Bosnia Has Plan, But no Money, to Fight Radicalisation

Last year, two families from the central Bosnian town of Zenica reported their daughters to the local police, worried they were becoming religiously radicalised by their partners.

The girls, aged 15 and 19 were placed in a safe house, but the older child, no longer a minor, insisted on leaving and returning to her partner, who was considered a radical Islamist by the local police.

“They wanted intensely to return to their partners, verging on blind trust,” said Azra Hrncic-Sehic, a psychologist with Medica Zenica, an organisation supporting women and children traumatised by war or who are the victims of violence.

The state’s hands were tied, not by the absence of a strategy to tackle radicalisation but by the failure to allocate any money to implement it, according to an investigation by the Bosnian arm of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN BiH.

BIRN BiH has found that local authorities in Bosnia are fighting the threat of radicalisation almost exclusively with money donated from abroad, if at all.

The Strategy for the Prevention and Fight against Terrorism 2015-2020 was adopted in July 2015 and an action plan passed in October 2016, but not single report has been made on its implementation. Indeed, the supervisory body that monitors implementation of the strategy only became operational in mid-2017, according to the findings of BIRN BiH.

The first attempts to analyse the effectiveness of the 2015-2020 strategy were made in early 2018, and the results are not yet in, said Sead Turcalo, a professor of international security at the Faculty of Political Sciences in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

“What can be said on the basis of the available data is that the key priorities in the field of prevention, protection, investigations and response have been fulfilled only on a small scale,” Turcalo told BIRN BiH.

“The problem is that not even the activities whose completion, according to the action plan, was due to happen within one or two years, have been completed,” he said. “And there is no guarantee they will be implemented.”

‘No cash allocations’

The Ministry of Civil Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina said that, under the strategy, the ministry should consult with the education sector in amending or developing teaching with the aim of preventing all forms of hatred, hate speech and violent extremism.

However, the education sector “has not undertaken independent activities and there have been no cash allocations for this purpose,” the ministry told BIRN.

In the course of its investigation, BIRN submitted FOIA requests to all state bodies listed in the Strategy and Action Plan. Of 41, 15 replied, of which 10 referred BIRN BiH to the Ministry of Security or another institution. Sixteen did not respond, including the Bosnia and Herzegovina prosecution and the Intelligence and Security Agency.

The only institution to respond in full was the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Bosnia’s mainly Serb entity, Republika Srpska.

Out of 12 education ministries under Bosnia’s highly decentralised power structure, only one replied, that of the Western Herzegovina canton in Bosnia’s mainly Muslim and Croat Federation.

The ministry said it had neither allocated money nor implemented any of the activities contained in the Action Plan.

The strategy does not specify exactly how much money should be spent, but lists sources of funding for each item, in most cases from the budgets of the relevant institution.

The Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not specifically allocated financial resources to implement the strategy, the state Ministry of Security confirmed.

The burden has fallen on foreign donations, notably $1.5 million from USAID for projects working with 1,300 parents and children in 15 local communities and another $1 million from Britain.

Turcalo blamed a “lack of awareness of the need for domestic institutions to be the owners of the process.”

‘No concrete progress’

Besides prevention of radicalisation, Turcalo said “very little” had also been done on protecting critical infrastructure and cyber security, which are among the strategy’s key priorities.

The Ministry of Security had not provided BIRN BiH with a complete report on the implementation of the strategy by the time this story was published. The first implementation report is expected to be adopted early next year.

The ministry did, however, say that “all action plans at all levels of authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been adopted.”

The OSCE, on the other hand, which monitors the work of the strategy supervisory body, said that in fact only the Federation Interior Ministry and the cantonal ministries of interior had adopted action plans.

“The Strategy is relevant for other authorities in the Federation as well,” said the OSCE Mission to Bosnia.

“Local action plans, which would arise from the roof strategy and action plan, would constitute welcome developments, at the same time making sure that local institutions and society would take over full responsibility and also ensuring the allocation of resources for their implementation.”

The Ministry of Security cited the submission to parliament of revisions to Bosnia’s Criminal Code as one of the successes of the strategy so far.

But the OSCE, noting that such a step is a key part of the strategy, lamented that parliament had yet to pass amendments with regards a series of new crimes listed under the Council of Europe’s Convention on Prevention of Terrorism, which Bosnia has ratified. “Although a working group was formed,” it said, “no concrete progress has been made.”

The mission also highlighted the fact that the two most important posts in the Ministry of Security’s Department for Combating Terrorism – the assistant minister and department chief – have been vacant for three years.

Reintegration ‘essential’

One of the few items within the strategy for which money has been allocated is the installment of a video surveillance system at all border crossings by the end of this year. However, a contract for the work has still to be signed and work will only begin in 2019.

In terms of the role of the Internet in radicalisation, Mario Janecek, an expert adviser on fighting terrorism with the Ministry of Security, said more should be done to regulate Internet portals, which, according to the strategy, falls under the jurisdiction of the Communications Regulatory Agency, CRA.

The CRA, however, told BIRN BiH that it does not have the capabilities to make “an assessment of the legality and harmfulness of Internet content” and that nothing had been undertaken since the strategy was drafted.

Janecek said too that deradicalisation in prisons was “long overdue.”

Bosnia citizens are no longer leaving to join armed Islamist groups on battlefields in Syria and Iraq, but there has been little done on the deradicalisation of those returning, including those in prison.

“This is extremely difficult due to the complexity of the entire organisation and political structure in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he said.

“The capacities of local and social services are not strong enough to be able to respond to those needs. We are conducting intensive discussions with international partners to find the best way to realise such activities and assistance.”

Turcalo, the Sarajevo professor of international security, said a program to reintegrate individuals convicted of terrorism and fighting in foreign wars, was of “essential importance”.

“Bearing in mind that we lack effective post-penalty treatment for other convicts, we can hardly expect it to be defined and implemented for this specific group,” he said.