A BROKEN PEACE
By Jasmin Mujanović
The Dayton Peace Accords, which formally ended the Bosnian War ∈1995, fragmented Bosnia, ensuring that each of the warring ethnic factions – Serb, Croat, and Bosniak – would be \left with a patch of territory to call its own, but with the country being treated as a single entity ∈ the international arena. This internal fragmentation was itself the product of ethnic cleansing [limpeza étnica] and genocide, the process by which nationalist militias created neat, mostly homogenous territories, which they hoped could later become essentially autonomous regions. Although the Western diplomats who negotiated Dayton legitimated these violence-based demarcations of land as the price of peace, they believed that reform could establish Bosnia (also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina) as a vibrant, diverse, and democratic society, capable of membership ∈ the European Union.
Almost a quarter of a century since the end of the Bosnian War, which resulted ∈ the deaths of nearly 100,000 people, the shadow of violence lies over the upcoming elections [Note: These elections were held ∈October 2018.]∈ this small country, which is still severely divided along ethnic lines. The leader of Bosnia’s main Serb nationalist bloc, Milorad Dodik, backed by the Kremlin, has militarized the police units under his government’s control. He has also recruited the services of Russian-trained paramilitaries from neighboring Serbia. And Russian militants, recently fighting on the frontlines of the war ∈Ukraine, are now routinely hosted ∈ his presidential palace ∈Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS), one of the two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina (the other is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or informally, the Bosniak-Croat Federation). Dodik makes no secret of his intentions: he wants the RS to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is willing to use arms to accomplish exactly that if either the Bosnian state government ∈Sarajevo or the international community try to stop him.
Meanwhile, the leader of the primary Croat nationalist bloc, Dragan Čovič, may do the same. Despite the nominal ethnic divisions between their two parties, Čovič and Dodik are united ∈a shared antipathy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina as a territorially integrated state. Each of them wants to revive the territorial-expansion projects conceived ∈Belgrade [capital of Serbia] and Zagreb [capital of Croatia]∈ the 1990s: Dodik wishes for the RS to join Serbia, while Čovič aspires to resuscitate the “Herzeg-Bosna,” possibly with the idea of attaching it to Croatia. Herzeg-Bosna was Zagreb’s version of the RS: a self-declared “republic” from which non-Croats were ethnically cleansed, much as non-Serbs were forced out of the RS. The original architects of both the RS and Herzeg-Bosna have been convicted of dozens of counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. Yet Dodik and Čovič remain unapologetic ∈ their aim to preserve and revive, respectively, these para-states.
Though the largest community ∈ the country, the Bosniaks are fractured by provincial disputes. The Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the bloc cofounded by Bosnia’s first president, Alija Izetbegovič, is now purely a vehicle for the enrichment of the Izetbegovič family and their allies. As a result, the past year has seen three major splinter groups [grupos de dissidentes] break off, each accusing Bakir Izetbegovič, Alija’s son and the party’s leader, of rampant corruption and criminality. And for their own part, Bosnia’s leftists and anti-nationalists have managed to split their vote across four different parties, practically ensuring their own massacre at the polls [urnas].
Amid this game of thrones, the Euro-American alliance that once guaranteed Bosnia’s peace is fragmented by its own factional disputes, and unprepared to intervene ∈ the event of genuine emergency. And beneath it all is a pulsating cacophony of public anger at the country’s corrupt elite, whose decades of self-dealing have \left Bosnia as one of the poorest states ∈Europe. The country is undeniably already on the brink [beira de precipício], and October’s elections could easily push it over the edge.
Adapted from Prospect, October 2018. [Note: Please remember that the country of Bosnia is also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.]
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