The contemporary history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, like the region or states that emerged from the dissolution, is largely a history of brutal, widespread theft of epic proportions of everything that was once public, general, communal, and state property.
This theft was and is still being committed by a small but self-selected, diverse, colorful group of scoundrels, cutpurses, rogues, and moral idiots who, despite their diversity, all share one common trait – the complete absence of any scruples, meaning their success is directly inversely proportional to the existence of scruples.
The fewer the scruples, the greater the wealth or position.
Besides their unscrupulousness, this group, which could be called ethno-political entrepreneurs, shares another common characteristic regardless of their ethnic background. This characteristic is the masterful execution of theft, which was skillfully and systematically hidden behind sweet-talking tirades about patriotism, colorful phrases about mostly imagined centuries-old national traditions, insipid and saccharine mythomaniac concoctions, cheap oaths to the altar of homeland/fatherland and ancestral heroism, as well as open promotion of hatred towards others and those who are different.
Of course, it reeked of deception in that ethnic pen or herd, but if nothing else, it was warm and protected, while in the open, an individual risked being trampled by other herds or even their own if they were, God forbid, characterized as a stray “auto-chauvinistic” sheep.
In Marxist imagery, such a process was once designated as the primary accumulation of capital, which still sounds quite euphemistic. Naturally, it’s not unknown that throughout history, major social upheavals, the fall of empires, the collapse of empires, changes in socio-political systems, usually brought great social turmoil that could consume two or three generations before society returned to its usual routine or a kind of social calm.
Year zero of the contemporary history of this region is certainly the period of the early 1990s, also the period marking the beginning of complete twilight of every kind of reason, and all of us old enough to remember that period have certainly witnessed what came of it.
This history of brutal plunder could be divided into three ideal typical phases. These, of course, didn’t exist in their pure forms in reality, as they actually intertwined and/or overlapped, but we list them so that history, the teacher of life, which rarely teaches anyone anything and tends to occur first as tragedy and repeat as farce, might try to teach us something.
The first phase of general public plunder and societal collapse is tied to the period of armed conflict and its immediate aftermath. This phase is characterized by brutal, unsophisticated forceful theft of everything available, whether state, social, or private property. Of course, in this phase, we must not forget smuggling, which experienced its stellar moments precisely then, including smuggling of various goods from weapons, food, oil, cigarettes, medicines, drugs, alcohol, to the smuggling of people who had the misfortune of finding themselves on the side of the front where they were a minority.
The scale of plunder was no smaller immediately after the end of the conflict. According to estimates by international Bretton Woods institutions – and they should be trusted at least in mathematics and analysis, if not always necessarily in prescribing solutions to problems – BiH received the largest amount of post-conflict reconstruction aid until then, more than Germany under the Marshall Plan, per capita of course, taking into account changes in currency values.
What happened to that money, or rather the vast majority of it, we will never know, though we can reliably guess, despite the fact that three parliamentary commissions tried to trace it. They were probably formed precisely to ensure it would never be determined.
The second phase of general plunder or theft comes in the form of privatization. The bestial, insidious theft of state and social property, large industrial giants, world-renowned concerns that were very successful competitors to major global companies in global competition, resulted in the disappearance of property worth tens of billions of marks.
It’s enough to mention just some names that still command awe and increasingly nostalgia because nothing remains of them – Energoinvest, UNIS, TAS, Rudi Čajevec, ŠIPAD, Kosmos, etc. Only dust and ashes remain – a post-transition desert, tens if not hundreds of thousands of humiliated, disenfranchised, impoverished workers, and a handful of scoundrels – popularly called transition winners with enormous wealth acquired overnight.
The third phase, which we are currently going through, concerns the plunder of natural resources – forests, waters, land, and what’s under the ground, of course – minerals. Everything is bursting with concessions, investors, mini hydropower plants, geological mineral exploration, solar power plants. The strong pumping from all media tools of the seductive appeal of the lithium fever is only momentarily interrupted by rare and sober warnings from few activists about the devastating environmental impacts of lithium exploitation.
Green transition – it would be cynical, even offensive to call it that, because not only does no one care about environmental protection, it’s illusory to even mention it. The most illustrative example relates to changes in the law on geological research, where local government units are completely excluded from the process of giving consent for such research, with authority entirely transferred to republican government. Surely we don’t expect someone to ask citizens what will be done in their backyards and in front of their houses and where their children will grow up.
We witness daily hundreds of citizens trying to physically prevent investors, better said bulldozers, from destroying their lives and the environment in which they live. You already know who will win; if you doubt it, remember the previous phase – privatization.
There is another very important thing that should not be lost sight of. For plunder to proceed unhindered through all its phases, it is necessary to secure power, or rather to ensure that power is not lost under any circumstances. The terrible specter of political accountability from the deep subconscious is there to warn those blessed with power that they must never, under any circumstances, allow the real will of voters to threaten their promised land, which is unfortunately all too real for everyone else.
That’s exactly what political parties serve for – to keep democracy only in the realm of imagination, ideals, while on earth and in reality, different laws rule. The first opponent of the self-will of ethno-political entrepreneurs is fair and honest elections, and such a thing must always and everywhere be prevented at all costs, because power is too important to be left to the deceptive and fickle free will of voters.
No less important is that political parties be functional and organizationally capacitated clientelistic networks that will control the entire public sector and effectively extract public resources and distribute them to their own supporters – employment in the public sector based on party loyalty, rigging tenders for companies close to authorities are the basic mechanisms for maintaining power but also the foundation for any systematic plunder.
All in all, a perfect recipe for disaster. Not for everyone, of course. But yes, things always happen for a reason, very often the reason is stupid or bad decisions. It’s particularly bad when the authority to make decisions is usurped, or in common terms, when no one asked us anything, and it’s even worse when we decided not to be asked.
Turn it any way you want, it always comes to the same thing…
We are to blame for letting them…
