Source: tanjug.rs |
Milorad Dodik has his faults. The
effective and aggressive defense of the Serb Republic’s right to exist outside the
domination of the fundamentalist Sarajevo is, however, not one of them. As the
president of the Serb Republic he firmly stands by the historical legacies of
the state, going back to her conception, not merely by the policies he himself authored
and enforced during his mandates, and by the unalienable right of the Serb
people in Bosnia-Herzegovina to determine its political status independently. And
so he should.
He made a mistake today though. A
minor one, but a mistake nevertheless, at least in the PR sense. He was
completely out of line in going to Belgrade to debate issues of importance to
the legacy of the Serb Republic with an irrelevant Belgrade politician who
insulted him and the Bosnian Serbs. Čedomir Jovanović was at an advantage before the debate
even began because he was able to draw Dodik out to a duel of unequal prerogatives.
For Jovanovic, who irresponsibly, but not surprisingly, called the Serb
Republic “a genocidal creation” earlier in the week, it was a match all but won
in advance not because he’d go on to win his arguments – I heard no meaningful
argument or a statement of facts from him for the entire duration of the debate
– but because he, a leader of a party that hardly has enough popular support to
go above the parliamentary threshold, the fact that renders his LDP irrelevant,
matched up with an elected president of the Serb Republic, who fell for his
bait. Milorad Dodik had no business going to Belgrade to prove anything to
anyone short of maybe the Serbian Patriarch, let alone humiliate himself and
his official capacity by even responding to Jovanović’s provocations.
I’m not going to go into Jovanović’s motivation for
making statements that confirmed his status of a political rogue he is viewed
to be by the overwhelming majority of Serbia’s electorate. The foreign
mercenary accusations frequently leveled at him received more credence than
ever with this attack on the Bosnian Serbs. Perhaps it was an electoral tactic.
Perhaps it was just a jab in a broader PR offensive against the Serb Republic. In
any case, it was a major amplification on the radar of Jovanović’s generally consistent
anti-Serb tone veiled in self-accusatory, ever-apologetic “Serbianism” of the
sort almost no one in Serbdom really appreciates and rallies to. This attack on
the Serb Republic, combined with Jovanović’s inability and unwillingness to
adequately back it up in today’s debate with Dodik, was too harsh and, I’d say,
inexplicably out-of-place even coming from such a nefarious source. But the
very nefarious character of the source made me get the eerie feeling that the attack
on the Bosnian Serbs by Jovanović
couldn’t have been a random rant.
I watched the debate. Yes, it was
a debate, although Dodik started by saying he didn’t come to debate. Then why
did you come, Mr. President? Did you not know that Jovanović’s provocative
rhetoric, backed by nothing but an attitude, would not leave you unfazed? I was
startled from the get-go by moderator’s insistence on undermining Dodik’s
position by unnecessarily, thus calculatingly, trying to explain and justify
the context behind Jovanović’s
slanderous rant against the Bosnian Serbs and their historical experience. She went
on and on defending the slanderer, reiterating that Jovanović's words were taken out of
context, when it was clear that his statement was standing free of a context and
its essence wasn't affected by the intended broader message. He said,
unequivocally, that the Serb Republic was built on a genocide, not conditioning
this core qualification on the rest of the message, not countering it and not
leaving any room for misinterpretation. And while it is necessary to put
statements of this kind into a broader context, the context of Jovanović’s
address to his party’s main committee didn’t change the meaning of the
controversial core. It was controversial, I’d add, only because it stirred the Serbian
public in a protest, not because there is a doubt about the fallacy and
malevolence of such words. To his credit, even Jovanović didn’t try to play the context card. This
being said, from the very beginning, the tone of the Tanjug-sponsored event was
anti-Dodik. The comparably higher audio levels on Jovanović’s microphone didn’t help
Dodik’s position either.
Dodik, visibly incensed
throughout, made a further mistake of trying to argue points with Jovanović, who apparently wasn’t
making any, outside of Amanpourian clichés and the range of anti-Serb advocacy
paroles that would make Mustafa Cerić envy him. Dodik fell into the trap of having to stoop to the
level of a loudmouth and to oppose judgmental disqualifications without
substance using facts and established notions that Jovanović rejected as irrelevant or perfidiously
span as counterintuitive.
A clear rhetorical difference between the two emerged: Jovanović’s proneness
to ridiculing his opponent’s reliance on the selfish national interest as a political
motivator appeared to have dominated over Dodik’s insistence, somewhat clumsy in
comparison, on the self-evidence of that interest, natural to all pragmatic
politicians. Dodik defeated Jovanović’s insinuations time and again, reaching for facts and logical
arguments, but he also lost patience with Jovanović’s bullying with superficial attitudes and
shallow arguments in the face of facts that spoke so convincingly. Despite the
starting positions stated at the top of this article, there is no doubt as to
who won this debate: no one. The debate itself was unfair from the outset, not
because of Jovanović’s
superiority in any area, but because Dodik was an elected leader whose legacy,
well in the public eye and a subject to accountability, was susceptible to questioning and
criticism, and who had a history of governing that could be scrutinized.
Jovanović, on the other
hand, had no such burden and he could swing at Dodik and the Bosnian Serbs
freely and without concerns such as accountability. That is why Dodik's coming
to Belgrade baffled me. There is no doubt that facts on this matter are on the
side of the Bosnian Serbs and that Dodik presented them in a way that would convince a rational
and well-intentioned person, but he should have sent Staša Kotarac to wrestle
with the absurdity of Jovanović’s dog bites, if he wanted to respond in such a direct way at
all. Milorad Dodik and the Serb Republic had nothing to prove to Jovanović and his kind of Serbs
and not only that, but the president of the Serb Republic couldn’t allow
himself to discuss state politics with a leader of a minor and extremist
political party in Serbia.
The right response to the attack was,
actually, to invite Jovanović to Banja Luka to debate with Kotarac, Drago Kalabić or more appropriately, Milanko Mihajlica. If he
refused and came up with some bogus denial of responsibility, he’d
be seen as a coward who didn’t stand behind his words. Dodik, on the contrary,
showed he could put his money where his mouth was, but it was still unwise to
agree to such a charade. Unless Dodik wanted to sharpen his teeth, which I can’t
say he did successfully, this debate was totally unnecessary. Those Serbs that
follow Jovanović will not
have their minds changed by Dodik, who they see as not much different
from Radovan Karadžić anyway.
The majority of Serbs don’t pay any serious mind to Jovanović's verbal diarrhea and no rational
Serb would start believing all of a sudden that the Serb Republic was what
Jovanović said she was just because he said it. I also doubt that this was some
kind of a setup for Dodik to publicly denounce the attackers on the Serb
Republic and repeat his attitude towards the Srebrenica events, since he looked
way more uncomfortable than his counterpart.
I am baffled and it’ll probably take
several days and additional information that is sure to come out for me to get
a better grasp on why Dodik would stoop to the level of Čedomir Jovanović. The Serb Republic is a
reality and while the defense of her existence and her historical legacy
in the face of continued assaults is of utmost importance and a task of every
rational Serb out there, I do not think her president did himself a favor by lending
political relevance to one Čedomir Jovanović. This debate
was, after all, the second greatest political success of Jovanović’s career,
just for the fact that he got to participate in it.
2 comments:
I couldn't have said it better myself.
love it
Post a Comment