VChristian Schmidt doesn’t seem desperate on the phone, but he does seem thoughtful. And sometimes helpless. Of course, one should not be made of sugar in politics. “But the personal attacks and everything that is said here in the political struggle, these insults, are of a magnitude that could also end careers in Berlin.”
But Schmidt is not in Berlin, but in Sarajevo. Since August 2021, the CSU politician has held what is probably the strangest political office you can have in Europe. Angela Merkel’s former Minister of Agriculture is the “High Representative of the international community in Bosnia-Hercegovina” and thus by far the most powerful man in the country, at least on paper.
His powers seem to come from an autocracy’s toolbox: Schmidt can dismiss civil servants and democratically elected politicians, he can decree laws or declare them invalid with the stroke of a pen – and no local institution can prevent him from doing so. Theoretically, he could also end the career of an innocent public official by decree without the person concerned being able to defend himself against this in a local court, because the powers of the High Representative are withdrawn from domestic jurisdiction.
Cases in which innocent people were released on false charges did indeed exist among Schmidt’s predecessors. The quasi-dictatorial powers that were bestowed on the High Representative by Bosnia’s predominantly western protecting powers a few years after the end of the war in 1995 were initially justified.
At that time, the warlords of the past war were still up to mischief in the devastated country. The Bosnian Serb war criminals Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, who were later sentenced to life imprisonment, walked free. Displaced people who wanted to return to their pre-war homeland were violently prevented from doing so by nationalists, and some were even murdered.
Insulted as a Nazi, Gauleiter or Gestapo policeman
But all of that was more than a quarter of a century ago. There have been no violent ethnic clashes in Bosnia for more than two decades. The brute powers of the High Representative no longer suit the country to which they apply. Despite this, it is pretended that every day in Sarajevo still begins with a gunshot wound. The High Representative continues to wield powers as if Bosnia were a Caribbean sugar plantation at the turn of the last century.
Such a powerful man would have to be bursting with self-confidence, one would think. But Schmidt is not brimming. “In my thirty-year career as a politician, I have never experienced the extent of political insults that one has to endure here, neither in Bonn nor in Berlin,” repeats the politician. This sentence reads mockingly when you write it down, but it doesn’t seem so in conversation, because Schmidt delivers it in the dry tone of a statement, as if he were reading a weather forecast or football scores.
With the insults, he doesn’t mean the “Magazine Royale” on ZDF, which recently mocked the CSU politician. The program’s scam was based on targeted omissions and tendentiously bent research, but always moved within the limits that also apply to satirical shows in public broadcasters. Compared to what Schmidt gets to hear in Bosnia, the program was harmless.
In Bosnia, Schmidt was insulted as a Nazi, Gauleiter or Gestapo police officer, and parallels were drawn between his administration and the Holocaust. The reason for the furore were changes to the electoral law that the German had decreed last year. These changes are actually controversial. However, putting them on a par with the Nazi regime and the Shoah does not discredit Schmidt, but only those who make such comparisons.
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