Mayor’s Life Offers Cautionary Tale of Bosnia’s Lost Hopes

At that time, state building reached its apogee and a thousand flowers were blooming with ideas about constitutional reform. It was not then nearly as politically radioactive a concept as it later became.

When I once asked my new colleagues whether anyone had ever proposed a two-layer state: municipalities and the state, one of my Bosnian colleagues summoned exactly such an idea - recently sent to the then OHR Paddy Ashdown, and distributed through the inter-office mail.

Then Mayor Krsmanovic's idea for "municipalization" drew from local experience in eastern Bosnia - then as now, the dark side of the moon to the RS political leadership in Banja Luka.

The argument was essentially to "take back control," at a municipal level, over local resources such as forests which then, as now, were exploited with precious little of the revenue, or even employment, feeding into the local economies.

Control of RS governance was too centralized. The essence of his thin sketch of a state, with an agglomeration of municipalities, was for amplified local self-government with a strong-enough state to ensure health, pensions, and other collective services.

As I co-wrote at the time, "the premise is that local government is best suited to provide for the needs of its residents and is the only level where they can easily make their concerns known outside the electoral cycle".

I was intrigued by the idea and from whence it came. It would not have had nearly the same impact on my imagination and sense of possibility had it come from a Bosniak-majority municipality, from, say, Donji Vakuf or Buzim, or even a Croat one like Grude.

It hinted at more potential below the waterline than was generally thought possible. The front office of OHR was among...