Komsic Rocks Bosnian SDP By Quitting Posts

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By Elvira Jukic

Nermin Pecanac, a former SDP member and the leader of the Social Democratic Union, SDU, a small opposition party, said Lagumdzija himself should step down now.

“Zeljko Komsic’s decision is very brave and is a reaction to the autocratic leadership of Lagumdzija,” he said commenting Komsic’s decision to resign from all posts in the Social Democratic Party, SDP. Komsic has not yet given an official explanation for the move to the public.

Pecanac said it was also a call for the democratization of the SDP, as the party functioned like a clique of Lagumdzija’s and his closest collaborators, such as Damir Hadzic, Marin Ivanisevic and Svetozar Pudaric.

Sarajevo professor Asim Mujkic predicted that Komsic might now leave the SDP entirely.

“I don’t think two persons like that [Lagumdzija and Komsic] can be in the same leadership of a party,” Mujkic said.

The party president Zlatko Lagumdzija and Komsic met in Sarajevo on Tuesday but did not divulge the contents of their meeting.

Komsic urged reporters to be patient and said he will announce more details on Wednesday.

Referring to the number of people who voted him onto the country state presidency, he said: “I ask those 337,000 to be patient because you will not get anything useful until tomorrow.”

Lagumdzija announced that the SDP presidency would meet on Wednesday and speak afterwards about what was happening in the party.

Professor Slavo Kukic, from Mostar University, told Balkan Insight that Komsic’s resignation was a sign that the SDP needed reorganization.

“The next year for the SDP will not be easy and it will be a year of reorganization, maybe even of the removal of the whole leadership,” Kukic said.

It was not good for the party that the leadership was so overshadowed by Lagumdzija, he added.

Komsic previously told the daily Dnevni list that he had decided to resign out of principle.

“This cannot go on like this anymore, so this was a logical step. I will stay a member of the SDP, but with no posts and I will continue to fight for the principles of Social Democracy,” he said.

“I remain a member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina and I will continue to work in that post in full capacity with all the obligations that this entails,” Komsic added.

According to reports, Komsic sent his letter of resignation from his posts to the SDP president Lagumdzija, the Central Committee chief, Svetozar Pudaric, and the General Secretary, Nermin Niksic.

Komsic was deputy president of the SDP but also held the post of ethnic Croat member of the tripartite state presidency. He was also a member of the SDP presidency and a member of the Central Committee.

Controversially, many Bosnian Croats have refused to consider him as their community’s legitimate representative in the state presidency.

They claim he received most of his votes from Bosniaks [Muslims] and from the ethnically undeclared. The SDP is a left-of-centre secular party but is Bosniak-dominated.

Balkan Insight

The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.

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