Bosnia, Year Sixteen
by Nebojsa Malic
It has been sixteen years since war broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina. If commemorative coverage in the local media is anything to judge by, the war is still going on – the peace agreement made in Dayton, Ohio notwithstanding.
The war’s physical scars in http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3396 have mostly healed. Several burned-out buildings still remain, but the rest have been repaired and renovated. The city actually looks better today than even in 1984, when it last received a facelift for the Winter Olympics. Old Austrian-era buildings, gone drab with soot and smog over the course of the 20th century, now sport light ochre, burgundy, beige and even green facades. Communist-built public housing in western parts of the city, once depressingly concrete-gray, now sports cheerful blues, greens, yellows and reds.
And yet, only the buildings are cheerful. The people grumble. Work is scarce. Those who do work are sucked dry by a myriad of taxes and fees, levied to support a gargantuan bureaucracy. Bosnia-Herzegovina has more http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2857 officials per capita than anyplace else on the planet. And after paying all the local, provincial and entity taxes, Bosnians pay a crushing 17% VAT.
Shiny stores filled with expensive goods line Sarajevo’s main streets, but there are few shoppers inside, and fewer buyers. The only burgeoning businesses are cafes, bars and eateries. There is never enough capital for entrepreneurs, but there is somehow always plenty of money for http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3195, or inflammatory war memorials. The Saddest Show on Earth
This helps explain the anger with which the public – Serbs, Croats and Muslims alike – reacted to the bill currently debated in the state legislature that would regulate the salaries of government employees, including the members of parliament. While most Bosnians are supposed to scrape by with a few hundred marks (the country’s currency is the poorly-named “Convertible Mark” and is worth about .5 Euros), their legislators’ salaries and pensions would be greater than three thousand. Some government employees – like the head of the revenue service, or the postmaster – even have five-figure salaries. Ironically, it is Bosnia’s foreign overlords that have lobbied for such exorbitant government paychecks, believing them to be a barrier to corruption. Bribes, however, aren’t so much of a problem as the fact that government is the most profitable “business” in Bosnia today.
To make matters worse, occasional live TV coverage of the Parliament looks like a lowbrow reality show. Many of the legislators can’t string together a coherent sentence. Others communicate strictly through callous insults and outright slander. Diatribes and rants are common. There are a few honorable exceptions to the cesspool that is the Bosnian Parliament, but their presence only underscores the general rot.
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