Surveillance Claims Intensify Row Between Bosnian Officials

Bosnian Security Minister Dragan Mektic. Photo: Anadolu Agency

The conflict between Bosnia’s Security Minister Dragan Mektic and the country’s acting Chief Prosecutor, Gordana Tadic, which has been ongoing for months, reached a new peak this week.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Tadic’s office said it had received documents indicating that her movements and conversations with the vice-president of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, Ruzica Jukic, had been monitored.

Jukic confirmed that she had also received the same material.

“Bearing in mind that the conversation [with Jukic] was authentic, the Prosecutor’s Office will conduct a detailed analysis of the legality of these operations and of the persons who took part in the said activities,” a statement from the prosecutor’s office said.

Josip Simic Djindjic, a journalist from the Dnevno website, also told media on Wednesday that he had warned Tadic that she had been secretly monitored and her conversations recorded.

Republika Srpska state auditors resign In another development, which also pointed to growing political interference with the work of state or entity institutions, the Chief Auditor in Republika Srpska, Dusko Snjegota, and the Deputy Auditor, Darko Pejic, both resigned on Thursday. They quit their posts after RS President Dodik called for their dismissal on Wednesday, clearly dissatisfied with their reports, which had revealed numerous problems in the work of the mainly Serb entity’s institutions. The resignations have dismayed many, as for years, the post of RS Auditor was seen as one of the few remaining independent institutions in the entity seriously analysing the work its institutions and highlighting numerous problems and anomalies.

He said he had handed “transcripts of intercepted calls and monitored emails exchanged between Tadic and Jukic” to Tadic’s office on Wednesday.

However he did not explain where and how he obtained the material.

The submitted documents reportedly had the logo of the State Investigation and Protection Agency, SIPA, which appeared to imply that the top security agency had monitored Tadic and Jukic, and had passed on this information to Security Minister Mektic.

But Mektic denied that SIPA had monitored either Tadic or Jukic.

He also accused the state prosecutor of making wild allegations without checking them first.

“This is an attack on SIPA, an attack intended to destroy the dignity of this agency,” he said.

He also said that Tadic’s office “should be levelled to the ground” because of all the crime and corruption there.

Tadic reacted by calling for Mektic to resign for making such statements. Mektic refused.

On Wednesday evening, Tadic attempted to calm the situation by meeting heads of the police and security agencies and agreeing on future joint activities that will help reduce tensions within and between the agencies and their heads.

Mektic, however, did not attend the meeting.

While most ordinary Bosnians are fed up with such public quarrels and pay little heed to them, local experts suspect they reflect growing clashes between different personal and political agendas.

“The point is that we have irresponsible politicians and an often both corrupt and incompetent judiciary,” Adis Arapovic from the Centre for Civil Initiatives told BIRN.

Arapovic said he could not rule out suggestions that the conflict between Mektic and Tadic is a sign of the growing pressure which the top Bosnian Serb and Croat leaders – the President of Republika Spska, Milorad Dodik, and the head of the main Bosnian Croat party, the Croatian Democratic Union, Dragan Covic – are putting on Mektic, a Bosnian Serb opposition leader, ahead of the 2018 general elections.

Arapovic says these quarrels are also often used to distract public attention from the country’s real problems, one of which, he explained, is the absence of the rule of law.

Srdjan Puhalo, a veteran Banja Luka-based analyst and blogger, agreed that there is more to the feud than meets the eye.

“The attack on Mektic is an attack on state institutions. Who does it suit? It suits the ruling party in Republika Srpska, the Alliance of the Independent Social Democrats, and its leader Dodik, and partly suits the strongest Croat party [the Croatian Democratic Union],” Puhalo said.

“This is a very complex story, and I’m afraid that we only see what is going on on the surface. What it really means is difficult to define,” Puhalo told BIRN.