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World: Please Remember Bosnia
Published November 21, 2008 @ 12:14PM PST
On Thursday, the United Nations Security Council reauthorized the deployment of EUFOR, the European Union peacekeeping force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The BBC reports:
The UN Security Council voted unanimously on Thursday to prolong the mission of the 2,200-strong EU force (Eufor), whose job it is to prevent any violations of the 1995 Dayton peace deal.
The international civilian body - the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia - will stay in place next year.
The Peace Implementation Council (PIC), which oversees the OHR, expressed deep concern about "divisive rhetoric" from Bosnia's political leaders, "which challenges the sovereignty and constitutional order of Bosnia-Hercegovina".
(More, after the jump)
The entire BBC article is worth reading, as it highlights many of the legacies of the violent war in the early 1990s. The article highlights the divisions created by the establishment of Bosnia and Herzegovina:
The Dayton peace agreement created two semi-state entities: Republika Srpska - for the Serbs - and the Bosniak-Croat Federation for Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats.
Milorad Dodik has been the first post-war leader to actually challenge the central state. According to the OHR, he has built up parallel institutions, like his own government in Banja Luka, and reappropriated competences which should be held at a state level.
He has refused to hand documents to the state prosecutor, issued Republika Srpska bonds, established a separate Missing Persons Commission, and is now setting up diplomatic offices of Republika Srpska abroad.
About a month ago, Paddy Ashdown and Richard Holbrooke published a piece in the Guardian warning the world of Bosnia's increased, internal Balkinization before our eyes.
Interestingly, Ashdown and Holbrooke say Dodik's sabotage of Bosnia's joint progress is "fuelled by Russian encouragement and petrodollars".
However, the true blame for Bosnia's slide lies with the international community:
This tipping point is the result of a distracted international community. While the Bush administration largely turned its back on Bosnia, the EU became deeply engaged; EU membership has been the critical lever for pressing reforms in Bosnia since it was made policy in 2003. But the EU did not develop a coherent strategy, and 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 (the European Union Force, Eufor, which succeeded Nato) the drivers of progress in Bosnia since Dayton.
The degeneration of the OHR's influence coincided with the withdrawal of the US military and the hollowing-out of Eufor, which now has little in the way of operational capacity. 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-centred mission, seems intent on emptying its toolbox before it knows what tools it will need to enable Bosnia's transition. It failed, for example, to back its man on the ground, the able Slovak diplomat Miroslav Lajcak, at a crucial moment, fatally undermining his authority.
An important reminder that once genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes are over, the international community's responsibilities to the people affected don't stop. Kudos to the U.N. Security Council for reauthorizing EUFOR. Let's hope the world doesn't forget to keep engaging with Darfur long after the violence stops.
Photo of billboard thanking EUFOR taken by my dad in July 2007 in Sarajevo.
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Author
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Martha Bixby
- Washington, DC
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Martha has spent the past 4 years advocating for an end to the genocide in Darfur with various organizations and institutions, including STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, the Save Darfur Coalition, the United States Holocaust Museum's Committee on Conscience's Student Advisory Board, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and Sudan Voice for Peace and Justice. Most recently, Martha directed Team Darfur, an international coalition of athletes committed to raising awareness about and bringing an end to the genocide in Darfur.
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The Case Foundation, a partner of Change.org, is running a campaign called "Change Begins With Me," which
calls on citizens across the country to get involved by answering the question: how will YOU commit to
bringing about change in your neighborhood, your community or your nation?
Sobering reminder. I worked in BiH last year, and lack of a functioning state-level government is a huge problem. For much of the time I was there, the state-level government had ceased functioning and everyone in the international community was in political crisis mode. At the sub-state (entity) level, you've got the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with its ten cantons, each with its own, uniquely incapable government. Then, in the Republika Srpska, you have a centralized government under the control of one nationalist party --Dodik's SNSD. The RS is less complicated than the FBiH, but not better. Things like press freedom, civil society, and pluralism are more squeezed in RS than in the chaotic Federation. This makes something like the Srebrenica question impossible to deal with in a constructive way. Returnees and would-be returnees want Srebrenica to be either part of the FBiH (it's part of the RS now) or its own distinct jurisdiction, like the creepily well-run village Brcko District. Also, it goes without saying that the Dayton structures have entrenched the most intolerant nationalists and led to the political marginalization of progressive forces throughout the country. I would be remiss not to mention the Roma, too, as they lost out in the war, and lost out again in the peace, and are truly a non-constituent (to borrow the European Roma Rights Centre's term) underclass in their country --and live in conditions that are hard to imagine in modern Europe. It's a sad state of affairs, and the EU needs to get its act together yesterday.
That said, people in BiH are moving on. Despite their problems, political and otherwise, Bosnians look forward to a better future. There is tremendous energy in civil society, with young people organizing summer schools on human rights, the rule of law, and fighting corruption. Sarajevo is not without some kind of festival going on at any point in the year. And tourism, especially eco-tourism, is slowly but surely picking up, and providing vital income in depressed but ecologically spectacular areas of the countryside.
Posted by Transition Land on 11/21/2008 @ 02:49PM PST
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