Bosnia Police in Sarajevo Photo: EPA/Fetim Demir

Opposition MPs say parliament’s lack of control over the work of the country’s intelligence agency is worrying.

The joint committee of Bosnia‘s state-level parliament, which supervises the work of the Intelligence Security Agency, has been without a chair for months because of political disagreements.

“This situation is becoming absurd because there is no parliamentary control over this agency, so we can not know what it is doing,” Dusanka Majkic, an MP from the opposition Alliance of Social Democrats SNSD, told BIRN.

Majkic expressed concerns that, in this situation, it is impossible for MPs to know who is under eavesdropping or under similar surveillance measures.

The problem dates back to last July, when parliament forced Nikola Spiric, another SNSD MP, to resign from the chair. No one has replaced him, after several attempts to vote for a new chair failed.

Majkic blamed the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, which is part of the ruling coalition at state level, but the main opposition party in the Serb-dominated entity, Republika Srpska.

“The SDS had an idea to vote for Spiric’s replacement and is well aware that the chair should be selected from our party, but will do everything to stop that,” Majkic claimed.

Darko Babalj, an SDS MP and a member of the joint committee for supervision of the agency, insisted that the situation was less dramatic.

“This situation is not something that we in the SDS wanted, but there is no reason to blame only us or to use this for any kind of political games,” Babalj told BIRN.

Babalj did not say whether the vacancy would likely be filled soon, or whether it will have to wait for the autumn general elections and new MPs to deal with it.

Goran Kovacevic, a professor from Sarajevo’s Faculty of Crime and Security Studies, told BIRN that the matter should not be a subject for political intrigue.

“We can see once again that even this can be used for some sort of the everyday old games played within political circles here,” he said.

Given the overall political situation in the country, he doubted the matter would be resolved soon.

The Intelligence Security Agency of Bosnia declined to comment on the topic.

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