An election in a polarised country hit by extreme weather. (Hint: not the US)
An election in a country, where there is low trust in the political class, parts are hit by an extreme weather event, and where the final results are unavailable nearly a week later?
Not the United States come November 5, but Bosnia and Herzegovina, hit by intense flooding just days before municipal elections on October 6.
In the Balkan country wracked by a brutal civil war in the 1990s, voters were meant to decide on October 6 who would govern more than 140 municipalities across the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska. They did, for some, but as of October 10, many of the final tallies remained unavailable. They did, for some, but as of October 10, many of the final tallies remained unavailable.
These elections mattered because they were the first after a sweeping electoral reform programme was adopted by Bosnia and Herzegovina. In March, electronic voting machines were introduced to clamp down on electoral fraud. Convicted war criminals were also barred from running for local office.
What the reforms didn’t — and couldn’t — do is to glue together a fractured society to repose trust in politicians who would be charged with the task of building a shared, hopeful future.
It’s been nearly 30 years since the end of the Bosnian war, which was, until Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, routinely described as Europe’s worst conflict since World War II. A US-brokered peace deal, the 1995 Dayton accord, managed to stop the bloodletting but only in return for allowing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s wartime leaders to entrench their positions in a state built on sectarian institutions and boundaries. As some analysts noted at the time, Dayton created a complex system designed to make sure that none of the country’s three main ethnic groups could dominate the others.
It was a stalemate — a painful one.
That situation continues for the country’s main ethnic groups — Serbs; Bosniaks (a term used to refer to Bosnia’s Muslims, who make up around half of the country’s population) and Croats.
By some accounts, not least a startling 2018 New York Times report from Mostar, a city in southern Bosnia and Herzogovina, the “ethnonationalist fissures” run so deep in the country that even municipal services are riven by ethnic boundaries and kept separate.
Apparently, Mostar has separate fire departments for its Catholic Croat and Muslim areas, and these are staffed by Catholic Croat and Muslim firefighters. So too Mostar’s two garbage collection companies, two hospitals, two electricity companies, two bus stations, two popular nightclubs and two soccer teams. “All technically serve the same city,” the paper said, but each is only really expected to attend to one or the other of the city’s divided communities.
Meanwhile, in schools across Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country’s three main ethnic groups learn different histories.
With no sense of how to move together as one nation, it’s not surprising that elections aren’t seen as hopey-changey moments in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This makes the country a salutary lesson. When we think of 2024’s key elections, the focus is mainly on the big-ticket ones — the United States, United Kingdom, Sri Lanka, for example — but spare a moment of reflection for what that ballot in Bosnia and Herzegovina tells us.
The country’s imperfect election, fragile democracy and deep mutual distrust between communities offers a warning, a dark lesson on the dangerous and enduring nature of pushing ethnonationalism to the point that our shared humanity is obscured.
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
