Bosnia is going bad again
The Times – 11 April 2011
Nothing better illustrates the West’s susceptibility to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than its contrasting policies towards Libya and Bosnia- Herzegovina. Maximum activity is applied “to prevent Libya becoming another Bosnia”; but inaction, born of fatigue, somnolence and simple bad judgement, is the response to Bosnia, as it slides back towards the status of a failed state, and possibly one at conflict with itself.
In December 2009, I joined the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to warn that, without stronger action to reverse the nationalist dynamic in Bosnia, there was a real risk that the country would break down into independent ethnic “statelets”. True to his word, Mr Hague made Bosnia a key foreign policy priority in the coalition agreement. Since then, the danger of Bosnia’s break-up has not decreased, it has deepened.
Bosnia is currently comprised of into two sub-divisons, called “entities” .Milorad Dodik , the President of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated “entity”, the Republika Srpska, has continued with impunity to use every opportunity to undermine the Bosnian state and push for secession. He talks of a referendum to break away from Bosnia, knowing full well that it was just such a referendum that started the Bosnian war in 1992.
Mr Dodik is not a nationalist — he is an opportunist who uses nationalism for political purposes. But then that was true of Slobodan Milosevic too.
And the consequences of his behaviour are exactly the same as in the early 1990s: increased nationalist rhetoric — and action — from the Republika Srpska capital Banja Luka is generating a response in kind from the Bosniak Muslims in Sarajevo; and some Croats in the south, whose population is dwindling, are resurrecting the old claim for a separate Croat territory which nearly blew Bosnia apart in the early 2000s. The Croat nationalist parties, meanwhile, blocked the formation of the government of the Bosniak/Croat “entity”, which should have been formed months ago, claiming — not without a degree of justification — to have been provoked to this by the Bosniak Muslim-dominated parties in Sarajevo.
Not surprisingly, this is fuelling a sharp rise in ethnic tensions.
Led by Mr Dodik, Bosnian Serbs are now engaged in a full-scale attempt at genocide denial over Srebrenica. In a classic act of provocation, a Serb Orthodox church is now being built next to the mass graveyard of slaughtered Muslims in Srebrenica. It is being constructed without either a legal permit or action from Mr Dodik’s government to enforce his own laws. As a spark for action, the denial of the right to sell vegetables which led to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and onwards to the conflict in Tunisia, looks small by comparison.
Now Mr Dodik is calling for Serbs in the state government to move out of the capital Sarajevo and into the Republika Srpska, next door. No doubt he is doing this to have them in the right place should the moment for secession come. But the parallel with the exodus of many Sarajevo Serbs just before Radovan Karadzic launched his attack in 1992, is not lost on anyone.
And so, little by little, as Brussels sleeps, Washington is distracted and the Chancelleries of Europe, absorbed by their own economic crises, look resolutely in the opposite direction, Bosnia slips deeper and deeper into dysfunctionality — and possibly far worse.
For the moment, conflict remains an unlikely outcome of all of this. But it is no longer an impossible one.
This hands-off policy has to end. The EU and US have to engage again. They have to work hand in glove to do whatever is necessary to prevent the break-up of Bosnia, to help build it into a fully functioning state capable of joining the EU and to overcome those who stand in their way. To say that we are too busy elsewhere in the world is not good enough.
The tragedy is that, for the first ten years after the Bosnian war, the country made more progress towards a sustainable peace than any other post-conflict country in recent history. Then the international community foolishly allowed itself to believe that the job was done and, distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan, shifted their attention elsewhere. Even more foolishly, Brussels and many European capitals allowed themselves to be persuaded that inaction was the best policy, even when the evidence became overwhelming that the dynamic in Bosnia had, thanks largely (but not exclusively) to Mr Dodik, turned from one of progress towards statehood, to one of retreat back to nationalism and dissolution.
There are many who still seem to believe this — some, perhaps even in the lower reaches of our own Foreign Office. Others can be heard whispering that it is all too much — what would it matter if Bosnia did break up? Surely now, it would do so peacefully?
The answer to that is a resounding NO. The place is awash with arms and with veterans still fit enough to fight. I just cannot see the Muslim Bosniaks allowing themselves to be trapped into a tiny pocket in central Bosnia, isolated, let down by Europe yet again and surrounded on all sides by their enemies. They did not allow it 20 years ago against far greater odds and they will not allow it now.
And even if that could be avoided, which I doubt, what would it say of the West, if having invested so much in persuading more than one million refugees to return to their homes in areas where they were the ethnic minority, we now have to watch an exodus back in the opposite direction, while the nationalists create three mono-ethnic spaces where multi-ethnic Bosnia used to be?
What would it say about our attempts to reach out to the newly emerging democratic Islamic states, if we are not prepared to defend Europe’s oldest Islamic community from isolation?
What would it say of Europe if, as Radovan Karadzic stands accused of war crimes at the Hague, Brussels through, apathy, ignorance or indifference becomes the inadvertent instrument of his policy of dismemberment in Bosnia?
What would it say for our attempt to help Libyans create a sustainable democracy on the other side of the Mediterranean, if we cannot even consolidate one within our own borders in Europe?
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