Kalay’s Useful Idiots

Key Theses:

1. Criticism of Schmidt’s Judicial Farce
   The author harshly criticizes the legal process against Dodik, calling it a political and legal voluntarism orchestrated by High Representative Schmidt, whose legitimacy is questionable.

2. Dodik’s Counterproductive Strategy
   Dodik initially accepted the rules but later rejected them, dragging his party into a risky and potentially disastrous political path.

3. Bosnia and Herzegovina as a Politically Sterile Society
   Unlike Serbia and Croatia, BiH lacks politically and culturally vibrant cities. The combination of foreign bureaucracy and domestic party greed has led to political apathy and paralysis.

4. Criticism of Both Serbian and Bosniak Political Elites
   Both leaderships are portrayed as collaborators without an occupier—stuck in outdated ideological narratives and incapable of reform.

5. Inzko–Schmidt as Modern-day Kalay
   The High Representatives are seen as heirs to Benjamin Kalay, working to prevent Serb-Bosniak political rapprochement through manipulation and engineered divisions.

6. Mutual Downfall of Dodik and Sarajevo’s Politics
   Dodik’s actions may lead to the loss of all gains for Republika Srpska, while Sarajevo’s celebration of his fall masks its own total failure.

7. Conclusion: No Political Subjectivity in BiH
   Bosnia remains a passive and externally managed society. Its leaders serve as useful idiots in a new, more economic and bureaucratic form of occupation.

By Elis Bektaš

Shortly before and after the first-instance verdict against Milorad Dodik at the Court of BiH, I wrote several columns in which I offered harsh criticism of the entire judicial farce orchestrated by the not-so-high High Representative Schmidt.

The less perceptive among my readers interpreted these texts as support for Milorad Dodik, probably because I believe that a society should not rid itself of its political pests through the political and legal voluntarism of foreign overseers with dubious legitimacy.

By agreeing to participate in Schmidt’s judicial show, Dodik accepted certain rules of the game, only to later reject them after the non-final verdict was issued, plunging into a highly risky adventure of unilaterally withdrawing from previously ratified state-level agreements on police and judicial bodies.

Neither the murky legitimacy of “Gauleiter” Schmidt nor Sarajevo’s ambitions to further reduce entity-level competences with international backing justify Dodik’s decision to drag his party and coalition partners into a game with highly uncertain outcomes.

Although for a time it seemed like Dodik was in control—backed by a competent team of legal advisors—it turned out that he is still just a provincial politician. Together with political Sarajevo, he fell into the Kalay-style offside trap masterfully laid by the Inzko–Schmidt duo, who sent them, in football terms, to “go get some kebabs”.

Dodik’s Miscalculation

Dodik made his latest decisions based on assessments that could soon prove to be catastrophically wrong. He clearly does not understand that BiH society is not political in nature. Its political essence has been anesthetized—perhaps even euthanized—by three decades of management by the Office of the High Representative.

Unlike Serbia, which maintains some degree of sovereignty and has several large cities that serve as centers of modern political consciousness, and unlike Croatia, which pursues political maturity through the thorny bureaucratic path of Brussels, BiH is a political desert. The toxic mix of foreign bureaucratic rule and insatiable local party politics has been devastating for its political awareness.

Cities Without Political Energy

BiH has no cities as centers of cultural, political, or social life. Even its largest settlements, like Sarajevo and Banja Luka, are little more than a collection of suburbs—completely barren in their capacity to foster modernity or emancipation.

In terms of political development, BiH is even further from the United States than it is from Serbia or Croatia. Thus, Dodik’s attempt to imitate Donald Trump is nothing more than a pathetic and cartoonish performance by a worn-out politician deep in the terminal phase of hubris syndrome.

No Public Backing, No Political Weight

Today, no political force in BiH, including Dodik’s, enjoys broad public support—unlike the 1990s. Without this, their maximalist goals cannot be diluted or legitimized. Their lack of domestic support is also the reason for the absence of strong international backing—despite what Banja Luka and Sarajevo may have hoped.

The world sees Bosnia in three ways:

1. One part is tired of it altogether.
2. Another sees it as a manipulation zone for achieving goals elsewhere.
3. The third—represented by Inzko and Schmidt—views BiH through the eyes of Benjamin Kalay, who believed that a Serb-Bosniak political rapprochement must be prevented at all costs.

Trapped in Outdated Ideas

Blinded by the illusion of power and driven by gluttonous appetites, both Serbian and Bosniak political elites have proven incapable of understanding reality. Instead, they remain loyal to outdated ideological constructs, building Potemkin villages and deluding themselves with hallucinated visions of glorious futures tailored to their fantasies.

These political elites are nothing more than obedient laborers on a construction site where new, subtler, more economically driven forms of occupation are being built. Both Dodik and Sarajevo are mere collaborators without an occupier, unable to comprehend that they’re on the brink of irrelevance—reduced to the role of local administrators from the Austro-Hungarian era.

Final Blow

Thanks to Dodik’s leap outside the bounds of rationality, Republika Srpska stands to lose a lot. His current arrogance will serve as a cautionary tale: big words mean nothing without real substance behind them.

On the other side, Sarajevo will likely celebrate Dodik’s downfall, failing to realize that it’s also celebrating its own total defeat—a political culture that can’t even clean the trash in its own neighborhoods, let alone build a viable state.

Had Sarajevo abandoned its neurotic dependency on the international community, and had Dodik approached compromise without poisoning it with crude nationalist and chauvinist rhetoric, perhaps both Serb and Bosniak societies would have something to look forward to.

Instead, they will go down in history as politically sterile organisms who entrusted their fate to a mix of sly and clumsy fraudsters—nothing more than useful idiots in service of the long-dead Benjamin Kalay and his modern successors.

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