Bad news from the Balkans again
by Hajrudin Somun*

Like it or not, it doesn’t look like the Balkans will soon shake off the pejorative connotation its name acquired during the Balkan wars at the beginning of the last century. Even Europe’s current monetary crisis and recession were triggered by Greece, a genuine Balkan country, though it pretends that it belongs more in Europe’s west than in its southeast. Anyhow, people in this region have had for over a century now this saying: “I am in debt like Greece!”

Despite the fact that half of its countries have become members of Euro-Atlantic integration and others are more or less approaching this, the Balkan region still falls short of essential stability and security. Judging by appearances, everything is nice and normal. In September alone the Balkan leaders had two summits. A declaration was adopted at the first one, held in Belgrade, expressing the commitment of its participants to “the pursuit of reconciliation in Southeast Europe and the building of a peaceful and prosperous European future,” and Serbian President Boris Tadic stressed that his country’s relations with Croatia were “the best in the past 20 years.”

At another summit, this time held in New York, all also spoke in favor of regional reconciliation and cooperation. Apart from a recent wave of mutual accusations regarding Kosovo, a new spark has started to fly between Belgrade and Zagreb these days. Croatia’s parliament passed a law proclaiming “null and void all legal acts” related to the 1991-1995 war in which Croatian citizens were “suspected, indicated or sentenced” for war crimes by Serbia. That act caused concern even in the European Union. There are some reconciliatory steps as well. Turkey has brought to a close its efforts to unify two Islamic communities in Serbia that were creating tension in its province of Sandzak. That shows how hard it is to solve an internal dispute without foreign mediation even when we’re dealing with the adherents of only one religion.

In one of my first appearances on this page of Today’s Zaman I said that “tensions that have plagued Kosovo for a few years now have extended themselves to Bosnia as well.” Unfortunately, after almost four years, I can repeat the same words. Kosovo and Bosnia, or vice versa, are still the main sources of anxiety for the stability of not only the countries concerned but of the whole region as well. Back then I quoted The Economist, which stressed that perspectives for the Western Balkans “are not encouraging,” and the International Crisis Group (ICG), which said the situation in the region had “deteriorated significantly.” News coming from the border between Kosovo and Serbia these days is alarming the region and NATO. And regarding Bosnia, that same ICG now says that the country has been “brought back to the brink of war,” while a recent report of Sarajevo-based NGO Atlantska inicijativa (Atlantic Initiative) was fully charged with risks for the stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Status of Kosovo most vulnerable political problem

Negotiations Serbia and Kosovo entered into last summer have resolved some important technical issues, but the status of northern Kosovo, inhabited mostly by Serbs, remains the most vulnerable political problem. Kosovo’s Serbs refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the State of Kosovo. They mostly run their own affairs with support from Serbia, which still maintains its institutions in that part of Kosovo. Kosovo’s Serbs set border gates on fire and erected barricades in July when Kosovo’s security forces tried to take control of the border with Serbia and enforce a trade blockade in response to Serbia’s effective ban on imports from Kosovo. One Kosovar police officer was killed in clashes with the Serbs.

There were no new outbreaks of violence until the beginning of October, when NATO forces set a deadline for the local Serbs to remove the 16 barricades they erected over the summer to block the main access to the border gates. Troops used tear gas to disperse protesters refusing to accept the authority of the Kosovar government. Eight peacekeepers were slightly injured, as well as a dozen protesters. Near the town of Pec, an ethnic Serb was killed by an Albanian following a dispute over land. The game of nerves is still going on between NATO troops and Kosovo’s Serbs, who insist the roadblocks will remain until Kosovo’s authorities withdraw from the two border crossings to Serbia.

Appeals for calm in that narrow valley are coming from all sides. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Serbia and Kosovo “to resolve all pending issues,” stressing that “it is unacceptable that the borders are blocked.” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen went further, saying that “the military alliance will not allow the Balkan region to slip back into violence amid simmering tensions between Kosovo and Serbia.” His words that the recent violence was “bad for the image of Kosovo and a clear setback for the progress achieved” were not very pleasant for Pristina.

In these, the final days of October we saw a thus far unheard exchange of harsh words between those who strive to keep Bosnia and Herzegovina a unified and functional state and those who do not spare any effort to make it as weak as possible, destabilized and divided. If Bakir Izetbegovic, the Bosniak member of the country’s tripartite presidency, did not reply to him in an open letter, perhaps the interview Milorad Dodik, the president of the Republika Srpska entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina, gave to Radio Free Europe would not have been particularly noticed.

The Bosnian Serb leader can hardly surprise anybody with some new “anti-Bosnian rhetoric,” but this time he outdid himself by saying that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a failed international experiment and that the Serbs overwhelmingly support secession. He also denied a national identity to the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), accusing them of wanting to dominate Bosnia and to marginalize and subjugate the country’s Serb and Croat communities.

In his reply, Izetbegovic accused Dodik of pushing Bosnia into one of its worst crises since the signing of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreements. He said Dodik’s views were based on unfounded and arbitrary claims and did not contribute to reconciliation, mutual respect and the development of democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“You, Mr. Dodik ,” he stressed, “will personally bear all responsibility if the conflicts you are provoking in your public appearances happen.” “With a little effort from Bosnia’s political leaders we can move forward, catch up with our neighbors and soon become an equal, prosperous and credible member of the EU. Be an engine, not a brake, on processes that have no alternative,” he said.

Support for Izetbegovic’s letter

While Izetbegovic’s public letter was met with support by most of the democratic Bosnian parties and circles, Dodik’s representatives in the Bosnian parliament went even further than himself, accusing the Bosniaks of being “ready to mobilize in order to achieve domination” in the country. One of them, Slavko Jovicic, said the Serbs would resist the creation of an Islamic state and leave Bosnia’s joint institutions, just like they did in 1991, on the eve of the war, “and we will never return again.” This is the same language and words that Radovan Karadzic used in the Bosnian parliament on Oct. 14, 1991, when he threatened “one whole people to disappear” -- meaning the Bosnian Muslims -- if they secede from Yugoslavia (i.e., from Serbia).

It is well known what happened in the years that followed, from the ethnic cleansing of “Serb lands” of Bosniaks, Croats and other non-Serbs to the genocide in Srebrenica. But what is happening 20 years later? What was not possible to achieve through the use of arms in the 1990s -- not only the disappearance of “one whole people,” but the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole -- is being attempted nowadays through other means.

Thus, it is no wonder that the ICG continues to say Bosnia’s entity of Republika Srpska “still threatens the stability of the country and the Western Balkans” and that, if the Bosnian Serb leaders “continue driving every conflict with Sarajevo to the brink, as they have done repeatedly to date, they risk disaster.” Furthermore, the abovementioned Atlantic Initiative, led by young Bosnian scholars, concludes that “the ethnic tensions, war legacy, unstable political situation, weak central institutions, poverty and unemployment are potential risks that might lead to the renewal of the inter-ethnic conflicts and armed incidents in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

It is hard to believe that the unstable and uncertain situation in Kosovo and Bosnia might lead to larger armed conflicts, similar to those of the 1990s. NATO proved in 1999, as its secretary-general is proving today, that it will prevent the region from “slipping into violence.” However, high-tempered tension can cause serious and sporadic incidents between Kosovo’s Albanians and Serbs that will need time and means to be checked and stopped.

Something similar happened in Macedonia a decade ago. High inter-ethnic tensions in Bosnia are being initiated at football matches or, as is happening these days, in a small town where local Croats are trying to prevent the rebuilding of a mosque that their nationalists destroyed during the Bosnian war. A new war would most probably be prevented by NATO, but Bosnia’s main problem is that its own nationalists are trying to destroy it from within using “peaceful means,” and blocking the formation of the country’s government for more than a year is only one of those means. Regarding the role of regional powers in increasing or lessening instability in the Balkans, Serbia can do more in Kosovo than in Bosnia, and the international community can, and should, do more in both cases. Leaving aside for this occasion Russia’s interest in supporting and encouraging Serb nationalists, both in Serbia and in Bosnia, Serbia could secure its EU membership by recognizing the reality of Kosovo’s independence and by leaving the north of Kosovo to be run by Pristina, which should itself guarantee the national rights of Kosovo’s Serbs.

In Bosnia, the main responsibility lies within the international community -- the US and Europe -- as it created an extremely dysfunctional state structure in Dayton and led to the formation of local nationalist and ethnic elites interested only in staying in power as long as possible. Although they said it’s impossible to create a “new Dayton,” the only way for a functional Bosnia, it would not have been so difficult had there been enough “political will” in Washington, London, Berlin and Paris -- not only among Bosnian politicians. Or, as Matthew Parish, an expert on Balkan affairs, says about Dodik, the “Serb Machiavelli that has Bosnia’s future in his hands,” “Rather than condemning him, they [the international community] should perhaps condemn themselves for having immersed his tragic country in a political maelstrom and then carelessly turned their backs on the results.”

*Hajrudin Somun is the former ambassador of Bosnia and

Herzegovina to Turkey.