A few imaginary lines or some news snake oil on Croat entities

In today’s brave new media world, stories, articles and interviews are quickly posted, reposted and shared. While it is making life difficult for many media outlets to get the reader to come their site or buy the newspaper or magazine, stories get a round quickly. Sometimes it seems that the reposting portals might do just a bit more than circulating an existing text.

The original interview

It took me thus by surprise when some friends and acquaintances asked me a few days ago whether I really supported the creation of a Croat entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not having suffered amnesia recently this news surprised me as much as my friends. The source for these claims was the “re-print” of an interview I gave a few days ago to the Croatian daily Večernji List on the webportal poskok.info (meaning viper in Croatian).

The title of the „interview“ was “Hrvatski entitet je isključivo hrvatsko pitanje. Radi se o naime o suverenom pravu koje se Bošnjaka ne tiče…”  a line one would not be able to find in the original interview. Following many questions which the portal correctly copied from the interview (without ever mentioning the original source), there comes the surprise:

The question “Do Croats have the right to ask for their entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina?” which Večernji List never asked me followed by an answer I never gave:

“Of course they do, this is as if you’d ask me does the buyer of a car get the steering wheel for this car? Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina are a constituent people and accordingly to all [sic!]UN convention sovereign people have the right even to self-determination and to declare independence. In this sense, the demand for territorial autonomy inside the state that is not questioned is a normal and legitimate process. The problem of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina is more the problem of the right expression of what that people anyhow have the right to considering that their political elite does a bad job and is inarticulate, whereas a part of the Croat political forces many years openly serves the Bosniak national project.

Broadly seen, Croats in BiH already have some ‘entities’ considering that cantons per definition are entities for themselves are entities [sic]. Entities in international law are nothing else but territorial units with specific institutions and competences.The international community constantly commits legal violence against Croats in BiH. The questions is when this body will radicalize and then the question will arise whether they will stay in BiH. Namely, Croats in BiH are above all a small nation who hold the balance, if you turn them against BiH I think that BiH is finished as a political idea.”

The fictional answer contains bad metaphors and the absurd idea that UN conventions have anything to say about constituent people, their right to self-determination or entities.

Following the next question the creative interviewer returned to an original question by VL, but took the liberty to embellish the answer (the added sections marked in bold) :

I think that the odds for this in current circumstances, are very slim, but politics is changeable and the question is what will be tomorrow. Remember Kosovo. Who foresaw the independence of this province? And Kosovo is not inhabited by a constituent people, but an ethnic minority in Serbia.

The failed constitutional reforms in BiH in 2006 and 2009 demonstrated that even minimal change to the Dayton Constitution is nearly impossible. Creating a Croat entity would be a major change to the Dayton Constitution and is opposed by Bosniak [the text in VL mistakenly writes Bosnian] politicians if it affects only the Federation.

Certainly the RS would oppose the changes if it would also affect the RS. As a result, I cannot see this coming about, unless this is part of a grand bargain between the political elites. However, the record has been poor. Finally, the census of next year is likely to show two things. First that Croats are much smaller in number than Bosniaks and Serbs and that many Croats do not live in areas with whom the Bosniak elite manipulates as ‘nominally Croat’ regions.  In this manner the theory of multiethnic Bosniaks is failing considering that ethnically mixed regions of BiH generally exist in regions that used to be part of Herceg Bosna.

These two points strength the arguments for creating a Croat entity but the question of its realization depends only on Croats. Frequently the wrong question is asked in public—will Bosniaks allow Croats this and to this one constantly returns. There is nothing Bosniaks have to allow Croats and neither Croats Bosniaks. The sovereign right of people are defined for themselves and concern only the nation to which it relates.”

Also here the changes use terms like “Herceg Bosna“ which are not really widely used outside of, well “Herceg Bosna” and the additions constitute the opposite of my original statement which I concluded with the observation that “Both of these undermine arguments to create a Croatian entity.”

So why should I or anybody else care what some marginal portal called “Viper. Portal for Social Decontamination” makes up? With the quick spread of stories via social media such as twitter and facebook, few media are truly marginal. Thus, word spreads even from unserious portals such as poskok.info as it attested by the numerous friends and acquaintances who found out that I was a clumsy defender of the supposed Croat right to a third entity. Secondly, news spread to another, more serious news portal, dnevnik.ba which circulated the fake interview, getting hundreds of hits (currently the portal is down). Thus quickly a few made up questions from a marginal portal become “real.”