SARAJEVO: Irma Baralija is looking forward to Sunday, when she intends to vote and hopes to win her race as the southern Bosnian city of Mostar holds its first local election in 12 years.

To make that vote possible in her hometown, the 36-year-old Baralija had to sue Bosnia in the European Court of Human Rights for letting a stalemate between two major nationalist political parties prevent her, along about 100,000 other Mostar residents, from voting or running in a municipal election for over a decade.

By winning in court in October 2019, Baralija believes she has busted the myth (that nationalist parties) have been feeding to us, that an individual cannot move things forward, that we matter only as members of our ethnic groups.

Parties representing only one ethnic group have dominated Bosnian politics since the end of the country’s devastating 1992-95 war, which pitted its three main ethnic factions Serbs, Croats and Muslims against each other after the break-up of Yugoslavia.

I hope that my example will inspire citizens of Mostar, when they vote on Sunday, to be brave, to realise that as individuals we can bring positive change, said Baralija, who is running for a city council seat on the ticket of the small, multi-ethnic Our Party.

Divided between Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats, who fought fiercely for control over the city during the 1990s conflict, Mostar has not held a local poll since 2008, when Bosnia’s constitutional court declared its election rules to be discriminatory and ordered that they be changed.

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2020