Going backwards in Bosnia
The fourteenth anniversary of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords passed unnoticed in November. With ethnic cleansing effectively halted since the guns felt silent after Dayton, a cold but seemingly durable peace has prevailed. The collapse of a U.S.-EU diplomatic initiative in Bosnia-Herzegovina last month went virtually unreported too, as is the fact that Bosnia’s cold peace is under serious threat.
Bosnia-Herzegovina may seem not to matter much to the US in the broader scheme of things – pressing challenges in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the wider Middle East rightly demand great attention. But the fate of the country should matter to Europe, and the risk of a failed state taking root in Europe cannot be ignored in Washington.
Old habits die hard, especially in Europe, where failure in Bosnia-Herzegovina risks becoming an EU niche specialty. War may be hell, but in Brussels serious Balkan diplomacy seems more difficult – so many capitals to confer with, tactics to coordinate, and memos to draft and so little political will to take difficult decisions. The local leaders driving Bosnia towards disintegration are accommodated by the EU, rather than faced down. The EU rests confident that their all-carrots, no-sticks approach linked entirely to the promise of an EU accession process, starting sometime in several years and after the parties resolve several substantial problems on their own, will ultimately change the domestic politics of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the neighbouring Serbia and produce the political cooperation that has been glaringly absent. The U.S. administration is backing this approach, despite the fact that Bosnia-Herzegovina today is further from EU membership than any other aspirant country and some in Bosnia clearly state that they rank independence higher than EU membership.
Bosnia’s economy has grown with foreign aid but the state has not and today it does not work. The Bosnian Serbs have exploited the autonomy they were granted at Dayton, relying on politicking to keep the country divided, its government dysfunctional, and their hopes of secession alive. Some resistance has been overcome only when the international High Representative overseeing Dayton has insisted on it. But even this level of effort has overtaxed the patience and capacity of the EU and US. The High Representative’s office has been allowed to be cheapened and demeaned so that none of the parties, particularly the Bosnian Serbs, heed its efforts. It is now proposed that the High Representative be recast as an EU Special Representative, weakening the role further by removing the US from the frame and stripping out the Bonn powers.
So many European capitals have thrown in the towel on Bosnia that Sarajevo is looking like a diplomats’ locker room. Bosnian Serb leaders continue to use their stalling often insulting tactics while some Bosniak leaders can be equally rigid. The leader of the entity of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik is politically invulnerable and flush with money, jobs, and influence, so long as he positions himself against the state. . With the election season in Bosnia imminent, nationalist rhetoric will certainly increase in all parts. Even the Croatians increasingly talk of their own entity and a break with their federation with the Bosniaks.
What happens in Europe’s Backyard matters: the consequences of Bosnia’s disintegration would be catastrophic. The breakdown of the country into independent ethnic statelets would not only reward ethnic cleansing – surely moral anathema – but would have long term security implications, risking the creation of ungoverned areas in the heart of Europe; a fertile ground for terrorism and crime and a monstrous betrayal of all those who survived the concentration camps, mass graves and displacement of the 1990s.
Bosnia will not solve itself, nor will the prospect of EU integration induce sufficient cooperation among Bosnian politicians. Since 2006 the hands-off approach, leaving difficult issues to local politicians, has allowed BH to slide back. Bosnia needs a momentum-generating way to animate political progress.
We must recognize that all the countries in the region are linked and that we cannot deal with each in isolation. We urge the appointment of an EU Special Envoy for the Balkans, who would work alongside a dedicated US Envoy to deliver a united message to the region. Part of this message should be to impress on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s leaders that the sovereignty of the country is unquestionable and its break-up unthinkable. But it should also include a message to European candidate countries Serbia and Montenegro that they are expected to uphold EU policy towards the country and take positive acts to strengthen it.
A robust international approach would focus on a single goal: a central government effective enough to carry out the responsibilities of EU and NATO membership. Each Bosnian leader should have to stand up, or against, that simple idea — and face consequences for his answer.
This breaks from the recent diplomatic failures, which sought to reward the various parties with a little bit of what they want. In its place, we propose that the international community be prepared to use sticks as well as carrots in pursuit of what it, and Bosnia’s citizens, have long favored — an EU perspective. There is a strong argument for the threat of targeted sanctions against politicians who undermine the Bosnian state.
Talk of timelines for the closure of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina must come to an end once and for all. The OHR should only be closed down once we have achieved constitutional and electoral reform, and the High Representative must have the rock solid backing of the EU and US so that all parties know that they cannot sit out the international presence in the country.
Finally the EU peacekeeping mission in Bosnia must be retained and reinforced if necessary, to send a strong signal that neither secession nor violence will be tolerated.
Today Radovan Karadzic is finally on trial in The Hague on charges of alleged genocide and war crimes in Bosnia. As he and others are called to account over their part in the horrendous events of the 1990s, it would be a supreme irony if their plans for carving up Bosnia-Herzegovina were to be realized simply because the international community was too busy to care.