After wasting years and ending his mandate ingloriously, followed by a sudden retreat across the ocean, Michael Murphy is once again attempting to lecture someone in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said Staša Košarac, Deputy Chair of the Council of Ministers.
“It would be most appropriate to quote the legendary Zoran Radmilović in the cult comedy Radovan III: ‘Stanislav, you’re overdoing it…’ That pretty much sums up Murphy’s observations,” Košarac remarked.
As if the damage he caused this country weren’t enough, Košarac added, Murphy now feels the need to analyze the Dayton Agreement, political dynamics, and the current crisis in BiH.
“Unsurprisingly, in Murphy’s broad but shallow analysis, the ‘evil Serbs’ are once again to blame—especially President Milorad Dodik, who refused the April Package in 2006 and has, for twenty years, prevented BiH from developing outside of the Dayton framework. He also lays partial blame on the Croats for insisting on electing their own representatives,” Košarac wrote on Instagram.
He went on to note that, according to Murphy, the Bosniaks bear the least responsibility—he merely faults them for being too impatient to wait for a unitary state to fall into their hands, accusing them of “showing their cards too early.”
“Of course, in Murphy’s view, the only ones without blame are the actual sources of the crisis—illegitimate Christian Schmidt, the former U.S. ambassador himself, and nearly all past U.S. administrations, who have so drastically altered, devalued, and hollowed out ‘Dayton—the foundation for building BiH’ that the entire structure is now tilted and at risk of collapse,” Košarac emphasized.
He added that Murphy’s analysis, made for the Federation’s media, is riddled with contradictions: first, Murphy claims that BiH’s problems won’t be solved by think tanks in Brussels and Washington but only through internal consensus—only to then call for increased international interventionism against Republika Srpska.
“His obsession with President Dodik only proves how much Murphy is still stung by his defeat in that conflict. He rambles through history, invokes ‘constructive Serbs for BiH,’ and continues to show that, instead of going public, he would do better to remain in retirement—given all the problems he left behind,” Košarac concluded.
Source: RTRS
