Is Bosnia on the road to war?
The Balkan state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which suffered a civil war costing hundreds of thousands of lives in the early 1990s, is at risk of breaking apart in further conflict, a senior EU official has warned.
The warning came as the UN Security Council is due to renew the mandate for the 700 strong EU peacekeeping force in the country. However, Russia and China are hinting they’ll veto the mandate.
The echoes of the recent violent past have been conjured by the declaration of the head of the Serb entity in the state, Milorad Dodik. He has previously been head of the presidency council, which rotates between leaders from the three main ethnic communities, the Bosniak Muslims, Serbs, and Croats.
Dodik has been training a separate corps of Serb paramilitary police and has said the Serb part of the federation will withdraw altogether, and insist on its own autonomy. The Serbs belong to the Republika Srpska, whereas the Croats and predominantly Muslim Bosniaks work together in their own Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Bosnia has been enjoying an uneasy peace since 1995, when agreement at Dayton Ohio brought three and a half years of civil war to a truce. The deal, which underpins the present state of Bosnia, has proved shaky at best – larded with resentment from both the Serb and Croat communities.
The sense of Serb betrayal has been compounded by the fact that their principal political and military leaders in the conflict, which may have taken more than 200,000 lives, ended up before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Dr Radovan Karadzic, the political head of the early self-declared Republika Srpska, and his military opposite General Ratko Mladic were both sentenced for war crimes and genocide. Slobodan Milosevic died while still undergoing trial in The Hague. All three are still seen as martyrs and national heroes by some Serbs to this day.
This sense of resentment partly explains the support for Milorad Dodik’s push for autonomy for the Bosnian Serbs, and possibly the breakup of the present state of Bosnia. Bosnia itself has applied for membership of the EU. But Dodik has warned he has “powerful friends” in the wings – meaning the Serbs in Belgrade and Putin’s Russia. He also may have some sympathy and support from the Croat HDZ, the centre-right majority party in neighbouring Croatia, which has a powerful affiliate representing the Croats of Bosnia.
As well as threatening to veto the renewal of the Sarajevo peace force, the Russians are pressing the UN Security Council to ignore or downgrade the report of the current High Representative, Christian Schmidt of Germany, warning of incipient conflict because of the activities of the separatist Serbs under Milorad Dodik.
This is seen as deliberate meddling by Putin to undermine both the EU and Nato in Europe by critics such as Baroness Arminka Helic, the former Bosniak Muslim refugee who sits as a Conservative in the House of Lords. In this Russia has form. In 2016 the Kremlin was revealed to be behind an attempted coup in neighbouring Montenegro.“ There are alarming echoes of the 1990s sweeping across the Western Balkans,” Arminka Helic writes in Politico this week.
Russia continues to destabilise in Kosovo and Montenegro as well as Bosnia. Helic is particularly critical of the Serbian government in Belgrade, which, she says, “is actively backing efforts to destabilise them (i.e. all three states), supporting internal proxies, and threatening their sovereignty and territorial integrity.
“Coupled with Russian meddling, EU division and Nato weakness, this proving to be a lethal mix.”
Bosnia is now one of the great zombie neo-conflicts of the European and Mediterranean neighbourhood – along with the likes of Ukraine, Ossetia, and Nagorno Karabakh. They can burst into open conflict at any time, and the fire is likely to spread.
Bosnia sits on one of the great geo-cultural faultlines since the Age of Antiquity in Europe. It marked the border between the Roman Empires of the East and West. This bled into the division between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities, still evident across the country. But then came the Ottoman Turks and Islam. The ultra-nationalist propaganda of Serb and Croat paints the Bosniak Muslims as interlopers, invading Turks or turncoat Serbs converted to Islam for political advantage. It must be observed that some of the most distinguished of the Sultans of the Sublime Porte, the court in Istanbul, were of Bosnian and Balkan origin.
From Ottoman times, Bosnia, like Kosovo and parts of Bulgaria, and enclave of the Sandjak of Novi Pazar in Serbia, is one of the historic centres of Muslim populations in southern Europe.
Bosnia mirrors much of the story of Yugoslavia and its constituent people over the last century and a half. Serbs, Croats, Bulgars, Romanians and Greeks fought for identity and independence over much of that period, and the coals of resentment still glow to this day. The losers were the Muslims as the Ottoman Turk influence retreated and declined. They were deprived of recognition when Bosnia emerged under Austrian tutelage at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.
Fatally, this led to the outright annexation of Bosnia to Austria-Hungary in 1908 – and six years later a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Austrian imperial heir, Franz Joseph, in Sarajevo on the Serb national day.
In the ensuing war, the Serbs would lose up to a quarter of their population. The Second World War also brought a strong element of inter-community fighting along ethnic lines. This has to be pointed out, as it is still present in the growing tensions of today. The Serbs depict themselves as the holders of the title to much of the Bosnian lands – baptised by the sacrifice of their blood in the more lurid portrayals of the national myth. The Muslims are interlopers, turncoats, who are staking claim by superior birth rate.
Today the Bosnian population of just over three and a half million is 50 per cent Bosniak, 30 per cent Serb and around 15 per cent Croat – the rest a mix of Turk, Roma and mixed race. The Serbs have always looked to Moscow, their fellow slavs, for support – though often this has been rhetorical rather than substantial. The Croats claim alliance with Catholic Austrians and Germans. The Bosniak Muslims are once again receiving support from Turkey, and since Dayton in 1995 Saudi Arabia and some Gulf countries.
Demography is a crucial and generally unacknowledged part in the perpetual crisis of the Balkans, and very much so today. Bosnia and the Western Balkans suffered devastating famines in the 17th Century. So, as my colleague and friend Allan Little of the BBC always points out “to talk of ancient hatreds is nonsense – a lot of the population was all but wiped out three centuries or so ago.”
At 3.5 million today, the Bosnian population is at least 20 per cent smaller than it was in 1991, on the eve of the devastating communal war which broke out in April the following year – murder, mayhem and migration caused, and continues to cause, the drain of humanity. Romania and Bulgaria have suffered declining populations since the 1980s. The Serb population is also in decline, with a natality rate of around 1.48 – well below the 2.1 for population stability.
Against this background, the war of words of Milorad Dodik, the UN, and the EU High Representative Christian Schmidt becomes more ominous. It echoes what went on in the late 80s as Croats, Serbs and later Bosniaks sought autonomy and then independence. The wars of the dissolution of Yugoslavia spread their malign influences and poisons well beyond the Western Balkans. The EU, Nato, and OSCE need to take timely steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.