United States Capitol. Photo: Pixabay

Matthew Palmer, acting deputy assistant secretary at the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, told the US Congress’s House of Representatives foreign affairs committee on Wednesday that a post-election crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina could have serious consequences.

“There is a real risk that national elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina this fall could fail to produce a government unless political leaders can reach agreement on reforms to the country’s electoral law,” Palmer said.

“Without a government, the country could face a prolonged post-election crisis, during which progress would stall on pressing objectives such as tackling corruption, strengthening rule of law, countering violent extremism, and furthering the country’s Euro-Atlantic integration,” he added.

Speaking at a foreign affairs committee hearing entitled ‘The Dayton Legacy and the Future of Bosnia and the Western Balkans’.

Palmer said the most pressing reform issue concerns elections to the upper chamber of parliament, the House of Peoples, in Bosnia’s Federation entity.

In December 2016, the Constitutional Court ruled that the electoral mechanism to establish the Federation House of Peoples was inconsistent with the constitution and gave the state parliament six months to fix the election law.

When parliament failed to do so, the court invalidated these sections of the law, and in doing so effectively eliminated the legal basis for establishing the House of Peoples.

Without a fully-constituted House of Peoples, it will be impossible to form either the Federation government or the state-level House of Peoples, the upper house of the Parliamentary Assembly.

In consequence, neither the Federation nor the state-level government would be able to adopt legislation.

The Bosnian Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights have also ruled in numerous cases that constitutional provisions governing elections to the country’s state-level presidency are discriminatory.

Under the current set-up, anyone who is not from one of the three major ethnic groups is ineligible to run for president.

Palmer warned that there is a considerable risk that corrupt politicians could use the opportunity offered by a crisis to undermine state institutions and further weaken the rule of law.

“Most importantly, such internal problems in Bosnia and Herzegovina open the door to malign actors such as Russia, which is intent on sowing chaos in the region and thwarting Bosnia’s Euro-Atlantic future,” he said.

During the hearing however, some of the politicians displayed a lack of knowledge about the situation in the country. Republican Dana Rohrabacher, who led the hearing as chairman of the foreign affairs subcommittee, asked: “So the Bosniaks are Muslims like Albanians but they’re not Albanian? So what language do they speak?” Rohrabacher then asked senior civil servants if people in Bosnia speak the same language and if Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats can tell each other apart on the street.

Sasha Toperich, a senior fellow from Centre for Transatlantic Relations think-tank, told the foreign affairs committee that “if Parliament does not act by May 8 to replace the struck-out text of the election law, the October 2018 general election risks being nullified, potentially throwing the country into political and governance chaos”.

Toperich warned that Bosnian leaders have developed a bad habit of ignoring court rulings they don’t agree with, and attending to important issues at a very last minute, often only if pressured to do so.

He recommended that Congress and the Trump administration should ask their European partners to follow US sanctions on Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik with their own, claiming that Dodik’s “separatist” rhetoric continues to represent a serious threat to regional stability.

He also recommended that, in order to counter Russia influence, “the US should work with its NATO partners to reach political decision and activate NATO Membership Action Plan for Bosnia and Herzegovina, as early as this July, at NATO’s summit in Brussels”.

Kurt Bassuener from the Democratisation Policy Council think-tank told the committee that without pressure from the US, the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina has deteriorated for more than a decade.

Bassuener said the country was currently going through “slow but inexorable and accelerating dissolution of the state, attended with ever more open and shameless corruption, abuse of power, and generation of fear”.