“Republika Srpska will have a referendum”: the rhetorical politics of Milorad Dodik

Abstract

The theory and practice of referenda played an important role in the break-up of Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), where two divisive referenda preceded the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. After the failure of constitutional reforms in April 2006, Milorad Dodik, then Republika Srpska's prime minister, suggested that Republika Srpska had the right to hold its own referendum, with separation from Bosnia an unstated (yet soon openly discussed) aspiration. This paper presents an account of the emergence of Republika Srpska referendum discourse and how it was articulated by Milorad Dodik to establish his SNSD party as the dominant force in Republika Srpska. It documents the dialogical context and rhetorical gambits used by Dodik to articulate the discourse, tracing how it evolved in response to regional events and elections. The paper concludes by considering the limits of interpreting Dodik as a demagogue and of a discourse-centered approach to political rhetoric.

Keywords:

• rhetoric
• referendum
• discourse analysis
• Republika Srpska
• Bosnia

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Adis Maksić for research assistance with this paper. His Master's thesis (Maksić 2009) was an important stimulus to investigate the subject further. US National Science Foundation award number 0827016 provided the funding for his subsequent graduate research assistantship at Virginia Tech. I would also like to thank the US and international officials who spoke with me on background about Dodik and Bosnian politics. Many thanks are also due to Obrad Kesić for patiently explaining to me how certain issues are seen by Dodik. Finally, I would like to thank Florian Bieber for accommodating an enlarged paper, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Notes

The construction “natural Serb areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina” is from the first party program of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS); see Oslobodjenje, 2 August 1990. Later that month, separatist Serb forces in the Krajina organized a referendum restricted to Croatian Serbs that asked if they supported Serb autonomy and sovereignty in Croatia. Karadžić defended this action, though he acknowledged it had no legal force. But at a meeting founding the SDS branch for Novo Sarajevo, he held out the idea of a referendum as a legitimate defensive response to the drift toward a confederation where former Yugoslav republics would be functionally independent states: “There can be no confederation without Serb peoples' consent. And we don't want confederation, our choice is federal Yugoslavia. In the final instance, Serb peoples will insist on a referendum for expressing its will regarding the structure of its state.” See Oslobodjenje, 22 August 1990, p. 4, and 23 September 1990, p. 4.

The word count was compiled by creating a relevant electronic archive of articles. This began by using the available search engine within the Dnevni Avaz archive (purchased through subscription). Because the four keywords have different grammatical forms in use, the constant stem forms of the keywords referendum, otcjep, nezavisn, and samostaln were used. This large collection of articles was then extracted from the DA archive and individually inspected. Extraneous articles were discarded. The keywords were then manually counted only if Republika Srpska was referenced in some way in the same paragraph. Keywords occurring in the title were counted only when the title also cited the RS.

There is an enormous archive of Dodik's rhetoric translated into English by BBC Monitoring Europe and available through LexisNexis Academic. I have largely followed the translation in these documents. Adis Maksić translated other references and articles.

This denotative/connotative distinction has a certain heuristic value but a deeper analysis would investigate cognitive psychological processes like priming, substitution, and anchoring. Barthes developed the distinction when considering images, and it is worth noting that images, particularly maps and visual representations of RS territory, are part of RS referendum discourse. For an example, see the widely circulated photograph of Dodik pointing to a large map of Republika Srpska in Champion (2010).

An aspect of the embodied nature of Dodik's reasoning relates to his own personal health. Dodik is known to suffer from debilitating migraines that leave him unable to speak and function. His constant complaints about how foreigners constantly put “pressure” on the RS, therefore, have a visceral corporal register for him, and are all the more deeply felt.

In a revealing appeal to a family metaphor, Dodik said in July 2010 that “we will never forget that the Serb Republic is the unwanted child in Bosnia-Herzegovina, that many people in Bosnia-Herzegovina, outside the Serb Republic, do not want to see the Serb Republic” (RSPTV 2010). It can be argued that an unconscious sense of “unwantedness” and a conscious sense of being stigmatized (for genocide) are the foundations of Bosnian Serb political discourse. The gendered dimensions of Dodik's discourse, and of nationalism in general, are topics that deserve more consideration that is presented here.

For various examples of Milorad Dodik's style, see the clips gathered under his name on the YouTube website.

Plavsic was one of the most senior Bosnian Serb leaders during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was a member of the Bosnian presidency before the war, a member of the Republika Srpska government during the war, and the president of Republika Srpska after the conflict. Breaking with the Pale-dominated SDS, she received some Western support and together with Dodik tried to soften the hard ethnocratic nature of the RS and its hostility toward the Dayton accords. She was indicted by the ICTY in 2000 and voluntarily surrendered herself in 2001. Two years later, she admitted her guilt and was sentenced to 11 years in jail for crimes against humanity and forced expulsions prompted by religious, political, and racial motives. She was released after serving two-thirds of her sentence.

Dodik was tried for embezzlement of public funds after he left office but was acquitted of all charges.

NDI officials worked on providing information on “voter demand” – for jobs and economic development – not on what the SNSD should say to voters. They stopped working with the SNSD in 2007.

The BIH chairman of the Council of Ministers until 2012, Nikola Spirić, is a case in point. He had been a member of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) in 1993, then by 1998 an SDS member, then in 2000 a PDP official. In 2002 he switched again, this time to the SNSD.

Email correspondence with Donald Hays, 8 February 2011.

Tihić's legal challenge was spurred by a Constitutional Court decision ordering the RS to remove the prefix “Srpska” from the names of 13 towns in the entity renamed during the war. The prefix was judged to be discriminatory. Tihic's legal challenge made the claim that the very name “Republika Srpska” was ethnically exclusivist and discriminated against Bosnians who were not Serb.

The tone and style of Schwartz-Schilling's tenure were established by his first television address on 31 January 2006. He appeared seated very comfortably in a soft armchair with a roaring fire behind him. He announced that the OHR would be closed in the near future, and he would become simply the EU special representative to the country.

A few days later, in a lecture at the Belgrade city assembly, Dodik, who has a house in Belgrade, undermined his “no adventurer” claim by describing how the calling of a referendum on the RS's secession from BIH would be “a political adventure” (Beta 2004).

In June 2007, former high representative Paddy Ashdown published a book called Swords and Poughshares. A passage in the book explained that Ashdown relied on his friendship with Chris Patton at the European Commission in order to have his agenda supported as European criteria for BiH to meet. The passage became headline news in Nezavisne Novine as confirmation that Ashdown was leveraging BiH's desire to join the EU to impose unnecessary requirements on the RS. Dodik had the offending passage framed and made a point of showing it to visiting ambassadors to underscore his arguments.

Dodik's agitation did earn him a victory, for Inzko decided not to extend the tenure of the foreign judges working on civil law cases, including corruption, but only those serving on war crimes cases.

Interview with Srdjan Blagovcanin, 21 October 2010. Transparency International's reports are available on the web site: http://www.ti-bih.org.