October 20, 2008
By: Richard Holbrooke and Paddy Ashdown
Don’t forget Bosnia
Almost exactly 13 years ago, American leadership brought an end to Bosnia’s three and a half year war with the Dayton Peace Agreement. Today, the country is in real danger of collapse. As in 1995, resolve and trans-Atlantic unity is needed if we are not to sleep walk ourselves back into another Bosnian crisis.
Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, once the darling of the international community (and especially Washington) for his opposition to the nationalist Serb Democratic Party, has adopted that party’s agenda without being tainted with their genocidal baggage. His long-term policy seems clear: to place his Serb entity, Republika Srpska, in a position to secede if the opportunity arises. Exploiting the weaknesses in the country’s constitutional structure, the international communities’ weariness and the EU’s inability to stick by its conditionality, he has, in two years, reversed much of the real progress in Bosnia over of the last thirteen, crucially weakened the institutions of the Bosnian state and all but stopped the country’s evolution into a functioning (and EU-compatible) state.
Dodik’s actions have been fueled by Russian encouragement and Russian petrodollars. In addition, his longtime rival, the senior president of all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silajdzic, has often made statements about the need to abolish the two entities that make up Bosnia, and create an undivided, non-federal country. Although Dodik professes to respect Dayton and Silajdzic openly wishes to revise it, in fact both men are violating the basic principle of Dayton: a federal system within a single state. The toxic interaction between them is at the heart of today’s crisis in Bosnia.
As a result the suspicion and fear that began the war in 1992 has been reinvigorated, and an unhealthy and destructive dynamic is now accelerating, with Bosniak and Croat nationalism on the rise. The recently-held local elections gave a fillip to the nationalist parties.
The situation has been allowed to reach this tipping point by a complacent and distracted international community. While the Bush Administration virtually turned its back on Bosnia, the European Union became deeply engaged in the country; the open door to EU membership has been the critical lever for pressing reforms in Bosnia since it was first made policy in 2003. But the EU did not develop a coherent strategy commensurate with its exposure, potential, and responsibility. Worse still, by proclaiming progress where it has not been achieved, the EU has weakened not only its own influence in the country, but also the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the international military presence, (nowadays EUFOR, which succeeded NATO), both of which had been the drivers of progress in Bosnia since they were put into place by Dayton.
It is no coincidence that the degeneration of the High Representative’s influence has coincided with the withdrawal of the US military and the hollowing-out of EUFOR, which now has little in the way of operational capacity. Now, despite the danger signals, France and Spain apparently want to pull the plug on EUFOR altogether before the end of the year, seemingly to prove the purely technical point that EU missions can end.
The EU, fixated on a still undefined “transition” from OHR to an EU-centered mission, seems intent on emptying its toolbox before it knows what tools it will need to enable Bosnia’s transition. It first failed to back its man on the ground, the able Slovak diplomat Miroslav Lajčák, at a crucial moment, fatally undermining his authority in the country.
Like Milorad Dodik, Russia is opportunistically exploiting the EU’s weak resolve, its agenda being to make trouble for the US and EU where possible. Yet Moscow’s equities in Bosnia pale in comparison to those of the EU or US. Their attempts next month to close OHR, regardless of whether the job is done, must be rebuffed. OHR has to remain open – or a similarly-strong organization set-up – until the conditions for the international community’s transition to a more normal EU presence are met. The United States, even in its current lame-duck state, must re-engage.
Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, should initiate an independent study, whose aim would be to propose a new trans-Atlantic policy, backed by Washington’s full engagement and strong EU conditionality, which can lead to deeper and broader international involvement in the country. This study could be discussed between the new U.S foreign policy team and European leaders. A collapse of the Dayton Peace Agreement would be an unnecessary and unwanted additional problem for the new administration.
Post-Irish referendum, the EU’s foreign policy will be, above all, a Balkan policy. Attention has recently been on Kosovo. But Bosnia has always been the bigger and, ultimately more dangerous challenge. The country’s decline can still be arrested, provided the EU wakes up, the new US administration gets engaged and both renew their commitment to Bosnia’s survival as a state, maintain an effective presence of international troops and begin the process of strengthening the international community’s approach long-term, including by finding ways to untie Bosnia’s constitutional knot.
It’s time to pay attention to Bosnia again, if we don’t want things to get very nastily worse, -possibly quite quickly. And by now, we should all know the price of that.
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Paddy Ashdown was the international community’s High Representative and EU Special Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006
Richard Holbrooke was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia.