Last summer, the tourist might have witnessed the singularly dysfunctional national Parliament in session, surrounded by an angry mass of the citizens it was supposed to represent. They blocked the Parliament building, protesting the Legislature’s failure to pass a law allowing new personal identification numbers to be issued.
For weeks, and for nefarious reasons too tedious to explain, the proposed law had been stuck, which prevented the issuing of ID numbers for newborn children, so that they were born but did not bureaucratically exist — the state depriving them of citizenship with their very first breath. Some had health problems so serious they couldn’t be addressed in the crumbling Bosnian health care system (which the good tourist would be wise to avoid), but they couldn’t seek help abroad, since their passports couldn’t be issued without the ID numbers.
The blockade, led by angry parents, lasted for days, until police officers finally disbanded the protesters. The national soccer team was playing an important match that day, and they wanted to watch the game in peace.
The law was eventually passed, but the new numbers reflect the part of the country where each child is from, serving only to further cement ethnic divisions. Nobody resigned; nobody was fired; nothing seemed to have changed.I'm reminded that it's a region where ethnic cleansing featured the destruction of a range of identity registers as part of rendering people stateless.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has a joint legislature for two entities — a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serbian republic.
Last year the Constitutional Court ruled that the nation's ID-numbers inappropriately signified the place of birth (and thus ethno-religious identity or potential land claim of individuals) and accordingly should be changed to provide the same national identification scheme for all citizens born in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Republika Srpska opposed this idea, arguing that an undifferentiated scheme would give more power to the nation at the expense of the two entities. The resulting political deadlock since February 2013 means that newborns lack a personal identification number and thus do not legally exist as citizens or for the purposes of passports, vaccinations and other services that require the identifier.
