Br Petar Jelec is professor of history at the Franciscan faculty of philosophy and theology in 
Sarajevo. During
the last presidential campaign in Croatia, he strongly supported Ivo
Josipovic’s candidature, when this came under sustained attack from
Church quarters. Like leading members of the Bosnian Franciscan order
such as Ivan Šarcevic, also a professor at the above faculty and editor
of the respected Franciscan journal Svjetlo rijeci, Luka Markešic, president of the Croat National Council, and Franjo Topic, president of the Croat cultural foundation Napredak, he rejects the idea that it is necessary to establish a third - Croat - entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Sarajevo. During
the last presidential campaign in Croatia, he strongly supported Ivo
Josipovic’s candidature, when this came under sustained attack from
Church quarters. Like leading members of the Bosnian Franciscan order
such as Ivan Šarcevic, also a professor at the above faculty and editor
of the respected Franciscan journal Svjetlo rijeci, Luka Markešic, president of the Croat National Council, and Franjo Topic, president of the Croat cultural foundation Napredak, he rejects the idea that it is necessary to establish a third - Croat - entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In a recent comment, Andrej Nikolaidis made a number of brilliant observations which are well worth recalling. >I know that sophisticated, liberal and tolerant intellectuals are meant to have nothing but praise for Boris Tadic=s policy.
That it is imbued with the spirit of reconciliation, the spirit of new
cooperation, the spirit of European integration. To promote - indeed
follow - the policy of this self-declared regional leader is the spirit
of the new era. But the problem is that, to put it in a nutshell, Boris
Tadic is the regional leader in one respect only - regional destabilisation.
Nikolaidis proceeds to argue this position by analysing Tadic=s policy towards Montenegro and Kosovo. It is very interesting, for example, to hear Tadic=s
interpretation of the latest crisis in northern Kosovo, which
replicates earlier insurrectionary blockades in Croatia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbian president would like us to believe that
infiltrated Albanian provocateurs might have been involved in these
events, and in the torching of the border crossings - presumably
embarking on the felling of trees and the barricading of roads in
fraternal embrace with the local Serbs.
Tadic=s policy towards Bosnia-Herzegovina
But let us set aside the events in Kosovo, and the policy of
destabilizing Montenegro which Tadic is pursuing with the aid of the
Serbian Orthodox church, and concentrate instead on the consequences of
his policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the only country where unfortunately
the Greater Serbian project has largely succeeded. The policy which
Boris Tadic is conducting towards our country is the one drafted in SANU=s
second Memorandum, forged by his father Ljubomir Tadic together with
their family friend Dobrica Cosic. Those who wish really to understand
Serbian policy taken as a whole should read the books of the well-known
Serbian historians Latinka Perovic, Olga Popovic-Obradovic and Dubravka
Stojanovic, who have thoroughly examined the Serbian state=s
policy towards its neighbours. Those who still nurture illusions
regarding some constructive policy on the part of Boris Tadic will end
up pretty disappointed as a result.
One must include here also several Belgrade intellectuals, such as Srpa Popovic and Sonja Biserko, as well as the whole group around Petar Lukovic=s impressive website e-novine which has become a veritable thorn in the flesh of Tadic=s regime, and which the regime is therefore trying hard to suppress. At a recent meeting in Mostar, the president of the Serbian Helsinki Committee, Sonja Biserko, and her counterparts from Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, stressed that Tadic=s Serbia is seeking to realise in peace Slobodan Miloševic=s war aims. To be sure, Tadic operates in a more refined - and to the Western ear and that of >independent intellectuals= more acceptable - mode than Miloševic did. Thus he says publicly that he supports Bosnia-Herzegovina=s integrity, when in fact the Serbian political and intellectual elite is, through Milorad Dodik, doing all it can to destabilize the country, keeping it in a state of permanent tension.
Josipovic assists Tadic
But whereas Boris Tadic=s
destructive policy of furthering the Greater Serbian and Memorandum
project in the region should cause no great surprise - because Tadic=s
Serbia has not undergone a catharsis, and refuses to accept its
responsibility for the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Kosovo - the readiness with which Croatian president Ivo Josipovic has
endorsed Tadic=s
regional policy is rather worrying, to say the least. Instead of
lobbying across the globe, of visiting Washington, Brussels, Moscow,
Peking, etc. in order to promote his country=s interests, Josipovic's >international=
policy is reduced to countless encounters with his friend Boris Tadic,
who thanks to this friendship with the Croatian president now >modestly= insists that their policy is a decade ahead of everyone else=s in the region. This boast would elicit great merriment were it not so deplorable.
A never-ending past: Miloševic=s abiding supporters
In a recent interview for the >Magazin= section of [Croatian daily] Jutarnji list, Josipovic, responding to the journalist=s
direct question about how Bosnia-Herzegovina can progress when the head
of one of its entities negates and denigrates it day in and day out,
evaded it in a manner worthy of Pontius Pilate, offering in the place of
any answer empty phrases that had no connection with the question
asked. Following well-argued public warnings against the baleful
results of his attitude to Milorad Dodik (doubtless encouraged by their
joint friend Tadic), Josipovic told [Croatian weekly] Nacional that
his policy is designed to ensure that Croats return to Posavina; and he
has repeated on several occasions that Milorad Dodik has fulfilled all
his promises to him, without ever specifying what these promises
actually were.
The law on land books completes ethnic cleansing in RS:
In the meantime, however, following all these meetings at which the
improvement of conditions for Croats in RS were allegedly discussed,
Dodik introduced a law designed to complete in peacetime the process of
ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosniaks from the so-called Republika
Srpska. It is a law concerning land registers that the RS assembly has
recently adopted, to the accompaniment of total silence on the part of
domestic and international actors, including the Catholic church of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Only the Bosniak members of the assembly protested
against the law, according to which the already humiliated, murdered and
deported Croats and Bosniaks from Posavina and the so-called RS who
have been unable to return and restore their homes will have to pay tax
on the burned-out remains and on their overgrown fields and devastated
woodlands. Otherwise their property - fields, forests and grazing land -
will be sequestrated, all in accordance with the law!
But Ivo Josipovic is not here to protest against such a law –
something that cannot be expected from the two HDZ parties that orbit
around [Dodik=s] SNSD - or to ask >the man who has fulfilled all he has promised=
how it was possible to adopt a law that infringes all principles of
ethics and justice. In contrast to Croatia, which has rebuilt houses for
returning Serbs, Dodik=s
para-state not only has no intention of rebuilding the houses it has
destroyed, it is seeking to take away, by means of additional
regulations, also the remaining property and land from those who have
not returned and are unable to pay the imposed tax. This law
hides a diabolical plan to complete the ethnic cleansing of the non-Serb
population of RS. For Dodik and his followers find it unacceptable
that, as the land books show, most of the land in Posavina remains in
Croat ownership, while the Croats - luckily! - have not yet started to
sell it massively, but only sporadically. I should like to take this
opportunity to call upon them never to do so; and also upon church and
political leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina to unite in protesting against
this injustice that cries out to heaven. Dodik wants to encourage
those who have not returned, and who have no money to pay the tax on
their destroyed homes, to sell all their possessions, since being unable
to pay the tax they will anyway lose the forests, fields and houses
which their ancestors acquired and tended at great cost and sacrifice.
Here, then, is the greatest defender of Croat interests in
Bosnia-Herzegovina - according to [HDZ leaders] Covic and Ljubic - standing >bravely= alongside them on >the final line of Croatdom=s defence’!
Distorting reality
The Croatian media on both sides of the border maintain a near
complete silence on the truly tragic fate of the Croats of Posavina,
Krajina and Kotor Varoš, while at the same time Croatian television and
the leading Croatian papers pay the greatest attention to Dragan Covic
and Boño
Ljubic, and to a few of their clapped-out supporters from Herzegovina,
who live in Zagreb and repeat ad nauseam the same old story about the
allegedly unbearable tyranny under which Croats live in the Federation
of Bosnia-Herzegovina. No one cares for the fact that the
reality on the ground is quite different: that Croats in the so-called
RS - in contrast to those in the Federation – have been physically,
economically and institutionally fully eliminated.
The current trend in the Croatian media on both sides of the Sava
is to distort reality, pretending that the Croats living in RS are doing
incredibly well while the Federation is for them a prison, one in which
their human and civic rights are widely trampled upon. No one seems to
be interested in the truth, it is the spin that matters, reflecting a
renewed alliance between Mostar and Banja Luka aimed at the destruction
of this country=s institutions.
The people of Posavina: a strong barrier to the love-affair between Dodik and the so-called >legal and legitimate= Croats
The fate of Croatian Serb refugees is a subject of major
international concern, addressed by all relevant world bodies; but the
fate of Bosnian Croat refugees from Posavina and RS has been swept under
the carpet, and is treated as unfit for discussion. The sad and
tragic story of Posavina is to be avoided and its memory erased as much
today as in 1992, when the region was betrayed and handed over to the
aggressor; because it alone can produce dissonance in the harmonious
cooperation between Serb and >legal and legitimate= Croat parties in this country=s destruction. Increasingly, too, Croats from the southern part of our country are voicing angry complaints that >Posavina
men and women are becoming bothersome with their story about Posavina,
because this is injurious to our unity with the Serbs=. I am increasingly convinced that in view of all this, Tadic=s and Josipovic=s policy is a great threat to the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Tadic=s far more so, of course). Their >vision= and >leadership= will continue to give Bosnia-Herzegovina a headache for years to come.
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