Why Bosnia can’t be divided

Posted in Uncategorized - August 20, 2012 - 10 Comments

Some of my Twitter colleagues (antagonists?) are interested in my answering this question:

can join the without , so why can’t join without the Federation? Double standard?

The answer to this one is easy:  The EU only accepts for membership sovereign states.  Serbia can join the EU without Kosovo because Serbia is a sovereign state.  I have no doubt that many of the EU’s 28 members (the 27 current ones plus Croatia, which will join next year) will insist that Serbia be clear about where its sovereign borders lie.  Germany appears to be insisting on that before the EU gives Serbia a date for negotiations to begin.  None of Kosovo (not even the Serb-controlled north) will enter the EU with Serbia.

Republika Srpska (RS) is not sovereign and will not be.  But that begs the question, why can’t the RS be sovereign?  So this is a better formulation of the question:

Speaking of reintegration/independence…why can’t the Republika Srpska divide from B-H & stand alone—or rejoin ?

I have addressed this question on peacefare.net many times, but I suppose there is no harm in revisiting it.  After all, you can skip this post if you feel I’m repeating myself.

My colleague here at SAIS, Michael Haltzel, offers a moral argument:  Republika Srpska, which occupies the 49 per cent of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the product of an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted during the Bosnian war (1992-95).  Few non-Serbs have been able to return.  He argues that the international community will not and should not recognize as sovereign a political entity whose origin lies in war crimes and gross human rights violations.

This is not what I argue, even if I agree with Mike on the merits of the case.  After all, Kosovo Albanians chased Serbs from the area south of the Ibar river and relatively few of them have returned.  Yet the United States and 90 or so other countries have recognized Kosovo as sovereign.  There are many differences of both degree and principle between the two cases, but I don’t expect my Twitter colleagues to appreciate them.

I incline towards the realist arguments.  RS independence would inevitably lead to a three-way division of Bosnia.  The Croat-dominated southern portions would also secede from Bosnia, leaving what my State Department colleagues and I during the Bosnian war called “a nonviable rump Islamic state that would be a platform for Iranian terrorism.”  We imagined the terrorism would be aimed at Europe, not the U.S., but the prospect was still to be avoided.  It is even less appetizing today than it was in 1995.

In fact, the prospect is worse than our quoted phrase portrayed.  While some may imagine that the inter-entity boundary line drawn at Dayton divides the RS from any future Islamic state in central Bosnia, there is no comparable line defining the Croat state.  Nor is there any reason why the Bosniaks (that’s the non-religious term many Bosnian Muslims prefer) should accept the inter-entity boundary line as defining the limits of their state, especially as the eastern portion of RS before the 1990s was largely Bosniak, not Serb, majority. In short:  an RS claim of independence would reignite the Bosnian war, as each of the ethnic groups seeks to lay claim to territory it regards as its own.

In the meanwhile, no one in the international community would be interested in recognizing RS independence.  Even Serbia would refrain, because of the implications not only for EU membership but also because there is nothing attractive to Serbia about having a nonviable rump Islamic state on its border.  Croatia’s President Tudjman understood how unattractive that prospect was, which is why he shifted from supporting Croat secession from Bosnia to support of the Croat-Muslim Federation.  Slobodan Milosevic did not understand this, but many in Belgrade today do.  They also understand that RS secession would cause unrest in Sandjak and trouble in Kosovo as well.

In short, division of Bosnia  would cause a whole lot more trouble than Serbia, Croatia, the EU, the United States and most of the rest of the world think wise.  That’s a good enough reason for me to think it should remain a single state, albeit one in which there is a large measure of self-governance not only in Republika Srspka but also in the Federation.  But that is a different subject.

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10 thoughts on “Why Bosnia can’t be divided”

  1. A well-argued piece in general, except for the estimation that Serbia wouldn’t support secession of RS because “there is nothing attractive to Serbia about having a nonviable rump Islamic state on its border”.

    Official rhetoric aside, Serbia still sees – and has never ceased to see – as its prime national interest ethnic homogenization by integrating as many Serbs as possible into a single nation-state. If the so-called “international community” offered Serbia to recognize Kosovo’s sovereignty in exchange for Serbia’s formal and definite unification with RS, you can bet Serbia would readily accept the offer.

    Which by no means implies that the West should deem such a solution wise, not least because allowing the Serbs to unify into a “greater Serbia” would inevitably ignite similar aspirations among other ethnicities in the region (notably Albanians), thereby making things even more complex than they already are.

  2. Before we put aside the fact that ethnic hate that rampaged through the Balkans was ignited and distended by Serbs and as, at the time, the most powerful and what Serb’s intellectual elite like to say most evolved nation they are to be held responsible and accountable for what happened. They need to understand this. What happened is responsibility of their own intellectual elite. Several months ago, Crown Prince Alexander was on Kosovo trying to bring some help and give support to Serbs who live there. What he ran into was stones thrown upon him and chanting “Noz, zica Srebrenica” – the most monstrous sentence that speaks to me about the sad state of Serbs soul and mental health. What it speaks politically is that the same politic that led to Genocide in Srebrenica is still alive. The politic that led to war and bloodshed on Balkans is alive among Serbs and until they understand this the will not get better. As far as this goes the same mutant created by Milosevic, led to Milosevic’s downfall, killed Zoran Djindjic, prevented any progressive politic in Serbia to pull the country out of the madness toward civilized world. Whoever wishes good to Serbia ought to see things under this light. After that one could put aside this matter and turn to next thing. Which is Serbia has no historical nor legal right on any part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is insane to get down this road. The same way Hungary (or Hungarians) could ask for Vojvodina, Albanians and Bosniaks for large parts of Serbia, Bulgarians and Romanians for their own parts. And when all of them get piece of Serbia, Serbia still would not had any right on any part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. That political idea has to be put down like a mad dog. It only brought misery to everyone involved, to Serbs especially not to forget that it represents ethical, legal, and historical abomination.

  3. Why do you accept the easy equivalence between the Serbs of Kosovo and the Muslims of BiH? The Muslims of Bosnia were driven out of their homes after years of systematic persecution culminating in the genocide at Srebrenica (Hague-approved terminology). The Serbs of Kosovo left after a week of rioting in which a handful of Serbs (8) died. (More Albanians were killed by the international forces trying to protect the Serbs.) The Serbs then made a dramatic voluntary exit to the north, allowing the government of Serbia to complain ever since about their refugee problem and demanding that Prishtina make conditions sufficiently attractive to lure Serbs back to an economy Serbia does everything possible to undermine. Where is the international pressure on RS to attract the expelled Croatians and Muslims to return? In RS, efforts of Muslims to organize their return (recently, to vote in local elections) is treated as an anti-Serb plot. The international community has tacitly accepted the Serbian argument that they deserve an ethnically pure region of their own in BiH while pressuring the government in Kosovo to incorporate their own minorities, which seems to be going well in all cases except among the Serbs of the northern municipalities. (Leading to an almost impossible situation regarding treating half-a-dozen languages as official in certain circumstances – do they really not know about the free computer-assisted-translations programs available??)

    It may simply require some time for the Serbs to come around. Remember the asterisk? For a while it was defending the very survival of Serbdom, if you listened to the overheated rhetoric. Now, the new government – the people who were throwing around words like “traitor” before the election – are noticing that storming out of regional meetings simply means no one listens to them. So plans are being drawn up to return to the meetings, regardless of what the organizers put or fail to put on Kosovo’s nameplate. And so it goes, one slow step back at a time. So give them time and don’t rush to make unnecessary concessions for the sake of achieving agreements just in order to be able to say you’ve achieved agreement, which only encourages them with the idea that holding out will secure a bridgehead to be exploited in more favorable times. Criminy, Hungary lost 2/3 of its territory with less international handholding than Serbia seems to require.

    1. “Where is the international pressure on RS to attract the expelled Croatians and Muslims to return?”

      Where is the international pressure on Croatia to attract the 200000 expelled Serbians from the Krajina region?

  4. Mr. Serwer, why don’t you stick to international law? Under international law the RS could only secede with consent of the other ethnic groups. That would solve any problems that you see regarding inter-entity borders.

    I can’t see your problem with “a nonviable rump Islamic state that would be a platform for Iranian terrorism.” It sounds to me like typical propaganda to defend something indefensible. Even stripped of the Croat parts it would have a population three times as large as Montenegro.

    The Bosniaks have lots of possibilities to placate the Serbs and find a way to live together. But when they choose not to there should not be some US veto that tells the Serbs that the US sees them rather expelled than having their own state. The fact that the West wrote such a blank check for the Croats and the Bosniaks in 1991/1992 and it made war nearly unavoidable.

    Finally the “product of ethnic cleansing” argument. It sounds nice until one considers that the other side cleansed just as hard. The Serb argument for the war was that Serbs became second rate citizens in the way Bosnia’s independence was handled. After the war the Bosniaks had a chance to prove them wrong. Instead they proved them right – just look at the fate of the Serbs in Sarajevo as an example.

  5. “After the war the Bosniaks had a chance to prove them wrong.” – I had already meet this type of thinking. So some raped girl ought to apologize and show good will toward the rapist even Bosniaks after the war showed nothing but good will in trying to mend fences. Number of Bosniaks killed during the war is 5:1 dead on Bosniak side against 1 which might as well be Serbs + Croats. Having said thta weight is on civilians among the fifth of those 5 on Bosniak’s side compared to the one on Serb’s side. What you are expecting is that we ought to believe that Serb’s victims ought to be grateful for an extended hand from Serb’s side with the same mentality that caused the problems behind it.

    1. The “gratitude” you mention was also shown to the Serbs who had stayed behind in Sarajavo and helped to defend it.

      If you insist on seeing all Serbs and Croats as criminals there is little hope for Bosnia and the only alternative to a split is Serbs and Croats being reduced to the status of second rate citizens.

      1. Guilt is individual, responsibilty is social category. Ordinary citizen suffers this responsibility as a guilt because there is no one to show him the better way where ordinary citizen ought only to suffer responsibility for what happened because of his lack of wisdom in previous times. This is the way of learning.

    2. You say that Bosnians died at a rate of 5:1 compared to serbs. FALSE. Yes, more bosnians died. But they didnt fight JUST serbs. They fought croatians also. They also fought OTHER muslims. To attribute every death to serbs is ridiculous.

      less than 32K bosnian civilians died. Granted that is far more than the 4200 Serb civilians killed or the 2500 croatian civilians killed. But how many of those 32K were killed by Croats? How many were killed by other Bosnians (Fikre Abdic).

      The Serbs were better equipped militarily. Just as the US is better equipped. Look at Iraqi Civilian deaths from the US actions there. Keep in mind that the 32k figure is from a 3YEAR war! Many of those died from mines, bombs, crossfire etc etc. Sure many were massacred as were Serbs as well.

      But an honest picture should be depicted … not one in which a particular narrative is forcefully attempted to be reached.

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