In a German-language piece in the major German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, correspondent Michael Martens calls the powers of the Office of the High Representative in BiH “colonial” and says they “seem to have come from the toolbox of an autocracy.” Martens notes the controversy over Christian Schmidt’s October 2022 electoral law decree and writes, “The real scandal, which strangely enough is often overlooked by left-wing critics, is that he was able to decree the changes at all.” Martens quotes former High Representative Carl Bildt as saying, “For at least a decade, [the Office of the High Representative] has been part of the problem in Bosnia.”
He also quotes former High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch as saying that the powers of the office are “deeply undemocratic” and that the High Representative is now “part of the problem in every respect, not the solution.”
Martens further writes:
Bosnia is far from a perfect state, but despite its shortcomings it is a democracy. The country has been a member of the Council of Europe for many years, there are no political prisoners there, no one is tortured in the country’s prisons, it is safe to criticize all parties in the country, there is a diverse media landscape and regular democratic elections . . . repeatedly lead to peaceful changes of government and new coalitions. By what right is there in such a country an untouchable governor with full powers, as if in British India he had to bear Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden?
Read the full piece here.
