Politics
Bosnia vs. America, on and off the pitch
When two teams take to the World Cup pitch, their national histories and politics take the field with them. Seldom is that weight as present as in Wednesday’s knockout stage game between the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The U.S. played a decisive role in ending Bosnia’s nearly four-year war in the 1990s, a conflict that claimed more than 100,000 lives and produced the single worst crime on European soil since World War II — the Srebrenica Genocide, in which more than 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys, were summarily executed in early July 1995.
“The United States is an indispensable ally,” said Reuf Bajrović, the vice president of the US-Europe Alliance, a nonprofit group that works on mobilizing Americans around key European issues.
Bajrović, as many in Bosnia would, highlights that the existence of an “independent, free and sovereign Bosnia” as the direct result of U.S. involvement in ending the war and brokering a peace deal, widely known as the Dayton Peace Accords — signed in Dayton, Ohio.
Thirty years later, the country faces internal disputes and struggles with a political system that is deeply vulnerable to nationalist manipulation. But reaching this stage and competing against their erstwhile liberator has unleashed a rare moment of collective elation across the Balkan nation.
“A nation which was supposed to be erased from history is competing with the most powerful and influential nation in the world,” Bajrović continued. “The euphoria is absolute,” he continued.
Even the country’s most famous footballing son, former AC Milan star Zlatan Ibrahimović, said he felt “goosebumps” watching Bosnia’s fairytale run to the round of 32. Ibrahimović, who was born in Sweden but embraces his father’s Bosnian heritage, had earlier trolled his fellow Fox Sports co-anchors by playing pop-folk songs by Bosnian singer Lepa Brena as an homage to his roots.
Yet back home, some worry that America’s more recent role in Bosnia’s brittle political order has been anything but benign.
“Until Trump entered the scene, there was bipartisan support for Bosnia… after all, Americans are the founding fathers of the peace deal that became the Bosnian constitution,” said prominent author and political analyst Dragan Bursać, who is based in Banjaluka.
Two Trump administrations have steadily hollowed out that commitment, and some of the most destabilizing figures in Bosnia right now are Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani and Rod Blagojevich.
Blagojevich, the disgraced former governor of Illinois, has promoted far-right talking points about a “persecuted Serbian Christian minority” — his own background is ethnically Serbian — by a “radicalized Muslim leadership” in the country.
Giuliani promotes the same kind of “Christian victimization” narratives as Blagojevich, and also often draws comparisons between Trump and Milorad Dodik, an ultranationalist pro-Putin Bosnian Serb leader, saying they’re victims of the same “lawfare” movement led by liberal or woke judges. Dodik was stripped of the presidency last year after directly violating the Bosnian constitution and encouraging separatist activity.
The “Christian victimization” rhetoric employs the same divisive logic that produced the war itself. In the 1990s, political and military leaders turned a country praised for its diversity against itself, pitting its nominally Orthodox Christian, Catholic and Muslim populations against one another as neighboring Serbia and Croatia backed forces across the border.
Giuliani’s and Blagojevich’s narratives have particular populist purchase with figures like Dodik, who was, until recently, on a U.S. sanctions and travel ban list. Giuliani is thought to have played a key role in getting the sanctions against Dodik lifted last year.
“Dodik is one of those European leaders who wholeheartedly supports Trump’s beliefs and sees himself as a mini-Trump in Bosnia,” Bursać continued.
Bosnia’s political system rests on intense ethnic power-sharing, which has now turned into one of its key weaknesses. In Banjaluka, the administrative seat of the Serb-majority entity of Republika Srpska, pro-Trump chants now ring out at rallies, including during a visit by Donald Trump Jr. in April.
“Now we’re facing a situation where many people would prefer the current U.S. administration ignore Bosnia as much as possible and not get involved, since they fear that there would be no positive effect,” Bursać explained.
Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, is a registered foreign agent for Dodik. His brother Joseph, along with Jesse Binnall — a former Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election — runs a company chasing a $1.8 billion investment in Bosnian airports, gas power plants and a pipeline.
The country that saved Bosnia is now, according to some accounts, actively engaged in undermining it.
“The U.S. policy in the 2020s is not something that Bosnians experienced in the past, and the U.S. never previously openly sided with nationalist Serb and Croats at the expense of the Bosniak-majority of the country,” Bajrović said.
As a rule, JD Vance seems to go out of his way to say whatever Donald Trump wants him to say, but from time to time, contradictions emerge between the president and the vice president.
Take the recently passed housing bill, for example, which arrived at the White House earlier this week.
As part of an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, the Ohio Republican said, “Frankly, Laura, I would love it if Democrats were willing — you know, not that they will agree with Republicans all the time — but if they were willing to work with us on lowering housing prices, on lowering gas prices, on actually making the lives of American citizens better. You know, we could have some real bipartisan compromise. That’s not what they’re talking about.”
I realize the vice president must be very busy, but it really isn’t that difficult to keep up with the basics of current events. In this case, when Vance said Democrats are unwilling to work with Republicans on priorities such as “lowering housing prices,” he turned reality on its head. It was literally last week when Democrats offered unanimous support for a bipartisan bill to address housing prices — legislation that members such as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts helped to write.
Democrats recognized that doing so would offer the GOP some election-season bragging rights, but Democrats did it anyway because they have prioritized governing and “actually making the lives of American citizens better” over partisan considerations.
But Vance didn’t just contradict reality; he also contradicted his boss.
Just one day before the vice president brazenly misled a national television audience, Trump was asked about the pending housing bill. “It’s very bipartisan; that means the Democrats like it,” the president saidwhile acknowledging that he hasn’t yet decided whether to sign it.
In other words, when Vance said policymakers “could have some real bipartisan compromise,” he seemed indifferent to the fact that we’ve already had some real bipartisan compromise — a detail that even Trump was willing to acknowledge a day earlier.
Whether the vice president will suffer for publicly contradicting the president remains to be seen.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
BELGRADE, Serbia — The nearly four-year Bosnian war in the 1990s set off a massive wave of displacement, with a third of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s pre-war population permanently leaving the country as refugees.
Team captain Edin Džeko, a 40-year-old striker who left his native Sarajevo soon after the war, has recalled playing soccer in the lulls between the daily barrage of sniper fire that defined the siege of the Bosnian capital and says he could never have imagined becoming a world-class player after watching the football pitches in his neighborhood reduced to “fields of scorched earth.”
Bosnia’s squad reflects that postwar diaspora. Left back Sead Kolašinac was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1993 to a family that left after Bosnia descended into war. Right back Amar Dedić was born in Austria after his parents left northern Bosnia during the war, and midfielder Benjamin Tahirović in Sweden to refugees from besieged Sarajevo.
And then there is the so-called Milwaukee Messi: young forward Esmir Bajraktarević, who was born in a Wisconsin to parents born in the eastern town that gave its name to the Srebrenica genocide.
BRUSSELS — The Matongé area of Brussels was filled with drums and flags on Wednesday evening as every bar and barber shop showed the DR Congo vs. England game — the biggest Congolese match since 1974, when it won the African Cup of Nations and competed in the World Cup under the name Zaire.
Belgium’s relationship with DR Congo is rooted in its colonial rule, a legacy that continues to shape political, cultural and diplomatic ties today. Up to 50,000 members of the Congolese diaspora live in Brussels, with the vibrant Matongé as the epicenter.
English fans in Matongé were few and far between — and mainly silent — throughout most of the match as their team trailed for a long period before turning the game around.
Despite Congo’s eventual narrow defeat, supporters were stoked by the team’s performance. “At the end of the day Congo was better than England because they overperformed and England underperformed,” said Darshan Pham, whose family hails from DR Congo. “That’s the beauty of the games, it’s a victory for them anyway because they made it so far.”
Sydney Jadot, who worked for five years in DR Congo where his family is from, also admired the team’s fight: “What can I say? I think Congo fought well — they put all their hearts [into it] and England is more thorough.”
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