Bosnia lurches into a new crisis

In the piano bar of the Hotel Bosna in Banja Luka's centre, the former finance minister of Republika Srpska, Svetlana Cenic, offered a bleak vision of life in Bosnia's Serb entity.

"I'm living in the most corrupt part of Europe, in a kind of dictatorship with no human freedoms," she said, smoking the first of a series of long, brown cigarettes. "I can't work here. The few times I have had interest from companies, the government has intervened. I'm described on the news as a traitor and a spy. I'm even approached in the street by people and told I should be arrested."

Cenic's "offence" was to have questioned what she calls the "crazy" and corrupt economics of the largely autonomous Republika Srpska, which is a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a place, she says, where politics have also been corrupted to a dangerous degree by the rhetoric of ethnic identity.

Three hours' drive away in a restaurant in Sarajevo, in the heart of the Muslim-Croat federation that makes up the rest of Bosnia, Danis Tanovic, Bosnia's Oscar-winning director, was just as gloomy. No Man's Land, which Tanovic wrote and directed, won the Academy award for best foreign film in 2001.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/03/bosnia-war-nationalism-poor-economy

how Tito was able that hold that together for so long.

And there were plenty of loans from the West on very favorable terms, owing to the fact that Tito told Stalin to stuff it and refused to join the Warsaw Pact. Also, in Bosnia, any of the three major ethnic groups had veto power over proposed policy changes.

Whatever one thinks of the Tito regime, it was much less disastrous than what replaced it.

I hope there is no repetition of anything like the horrors of the 90s.