Turkey and Bosnia: a matter of life and death
by
HAJRUDIN SOMUN*

In the meantime, expectations from talks between Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat leaders, launched by the United States and the European Union to break the impasse, were overly optimistic. The heated discussion is still going on in Butmir, a NATO-supervised military base near Sarajevo, without a visible positive outcome. The American and EU negotiators provided an extension to the main Bosnian political party leaders to accept or reject a package of constitutional reforms by Jan. 1, 2010 as a condition for further moving the country toward EU and NATO membership. This is also a condition for lifting visa restrictions on Bosnian citizens traveling to EU countries.

Serb leaders staunchly opposed any serious change to the country’s constitution, imposed together with the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, and are still being appeased by the international community, which allows the continuation of ethnically based elections and some other provisions beneficial to the Republika Srpska entity despite the fact that they undermine the integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosniak leaders are, unfortunately, still divided among themselves. Sulejman Tihic, president of the Party of Democratic Action, considers acceptance of the US-EU package in the prevailing circumstances a lesser evil, while Haris Silajdzic, president of the Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Zlatko Lagumdzija, leader of the main opposition Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina, see the proposed constitutional changes as cosmetic. Croats are, as usual, somewhere in the middle.

If the rising poverty, absence of foreign investment and increasing crime, workers’ strikes and public dissatisfaction are added to the political turmoil and division, preserving the Bosnian status quo looks not only unviable, but retrograde for the county’s future and existence as well.

Alarmed by such developments and only a few months after taking charge of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ahmet Davutoğlu, flying from Damascus to Belgrade, from Tehran to Tirana, from Baku to Baghdad and further to Zurich and Brussels, jumped to Sarajevo as well. He arranged trilateral meetings with the foreign ministers of Bosnia and Serbia, Sven Alkalaj and Vuk Jeremic; two such meetings took place in İstanbul in only a month’s time. Although rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia was the subject of his meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Davutoğlu discussed the Bosnian issue more than the Armenian one, urging more efficient American involvement in Bosnia. The same happened when President Abdullah Gül spoke by phone with US President Barack Obama.

What Turkey can do

What prompt actions can Turkish diplomacy take -- and as far as I know, has concertedly been taking in these last few weeks and days -- to prevent any further deterioration of the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

There are two ways through which Turkey can act institutionally when it comes to Bosnia -- NATO and the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), set up in 1995 to monitor the Dayton Peace Accords and provide the High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina with political guidance. Turkey represents the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) on that board.

NATO is, of course, much more important, especially now that Bosnia and Herzegovina has already started so-called Intensified Dialogue relating to its aspiration for membership. Thus, the continuation of that process and accepting Bosnia into the NATO family, if even possible in 2010, would be of utmost importance for ensuring its security and protecting its sovereignty and integrity. It should not be connected to the EU accession process and next year’s elections. In the meantime, the Office of the High Representative, the current mechanism of the international protectorate in Bosnia, should not be replaced by a vague EU mechanism.

To keep Bosnia outside the Western alliance’s umbrella would mean keeping options open for further disintegration of the country and the destabilization of the entire Balkans. Let me remind you that the leadership of the Republika Srpska entity still threatens to use a local referendum on NATO accession and, as a further step, secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Republika Srpska Prime Minister Milorad Dodik called “an idiotic state” not long ago.

An analogy with the situation in Georgia in 2008 is perhaps too distant because this is Europe, after all, though who would have imagined that Russia would recognize the secession of South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Russia’s increasing interest in developments in Serbia and Bosnia became visible during the US-EU attempt to solve the Bosnian crisis. President Dmitry Medvedev and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, while visiting the region, expressed more or less open reservations about full NATO coverage of the region.

I am convinced that Turkey, together with the US, Spain and several other NATO countries, is working to realize what Minister Davutoğlu commented on recently, as cited by Today’s Zaman, namely, that “Bosnia should be provided with what we call a ‘membership action plan’ with regard to both the EU and NATO.” Stressing only NATO, and postponing EU membership for better times due to its widespread opposition to further expansion, I am also sure that Turkey’s involvement in resolving the Bosnian crisis and preserving its integrity and sovereignty will be more successful than at any previous time because of the increasing weight Turkey enjoys in the international arena. Turkey was respected as a regional power earlier, of course, but it was a rather passive power. It has since built a steady foundation as an active, unavoidable regional player by solving, one by one, serious problems with its neighbors as well as domestic issues in a courageous, risky and even attractive manner.

Minister Davutoğlu was also right in saying that a move toward NATO and the EU “will help restore the psychological well-being of Bosnians.” It is interesting how quickly the minister won over many in Bosnia, at least in the half not belonging to Republika Srpska. I heard that he knows Bosnia, its people and even topography better than many Bosnians. His recent appearance at a conference in Sarajevo on the “Ottoman legacy and Muslim communities in today’s Balkans,” which deserves special comment, was particularly welcomed, but also widely discussed. He arrived in Sarajevo after a tiring visit to Baghdad, having only three hours rest in İstanbul, but as he stressed, he felt refreshed when he stepped into Bascarsija, Sarajevo’s old market. He wanted to show that he stands in solidarity with Bosnia during its “very critical period.” In his improvised and emotional speech, he said, among other things: “For diplomats from other parts of the world, the Bosnian question is a technical issue. For us [Turks] it is a matter of life and death. The territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina is equally important as the territorial integrity of Turkey. … What happens in Bosnia is our responsibility as well.”

Turkish involvement up

For me personally, it was not easy to recognize that the present Turkish government is more involved in Bosnian developments than previous ones. I dealt with different people, ministers and generals for more than five years and could not tell that they were active in supporting the Bosnian cause internationally. As in other issues, such as the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Balkans and elsewhere, Turkish foreign policy was more static and defensive than dynamic and energetic. It was different during the aggression on Bosnia, of course, when all of Turkey, from its president to the illiterate Anatolian peasant, breathed in unison with the suffering Bosnians. The situation with Turkish foreign ministers was similar to that. The first Turkish foreign minister I met was Hikmet Çetin, who told me at the beginning of the war, somewhere in the world, that I knew his ambassador better than he himself did. He ran around the world seeking help for Bosnia and once spent a night during the war in a freezing Sarajevo Holiday Inn hotel room with broken windows.

Regarding Davutoğlu, I did not need more than a lecture he gave at the Sarajevo International University around five years ago to discover who is behind the dynamic Turkish foreign policy. Listening to his words, I imagined circles of Turkish foreign engagement, seeing Bosnia in the second or even third circle. Today I am satisfied that Bosnia and Herzegovina has been included in the front row.

P.S.: I intentionally did not want to spoil my article and Minister Davutoğlu’s noble intentions toward Bosnia by the reaction of the Serb member of the Bosnian Presidency, Nebojsa Radmanovic, who quoted Davutoğlu as saying, “Sarajevo is ours!” Quoting him out of context, he said the Turkish minister’s statement was a “classic example of interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state” and that he had shown “imperial intentions toward the Balkans.”