Can Bosnia's Peace Survive?
As Bosnian Serb politicians go, Milorad Dodik was considered one of the good guys. The former businessman took over the job of Prime Minister of the Bosnian Serb Republic in Banja Luka shortly after the end of the Bosnian war in 1995, helping to purge the local government of cronies of the wartime leader Radovan Karadzic. He battled corruption and helped international investigators send indicted war criminals to the Hague. But these days, Dodik sounds like a changed man.
In the past two months he has questioned the underlying agreement that ended the war, attacked Muslim politicians for "consorting" with war criminals and asserted that his Serb-dominated Republic may try to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina and ultimately join Serbia. Meanwhile, Bosnian Muslim leaders in Sarajevo are matching him word for word: Haris Silajdzic, a former Bosnian Muslim Prime Minister, and another erstwhile moderate, told Time that the boundaries imposed at the end of the war should be erased because "they are not natural. They are based on genocide."
Between them, the two former moderates have cranked up the heat for Bosnia's upcoming general elections, scheduled for Oct. 1, to a level not seen since the war ended, alarming international officials who oversee the country and ordinary citizens who fear a return to violence. "These men are feeding off each other. They are not real nationalists, but they are using it to get elected. This is our catastrophe," says Senad Pecanin, editor of the Sarajevo weekly Dani. The concern is all the more urgent because Silajdzic and Dodik, if current public opinion polls are borne out, could be the first postwar Bosnian political leaders to wield significant political power; the group of Western countries that has overseen Bosnia since 1995 is scheduled to scale back its authority next year, and although it will hand over duties to the E.U., the scope of those duties may be sharply reduced.
"There is a lot of fear," Bosnia's High Representative Christian Schwarz-Schilling told Time recently in Sarajevo. "People remember the same rhetoric from the early 1990s. And that ended in war. There is risk of it going too far." While he and other diplomats say a return to war is unlikely, Pecanin is less sanguine: for the first time since the war, he said, "I am afraid for the peace here."
The tensions are rooted in the Dayton peace accords, named for the Ohio town where they were hammered out in 1995. To silence the guns, the agreement created two separate ethnically based "entities," the Muslim-Croat Federation, which comprises 51% of the country, and the Serb Republic, the majority Serb area that makes up the rest.
More than a decade on, these areas still have the appearance of separate countries. They have their own Prime Ministers and parliaments; their own languages, religions and mobile-phone networks. Although the army was finally unified under one command last year, the Serb Republic is crucially resisting efforts to centralize the police force.
And any visitor can attest that they feel like two different countries. Cross the border into the Serb Republic from the Muslim-Croat Federation and Latin script road signs give way to Cyrillic, mosques to Serbian Orthodox churches. Locals prefer Serbian beer and loza, a grape brandy, and the only flags visible, even on official government buildings, are Serbia's red, blue and white rather than Bosnia's official blue and yellow. "We've got everything here," said Predrag Andelic, 50, over a cigarette and a bottle of beer. He's a war veteran from near the city of Prijedor, site of internment camps that saw the deaths of thousands of Muslims, Roma and Croats. He and his neighbors don't trust Muslim leaders in Sarajevo. "We would like to share with the Muslims but they do not want to share with us," says one friend. "They want to take over."
This month's election campaign has opened up a sharp new divide between Bosnia's leaders over the future of the two entities. Silajdzic, the leading Bosnian Muslim prime ministerial candidate, says he would like to see them dismantled in "a year or two." He explains: "A minority of 23.8% [Serbs] can block the whole country. We should be a citizen-based, and not an ethnically-based, country." He favors what he calls a new "dialogue" with all sides about how to eliminate the old borders and establish a centralized government in Sarajevo, but critics fear he means a Muslim-dominated state in which ethnic Serbs and Croats would lose their collective rights.
Serb leaders insist that the entities, and hence their Serb-dominated statelet, are sacrosanct. "We will fight" attempts to dismantle the current system, Dodik told a Serbian news agency earlier this month. Speaking to Time, the Serb Republic's President, Dragan Cavic, struck a more conciliatory note. He said the idea of a referendum calling for the secession of the Serb Republic was "crazy, suicide," but added that dissolving the entity's borders unilaterally would lead to "a crisis that I cannot imagine." He warned: "Enough blood has been spilled."
Until the past few months, senior politicians were barely able to talk about redrawing Bosnia's borders. The Office of the High Representative for Bosnia (ohr) was endowed by the U.N. with extraordinary executive powers to keep the peace in postwar Bosnia, and it used them regularly to make sure that local politicians toed the line. Dozens of judges and other bureaucrats were sacked and hundreds of politicians barred from office for breaking the rules and threatening the peaceful development of a multiethnic country. But now the U.S. and other Western countries plan to hand over responsibility for Bosnia to a European Union representative, possibly with strictly limited powers, by next July. Schwarz-Schilling, who succeeded Britain's Paddy Ashdown in the office earlier this year, has already adopted a more cautious approach than his predecessors. Bosnia's politicians need to "face the consequences of their own mistakes," he explained to Time, noting that a final call on whether or not the E.U. will wield executive powers will only be made early next year. "The decision will be whether to stick with the plan of disbanding the ohr, or to rethink," said Schwarz-Schilling.
The prospect of a weaker international presence is disturbing to many. Emsuda Mujagic, 54, is a Muslim woman who was driven from her home near Prijedor in the Serb Republic in 1992. Her village was torched and 48 family members, she says, were murdered in camps. She was able to escape and returned a few years ago, thanks mainly to the presence of foreign troops and the international community. Now she says, "I don't think it's a good idea for the ohr to leave. I am afraid. The politicians will just have a free hand to build up people's fears and fan ethnic intolerance."
Moreover, the region is already undergoing a kind of realignment. Neighboring Montenegro won independence from Serbia in late Spring, and contentious talks are under way to grant autonomy to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo — where Serbs are an embattled minority — by as early as next year. Serb politicians in Belgrade and in Bosnia warn that an "imposed" solution in Kosovo could inflame Serbs across the region. Of course, it's possible that the current round of nationalist posturing by moderate politicians is mere populist vote-getting. But too many with memories of recent history are unwilling to rely on that.
With reporting by Dejan Anastasijevic/Sarajevo
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/printout/0,13155,1538599,00.html
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