REPUBLIKA SRPSKA WILL NOT ACCEPT SOMEONE ELSE'S HISTORY AS ITS OWN

BANJA LUKA, SEPTEMBER 23 /SRNA/ - Republika Srpska does not seek the right to determine other people's history for them, but it equally firmly rejects the presentation of someone else's history, political view and wartime diplomacy as its own, Acting Director of the Republika Srpska Office for International Cooperation Ana Trišić-Babić said.

"Republika Srpska is not a footnote in Sarajevo's understanding of BiH. Nor will it allow common institutions to become a printing press for a single political narrative," Trišić Babić said in her column "Republika Srpska Will Not Accept Someone Else's History as Its Own".

When one political center claims for itself the right to determine everyone's past, Trišić-Babić pointed out, it will very quickly try to claim the right to determine everyone's future as well.

"Republika Srpska has watched for long enough as others have spoken on its behalf. The time of such diplomacy is over, and Republika Srpska will never again be the subject of someone else's narrative. We made that decision long ago," Trišić-Babić stressed.

The Republika Srpska media system - SRNA publishes in full the column by Acting Director of the Republika Srpska Office for International Cooperation Ana Trišić Babić:

Recently, in my column "Republika Srpska's Right to Speak in Its Own Voice," I wrote that the establishment of the Republika Srpska Office for International Cooperation was not an administrative act, but a response to a situation that had become politically unsustainable. For too long, it was taken for granted that a political position could be formulated in Sarajevo, then given the status of a state position and, finally, presented to the world through common institutions as the position of everyone.

That is precisely why the case of the so-called monograph "Diplomacy of Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-2022" is much more than a story about a single book. The BiH Ministry of Foreign Affairs presents the so-called monograph as its "institutional work", as an account of 30 years of diplomatic and foreign-policy activity in the period from 1992 to 2022.

Republika Srpska cannot accept such a political construct.

The diplomacy conducted from Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995 was not the diplomacy of Republika Srpska. If this is not clear to someone, it was wartime Bosniak diplomacy. It did not represent the institutions of Republika Srpska, it did not defend the interests of Republika Srpska, it did not express the political will of the Serb people, and Republika Srpska did not consider it its diplomacy even then.

There is no serious political reason for us to start viewing it that way today simply because someone, 30 years later, bound it into a book and put the name of a common institution on the cover.

That is precisely what Republika Srpska must reject.

For Republika Srpska, there is a clear political and constitutional boundary. The common diplomacy of today's BiH can only be discussed from Dayton onward, because it was the Dayton order that established the framework in which Republika Srpska, as one of the two entities, and the Serb people, through their member of the Presidency, participate in the creation and conduct of foreign policy. That is Dayton diplomacy. Everything before that belongs to wartime, to different political structures and their separate diplomatic activities, among which was the diplomacy of the then Bosniak authorities in Sarajevo. Its retroactive designation today as a common diplomatic tradition of all is not historiographical precision, but a crude political revision of the past.

At the same time, I have no illusion that the principle of joint decision-making was always respected after Dayton either. On the contrary, Republika Srpska has for years raised concerns about a practice in which certain Bosniak political representatives attempt to present their own foreign-policy positions as the position of BiH even when there is no genuine political consensus on them within the mechanism established by Dayton. But that is precisely why the distinction must remain clear: one thing is Dayton diplomacy, whose common character is determined by the constitutional architecture, even if some attempt in practice to unilaterally circumvent or appropriate that architecture - quite another is the wartime diplomacy of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995, which Republika Srpska never considered its own and which cannot now be transformed by political decree into its diplomatic history.

Dayton is not merely a date after which a new chapter begins here. It is the boundary between a wartime period in which there were three warring sides, three republics, each with its own political structures, interests and diplomatic activities, and a constitutionally defined order in which the word "common" first acquired a concrete political and institutional meaning following the signing of the Dayton Agreement. That is precisely why the attempt to retrospectively incorporate Sarajevo's wartime diplomacy into the same continuity is more than a dispute over a single so-called monograph. It is an attempt to institutionally elevate one perspective on the past above all others. Sarajevo has the right to its own interpretation of the wartime period. The Bosniak political public has the right to its own memory and its own diplomatic chronology. But it is an entirely different question whether it has the right, using the money and seal of common institutions, to declare that chronology the diplomatic history of Republika Srpska. It does not!

A common institution is not a mechanism for turning one national viewpoint into a common truth. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not an extension of Bosniak political historiography, nor should its institutional authority serve as a means of retrospectively legitimizing a one-sidedly written history before the international public. That is where I see the essential problem.

For years, we have witnessed the same pattern. First, one political center defines what is supposedly the interest of BiH. Then the same position is unilaterally introduced into a common institution. After that, the common institution is unilaterally used to give that position the appearance of general consensus. Finally, any opposition from Republika Srpska is portrayed as opposition to the state. There is nothing common about that. It is a political method.

And it is precisely such unilateral use of common institutions that Republika Srpska must systematically reject. It is particularly absurd that today, while we are being told that this is a serious institutional work and an official diplomatic record, the public is witnessing a bizarre and caricatural dispute between Bisera Turković and Elmedin Konaković over who the so-called monograph actually belongs to, who prepared the material and whose money financed the entire project.

Konaković claims that it was Turković who, during her term in office, formed a working group to prepare the so-called monograph, that Ministry officials and external associates participated in the work, that budget money was allocated and spent on the external associates, and that after leaving the Ministry, Turković took the materials with her and has now published them in a book under her own name. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs additionally announced that a preliminary comparison had established significant similarities between the institutional material and Turković's publication. She rejects those accusations and has announced legal action. The bazaar never disappoints when it comes to the sheer amount of absurdity. So, Turković and Konaković are now staging their own political reality show over authorship, materials and public money. That is their problem.

Our problem begins where both of them behave as though one question has already been settled and no one else has the right to discuss it: that what they have decided to call the diplomacy of BiH since 1992 automatically represents Republika Srpska as well. It does not. And there is no ambiguity about that.

If Konaković's allegations about the use of budget money and the subsequent private use of institutionally produced material are true, then this is no longer a matter of literary authorship or political vanity. It is an issue requiring serious financial and legal scrutiny and, where there are grounds for it, a criminal-law investigation. But there is another kind of responsibility that is politically even more important for Republika Srpska.

Konaković is now accusing Turković of privatizing a Ministry project, while at the same time adopting the political construct of that same project and attempting to institutionalize it as a diplomatic chronology of BiH.

That is an interesting definition of protecting a common institution: challenging the privatization of the book while retaining a monopoly over its political content. Republika Srpska has no reason to participate in such logic. History cannot be nationalized by an administrative seal.

And the political memory of a people cannot be confiscated by a unilateral decision of a Bosniak minister. That is precisely why the Republika Srpska Office for International Cooperation exists. Not so that we could seek a place in the margins of someone else's books. Not so that we could ask someone in Sarajevo to interpret us more accurately. And not so that we could retrospectively correct what others have already sent out into the world about us. But so that Republika Srpska can speak for itself. Directly, institutionally and without intermediaries.