A better Bosnia. Rebranding time

Date: 08/04/06

A new proconsul talks up his country

HARI VARESANOVIC and Christian Schwarz-Schilling make unlikely allies. The first is a lead singer in a Bosnian pop group called Hari Mata Hari. The second is a 75-year-old German former cabinet minister, who is now the international proconsul in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Both men think that the country has got a bad name and that it needs better publicity. Hari, as he is known, will represent Bosnia in next month's Eurovision song contest. Last month he had dinner with bankers and industrialists in Sarajevo to raise money for concerts for the Bosnian diaspora in Germany and Sweden. The moneymen were ready enough, in the hope that they can raise Bosnia's chances of winning, thereby bringing the lucrative competition to Sarajevo in 2007.

Mr Schwarz-Schilling frets that people link Bosnia only to racketeering and people-trafficking. He says the country has done a poor job of trumpeting the progress of the past few years. "How are we to improve the economic climate," he asks, "if people associate the country with organised crime? Who will come?" The economy is top of his agenda. If foreign investors are slow to come to Bosnia, he thinks Bosnians should go to them. Recently he took a group of Bosnian entrepreneurs to a Hanover technology fair that he helped to found in 1986. "If you don't know which possibilities exist, you cannot go out and take advantage of them," he says.

Mr Schwarz-Schilling is doing the job that Britain's Lord Ashdown did for over three years. The so-called high representative has huge powers in Bosnia, which derive from the Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in 1995. Lord Ashdown used those powers to the maximum. His successor says that he will use them only if there is a threat to the peace, or over suspects such as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic who have been indicted by The Hague war-crimes tribunal.

In fact Mr Schwarz-Schilling has a very odd job. He insists that he will not interfere in the daily running of Bosnia; indeed, he hopes that the post of high representative will be abolished early next year. But that will not mean that he slips into quiet retirement. Far from it--for he also has a second role, to represent the European Union in Bosnia. That will become more important when the post of high representative goes: for it is then assumed that Bosnia's fractious leaders can continue to be cajoled into reforming their dysfunctional state via pressure from Brussels.

The Dayton peace agreement succeeded in ending the country's war a decade ago. Now Bosnia is made up of two entities, plus the autonomous district of Brcko. Last month the leaders of seven of Bosnia's main parties agreed to make modest constitutional changes (though these could be stalled in parliament). They also agreed to work for bigger changes after the elections that are due in October.

Among Sarajevo's intelligentsia, Lord Ashdown's heavy-handedness was unpopular. Now some find Mr Schwarz-Schilling's hands-off approach equally alarming. Noting that Bosnia's politicians "will never do anything" without pressure from outside, Senad Slatina, at the Centre for European Integration Strategies, a think-tank in Sarajevo, argues that, before Mr Schwarz-Schilling gives up his coercive powers, "there is a lot to be done."

The article reviews the shift from Lord Ashdown's heavy-handedness strategy to Schwarz-Schilling's hands-off approach to administering Bosnia on behalf of ther international community.

• Primary Source

Centre for European Integration Strategies http://www.ceis-eu.org/

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