Haris

Silajdžić

President of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Speech made to the Assembly

Tuesday, 30 September 2008

All speechesQuestions and answers

It is an honour to address the autumn session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Allow me to express my sadness at the passing of Lord Russell-Johnston, who was your peer for 23 years and who ably presided over this Assembly between 1999 and 2002. Lord Russell-Johnston worked tirelessly on human rights issues until the very end, and our thanks and sympathies go to his loved ones.

Bosnia and Herzegovina highly values the work of the Council of Europe and its bodies and institutions. We have often been direct beneficiaries of this work, and have, as a result of it, made improvements with respect to the rule of law, human rights and democracy. For this, I convey to you the gratitude of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is on human rights, the rule of law and democracy that I intend to say a few words.

We are mindful of the fact that we continue to face a number of obstacles. We have a long way to go before Bosnia and Herzegovina is able to live up to the principles that constitute the very foundation of this body. Even the progress that Bosnia and Herzegovina has made often falls prey to the discriminatory arrangements that are built into our system of governance. While Bosnia and Herzegovina was among the first five countries to ratify Protocol No. 12 to the European Convention, it is the only country in Europe, and the world, whose constitution bars some of its citizens from seeking office solely on the basis of their ethnicity.

“Helping to build a modern constitutional state that is true to its multiethnic character will make both Bosnia and Europe a better place”

To be sure, the Dayton Agreement for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina of 1995 ended the war, aggression and genocide. Its value in such a context cannot be denied, but that peace agreement was also intended to reduce discrimination and reverse the effects of genocide and ethnic cleansing. On paper, it had all the necessary elements to do so. Indeed, Annexe 7 of the Dayton Agreement guarantees that all refugees and displaced persons shall have a right to “return in safety, without risk of harassment, intimidation, persecution, or discrimination, particularly on account of their ethnic origin”.

In practice – and in the words of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Constitutional Court – we have witnessed “a systemic, continuing and deliberate practice of the public authorities of Republika Srpska” – that is one of the two entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina – “with the goal of preventing the so-called ‘minority’ returns, either through direct participation in violent incidents or through the abdication of responsibility to protect the people from violent attacks due solely to their ethnic backgrounds”.

Clearly, this matter is not solely our concern. On the contrary, we are hearing statements this week, in these halls, that the right to return – in another European context – is not an important right, as demonstrated by the fact that it was never implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Do these statements suggest that Republika Srpska succeeded in creating an international precedent? Does one get to keep the ethnically clean slate created by butchering or expelling those who are different?

If that is allowed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it will serve as a dangerous precedent and will seriously undermine this institution’s other objectives in my country and elsewhere. Dayton was clearly not designed with à la carte implementation in mind, as one of its components cannot function without the full functioning of the others. Obstruction of some of Dayton’s elements was born precisely out of a desire to stifle democracy and preserve ethnocracy.

One effect of this obstruction is that entity voting has morphed into an ethno-territorial mechanism, whereby only 22% of deputies in the state parliament, all of them Serbs, and all of them from Republika Srpska, can block any decision they desire. Indeed, precisely because 1 200 000 people have not returned, there are only two non-Serb deputies from the Republika Srpska, far from enough to unblock obstruction. Conversely, since a vote from Republika Srpska is worth double a federation vote under entity voting, this is a one-sided mechanism.

And what has this entity voting been used for? Just in the last two years, it was employed five times to block changes to the citizenship law that would permit dual citizenship. Unless these changes, modelled on European practice, are passed, more than 500 000 Bosnian refugees who fled the country not of their own volition but under the threat of death stand to lose their native Bosnia and Herzegovina citizenship. It is not the implementation of Dayton, but the violation of its core principles, that has led to the ethnic apartheid we see today in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

We are about to start work on a new constitution, and allowing this practice to continue will not make that process a successful one. Instead, we will see secretive and pressurised negotiations, resulting in a flawed document. I know that because I was there two years ago when the April package of amendments, which was heavily criticised by the Venice Commission, was offered instead of a meaningful constitutional reform. The Council of Europe knows that as well, because at that time, it adopted a report that unequivocally stated that it was “this [entity] voting system, the insistence on it and its political implications, which is to blame for the failure of the constitutional initiative, not a handful of individual representatives who voted against the package.”

It is for those reasons that I ask you to clearly identify the culprits and hold them accountable. Indeed, if Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot end school segregation because Dayton gives it no competencies to do so, where should the finger be pointed? Likewise, if only 22% of entity-voting deputies can block the law on the census, refusing the EUROSTAT-recommended disaggregated data, should the 78% majority who voted for the census take equal blame? Finally, if we do not create a supreme court, as the Council of Europe and the Venice Commission tell us we should, is the blocked majority to blame?

Please, tell us clearly what the European standards are, and I, for my part, pledge to accept them entirely, as I have in the past. I am certain that I speak for a clear majority of the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina in that. There are those who say that they would choose an ethnocracy and its institutions over Europe, but are such views relevant in today’s Europe?

In fact, is today’s Europe substantively different from Europe 60 years ago? Are we now only declaratively in favour of the rule of law, human rights and democracy, while secretly still harbouring respect for brute force, and not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Do we condemn genocide through a verdict of the International Court of Justice, but do nothing to eliminate its results? I hope that we are not such a Europe. I hope that we are a Europe in which ICJ judgments are implemented and not left in the archives. I hope that we are a Europe that realises that, in the long run, values will always win against short-sighted pragmatic interests or political expediency.

I could quote the ICJ judgment to remind you what values are at stake, but instead I will quote my good friend, the late Lord Russell-Johnston, whose account of the Srebrenica genocide was almost identical to that of the Court, seven years later. He wrote that “almost ten thousand husbands, fathers and sons, some only ten or eleven years old, even babies were killed in a five-day long spree of homicidal madness, committed by the Bosnian Serb troops under the command of Ratko Mladic, an indicted war criminal, who is still at large.”

While we applaud the recent arrest of Radovan Karadžić, the fact remains that some of the institutions that the ICJ judgment explicitly identified as perpetrators of genocide are still in existence. We also applaud the revision of the indictment against Karadžić, which now includes two counts of genocide across Bosnia and Herzegovina, against both Bosniacs and Croats. Finally, considering that the ICJ judgment is the first and only judgment under the Genocide Convention in its history so far, I hope and expect that this Assembly will consider its implications.

Dear friends, we have not forgotten the help that we received from many of you. For that, we thank you once again. However, without comprehensive reform of the Dayton constitution, little progress will be made, threatening peace and stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the region. I hope that the monitoring process will continue, and that we can also count on the continued help of the Venice Commission in this regard.

The rule of law is important as it regulates an otherwise chaotic world, and we need such regulation more than ever. Financial regulation is not the only regulation that we need in this world. There must be a notion that justice exists and people must be able to believe in it. That is very important.

Finally, I hope that we can count on you to identify those who are committed to a Europe of the 21st century as against those whose thinking is still dominated by 16th century ideas of ethnic fiefdoms. Ironically, Bosnia and Herzegovina was for centuries an authentic multi-ethnic and multicultural society whose unique fibre was almost destroyed at the end of the last century through mass slaughter, rapes, torture, abuse, expulsion and plundering.

Helping us to reverse the effects of those crimes and to build a modern constitutional state – a democratic state – that is true to its multi-ethnic character will make Bosnia and Europe better places.