Serbs, Croats Run 27 of 33 Bosnian Institutions, MP Says

Semsudin Mehmedovic, a member of Bosnia’s House of Representatives from the Naprijed party, laid out a breakdown at a press conference today showing that Serbs and Croats run 27 of 33 state institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Bosniaks head six, and he called on lawmakers who see themselves as pro-Bosnian to take up the issue together. The count is not a distant matter for Belgrade, since it touches on the share Serbs, one of Bosnia’s three constituent peoples, hold in the administration of a neighboring state and in bodies that Serbian institutions deal with daily.

By Mehmedovic’s math, that works out to 81 percent of institutions on one side and 19 percent on the other. He says a similar ratio holds inside the executive branch: in the current term of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 11 of 58 senior civil servants are Bosniaks, again 19 percent.

Where the Numbers Are Starkest

Mehmedovic listed the institutions where, by his figures, the gap is widest:

• at the Ministry of Finance and Treasury and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations, Serbs make up more than 50 percent of staff
• at the Institute for Standardization of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 65 percent of employees are Serb and 19 percent Bosniak, and none of its four senior civil servants is Bosniak
• every employee in the Communications Regulatory Agency’s Banja Luka office is Serb
• all eight staff at the headquarters of the Agency for Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education in Mostar are Croat

Taken together, Mehmedovic says, 75 institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina employ nearly 800 fewer Bosniaks than the legally prescribed number calls for. He named Anita Markic, director of the Civil Service Agency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the person most responsible, alleging that rigged hiring competitions have been run for years.

What He Proposed, and Why It Failed

His proposed amendments to the Law on Administration would have required that, whenever fewer than ten percent of the legally prescribed staff belonging to a given constituent people or to Others were employed at a body, vacant posts go first to candidates from the underrepresented group. HDZ and SNSD lawmakers voted the proposal down, he says. Three years earlier, he had already asked an administrative inspector to order eight specific institutions to correct the imbalance, but says there was no response.

That is why the appeal he made today was directed at his own political camp rather than the opposing one.

“We need to unite in resolving this issue, to stop passing the blame back and forth,” Mehmedovic said. He stressed that he is not seeking the dismissal of Serbs and Croats employed in state institutions, but rather enforcement of Bosnia’s Constitution and earlier rulings of its Constitutional Court.

A Package of Rulebook Changes at 28 Institutions

The second part of his remarks concerned the Council of Ministers’ agenda. Mehmedovic says a package of amendments to the rulebooks on internal organization and staffing has been prepared for 28 state institutions, coming, he notes, five months before general elections, and that it would put several hundred party appointees on the payroll. According to him, the draft rulebooks were submitted without the positive opinions from the Legislation Office that the Council of Ministers’ rules of procedure require.

Of those 28 institutions, he says, Bosniaks run seven, or 25 percent, and those are the ones with the smallest staffs. He closed with a message aimed at the deputy chair of the Council of Ministers.

“Finally, I want to address the deputy chair of the Council of Ministers, Zukan Helez, in particular. He has the means to stop all of this. And to the other Bosniak ministers as well: you cannot say you did not know,” Mehmedovic said.

His request rests on a document that already exists: a Special Report by the Human Rights Ombudsman Institution on the representation of constituent peoples and Others in institutions and regulatory bodies, published in 2020, on whose implementation the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina should have been briefed back in 2022. On top of that, a registry of civil servants that also tracks ethnic affiliation, required under amendments to the Law on Civil Service in the Institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, had a deadline of March 23 this year and still has not been set up.