Short Paper on Corruption in Bih

SHORT PAPER ON CORRUPTION IN BIH

SITUATION
During the war 1992-95, Bosnia and Herzegovina experienced a breakdown in governmental structures creating an environment which allowed corruption to flourish. After the war, corrupted activities continued, as BiH not only went through a transition from wartime to peacetime, but also moved from a centrally controlled economy to a free market economy and from a socialist style government to a democracy .
The multilayered constitutional setup, an effect of the Dayton Peace Agreement, paved government along ethnic lines. The entities were provided with an autonomy that gave the political parties control over state assets, housing policy, licensing, and appointments to public offices and to management and executive functions of state owned companies, public utilities, tax collection, privatization processes, the security sector and so on. .
On the police side, apart from petty corruption deriving from specific activities such as traffic control, there are more serious aspects of the corruption of the police and other enforcement agencies in BiH. Involvement in organized crime is one of them where the local police are paid to ignore the problem or are too frightened to start an investigation. The problem does not lie with the inability of the local police to efficiently deal with these kinds of issues, the problem lies with the forces that exert over these issues, where police actions, or inactions, become arbitrary and selective and serve criminal and political interest groups rather than the citizens .
Corruption in the judicial system , and examples of corruption in public utilities, can be also found in these last years , are still present today.
It remains difficult to determine the extent of corruption in the health sector in BiH, due to the lack of data collection. Corruption does, however, exist on several levels and can be detected at a systematic level, i.e. large-scale theft of public money and in the major...