Thread by @DPC_global

After two months of uncertainty, @OHR_BiH High Rep Schmidt last night imposed a broad set of amendments to the Federation of BiH Constitution & the BiH Election Law.
ohr.int/measures-to-im…

He retreated from his original July proposal facing strong domestic and international resistance.

The timing is insidious. The original plan in July was in violation of European and international conventions on political rights; but changing the rules of the game immediately AFTER the closure of voting makes a mockery of BiH citizens’ active and passive voting rights.

The @OHR_BiH’s insistence that the package “only relates to the post-election establishment of indirectly elected bodies” is deliberately misleading, as those bodies are the center of the Dayton system’s ethnic power-sharing decision-making...

…and the package actually strengthens those mechanisms.

Despite some limited cosmetic changes to the original proposal, the substance & rationale of the intervention in BiH’s political and electoral system remain unchanged:

The but-for reason was the threat by HDZ BiH and @Dragan_Covic to block the implementation of election results in the Federation, thus provoking an institutional-constitutional crisis if its demands for the ethnonationalist transformation of the electoral system remain unmet.

This imposition eliminates the mechanisms by which the HDZ BiH could generate such blockage.

But in return for eliminating this HDZ BiH structural leverage, it maintains the two 7/22 proposal elements of the “need to give something to the Croats” (read: HDZ/@Dragan_Covic). That is partially conceding to these ethnonationalist demands.

On the so-called implementation of the Constitutional Court of BiH (CC BiH)’s Ljubić ruling, the controversial 3% proposal was replaced by raising the number of delegates of the three ethnic caucuses in the FBiH House of Peoples (HoP) from 17 to 23.

This change achieves the same desired result: increasing of the share of delegates in the Croat caucus elected from cantons in the HDZ BiH stronghold of Western Herzegovina.

With this provision, the OHR makes a pro-HDZ U-turn from its previously articulated position that the Ljubić ruling had already been implemented w/ the CEC’s 2018 decision. This was subsequently confirmed by the CC BiH itself…

…thus limiting the damage done by that CC BiH decision to the constitutional order of the FBiH (the political hijacking of the CC BiH that enabled the Ljubić ruling).
ba.boell.org/en/2018/09/30/…

Even more perfidiously, the OHR is trying to sell this provision as a strengthening of minority rights, i.e., the rights of “Others,” based on that caucus in the HoP being enlarged from 7 to 11 delegates.

The second appeasement provision relates to the strengthening of the HDZ’s grip over election of the FBiH President (and through it of the Government). By raising the bar of 11 delegates of the future 23 members (47.8%) of one of ethnic caucuses in the FBiH HoP…

…needed to nominate a candidate for FBiH President, compared to the previous 6 of 17 (35.3%), Schmidt introduces a new formula compared to July’s proposal (8 out of 17-47%), but basically leaving the math unchanged (lifting the bar from roughly a 1/3 of delegates to almost 1/2).

The Schmidt package, pushed by the US and supported by the UK, was not shared with the other PIC members in advance – in contrast to July’s proposal. It was imposed without the support of any European PIC SB member. Germany informed Schmidt that it did not support him imposing it

Schmidt’s imposition of the amendment package thus represents a historic low point in the West’s post-war policy in BiH, highly damaging on numerous levels:

First, it gives into blackmail, rewarding the HDZ’s current threat of political blackmail and its successful past instrumentalization of legal structures (Ljubić) to prevent a post-election crisis.

It thereby continues a failed Western policy of accommodating disintegrative agendas of BiH’s ethnonationalists, undercutting core liberal democratic values and principles in the name of expedience and in favor of pacification.

The last two years of US-EU negotiations for “election law reforms,” aimed at accommodating Čović represent the depths of this history.

By declaring progress while imposing regression, the “international community” signaled to ethnocrats that their disintegrative agendas could define not just Western policy, but BiH’s present & future.

Second, the aim of forestalling crisis through appeasement will fail even on its own terms. In BiH’s oligarchic power-sharing system, no institutional regulation has the power to counteract deliberate political obstructionism.

Institutionally empowering ethnonationalist elites that rule based on an ethnic one-party system mindset certainly will not achieve that desired effect.

Third, contrary to the @OHR_BiH OHR, this imposition does not open the path to further election law reforms, i.e., implementation of the Sejdić-Finci, Zornić et al. ECtHR rulings. In fact, it will have the opposite effect.

While those rulings demand a shift of balance between collective ethnic and individual rights in favor of individual rights, Schmidt’s changes to the political and electoral system deepen the ethnic and ethnoterritorial divisions within the system. That was the point.

Fourth, with this regressive move, HR Schmidt has done more damage to the institution of the @OHR_BiH than any of his predecessors or by those PIC members that have been pushing for a decade and a half for the closure of the OHR.

From now on, defending the institution of the @OHR_BiH – which is needed, with a military deterrent, so long as Dayton holds sway over #BiH – means not only defending it against those actors, but first and foremost against the US (the UK) and the High Representative himself.

Fifth, the bullying performance of the US administration, pushing Schmidt to impose a package against the will of all EU PIC SB members (with only Croatian support), and against his own German government, strongly echoes the attitude of the Trump administration...

…and its envoy @RichardGrenell’s push for a Kosovo-Serbia land swap. It is ultimate proof that Biden left the State Dept’s middle ranks, corrupted with the amoral “let’s make a deal” approach of the Trump administration, with its hand on the tiller of US policy.

Last night, the “German” High Rep Schmidt became the American High Rep.
ba.usembassy.gov/statement-of-t…

Nevertheless, the current German government also bears responsibility. Berlin did not assertively resist this publicly, arguing for its own policy of not promoting further division in BiH. @ManuelSarrazin @ABaerbock @AnnaLuehrmann @W_Schmidt_

This habit of complacency must be fought by Germany, which finances a core of German advisors to Schmidt. Now would be the time for Berlin to demand the 360° policy review on BiH and wider Balkan policy that is long overdue for the West – and to conduct its own.