#22 Bosnia and Hercegovina
This week is about Bosnia and Hercegovina.
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Country Info:
Population: Roughly 3.2 million.
Current government: Bosnia and Hercegovina has one of the world's most complicated systems of government. But the Encyclopedia Brittanica does a pretty good job of explaining it. Here's what they had to say:
The internationally brokered Dayton Accords — the peace agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995 — established Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state composed of two highly autonomous entities, the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The latter is a decentralized federation of Croats and Bosniaks. Each entity has its own legislature and president.
The central institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina include a directly elected tripartite presidency, which rotates every eight months between one Bosniak, one Serb, and one Croat member.
The presidency....appoints a multiethnic Council of Ministers. The chairman of the council, who is appointed by the presidency and approved by the national House of Representatives, serves as the head of government.
The parliament is bicameral. Members are directly elected to the 42-seat lower house (House of Representatives), in which 28 seats are reserved for the Federation and 14 for the Republika Srpska. Members of the upper house (the House of Peoples, with five members from each ethnic group) are chosen by the entity legislatures.
I tried to break that description into bite-sized chunks so people could wrap their heads around it. In one of my recent stories, I described the government like this:
Bosnia and Hercegovina has a multiethnic system of governance with three presidents: a Serb elected from the Serbian entity, Republika Srpska, and a Bosniak and Croat president, both of whom are elected by voters in the Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Under the current system, Bosniak and Croatian voters can vote for both the Croatian and the Bosniak members of the presidency. The two presidents represent the entire federation, even though they come from their respective ethnic groups.
The Dayton agreement was supposed to be a stopgap measure to end the bloody war that left around 100,000 people dead and roughly 2 million displaced. But today the country still has one of the most complicated systems of governance globally.
Languages spoken: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. According to the BBC, "the languages referred to as Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are one common language, albeit with different dialects."
Harvard University's Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures described the differences between the languages like this:
Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are spoken by about 17 million people and are nearly identical to each other in vocabulary and grammar, though they use different alphabets.
In my experience, the differences between the three languages are found mainly in slang and pronunciation. Some words for basic foods like bread or tomatoes also differ from one Balkan country to another.
Religion: A little over half of the population identifies as Sunni Muslims. Roughly 30 percent, mostly Serbs, are Orthodox Christians. Around 15 percent, the country's Croat population, are Roman Catholic. The remainder of the population is Jewish, protestant, atheist, or other.
Standout artist: Safet Zec. A painter born in Rogatica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1943.
Standout film: Quo Vadis, Aida? The story of a translator for the United Nations in the town of Srebrenica, where Serbian forces slaughtered over 7,000 men and boys during the war in the early 1990s. This movie does an excellent job of representing the many women of Srebrenica who lost all the men in their families and were forced to live with their killers.
A surprising thing: The country has one of Europe's last two primeval forests, Perućica. The other is the Białowieża Forest, which stretches across the border of Poland and Belarus.
Story of the week: As their numbers dwindle, Bosnia’s Jewish community is creating an archive of Balkan Jewish history, including documents, photographs, artifacts, and genealogies to preserve the Bosnian Jewish story. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has the report.
What I'm writing:
• My colleague Casey Wooten and I report on Congress's reaction to the China spy balloon after a week of classified briefings and one bipartisan resolution. This is unlocked and free to read.
• Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill say the Biden administration should not sell any fighter jets to Turkey unless the country moves forward with ratifying the NATO membership of Nordic states Finland and Sweden. But others have a laundry list of other reasons Washington should nix the sale.
“Erdoğan has a lot of work to do to be eligible for that possibility," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez told me. "It runs the gamut. There are more lawyers and journalists in Turkish jails than in any other country. The actions of invading the airspace of Greece and the territorial waters of Greece, interfering with the legitimate right of both Greece and Cyprus to drill in their continental shelf, the actions they are taking that put our own troops at risk in Syria—the list goes on and on.”
• The complex politics of the war in Syria complicated the deployment of critical international rescue missions and humanitarian assistance to the country in the wake of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that shook the region Monday. This piece is behind a paywall, but here's a quick Twitter thread with the takeaways.
NEW: Aid to northern Syria, the region not controlled by Assad's regime in Damascus, has stalled.
There are a few reasons for that. A quick 🧵https://t.co/Yh5EGeFN5m— Cristina Maza (@CrisLeeMaza) February 9, 2023
What I'm reading:
.@Mr_Alhamdo describes the devastation caused by the earthquake in Atarib, northwest Syria.
It’s a town that for years was targeted for attack by the Syrian regime. Now it’s been levelled by the earthquake with almost no emergency infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/knFE3SMLM9— Raf Sanchez (@rafsanchez) February 6, 2023
• Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov is set to be replaced, according to a Telegram post by David Arakhamia, the leader of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party in parliament. Major General Kyrylo Budanov, who is known for having predicted Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, will step into the role. The Washington Post has the report.
• Ukraine released extraordinary video footage that appears to show Russian fighters dragging their badly wounded commander away from the battlefield and then beating him violently with what appear to be shovels, the Guardian reports.
• SpaceX took steps to limit Ukraine’s use of the company’s satellite internet connections for military purposes, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, the Washington Post reports. The move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.
• The Guardian has a report on the secretive Ukrainian special forces taking the fight across the border.
• The Ukrainian military relies on coordinates provided or confirmed by the U.S. and its allies for the vast majority of strikes using its advanced U.S.-provided rocket systems, the Washington Post reveals.
• Two Russian missiles crossed into Romanian and Moldovan airspace before entering Ukraine on Friday, Reuters reports.
• Moscow and Tehran are moving ahead with plans to build a new factory in Russia that could make at least 6,000 Iranian-designed drones for the war in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• Iran appears to be modifying the attack drones it’s providing to Russia so that they inflict maximum damage on infrastructure targets inside Ukraine, CNN reports.
• Meduza interviews Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek about the war in Ukraine and how Vladimir Putin is befriending other authoritarian regimes to create a new, ultra-conservative axis of global power.
• A former Chechen commander wanted by Ukraine for alleged war crimes is leading the Russian earthquake relief effort in Turkey, CNN reports. Daniil Martynov, who is thought to be close to the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, was appointed last year as an advisor in Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry.
• Finland has passed a new, progressive rights law that makes it substantially easier for trans people to change their legal gender, Euronews has the report.
• A court decision this week to leave Georgia's ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili in custody despite his worsening health has left his supporters in despair, EurasiaNet reports.
• Lili Bayer has a piece for Politico Europe about how the death of Marxist philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás highlights a growing chasm in Hungarian society.
• The U.S. sanctioned five high-profile Bulgarians, including two former ministers, under the Magnitsky act, stating they were “extensively involved in corrupt activity in Bulgaria.” Euractiv has the report.
• The United Kingdom sanctioned 3 Bulgarians, including the influential former parliamentarian and media mogul Delyan Peevski.
• Years of bitter battles between Poland and the European Union over allegations that the country’s nationalist government hobbled the independence of its courts come to a head this week, Politico Europe reports. The Polish parliament will vote on a bill that rolls back some of those reforms, aimed at meeting “milestones” set out by the European Commission to release €36 billion in grants and loans from its pandemic recovery fund that have been held up over worries that Poland is backsliding on the bloc’s rule of law principles.
• A committee in the European Parliament will send a letter to Commissioner Ylva Johansson, criticizing an Italian search and rescue decree recently adopted and calling on the European Commission to take action. The letter published by Relief Web reads:
The latest migration decree by Italy’s government represents a new low in its strategy of smearing and criminalizing nongovernmental organizations saving lives at sea. The government’s goal is to further obstruct the life-saving work of humanitarian groups, meaning that as few people as possible will be rescued in the central Mediterranean.
• Greece’s parliament passed a bill that bars parties whose leaders have been convicted of serious crimes and are deemed a potential threat to democracy, the New York Times reports. While not explicitly mentioned in the bill, the new legislation would disqualify the extreme-right party National Party-Greeks, which a former top official of the neo-Nazi group the Golden Dawn founded.
• Rights experts are urging Italy to stop criminalizing activists saving migrant lives at sea, according to the United Nations press site.
• Vice President Kamala Harris announced almost $1 billion in new pledges by private companies to support communities in Central America. The pledges form part of the Biden administration's strategy to keep migrants from fleeing toward the U.S. border, the New York Times reports.
• Nicaragua released 222 political prisoners, including an American citizen, the New York Times reports.
• Spain will offer a path to citizenship for 222 Nicaraguan political prisoners recently released from prison, CNN reports.
• The U.S. Defense Department lifted a Trump-era ban on releasing artwork made by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Under the new policy, detainees are allowed to take “a practicable quantity of their art” when they leave the facility, the New York Times reports.
• The United Nations Security Council will next week discuss if it will allow the United Nations to deliver aid to rebel-held northwest Syria through more than one Turkish border crossing following Monday’s devastating earthquake - a move Russia does not think is needed. Reuters has the story.
• The only crossing between Syria and Turkey approved by the United Nations for transporting international aid to Syria was closed due to earthquake damage to the roads around it, the New York Times reports.
• Six United Nations trucks carrying aid arrived in northwest Syria on Thursday via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing. The Wall Street Journal has the story.
• Jordanian security forces raided the house of 87-year-old Sufian Al-Tal, head of the Executive Office of the civil society group Al-Hirak Al-Mowahad, arresting him and two others for planning to publicly criticize King Abdullah's November 2022 speech to the parliament. The organization Democracy for the Arab World Now has the report.
• A newly released set of photos provides the clearest signal yet that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is positioning his daughter as his successor, the Washington Post reports.
• Sixteen pro-democracy figures went on trial in Hong Kong in a landmark case in the city’s crackdown on political dissent. The defendants were denied a trial by jury. Instead, three High Court judges picked by the city’s leader for national security cases are presiding over the hearing. The Wall Street Journal has the story.
You can write to me for any reason at: c.maza@prontonmail.com.