Nailing the Virus: How One Bosnian Canton Halted a Pandemic

"Our health system has its limits," Salkic said during his interview with country's most popular evening news programme, warning: "We should not fool ourselves but use the two-week-long window of opportunity and prevent this explosion." That evening, Colic took a deep breath and told herself that she had "to take it one day at a time" - something her father told her repeatedly throughout the 1992-5 war in Bosnia.

Casualty of political intrigues in hospital post:

Illustration. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR

Dajana Colic is not a politician to attract international media attention. Born in 1979 in Lukavac, she belongs to a generation of left-wing politicians in Bosnia too young to remember the communist Yugoslavia led by Josip Broz Tito. She was barely six months old when Tito died in May 1980.

In the midst of the Bosnian war, she attended Tuzla medical high school. After, she went to Sarajevo to study dentistry. In 2005, with a degree in her pocket, she moved back to work in a hospital in her hometown of Lukavac, some 15 kilometres west of Tuzla.

Her political career began in October 2016, when she was elected a member of Lukavac's municipal council. She joined politics to change things, after "realising that, as much as I resisted, politics governed every part of my life", she said. In early May 2017, she was appointed director of the hospital where she worked in Lukavac.

After studying its financial records, she concluded that "things could not continue as before". The hospital was accumulating debt. She started to take "difficult decisions". Among them was not extending the short-term contracts of 26 staff. They were not happy and complained, so she was invited to explain her decision to the municipal council...

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