‘This Is Crazy’: Israeli Embassy Memo Stirs Political Storm in the Balkans
The leaked document, which praises a controversial electoral reform plan supported by nationalist parties, was slammed by the Bosnian foreign minister. ‘Why would Israel do this?’ one former minister asks
Bosnian officials lashed out at Israel on Tuesday, accusing the Israeli embassy that serves Bosnia of inappropriately interfering in the Balkan state’s internal politics through its support for a controversial election reform plan. Critics say the proposed change in the electoral system would minimize the political influence of Jews, Roma and other minorities in the country.
“It is hard to fathom how the official policy of the State of Israel could be to welcome the discrimination of Jews in not being able to hold office in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Bosnian Foreign Minister Bisera Turkovic told Haaretz. “The proposed electoral legislation would cement the current discriminatory system towards minorities in Bosnia,” she said.
Turkovic’s statement came after a memo from the Israeli embassy in the Albanian capital, Tirana, which is also responsible for Bosnia, was widely circulated in the country on Monday. The memo was issued in response to an electoral plan promoted by the Office of the High Representative, an EU-supported institution created after the Balkan wars of the 1990s to oversee civilian aspects of the implementation of the agreement ending the war in Bosnia. The OHR can overrule government decisions in Bosnia.
The plan is supported by Croat and Serb nationalists and opposed by the current ruling government in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia’s current political system is based on a power-sharing agreement among its three major ethnic groups: Muslim Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats, an arrangement that is believed to have excluded more than 100,000 citizens from top level political representation.
At the moment, high level positions in both Bosnia’s national government and several on the local level are equally distributed among members of its constituent peoples, regardless of the size of their populations.
The OHR’s proposed change would weigh local demographics, which could in turn further consolidate the power of ethnonationalist parties. The Israeli embassy decided to weigh in on the sensitive subject by writing in its now-leaked memo that “the readiness and proposals of the Croat side, as demonstrated throughout negotiations on changes to the electoral legislation, [are] welcomed.”
Foreign Minister Turkovic, a Bosniak politician of Jewish heritage, told Haaretz she was surprised by the Israeli response. “A sincere approach and genuine support by the government of Israel is required in order to protect the rights of the Jewish people in Bosnia and Herzegovina rather than heaping praise on those who perpetuate inequality by denying people of other backgrounds, such as Jews, their rights in Bosnia,” she said.
The foreign minister also echoed these sentiments in a letter to the Israeli Foreign Ministry in which she demanded a clarification and asserted that the majority of Bosnian parties were against the proposed reform. While the Israeli Foreign Ministry declined to comment on Turkovic’s demand, it did issue a statement to Haaretz.
“The Israeli embassy in Tirana, which is also responsible for Bosnia and Herzegovina, issued a document [on Monday] in which it expresses the support [for] the preservation of the rights of the Jewish community in the country. The document was sent following a local initiative to change the election law and the fear that the implications of the discussion around this change might harm those rights,” the statement said.
According to the Bosnian news website N1, Zeljko Komsic, a Croat politician who does not support the reform, said Israel was endorsing a model that had been “abandoned long ago in the world because it is based on systematic discrimination” and was only supported by “political actors whose policies are based on the denial of genocide, the glorification of war crimes and criminals and on the realization of the goals of adjudicated joint criminal enterprises, which I firmly believe is not the official policy of Israel.”
The memo from the Israeli embassy in Albania expressed support for nationalist politicians Milorad Dodik of the Serb community and Dragan Covic, the head of the Croatian Democratic Union party, for “recent encouraging actions taken by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s institutions with the aim of protecting the Jewish community and its position in the country.” These included endorsement of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism and the renaming of streets that had honored Nazi collaborators.
Dodik, a vocal supporter of Israel, has been accused of denying the 1995 Srebrenica genocide in which, according to several international tribunals, Bosnian-Serb forces killed some 8,000 Bosnian-Muslim men and boys. He has also amplified calls for separatism and threatened to withdraw from the country’s army in order to create an independent Serb force.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s “undoubted intent to support” Dodik and Covic is “why Turkovic is angry,” said former Bosnian Energy Minister Reuf Bajrovic. “We can safely say that this has hurt Israel’s image among the Bosniak population. It came out of left field.”
Calling the current crisis the “politically most heated moment in a long time,” Bajrovic said that “for the government of Israel to come out and say this is in my view crazy. It’s seen as Israel siding with people who want Bosnia gone, far-right genocide deniers.”
“Why would Israel do this?” he asked. “I can only speculate.”
Both Bosniaks and Serbs have attempted to leverage Israel’s moral standing on genocide issues to bolster their arguments in recent years. Last December, Turkovic called upon then-Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to rally the international community against Serb revisionism, the battle over which is seen by many as central to the fight for the future viability of Bosnian statehood.