ANYONE interested in Bosnia and Hercegovina will soon be treated to a deluge of maudlin “I was there,” stories by a gaggle of journalists who covered the war and are reassembling in Sarajevo to mark the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the siege of the Bosnian capital. I was there, but I am not going. I don't go to school reunions either. What I fear is that readers or viewers of the material that emerges from the event will be treated to the same rehashed stories and old footage of Bosnia from nostalgic correspondents who have no idea what the place is like now. Still troubled, is the answer. This week the big story in Bosnia was the two-day “irrevocable resignation” of Zeljko Komsic from his party posts on March 19th.* Mr Komsic is a popular politician. In elections in 2010 he won 50,000 more votes as a presidential candidate than his Social Democratic Party did running for parliament. Mr Komsic sums up the complexities of contemporary Bosnia. The SDP is the country's main multi-ethnic party, as well as the leading party in the government of its Bosniak-Croat Federation half. Although most of the party's voters are Bosniaks, Mr Komsic is a Croat. Yet most Bosnian Croats don't vote for him, so it is Bosniak votes that led to him becoming the Croat member of the presidency (the other two must be a Bosniak and a Serb). Got that?

Why did Mr Komsic quit? As Eldin Hadzovic notedin Balkan Insight, it appeared that he no longer wanted to be pushed around by Zlatko Lagumdzija, the “autocratic” leader of the SDP who recently became Bosnia's foreign minister.

Mr Komsic was said to be particularly unhappy about Mr Lagumdzija's support for the bid by Vuk Jeremic, Serbia's foreign minister, to become president of the UN General Assembly. The ex-Yugoslavs usually support each another for such posts but Mr Jeremic has become a particularly divisive figure in the last few years.

Conspiratorially minded observers have noted two things. First, on March 13thMr Lagumdzija visited [video] Serbia's president (and Mr Jeremic's boss), Boris Tadic, in Belgrade. The two have known one another since boyhood. Second, Mr Jeremic is a scion of the Bosniak Pozderac family, whose members played key roles in communist-era Bosnia when Mr Lagumdzjia's father was mayor of Sarajevo.

These elements are not necessarily connected, but they help explain the milieu in which at least some politics in the region is conducted.

But the story did not end there. Two days after resigning Mr Komsic decided that he was not, after all, resigning any more. What's going on? One theory is that Mr Lagumdzija agreed not to stand as SDP president again, opening the way for Mr Komsic to get the job. But the party congress does not take place until 2014. The whole affair is rather mysterious.(If you are in London on March 28th you can ask Mr Lagumdzija about it in person when he gives a talk.)

More straightforward is the story of Emir Suljagic. Mr Suljagic was a translator for the UN during the war in Srebrenica, which helped him survive the massacres of July 1995. His book on the war years (which I reviewed here) is one of the finest to have emerged from the conflict.

More recently Mr Suljagic has been the SDP minister for education for Sarajevo canton, by far the biggest of the ten cantons in the Federation.When he suggested that pupils should be allowed to opt out of religion classes without suffering a loss to their overall grades, he became the subject of a hate campaign. One death threat came in the form of a bullet delivered to his home with the message: “Leave Allah and his religion alone, or the hand of the faithful will strike you.”

Andrea Rossini sums up the situation well in a piece (in English) for the Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso. He notes that one of Mr Suljagic's most fervent critics has been Reis-ulema Mustafa Ceric, head of the Bosnian Islamic community:

In May last year, in a particularly biting speech to 30,000 faithful at Blagaj, Cerić attacked the Minister's proposals, warning that Muslims would take to the streets... affirming that “the schools are ours” and condemning “those who want to do in Sarajevo what had been done in Srebrenica”, that is genocide.

Mr Suljagic has now been forced to resign. Meanwhile, earlier this week Mr Ceric received a prize in Rome for the “promotion of dialogue between religions.” Reflecting on the upcoming anniversary Mr Rossini wonders what Mr Ceric's award says about modern Bosnia:



From the end of the war to today, the question asked has been: how deep are the wounds left by that conflict? The version chosen by the international media has been that the causes of the war were ethnic, not the consequences. Twenty years later it seems to be the contrary. The resignation of Suljagić is a sign of Bosnia's lasting incapacity to create public structures characterized by inclusiveness, not division, for all its different citizens. The award to Cerić is perhaps a sign of our lasting incapacity to comprehend how much the internal dynamics of that country are important for the destiny of Europe.

Since resigning Mr Suljagic has put his wartime experience to good use. In a recent article (written with Reuf Bajrovic) he draws comparisons between Homs in Syria and Srebrenica, and argues that the West should arm Syrian rebels and launch a Libya-style bombing campaign. He has other lessons from Bosnia, too:

Bosnia should be a lesson: in a far less conducive environment, some Bosniak elements turned to extremist ideologies, which resulted in the formation of religious Muslim-only units, with emirs and imams, in what started out as a secular, multiethnic Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Wartime atrocities committed by foreign and domesticmujahedeencreated deep-seated fears and resentments that continue to be exploited by nationalist politicians.

* We originally stated that Mr Komsic had resigned from the presidency. This has been corrected.

