There are people who lie for profit. There are those who lie out of fear. And there is a third kind – those for whom lying is a lifestyle, a social performance and a way of self-affirmation. In Sarajevo they are called by various names. These are the types who sit in front of shops and convince the crowd that they "passed Džeko between their legs in elementary school, 'that guy will'", were "on the verge of signing for Željezničar", that "one call separated them from millions", that "people from the top call them", that they "know everything", "can do everything" and "finish everything".

Such characters exist in every neighborhood. Usually they have one common trait: life objectively hasn't turned out particularly impressive for them, so they try to upgrade reality with verbal scenography. And everyone knows it. Society knows. The one who is speaking knows. But the show continues because over time it has become a social ritual.

The World of the Demi-Monde

And it was from exactly this world that Elmedin Konaković emerged. Not from diplomatic schools. Not from serious political institutions. Not from the academic world. But from the Sarajevo transitional demi-monde – a world of small and somewhat larger crime, schemes, "buddy" connections, improvisation and storytelling as the basic capital for impressing the interlocutor.

Konaković was never a serious basketball factor, despite subsequent attempts to transform his sports biography into an epic. He was a solid domestic player at a time when Bosnian-Herzegovinian basketball was on life support. After that he enters a series of jobs characteristic of transitional Sarajevo: shops, organizing tables at concerts, various schemes and attempts at private business. He left no serious mark in any of it.

But then the SDA appears – a perfect machine for producing political careers without particular qualifications. And Konaković had the height, looks and rhetorical abilities. A perfect package for political marketing. And suddenly a mahala character gets serious positions. He even gets a university diploma from FESTO, although he still can't name who his mentor was on his thesis.

He becomes the director of KK Bosnia, which he leads into the financial and organizational chaos from which the club was recovering for fifteen years. It didn't even hurt him, so they launch him to the top of cantonal politics where he soon becomes premier of Sarajevo Canton, with a mandate marked by water shortages, more media performance than reforms and policy that largely amounted to marketing and self-promotion.

In the end he becomes president of his own party and, on the wings of the international community, the American ambassador and the high representative, he reaches the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs of BiH. And it is precisely here that the complete collision of the mahala mentality with the reality of geopolitics and serious politics begins.

It might have worked at the cantonal level. In serious politics with serious players, hardly.

Because diplomacy is not a shop on Soukbunar where a story passes that you "dried out" someone through buddies. International politics does not function on the principle of "it's done". And that is precisely how Konaković's entire foreign policy sounds today.

While Christian Schmidt resigned under American pressure, and Milorad Dodik is jubilant because another long-time wish of his is coming true, while American representatives at the UN openly tell us that BiH can no longer count on the interventionism of the high representative, while relatives of lobbyists that Dodik pays in America are getting historic energy deals in BiH, while Washington's policy toward BiH is fundamentally changing – Konaković on podcasts and Facebook talks about how he "dried out" Dodik's lobbyists and "smashed" his efforts in America.

Because don't believe your eyes. Believe Dino's stories.

Believe him even when he says that SNSD was "swept away by a bulldozer" from state government, while that same party blocks the House of Peoples for months, European laws and BiH's European path. Believe him too when, while Dodik regularly goes to the Kremlin for meetings with Vladimir Putin, and Sarajevo in recent years is visited by serious international officials only by IShowSpeed, he talks about how BiH is a "champion of European integration" and a "jewel of European diplomacy".

Washington is Not a Cafe

Unfortunately, "patching", "drying", "smashing" and "sweeping with a bulldozer" may impress part of not particularly educated society from which Konaković came and with which he made his party of, but it will hardly improve by a millimeter the difficult position in which BiH and Bosniaks find themselves today.

And while the international framework on which the Troika built its policy is collapsing, Konaković continues to pretend to be a man who "holds the strings". This is perhaps the biggest problem with his political profile: a complete inability to distinguish between media performance and actual power and actual politics.

In a Sarajevo mahala, it is often enough to act confidently and talk louder than others. In serious geopolitics, it is not.

Washington is not a cafe. The State Department is not a society from a stairwell. And international relations are not con artistry.

That is why Bosnian-Herzegovinian diplomacy under Konaković, with the assistance of Denis Bećirović and Zlatko Lagumdžija, often looks like a bad Balkan remake of Monty Python: a man running through the corridors of international institutions, issuing bombastic statements, proclaiming victories that no one else sees, while actual political processes are taking place completely without him – and without other Bosniak representatives.

And the worst part of all? It is possible that Konaković truly believes his own story.