wasn’t a surprise. Traditionally, at the Croatian parliamentary and presidential elections, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats in vast majority vote almost exclusively for the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, HDZ) candidates, which was Kolinda Grabar Kitarović. Former Prime minister Zoran Milanović, who was the candidate of the rivaling Social-democratic party (Socijaldemokratska partija, SDP), received the expected amount of votes.
Zoran Milanović on the question of the unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina
When it comes to addressing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s unity and political structure, based on the Dayton Agreement, Milanović is quite direct and even blunt at times. While speaking at the ceremony marking of the 70th anniversary of the Croatian Heritage Foundation in Zagreb in May, Milanović made references to the Croats living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He stated that “their homeland is Bosnia and Herzegovina as it was outlined 26 years ago by an international agreement to which Croatia is a signatory and which it will abide by in good faith.”[1] This statement could be seen as a follow up of the earlier Milanović’s reaction to the Slovenian “non-paper”, entitled “Western Balkans – A Way Forward”, which during April leaked out from European Union’s institutions and raised many questions regarding sustainability of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Milanović had a quite strong reaction to this “non-paper”, which discussed border changes between Serbia and Kosovo, unification of Kosovo with Albania, the annexation of parts of Montenegro and North Macedonia into Serbia, and annexation of Republika Srpska into Serbia and Western Herzegovina into Croatia. He completely discarded the idea of a peaceful break-up in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a “frivolous and dangerous topic that it should not even be put on non-paper, no matter who did it”. For Milanović “any peaceful break-up, Croatia all the way to the Drina river, Belgrade to the Una river is out of the question.” He concluded his remark by calling the “non-paper” a “a big shit”.[2] In yet another reaction, this time made after the NATO summit in June, which composed a final document that mentioned Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milanović showed both “satisfaction and concern”. Satisfaction because, due to his apparent “last minute intervention”, the Dayton Agreement was mentioned in the final version of the resolution.[3] The concern was there because the initial omitting of mentioning of the Dayton Agreement, as Milanović later explained, was a result of deliberate “sabotage” of the “not so small number of states” which “openly obstruct, make it impossible to mention the Dayton Agreement in the paragraph on Bosnia and Herzegovina at all, as if it was something poisonous”.[4]
Zoran Milanović and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s “Croat question”
Milanović’s attitude regarding the stability and unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the framework set by the Dayton Agreement seems to be clear. However, Milanović’s statements regarding the issue of safeguarding of the political rights and status of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats, create quite a few challenges, some of which can be understood even as standing in contradiction to his support of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Dayton Agreement framework. The key issue that has recently been troubling Milanović is Bosnia and Herzegovina’s “unjust election law, which prevents Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats to elect their “legitimate” representative. Milanović’s statements, which since summer had considerably grown in number, had pitted him against the current representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats Željko Komšić, who was elected as a Croat representative mostly thanks to support of the Bosniak voters, which is allowed according to the current election law. Milanović has thus joined the voices of Dragan Čović and his Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica Bosne i Hercegovine; HDZ), which do not recognize Komšić as a legitimate Croat representative. Milanović’s statements regarding the “illegitimate Croat representative” agitated some and pleased some other political actors within Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bakir Izetbegović, the leader of Bosniaks’ largest political party – the Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije, SDA) – at one point called Milanović, due to his casual daring to intervene in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internal affairs, “arrogant”.[5] In June, because of the same reasons, Milanović, alongside several other members of the SDP who distinguished themselves in supporting the same “anti-civic concept of Bosnia and Herzegovina”, was scorned also by the Bosnia and Herzegovina’s SDP as “rightists” who act this way only so that they can “attract at least a handful of right-wing voters”.[6] Unlike Bosniaks’ side, who are starting to perceive Milanović as their political adversary, Milorad Dodik, the leader of the strongest party of Republika Srpska, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (Savez nezavisnih socijaldemokrata, SNSD) and the Serb representative in the tripartite presidency of the country is accepting Milanović as a convenient pragmatic ally. Since the political destabilization of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina continue to create options for Dodik to pursue stronger independency of Republika Srpska, Milanović recent support to Čović’s agenda of creating a more uniform Croatian socio-political group within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which already is creating issues between Croats and Bosniaks, is working well for Dodik. Enough so that Dodik, disappointed with the previous international representatives due to their apparent affinity to Bosniaks, called Milanović in August to join the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić in finding a proper solution for Bosnia and Herzegovina.[7]
Conclusions
In our July 2021 external relations briefing we warned of a certain conundrum that Croatia is finding it self in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina. On one hand, Croatia is trying to follow the European Union’s policy of elimination of the divisions which exist within Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the other, due to its tight historic, social, ethnic, religious and political links to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croats, Croatia is heavily involved in the issues stemming from those divisions, which in return helps in preventing Bosnia and Herzegovina moving forward. Croatian President Zoran Milanović, with his attempts to dance between the two, seems to be a prime example of this conundrum. On one hand, from his numerous statements we can get the impression that he is firmly supporting the unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina based on the Dayton Agreement, safeguarding it from both outside and internal factors which could easily destroy the fine balance which exist between the Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitutive peoples. However, as the recent months had showed, Milanović’s even more frequent statements do not hide his interest in internal politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, within which he is openly supporting specific solutions which not only do not fully correspond with the European Union’s views of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s development, but can have the opposite result of tipping the balance in direction that will be difficult to control in the future.
[1] https://www.jutarnji.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/milanovic-o-hrvatima-u-bih-njihova-domovina-je-bih-onako-kako-je-zacrtana-prije-26-godina-15082050.
[2] https://dnevnik.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/milanovic-o-navodnom-planu-mijenjanja-granica-na-balkanu-taj-papir-je-big-shit-tko-god-da-je-autor-prste-dalje-od-bih—648205.html.
[3] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm.
[4] https://www.tportal.hr/vijesti/clanak/milanovic-zabrinut-zbog-otpora-nekih-clanica-nato-a-da-se-spomene-dayton-da-to-nisam-napravio-imali-bismo-deklaraciju-koju-kao-da-je-pisao-neki-korifej-zagovornik-tzv-gradanske-bih-20210614.
[5] https://www.jutarnji.hr/vijesti/svijet/bakir-izetbegovic-milanovic-je-nepotrebno-bahat-a-zbog-njegovih-postupaka-trpjet-ce-hrvati-15087896.
[6] https://avaz.ba/vijesti/bih/661932/sdp-bih-pozivamo-sdp-hrvatske-da-napuste-desnicarsku-politiku-mijesanja-u-unutrasnje-stvari-bih.
[7] https://balkans.aljazeera.net/news/balkan/2021/8/29/dodik-poziva-milanovica-da-s-vucicem-i-erdoganom-posreduje-u-bih.