Don’t forget Bosnia
Almost exactly 13 years after American leadership brought an end to Bosnia’s three and a half year war, the country – perched on the European Union’s flank – is in real danger of descending into dysfunctionality and perhaps even dissolution. As in 1995, resolve and trans-Atlantic unity is needed if we are not to sleep walk into another Bosnian crisis – or worse.
Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, once the darling of the international community (and especially Washington) for his opposition to Karadzic’s Serb Democratic Party, has adopted that party’s nationalist 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, like Milo Djukanovic did in Montenegro, if the opportunity arises. Exploiting the weaknesses in the country’s constitutional structure, the international community’s weariness and the EU’s inability to stick by its conditionality, he has, in a little more than two years, reversed much of the real progress Bosnia has made over of the last 13, crucially weakening the institutions of the Bosnian state and all but stopping the country’s evolution into a functioning (and EU-compatible) state.
As a result , the fear and tension that began the war in 1992 has been reinvigorated, and an unhealthy and destructive dynamic is now accelerating, with Bosniak and Croat nationalism also on the rise. The recent local elections gave a marked fillip to the nationalist parties.
The situation has been allowed to reach this tipping point by a complacent and distracted international community. The European Union is deeply engaged in Bosnia; and the open door to EU membership has been the critical lever for pressing reforms in the country since it was first made policy in 2003. But the EU has yet to develop a coherent strategy commensurate with its leverage, exposure, potential, and responsibility. Worse still, by proclaiming progress where it has not, in reality, been achieved, the EU has weakened not only its own influence in the country, but also that of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the international military presence (nowadays EUFOR, which succeeded NATO) – both of which have been the drivers and guarantors of progress in Bosnia since the end of 1992-95 war.
It is no coincidence that the degeneration of the High Representative’s influence has coincided with the hollowing-out of EUFOR, which now has little in the way of operational capacity. The military presence has been the implicit enforcer of last resort for international decisions. But now, despite the danger signals, France, Spain and others in the EU apparently want to pull the plug on EUFOR before the end of the year, supposedly in order to prove 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, so fatally undermining his authority in the country. It has now placed him in a position where, with no clear orders from Brussels and very little interest in European capitals, he is struggling to fill the vacuum where a policy should be.
Faced with this situation, the Bosnian Serbs control not only the Bosnian agenda, but the international one as well. They do so with overt Russian backing. Like 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 expected attempt next month to close OHR, regardless of whether the job is done, must be unanimously rebuffed by the other members of the international community. OHR has to remain open until the conditions for the international community’s transition to a more normal EU presence are met.
European governments, beginning with Britain and the Netherlands, must prevent matters from getting worse, and should now insist on the development of a clear EU strategy to re-establish its authority and Bosnia’s stability.
Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, should initiate an independent study, whose aim would be to propose a new trans-Atlantic policy, which can lead to a phase of deeper and broader international involvement in the country. It should also examine the creation of a new EU Balkan mechanism in Brussels, explore what adjustments are necessary to the EU’s accession process, and how to kick-start discussions on reforming Bosnia’s constitutional structure – all underpinned by clear, tough and rigorously enforced EU conditionality. This study, which should be available to the new US Administration before it takes office, could be discussed by EU foreign ministers under the Czech EU Presidency, which begins in December 2009, and at a special meeting of the new US foreign policy team and European leaders.
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 international military presence, and begin the process of strengthening the international community’s long-term approach, 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.