Freedom in the World 1999 - Bosnia and Herzegovina

1999 Scores

Status: Partly Free
Freedom Rating: 5.0
Civil Liberties: 5
Political Rights: 5

Ratings Change

Bosnia-Herzegovina receives a downward trend arrow because a popularly-elected entity president was removed from office, as well as numerous local and regional officials; two political parties were banned from participating in local elections; municipal elections were postponed; and reports of widespread corruption throughout Bosnian government and society emerged.

Overview

Bosnia-Herzegovina enjoyed its fourth year of peace since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) in November 1995, which divided the country into two largely autonomous entities, the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Bosniacs and Croats predominate. Unfortunately, however, the international effort to make the peace process in the country self-sustaining made little progress in 1999. Bosniac-Croat relations in the Federation remained tense, and in the RS, the position of Milorad Dodik, the prime minister supported by the international community, became increasingly tenuous. Finally, reports emerged in 1999 showing that corruption in Bosnia was widespread and endemic, and had perhaps become the single greatest impediment to a successful implementation of the DPA.

In the RS, several major developments shook the political scene, significantly weakening Milorad Dodik's government. On March 5, 1999, the RS president, Nikola Poplasen, who had been popularly elected in elections organized and supervised by the international community, was removed from office by the international High Representative in Bosnia, Carlos Westendorp, for allegedly obstructing the peace process. Although several public figures in both the RS and the Federation had been removed from office earlier, Poplasen was by far the highest-ranking politician to suffer such a fate. Poplasen, refused to accept the decision, however, and continued to sit in his office in Banja Luka for another six months while international officials were afraid to take any forceful action to remove him. To further compound political uncertainty in the RS, on the same day, the international arbitration commission for the disputed town of Brcko (the one territorial issue left unresolved by the DPA), after three prior postponements, finally announced its decision to remove Brcko from RS jurisdiction and make it a jointly administered municipality.

These two developments significantly destabilized political conditions in both the RS and Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole, and in response, RS officials withdrew their participation from joint institutions. The political situation in the RS became even more volatile after the NATO attack on Yugoslavia commenced on March 24, 1999, and several thousand refugees from Serbia proper made their way to the RS.

In the Federation, meanwhile, the political situation also deteriorated after Joze Leutar, a high-ranking Croat official in the Federation government, was assassinated in a car-bomb attack in Sarajevo in March. Croat officials immediately blamed Bosniac extremists for the attack, and withdrew their participation from Federation and statewide institutions. Consequently Bosnia was left without a functioning government for several months as both Croat and Serb officials refused to participate in statewide institutions.

In response to these developments, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was forced to postpone the September 1999 municipal elections, for fear that with public opinion so inflamed, many individuals would vote for the more extreme nationalist parties. In October, the OSCE banned the most extreme Serb nationalist party, the Serbian Radical Party (along with a smaller Serb nationalist party), from participating in the upcoming municipal elections, for violating directives issued by the OSCE. On November 29, the High Representative removed from office 22 local and cantonal officials for obstructing the peace process, and banned them from running in the April 2000 municipal elections.

Meanwhile, many high-ranking Croat officials continued to voice their unhappiness with the constitutional provisions laid out in the DPA. In October, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman called for the creation of a separate, third entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina for the Bosnian Croats. His calls were soon echoed by Ante Jelavic, the leader of the main Croat political party in Bosnia, the Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica (Croatian Democratic Union). Jelavic was at the same time the Croat member of the joint state presidency. Although international officials immediately dismissed such ideas, they were a further sign that the constitutional structure set up by the Dayton Peace Accords received little support among high-ranking officials in the country.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

The return of refugees in Bosnia in 1999 proved disappointing. In September, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees announced that only 10,500 non-Serbs had returned to the RS after Dayton. Overall, some 840,000 Bosnian citizens remained displaced within the country, and some 350,000 were still refugees abroad in 1999. Returnees were frequently the targets of organized mob violence if they attempted to settle in areas in which they belonged to the ethnic minority.

The judiciary in Bosnia is under the influence of the ruling parties and the nationalist leaderships. Judges who show independence often become targets of intimidation, and even when independent decisions are made, local authorities often refuse to carry them out. Citizens' rights to privacy are generally not respected. Police and prison officials throughout the country abuse and physically mistreat persons under arrest, although the number of arbitrary arrests has gone down since the end of the war.

The Bosnian constitution allows for freedom of assembly and association, although citizens' abilities to practice these rights are sometimes limited. Freedom of movement, although significantly improved since the end of the war, remains a problem owing to individual's fears of harassment in areas where they are not members of the ethnic majority. Workers have the right to organize and to strike, although because of the devastated economy and workers' fears that they might lose their jobs, few actual strikes take place.

In August, General Momir Talic, the chief of staff of the RS army, was arrested in Vienna on war crimes charges on the basis of a secret indictment issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). By 1999, half of the individuals publicly indicted for war crimes were in custody in The Hague, but the most prominent individuals, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remained at large.

Media in Bosnia-Herzegovina continue to suffer from a lack of resources, and almost all independent and alternative media in the country rely on international donors for their existence. On September 22, a car-bomb severely injured Zeljko Kopanja, the founder and publisher of Banja Luka's Nezavisne Novine. Kopanja's paper had recently begun to publish a series of articles on war crimes committed by RS forces during the war and on organized criminal activity in Bosnia, and some observers interpreted the attack on Kopanja as a warning to other journalists to avoid such issues.

Religious freedom in Bosnia-Herzegovina is circumscribed according to which territory is under the control of which ethnic group. Bosniacs are virtually unable to practice their religion in the RS, and mosques are also frequent targets of destruction or desecration in Croat-populated areas. In Bosniac-populated urban areas such as Sarajevo and Tuzla, Roman Catholic and Orthodox believers can practice their religious beliefs openly, but Catholic and Orthodox churches are also frequently targets of vandalism. In areas in which they are members of the local ethnic majority, however, Bosniacs, Croats, and Serbs are free to practice Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy, respectively.

Reports that emerged in 1999 also showed that corruption in Bosnia-Herzegovina had become widespread and endemic at all levels of government. Many international officials claimed that corruption was the single greatest impediment to economic growth and reconstruction in the country. Reports in Western media claimed that up to $1 billion had been skimmed or diverted from local taxpayers and from international donations, and had gone into the coffers of the ruling parties. In May, the OSCE's chief-of-mission in Bosnia, Ambassador Robert Barry, claimed, "You've got to be crazy to invest in this country where it is a given that if you obey the laws you're gonna lose money." In September 1999, the new international High Representative, Wolfgang Petritsch, announced the formation of a special body to oversee and investigate corruption in Bosnia.