Article – The Balkans post Mladic
- The Times – 3 June 2003 The Times
Bismarck once famously said “The Balkans aren’t worth the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier”.
The last century proved, from the battlefields of the First World War to the mass graves of Srebrenica and Kosovo, that they can cost us Europeans a lot more bones than that.
The western Balkans today are no longer expansionary territory beyond the EU’s borders, they are an island of instability, and a potential exporter of crime, within them. Bringing the western Balkans into the EU is no longer enlargement beyond our present frontiers, it is completing the process of unifying the EU within its present ones.
And there are solid reasons why it is our interests to do this.
Firstly it is the only way to ensure that we are not again endangered by this abscess of instability and potential criminality in our midst.
Secondly, this region is home to Europes’s only ancient Muslim population, who are as committed to European standards as they are to Islamic beliefs and understand, as Alija Isetbegovic the leader of the Bosnian Muslim’s during the 92-95 war used to say, that there is no contradiction between the two. Remember that, from 9/11 to 7/7 and beyond, it was the West’s failures in Bosnia which gave Al Qaeda one of its most effective recruiting sergeants. In the new, more hopeful dialogue between Europe and the Islamic world, the European Muslims of the Balkans are a vital asset as both a bridge and a conduit of understanding for both sides. To ensure that these Muslim Europeans become an integrated part of the EU, not a separated enclave within it, is to reassert that our Europe is a truly multicultural and multi-religious space. To leave them out would be to damage both that vision and our capacity for constructive dialogue with the world of Islam, just at the moment when, following the Arab Spring, it promises more than we could ever have hoped for.
Lastly this is a region rich in both natural wealth and human capability. These are deeply able people with a strong intellectual and cultural history whose contribution will enrich the EU and whose exclusion would impoverish it.
But there is, of course a problem. It is perhaps summed up in two conversations I had during the darkest days of the Bosnian war.
The first was in August 1993 when I met Ratko Mladic during one of his full scale artillery bombardments of Sarajevo. “I can take the city whenever I want” he boasted. “Why don’t you then?” I asked. “Because I was trained on Russian principles. If you have a chance of killing an enemy or shooting him in the balls, shoot him in the balls. A dead man takes two people twenty minutes to bury. A wounded one takes ten people, many weeks to look after. As long as Sarajevo is starving, the international community will spend all its effort keeping it alive and have none left to stop me doing what I want to do”.
The second conversation was after I returned from Sarajevo that year, callin for urgent intervention to stop the slaughter. A senior member of the British Government replied “Oh no, Paddy. They have always fought each other in the Balkans. They always will. The best answer is to let it burn itself out”.
I reminded him that if there was ever a region that had always fought each other – for a thousand years and at incalculable cost in blood and misery, not least in our own century it was not the Balkans, but us Western Europeans. We had found in the European Union, an escape from our history – how could we deny the same to them?
Karadzic and Mladic will now follow the fourteen others key war criminals who have already faced justice before the Hague. These men were not the only perpetrators of torture and murder. There were many others and they belonged – let not forget – to all sides in this war without clean hands. But those now at the Hague were the primary architects of the Balkans horrors. Their trials thus offer the region a unique chance to stop dwelling on the past and concentrate on building the only future they can have which offers peace and prosperity– full membership of the EU and NATO.
But if this to be done the EU must raise its game as well.
Brussels needs to stop believing that bringing this region in is the same as bringing in Hungary and Poland and the other new democracies of the old eastern Europe. This is a region emerging from conflict and needs policies to reflect that fact.
The EU must start treating the western Balkans as a region and not as penny packet countries each with their own penny packet policy. In the Balkans what matters most is not what happens, but the connections between the things that happen. The EU will achieve much more when it starts using these; when instead of individual policies for individual countries, it adopts a closely coordinated regional policy and the means to pursue it.
Central to this policy is an understanding that Bosnia, far more than Kosovo, is the key to Balkan peace. So it was in the mid 1990s; so it remains today. Bosnia is now embarked on a dangerous slide towards dissolution – and, as before that is unlikely to happen without blood. The EU needs to show that it will use all means to prevent the break up of Bosnia and is prepared to act against those who have been allowed for too long, to weaken the state in order to prepare for its dismemberment. Appeasement didn’t work in the 1990s and it won’t work today. What Karadizc and Mladic did in their attempt to break up Bosnia has led, at last to trial in the Hague. It would be a terrible irony indeed if, as they stand trial for their crimes, Brussels’ unwillingness, once again, to act decisively makes it the unwitting instrument for others to succeed, where they failed.
I spent four years chasing Mladic in Bosnia. I think of the grieving mothers of Bosnia and rejoice that he is at last coming to trial. But the potential of this moment will be wasted unless we can, not just celebrate an act of justice, but also build on the political opportunities it offers.
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