By: Miroslav Živanović
Originally published in: Perspectives
Publisher: Heinrich Böll Foundation
More than a decade has passed since the time when domestic public officials in Bosnia and Herzegovina were removed from their positions for the sole reason of not complying with legal human rights provisions. Of course, this practice was determined by the strict peace-building agenda implemented by the strong international presence, both civil and military, and extensive use of the famous Bonn powers.
Today, non-compliance with human rights requirements will not have such an impact on political and public officials in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the case of „Sejdić and Finci vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina“ can be taken as a perfect illustration. Moreover, the “Sejdić/Finci” case was one of the few human rights issues that rated quite high on the overall socio-political agenda of our society. Furthermore, in negotiations between the EU and Bosnia and Herzegovina, implementation of this particular ECHR decision was defined as a necessary precondition which, when fulfilled, will speed up the process of EU integration for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unfortunately, after years of fruitless efforts invested in the resolution of this issue, the EU decided to back out and exclude this particular human rights requirement from the set of key preconditions that Bosnia and Herzegovina must meet to progress in its EU integration. This decision represents a great setback for the European perspective of human rights protection in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This withdrawal sends a clear sign that the present EU leadership, as well as the countries participating in the PIC (Peace Implementation Council), accept the domination of the constitutional principle of the constitutional people over the constitutional principle of human rights as stipulated in the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It goes without saying that failure of this kind will not contribute toward the building of public trust in the human rights system and institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is already rather low. On the contrary, one can expect that distrust toward human rights will further demobilize citizens and their active engagement in the community and public life.
So, what went wrong with human rights protection and promotion in Bosnia and Herzegovina? It is very likely that attempts to answer this question will draw the attention of the domestic and international academic community interested in the wide scientific area of human rights. This effort is certain to recognize that, since the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed, human rights promotion and development have been firmly present on the peace-building agenda of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even today, there are no major international organizations active in Bosnia and Herzegovina without a human rights department, or at least a human rights officer dealing with the variety of issues covered by the universal human rights agenda.
Furthermore, the effort to establish and cultivate the human rights system in the country was generously supported, with a significant amount of international funds administered through international intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, and development agencies of some of the most developed countries in the world. These efforts covered almost all aspects of human rights, from promotional campaigns, legislation design, to capacity-building for a wide network of human rights actors and institutions as well.
Nevertheless, it seems that in the past 20 years, Bosnia and Herzegovina didn’t experience a change that would establish the social foundations for acceptance and further development of human rights culture in our society. On the contrary, recent human rights reports, both domestic and international, are quite clear about the fact that there is still, a huge gap between the existing constitutional and legislative human rights framework, harmonized with the international human rights standards, and its actual practice.
If this is so, one has to raise the question of 20 years of experience in human rights development in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Are there any lessons learned, or analysis of accumulated experience followed by recommendations that will help in developing more effective and efficient human rights development strategies? There is an even more important question regarding the future of human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina: whether the context of EU-BH relations will contribute to the advancement of human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina or take partial responsibility for their setback, as was the case with the “Sejdic/Finci” ECHR judgement? The importance of this question arises from the fact that EU integration and its human rights component is without any doubts the strongest factor influencing the demand side of human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unfortunately, this is not enough to prevent the actual and daily EU-BH politics harming the advancement of human rights culture in our country.
The state of human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina is constantly burdened with problems and negative records, in spite of the fact that the system as such enjoyed substantial international financial and technical assistance and aid over the last twenty years of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. For Bosnia and Herzegovina, obviously, the development of a human rights system is a matter of significant and demanding social change that will, eventually, lead towards widespread public awareness and acceptance of human rights, and active citizens’ demand for their respect and implementation. As with any other change, this one also requires leadership as one of its key ingredients. The assumption that the problem of human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina is actually the problem of leadership is the central point of debate for this article. In order to provide a tentative inquiry into this assumption, it is necessary to shed some light on the concept and contemporary understandings of leadership.
On leadership
In attempting to reflect on leadership, one must acknowledge that the majority of contributions regarding leadership come from the wide scientific areas of economy and political sciences, which one can put aside as not so suitable for a human rights leadership discourse. Nevertheless, the idea here is that even a rather general reflection on leadership can provide sufficient analytical tools for a provisional investigation of human rights leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In the scientific and popular-scientific views “out there”, there are a number of definitions of leadership, all of them having the human factor at the centre of their interest. Among them, a definition suggested by classical readings in leadership (Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal) states that leadership is a subtle process of mutual influence fusing thought, feeling and action to produce cooperative effort in the service of purposes and values embraced by both the leader and the led. Indeed, academic interest in leadership resulted with numerous conceptions about the subject. In the attempt to critically observe human rights leadership, the concept of leadership which makes a differentiation between transactional and transformational leadership might emerge as the most useful. Why is that so? The answer is that, by definition, transformational leadership is seen as a necessary precondition for achieving a goal of sustainable change. At the same time, there are no doubts that the development of a functional system for protection and promotion of human rights in countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina is a matter of sustainable change.
In this particular understanding of leadership, its transactional nature is described as purely managerial, focused on efficient compliance with already existing rules and regulations, applying as its tool, a system of rewards and sanctions. Transactional leadership is seen as a set of functions and roles that develop from an interaction between two or more people, where leaders are concerned with issues such as the initiation of a structure or establishing well-defined patterns of organization, channels of command, and ways of proceeding. A considerate attitude towards the human needs of subordinates is also one of the most emphasized elements of transactional leadership. On the other hand, transformational or transformative leadership is entirely about the change, defining leaders through their ability to develop and communicate visions, mobilize organizations and groups to work toward achieving these visions, and enabling the institutionalization of changes for the purpose of their sustainability.
Human Rights Leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina
With this in mind, and an interest in examining human rights leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one cannot avoid describing the context of human rights development in our country, because relationship between the two facets of leadership goes in two way direction. This means that context can determine whether transactional or transformative leadership will dominate, whereas leadership can undoubtedly change the context.
Development of the human rights system in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina was always more prioritized by the international community than by domestic political stakeholders. The political will to implement some policies, including human rights policies, can be defined as the “commitment of actors to undertake actions with the aim to achieve a set of objectives and to sustain the costs of those actions over time”1, with the following defining factors:
- government initiative (a certain degree of initiative from local decision-makers must exist in order to even be able to speak of political will);
- choice of policy based on technically sound, balanced consideration and analysis of options, anticipated outcomes and cost-benefit ratios (choosing one of the available policies can be considered to constitute a willingness to act);
- mobilization of stakeholders (effort by government actors to consult and communicate with civil society and the private sector);
- public commitment and allocation of resources (public commitment to a certain policy, accompanied by assigning the resources required to achieve the established programme goals, contributes to a positive assessment of political will);
- application of credible sanctions (a serious intent to implement a policy is reflected in well-prepared and enforced sanctions);
- continuity of effort (real implementation of a policy requires long-term effort and investment of resources);
- learning and adaptation (process for monitoring the implementation of a policy and adapting to emerging circumstances),2
If we are to accept this definition, one can easily conclude that the majority of these factors were usually met in the efforts of the institutions of the international community active in Bosnia and Herzegovina and delivered through national governmental and non-governmental organizations. However, engagement of the international community in the matter of human rights and civil society in general was the subject of numerous critical inquires which articulated the following observations concerning international community involvement:
- top to bottom approach;
- international organizations acting at the same time as donor and implementation agencies;
- financial assistance mainly aimed at the creation of, and/or strengthening non-governmental organizations, while neglecting other types of civil society organizations with a more solid and broad grassroots base;
- NGOs emerging in accordance with the donors’ interests, rather than those of the citizens affected;
- failure to consider specific political, economic and cultural conditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina;
- lack of coordination between international organizations and donors regarding their priorities and activities;
- failure to define priorities in cooperation with domestic civil society organizations;
- emergence of elite NGOs;
- regional disproportion in support to civil society;
- failure to timely address underdeveloped capacities of community-based organizations.
All that was mentioned contributed to a kind of paradox, still present in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although international aid was envisioned to develop civil society with core values such as trust and cooperation, total dependency on international financial aid created among civil society actors an atmosphere of competitiveness and distrust, making true cooperation and exchange of information almost impossible.
So what were the implications of such a context on human rights leadership? Obviously, due to the given circumstances, created by the leading position of the international community in the chain of “human rights command”, domestic human rights organizations and their human rights potential find themselves on the operational and service delivery level of human rights where, on the management level, transactional leadership is usually required. The role of transformational leadership was occupied, intentionally or not, by the international community and doomed to fail because it was not very realistic that the international community would ever be so integrated with the domestic society and, as such, capable of bringing about key societal changes in the area of human rights.
Today, after twenty years of the existence of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, its human rights community is simply struggling to survive, without any substantial potential for transformative leadership. At the same time, the prospects for human rights advancement in the society are alarming, with pressing problems in almost every segment of the broader human rights agenda in the country, from failure to implement the decisions of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the permanent failure to implement gender equality and anti-discrimination legislation, etc.
Conclusion
To conclude, without significantly changing the assistance paradigm of the still-active international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the European perspective of human rights protection will most likely stay on the same track, shaping the field of human rights protection, without really inspiring a genuine human rights movement capable of growing into a dynamic human rights community able to direct social transformation related to human rights. What, then, is to be done?
First of all, the identification of transformative leadership within the domestic human rights sector, both governmental and non-governmental, has to become the principal criterion for international community decision-making about assistance and aid for human rights development in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Genuine grassroots human rights initiatives need to be supported under few, but clear conditions, without putting too much administrative burden on the identified human rights actors.
Functional coordination between international actors and the European representation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is still a matter of essential importance. If achieved, this orchestrated international effort should find a way to deliver substantial support to further strengthen the human rights community through consistent application of a variety of community-building mechanisms, such as truly participative decision–making, quality communication systems, systematic education and training, etc. Furthermore, this emerging community is expected to reach a certain consensus around priority human rights issues and grow into a social movement able to mobilize public support, and even apply pressure on the authorities in seeking to reach an effective balance between the constitutional principles of human rights in general and the rights of the constituent peoples, as one of the most visible causes of the human rights setback in Bosnia and Herzegovina. If progress toward this particular balance becomes our reality, the potential of the European perspectives of human rights protection in Bosnia and Herzegovina will significantly increase.
1 Post, Lori Ann; Raile, Amber N.W.; Raile, Eric D., Defining Political Will. Politics and Policy, 38(4), 2010. Pp. 653 – 676.
2 Brinkerhoff, Derick W., Unpacking the Concept of Political Will to Confront Corruption. Bergen: U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, 2010. Pp. 2.