Old Script, New Ghost: Mladic’s Death Looms Large as Bosnia Election Campaign Opens

As Bosnia and Herzegovina's general election campaign officially opened on Friday, analysts warned voters to brace for a rerun of a familiar playbook: public money spent on buying political loyalty, recycled promises and the ethno-national mobilisation that has defined every campaign since the end of Bosnia’s 1992-5 war. But this year carries one new, combustible ingredient with the death of Ratko Mladic, the convicted architect of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, whose recent death has instantly become a campaign issue in its own right. “We are essentially seeing the same pattern, the same model by which previous campaigns were run,” Tanja Topic, a political analyst from Republika Srpska, RS, Bosnia’s Serb-majority entity, said. She argues that the campaign’s defining feature in the Serb entity so far has been the misuse of public funds, "money belonging to taxpayers", spent freely at every level of government, from the administration in Banja Luka, the Republika Srpska’s administrative centre, to entity level. Topic links this pre-campaign spending spree directly to a technical reform: the introduction of biometric voter identification and the scanning of ballots.