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Turkish support for NATO critical for Bosnia
With the latest visit of Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to Sarajevo this week, the Serbian and Bosnian foreign ministers came together for the third time in three months for trilateral meetings to discuss the issues on the agenda such as the ongoing constitutional reform process in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its integration into European structures and persuading the Serbian side to stop creating obstacles to Bosnian NATO membership. Turkey has been trying to convince Serbia of the benefits of Bosnian membership in NATO, and it has also been working hard to increase the number of countries that support the idea of Bosnia and Herzegovina having a seat in the alliance.
“Similar to other countries in the region and superpowers such as the US and Russia, Turkey also has attempted to boost its influence in the region. To achieve this, Turkey needs allies in the region. Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina are obvious choices because of their Muslim populations and because they have the same objectives as Turkey in the Balkan region,” said Caner Sancaktepe, an expert on the Balkans from the Turkish-Asian Center for Strategic Studies (TASAM), speaking to Sunday’s Zaman, adding that if the Bosniaks are able to prevent the disintegration of the country, they may become the dominant power in the country and that Turkey needs to create a beneficial alliance.
Explaining the Russian disquiet stemming from the NATO enlargement in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and its effort to prevent more countries in the region from becoming NATO members, Sancaktepe noted that Russia has taken steps recently to improve its ties with the Republic of Serbia by signing an energy agreement with it and setting up a military base on its border with Kosovo.
Sancaktepe also stated that there are not only foreign obstacles to NATO membership but domestic ones too. “In the Bosnian parliament, NATO membership must be accepted with by two-thirds of the deputies. Taking this condition into consideration, the Serbs in the Bosnian parliament must also support the country’s NATO bid, which seems quite unlikely in the long run,” he said, underlining that the Croat members of parliament back membership in the alliance, as Croatia is a member of NATO.
Furthermore, Hajruddin Somun, the former ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Turkey, emphasized that Turkey generally includes Bosnia within the “borders” of its regional policy (the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East) regardless of national, ethnic or religious considerations.
“Carrying out the foreign policy strategy of solving obvious issues with direct neighbors, it simply had no time to deal with Bosnian problems more actively. Now, the time has come -- after normalizing and improving relations with Syria, Armenia, Iran and Iraq -- for such activity, which is even more important now because of the deteriorating situation in Bosnia.”
The former diplomat praised the efforts of the Turkish foreign minister regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina and said he recognizes the needs of the country, adding: “We are fed up with the Western humanitarian approach and the moral support of many Muslim countries. We need concrete action from our friends if they say they want to help Bosnia and Herzegovina solve its political stalemate and constitutional crisis. Minister Davutoğlu understood quite well what we need. It needs to be included as soon as possible in the NATO security system to prevent further destabilization or even the division of the country. His thinking is very close to American thinking, but it is not acceptable to Russia and some important European countries.”
Somun thinks there has been no drastic change in Turkey’s foreign policy approach toward Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last decades but highlighted that “the present government is more active, pointing to the right things in dealing with Bosnia and Herzegovina more than previous governments. Bosnia simply became an indivisible part of Turkish strategic policy, what the majority of Bosnians have been expecting for decades.”
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