Bosnia back on the brink of conflict

Here’s an idea. Let’s send 1,000 British and other European troops to Bosnia. Quickly.

Bosnia? You might say. That was the 1990s. But that was then, and this is now. Alas, 2021 looks a little bit like 1991. I’m not arguing war is about to break out, but the direction of travel is towards violence and if the Europeans don’t get their collective act together, the destination risks being reached. If so, they will scramble to try and put together a much larger force amid grand declarations about the Common European Home.

 Some brief background. Back in 1991, as it became clear that Yugoslavia was breaking up, the Europeans told the Americans: “It’s ok – we’ve got this.” Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Jacques Poos said “This is the hour of Europe”. It turned into almost four years of carnage and a complete failure by the EU to stop the bloodshed before the Americans stepped in, bombed the Serb forces in Bosnia, and constructed the Dayton Accords which bandaged the open wounds the wars had caused but froze the tensions between the Bosnian Serb, Croat, and Bosniak communities who are respectively Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, and Muslim.

Peace was maintained by NATO, and then EU forces, of which about 600 remain in the country which is split between Republika Srpska and the Croat/Bosniak (mostly Muslim) Federation. There is a two-house Bosnian parliament with 28 members from the Federation and 14 from Republika Srpska. A tri-partite presidency oversees foreign, diplomatic, and military affairs and there is always one Bosniak, one Croat, and one Serb in office. However, above these is the Office of the High Representative (OHR) appointed by 55 countries and tasked with overseeing the implementation of the Dayton Accords.  

The High Representative also has “Bonn Powers”. This allows the OHR to enact decrees if the three sides cannot, or will not, take decisions. The powers include removing public officials from office. Earlier this year the outgoing High Representative imposed a law making it illegal to deny genocide including the massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the UN ‘Safe Zone’ of Srebrenica in 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces. This was met with outrage in Republika Srpska led by president Milorad Dodik who threatened secession. This is par for the course for a man who openly advocates his mini state becoming part of Serbia and who is supported by Belgrade and Moscow. He routinely employs ethnic nationalism as a rallying cry.

This autumn the situation has begun to escalate. Dodik says that by the end of the month Republika Srpska will pull its forces out of the Bosnian Army and create its own military force in defiance of Dayton. It’s not a co-incidence that Russia has spent the last few years helping the Bosnian Serb police force with training and supplying the sort of weapons not normally required to issue speeding tickets. Late last month the force carried out ‘counter terrorism’ exercises on Mount Jahorina involving helicopters, armoured cars, and men in camouflage uniforms carrying assault rifles. Mount Jahorina is part of the area from which the Bosnian Serb military shelled and sniped at Sarajevo throughout the war in the 1990s.

If Dodik carries out his threat he says the Bosnian Army barracks in his territory must be handed over and that if the West tries to intervene “friends” of the Bosnian Serbs will be called upon to help. In the face of this blatant threat to the Accords you might expect the US and Europeans to put their weight behind the authority of the High Representative­, currently Christian Schmidt. The opposite happened.

Ahead of the annual UN Security Council vote to extend the peacekeeping force Schmidt was going to tell the meeting that there was a “very real” prospect of a return to conflict with possible clashes between the national law enforcement agencies and the Bosnian Serb police. His appearance was cancelled, it’s thought due to a threat from Russia to veto the extension. Worse followed. The extension was passed, but there was not a single mention of the OHR in the text of the resolution following pressure from Russia and China to exclude it.

It sounds like a dry procedural point, but Schmidt’s authority has been seriously undermined and it will have been noted in Moscow, Beijing, and Belgrade, that not only was he successfully prevented from briefing the Council, but that the Americans and Europeans did not feel confident enough to make a stand. Perhaps, the conclusion might be made, that they are losing interest. Schmidt had already warned this summer that “If the degradation of the Dayton treaty continues … there is a risk that the country will break apart.” 

We’ve been here before. After Dayton attention moved away from the Balkans and four years later the Kosovo War broke out bringing with it another NATO intervention. If Dodik carries out his threat and violence follows it may not be contained within Bosnia. In recent years Serbia has moved heavy armour and special forces units to the Kosovo border several times amid periods of tension. During nationalist demonstrations in Belgrade this year a banner appeared reading: “If Kosovo is not Serbia, then Republika Srpska is not Bosnia”. Further south there are still ethnic Albanians in Macedonia who would like to attach parts of Macedonia to Kosovo and then to a “Greater Albania”. If that came to pass what was left of Macedonia would fall prey to division as Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria scrambled to protect their interests. 

There are many ultra-nationalists in the Balkans seeking to pour fuel onto any small fire which might break out in hope of a bigger conflagration. In the 1990s it took years to quench the flames. The fire alarms are going off again. Re-enforcing the tiny peace-keeping force in Bosnia would send a signal that they’ve been heard.