Building Bridges in Mostar
Author: International Crisis Group
Originally Published at Peace and Conflict Monitor on: 12/15/2003
Successfully reuniting the divided city of Mostar is a challenge that offers an opportunity to reinvigorate the other cities of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
The International Crisis Group’s latest report, “Building Bridges in Mostar”,* a copy of which is attached, suggests solutions for the most contentious issues in that city and recommends local authority reforms across the country, particularly an enhanced definition of the city as a qualitatively new unit of self-government.
“There is scope for a workable compromise in Mostar that can win support from all concerned”, says Senad Slatina, Sarajevo-based analyst for ICG, “and it is a solution that can be applied as a model for city government throughout the Federation and BiH”.
Making another attempt to unite Mostar has become, unexpectedly but appropriately, a very high international priority in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) in 2003. By late summer, it had come to be ranked by High Representative Paddy Ashdown as one of his four major projects for structural reform. The commission established to deal with this issue is due to report by 15 December 2003.
Mostar remains one of the most divided cities in BiH, and it has come to symbolise mutual intolerance, distrust, and tribal politics. Thus, any genuine agreement on a unified city administration would offer both a template for other segregated towns and encouragement for BiH in general.
Such a model is badly needed to sort out the current confusion in the country’s governance. The negotiated peace that ended the war left BiH with, in places, up to six separate layers of authority and fourteen different governments with taxing and law-making powers. But complex compromises that were necessary to smother the embers of war in 1994-95 appear an intolerable burden nearly ten years on. As a city of just over 100,000 inhabitants divided into six municipalities and an ostensible central zone, Mostar epitomises both the causes and consequences of such atomisation.
The new ICG report suggests the rudiments of an organisational solution for Mostar, involving changes to the electoral system for the city council and a reform of the legal concept of the city in BiH. The key is to ensure no constituent people would occupy more than 50 per cent of the seats on the council. A reinvigorated city administration would help Mostar to be reborn, both as a functional unit of self-government and as a multinational community in which all citizens feel fairly represented.
A successful Mostar model along these lines should then be applied to other cities in the Federation, and, in time, this formalised power sharing, if accompanied by a qualitatively enhanced and less circumscribed definition of the city, should appeal in Republika Srpska as well. After all, if limitations on majority rule are deemed appropriate for Mostar – as they have long since been accepted in Brcko District – then why should they not also apply in Sarajevo, Travnik, Tuzla and Zenica?
“What BiH does not need, of course, is another layer of administration”, says Nicholas Whyte, Europe Program Director at ICG. “But a newly revived concept of the city for Mostar would point the way forward for BiH as a whole”.
The International Crisis Group (ICG) is an independent, non-profit, multinational organisation, with over 90 staff members on five continents, working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Making another attempt to unite the divided city of Mostar has become, unexpectedly but appropriately, a very high international priority in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) in 2003. By late summer, it had come to be ranked by High Representative Paddy Ashdown among his four major projects for structural reform. In each case, the High Representative appointed a foreign chairman to lead commissions composed of domestic representatives and charged with finding state-building solutions in the symbolically or substantively important realms of defence, intelligence, indirect taxation – and Mostar. All aim to unify divided and dysfunctional institutions. The first three commissions, which have already reported and whose draft legislation is proceeding through the various parliaments, have also sought to empower the state over the entities and their respective national establishments.
The Mostar commission, which is due to report by 15 December 2003, has a seemingly more modest and less far-reaching goal: to devise a new statute for a single albeit emblematic city. In comparison with the other commissions, this might not seem so significant. Yet Mostar has long been a particular concern of the international community, representing a piece of unfinished business that cannot be ignored as the foreigners contemplate their withdrawal from intrusive peace implementation in BiH. Moreover, the right solution in Mostar may serve both as an example of and stimulus for local government reorganisation in the country at large – a hope underlined by officials in the Office of the High Representative (OHR) contemplating how to jump start the reform of public administration required if BiH is to make its way towards a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the European Union.
The compromise peace that ended the war between those who had fought to defend the state and those who had sought to destroy it left BiH with, in places, up to six separate layers of authority and fourteen different governments with taxing and law-making powers. But what was necessary or even desirable to smother the embers of war in 1994-95 appears an intolerable and unsustainable burden nearly ten years on, even to some of those same political forces that once insisted upon and have since benefited from the power and patronage this system provides. As Lord Ashdown has observed, all these governments devour more than 64 per cent of public spending in BiH. A city of just over 100,000 inhabitants divided into six municipalities and an ostensible Central Zone, Mostar epitomises both the causes and consequences of such atomisation. And just because it is a special case, the rationalisation of Mostar’s governance could point the way towards overcoming the ethno-national barriers and redundant administrative structures that plague BiH.
In Mostar the international community is thus seeking to facilitate local remedies to the national-administrative partition that has characterised the post-war period, as well as to assuage those fears of relegation to minority status on which this partition has thrived. Yet just because Mostar remains one of the most divided cities in BiH – and has come to symbolise mutual intolerance, distrust and tribal politics – any genuine agreement on a new statute for a unified city administration would offer both a template for other segregated towns and encouragement for BiH in general. On the other hand, yet another failure in Mostar would also have disproportionate effects. Viewed in this light, the new attempt to reunify the city deserves to keep company with the other reform projects currently underway.
This report points out the crucial issues that must be settled in the current round of talks if Mostar is to be made whole. It provides a brief sketch of previous attempts to unite the city; discusses the major problems arising from its continuing fragmentation; seeks to offer an explanation of why Mostar has emerged once more as a problem requiring an urgent solution; and introduces the various proposals currently being canvassed in political and intellectual circles.
Its concluding section outlines the rudiments of an organisational solution, involving changes to the electoral system for the Mostar council and a reform of the legal concept of the city in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This has the potential to ensure that Mostar can be reborn – both as a functional unit of self-government and as a multinational community in which all citizens feel themselves to be fairly represented.
RECOMMENDATIONS
To Bosnian Lawmakers:
1. Adopt a state-level framework law on local self-government, redefining the city as a special unit of local self-government with responsibilities for secondary education and social and medical services, transferred from the cantons to the cities, and providing economic development and fiscal incentives to townspeople and local politicians to initiate the formation of cities.
2. Adopt a new law on the distribution of public revenues to ensure that well run city and municipal administrations – and not the bloated cantonal and entity bureaucracies – get the revenues needed actually to deliver the services they are both required and in the best position to provide.
To International Donors:
3. Give financial incentives for cities to adopt the power-sharing formula suggested below in recommendations to the Mostar Commission.
To the High Representative:
4. In anticipation of the report of the Mostar Commission, issue a decision forbidding the existing municipalities from issuing building permits or allocating public land.
5. Appoint auditors to monitor and control public expenditures by the city and municipalities, past and present.
6. Punish the owners of illegally constructed buildings with heavy fines, rather than the loss of or removal from their properties.
To the Mostar Commission set up by the Office of the High Representative:
7. Design a city statute for Mostar which includes a guaranteed minimum representation for each of the constituent peoples on the city council, at the level of their share of the population in the last census, and which also ensures that no constituent people can have more than half of the seats on the council.
8. Stipulate that decisions regarding allocation of land, election of the mayor, appointments of directors of public enterprises, the city budget, awards and honours, and amendments to the city statute should invariably be treated as decisions involving vital national interests, thus requiring a two-thirds majority in each national caucus for adoption.
9. Stipulate that future mayors be elected by and from members of the city council, with enhanced executive powers, and with a duty of nominating heads of the city departments of finance and urban planning who are representative of the other two constituent peoples.
10. Abolish the current city-municipalities as units of local government with budgets and legal personality.
11. Propose that the main public services in the city should be dispersed among the current city-municipalities by establishing satellite offices in each of them.
Bio: Contacts
Andrew Stroehlein (Brussels) +32 (0) 485 555 946 – media@crisisweb.org
Jennifer Leonard (Washington) +1-202-785 1601
http://www.crisisweb.org/
