A generationIn August, the former Minister of Agriculture took office Christian Schmidt (CSU) in Bosnia and Herzegovina to take up the new position of senior representative of the international community. The authority that he should lead, the Office of the High Representative (OHR), was established after the end of the Bosnian War in 1995 and is responsible for overseeing the physical and institutional reconstruction of the Balkan countries. As far as OHR is concerned, it is overseen by a “Peace Executive Committee”, which is sent by more than 50 countries and international organizations. But after more than 25 years of peace in Bosnia, people have raised more and more questions about the reason for the existence of authority. Some actors and organizations have described it as redundant or even counterproductive at best.
These include Transparency International (TI), an organization dedicated to fighting corruption. TI-Bosnia Chairman Srdjan Blagovcanin described OHR as an authority, not only attacking corruption It makes no sense: “Today’s OHR’s work has exhausted the work of reporting to the UN Security Council every six months and participating in meetings of the Peace Executive Committee. Then expressed concerns about the situation in the country, nothing more.” Blagovkan Ning would never deny the historical merits of OHR in the first few years after the war: “In the late 1990s and the beginning of the New Deal for millennia, OHR established the institutional framework for the fight against corruption by establishing state judicial systems and enforcing laws at the state level.
Fertile soil for corruption
After the war, OHR played an important role in “implementing peace treaties and establishing basic state functions.” However, even so, the situation is not only positive: “The unrestricted power of OHR is also fertile ground for internal OHR corruption. Our first report in Bosnia 20 years ago was on corruption in the international structure. So we look at it. He was facing tremendous pressure from OHR. “An unresolvable contradiction is that the senior representative should support the democratization of Bosnia, but as a foreign-appointed official, he himself has no democratic legitimacy.
“It doesn’t make much sense to talk about transparency in a very undemocratic institution like OHR,” Blagocanin said. Indeed, it is wrong to attribute the main responsibility for corruption in Bosnia to OHR. But the problem is the shared responsibility of the authorities that have been or at least responsible for supervision as the supreme body for decades.
The core of the OHR debate is the “Bonn Power”. These powers are not affected by any democratic control, and Bosnia’s high-level representatives can pass laws, abolish or dismiss officials through these powers, such as German allies before 1949. Until July 23, the outgoing high representative Valentin Inzko (Valentin Inzko) ordered the denial of genocide and made Srebrenica a criminal offense for ten years. There are still serious doubts about whether the decree issued by resorting to power in Bonn can still be implemented in Bosnia today.
However, Blagokanin was fundamentally troubled by the power of attorney: “Transparency International’s position in Bosnia is that Bonn’s power should be abolished immediately and unconditionally, and OHR should be closed.” Council of Europe The proposal that Bosnia is a member already stated in 2005 that “OHR’s role and power are not in accordance with democratic principles.” This also applies because Bosnia has no legal actions against OHR statutes. For this reason, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe stated in a resolution in 2004 that this broad power without any accountability is not in line with democratic principles.
Is the continued existence of OHR harmful?
A quarter of a century after the end of the war, the continued existence of OHR is therefore not only no longer useful, but even harmful: “The EU itself has repeatedly emphasized that the existence of OHR is incompatible with the EU process. Bosnia seeks integration.” I The conclusion reached in 2009 was that Bosnia’s application for EU membership cannot be reviewed while OHR still exists.
“This is one of the reasons why OHR and Bonn Power’s presence in Bosnia today is part of the problem in every respect, not a solution,” Blagokanin claimed, and pointed out through the Peace Implementation Council, which also includes the state Like Russia and Saudi Arabia, big countries have a say in Bosnia. For them, it is very convenient for the country to stagnate and not move closer to the EU. Blagovcanin said that if he could ask Christian Schmidt as a Bosnian or OHR as an institution, it would be this: “OHR hasn’t done anything for 25 years, but what should I do now? Until when?
How can a German explain to a citizen of a democratic country like Germany that he is holding a position in another European country that is not controlled by any democracy? “Without the answers to these questions, Transparency International can only do what it is supposed to do. It is known elsewhere: to watch the powerful people who are elected-and even more so for those who are not.
