My advice
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and EU High Representative Katherine Ashton will be in the Balkans together this week. Their common objective is to maintain peace and stability there and to hasten integration of the region into Euro-Atlantic institutions, especially the EU itself. A visitor Friday suggested I tell them what to say. Here is what I would advise, though I hasten to add that I have no reason to believe anyone is listening:
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina are a mess. The European Union is unhappy with Bosnia’s progress towards candidacy for membership. The country’s proudest cultural institutions are closing shop due to lack of funding. Constitutional reform at the central government level is stalled. The Americans have launched an apparently open-ended effort to change the Federation constitution, the 51% of Bosnia governed by a Croat/Bosniak entity. The President of the other entity, Republika Srpska (RS), passes up no opportunity to declare the country is falling apart and is trying hard to make it happen. The RS’s founder, Radovan Karadzic, is busily denying war crimes in The Hague.
The big threat to Bosnia is the EU itself, which ironically describes the peril this way:
Some political representatives are questioning Bosnia and Herzegovina’s capacity to function as a country and are calling for an Entity-level EU agenda separate from the Bosnia and Herzegovina state.
If Brussels gives into this temptation, Bosnia will break up, with the RS pressing for early entry into the EU as an independent state and the Federation thrust into a struggle that can only end in a breakup into Croat and Muslim mini-states. There is no two-way partition of Bosnia. The three-way partition risks leaving an Islamic state with uncertain borders somewhere in central Bosnia, a threat to both its Croat and Serb neighbors. It is not difficult to picture the Bosniaks of Sandjak seeking to join this Islamic state, thus threatening the territorial integrity of Serbia and requiring Belgrade to act vigorously to protect itself from the threat of losing yet another province.
So the joint message from Clinton and Ashton should be this: Bosnia and Herzegovina needs to put its own house in order and create a government in Sarajevo that can act authoritatively in implementing the Stabilization and Association Agreement already signed with the EU and in eventually negotiating EU membership. The EU has already said this in its typically opaque terms:
Establishing an effective coordination mechanism between various levels of government for the transposition, implementation and enforcement of EU laws so that the country can speak with one voice on EU matters, remains an issue to be addressed.
Clinton and Ashton should make it clear there will be no partition and no separate EU negotiations with the RS and Federation. If the current mess continues, Bosnia will be left to stew in its own juices while the rest of the Balkans moves ahead. Aid will be cut and diplomatic exchanges curtailed. Those who are most responsible for the mess will find themselves barred from travel to the U.S. and EU and cold-shouldered in European and American visits to Bosnia.
Serbia
Belgrade has a new president and government whose help on Bosnia Ashton and Clinton should seek. Serbia today understands the risks partition in Bosnia would cause for stability in Sandjak, its own territorial integrity and its own EU prospects. President Nikolic and Prime Minister Dacic have no brief for RS President Dodik, who was a favorite of the previous administration in Serbia. Before he manages to compromise the new president as he did former President Tadic, the Americans and Europeans should let it be known they will greatly appreciate Belgrade’s help in strengthening the central state in Bosnia and ending Dodik’s increasingly strident tirades against it.
Kosovo is the other big issue in Belgrade. Clinton and Ashton need to tell everyone they meet that there will be no partition of Kosovo, something Dacic in particular has sought in the past. Serbia, as the EU put it recently, has to accept the territorial integrity of Kosovo, whatever its status. There is no basis in UNSC resolution 1244 or anywhere else for Serbia to hold on to the north, which it still occupies (even if it does not fully control the various enterprises there). As Chancellor Merkel has made eminently clear, this means dismantling the parallel structures in the north and integrating it with the rest of Kosovo, in accordance with the wide-ranging self-governance provided for in the Ahtisaari plan. The other issues Dacic has expressed an interest in can and should all be handled in the bilateral dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade.
There is more: Kosovo will get an armed security force next year, in addition to its police. The NATO-assisted design of that security force depends on the threats Kosovo faces. If there continues to be a threat to Kosovo’s territorial integrity from Serbia, the Kosovo security forces will have to be armed and trained to meet that threat, in combination with guarantees and backup from NATO. If, however, Belgrade establishes a more cooperative and business-like relationship with Pristina and unequivocally accepts Kosovo’s territorial integrity, the reduced threat will require less arming and training, and lower military expenditures in Serbia as well.
Kosovo
The Americans and Europeans have more reason to be satisfied with Pristina at the moment than with Sarajevo or Belgrade. Despite political resistance inside Kosovo, Prime Minister Thaci met recently with Dacic, at Ashton’s behest and with U.S. encouragement. The fulfillment of Kosovo’s obligations under the Athisaari peace plan and the consequent end of “supervised independence” in September was an important moment.
But Kosovo is far behind Serbia and other parts of the Balkans in preparing itself for EU membership. Belgrade’s progress in this direction is likely to slow, at least for the next year or so. Kosovo can do itself no greater favor than trying hard to catch up. Clinton and Ashton should say this will require a stronger focus on implementing its mostly EU-compliant legislation and campaigning seriously against corruption and organized crime, as well as fixing its fraud-vulnerable electoral system. It also requires avoiding all violence against Serbs or other minorities and showing the Kosovo state can maintain order when more nationalist Albanians take to the streets.
Bottom line: The EU and U.S., when they act together in the Balkans, get what they want. The trick is to make it clear that there is no daylight between them on the vital issues: no partition in Bosnia or Kosovo and serious focus in all three capitals on preparing for EU membership, with all that implies in terms of strengthening the central state in Bosnia, Belgrade’s acceptance of Kosovo’s territorial integrity and reintegration of the north, and Kosovo’s effort to make its governance conform to European norms.
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8 thoughts on “My advice”
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Maybe, just maybe, the good people of RS will take care of the Dodik problem on their own. At the polls. In the recent local elections his candidates did not do well at all, and perhaps we can hope that he will lose the next presidential election (2014 is it?). Just the prospect that he may soon be gone should help reduce his mischief-making potential.
The Bosnians are learning to play the game as it is played in BiH, and managed to get enough Bosnians throughout the region to register in Srebrenica (which used to have population that was 80% non-Serb) to win the recent mayoral election. This time the Bosnian Serbs (some of whom had spent only a few months living there) now resident in Belgrade ignored the mailed pleas to get on the buses in Belgrade center and go and do their patriotic duty and keep Srebrenica in Serb hands.
The last time Ashton went to RS to talk to Dodik was seen as a come-down by the EU, but reports say (= I lost the reference) that she actually told him that if went through with his threat of holding a referendum on taking RS out of BiH he would not be allowed to travel to the EU and that his bank accounts there would be frozen. The trick will be not to let up on the pressure. Hillary won’t, but if there’s a change of administration, I worry about Romney deciding to write off the Balkans as a bad investment.
“Serbia today understands the risks partition in Bosnia would cause for stability in Sandjak, its own territorial integrity and its own EU prospects. President Nikolic and Prime Minister Dacic have no brief for RS President Dodik, who was a favorite of the previous administration in Serbia”.
Um… I’d better say nothing.
Please say, Milan, whatever you like!
Well, ok then. First, there is no substantial difference between the current and previous (Tadić’s) administrations. Prime minister Dačić has been playing an important role in both, and he is in very good and friendly relationship with Dodik. Predident Nikolić may not be in as good personal relationship with Dodik as Tadić was, but his position on Bosnia in general and RS in particular is, regardless of Dodik, basically the same as Tadić’s and Dačić’s.
Secondly, you must never underestimate the influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) on Serbia’s national policies, no matter who is in charge at a given time. All leading Serbian politicians (Tadić, Dačić, Nikolić, or anyone) do not bring any in the least significant decision before they have consulted the patriarch of SPC. And the SPC headquarters, including the patriarch himself, maintain a very clear stance on Republika Srpska: they regard it as a de facto independent state and do not even bother to conceal such an aspiration.
The third reason is more (geo)strategic, and hence more rational: not only that Serbia’s elite view RS as a potential compensation for the (obvious) loss of Kosovo, they also understand that controlling RS is much easier and more advantageous than trying to regain any kind of authority over Kosovo. The reason is threefold: (1) unlike Kosovo, RS is ethnically almost homogenous in favor of Serbs; (2) The territory of RS is several times larger than Kosovo’s; and (3) RS’s geographic position offers more advantages than Kosovo’s, especially when it comes to defensibility of Serbia’s national border to the west and southwest.
What is encouraging is the fact that Serbia has not yet abandoned European integration. What is discouraging, however, is that Serbia’s primary, if not only, motive for that is the hope that it will get money from EU accession funds during the process; European values are of no, or at best very little, importance. This means that as long as Serbia remains committed to EU membership, at least nominally, the West – i.e. U.S. and leading European powers – will be able to maneuver Belgrade’s policies to a smaller or greater extent, but only if they constantly bear in mind how fragile Serbia’s European commitment is, whatever Serbian politicians may be promising to Western officials during their meetings in private.
Finally, it is wrong to focus exclusively on Dodik regarding the RS secessionist ambitions, because secession – and consequent unification with Serbia – is something that a vast majority of RS Serbs are hoping for; even if Dodik and his party lost next elections, nothing in this respect would change at all. The problem is much deeper and, as such, merits separate analysis.
(The lights are back on.)
Ok, I’ll stop hoping for the easy way out (that the Bosnian Serbs will change their minds as well as their leaders).
As for the attractiveness of “European values,” it does seem as though Serb politicians keep trying to convey that they will cleverly find some way to sneak Serbia in without making any fundamental changes, especially with regard to Kosovo.
What is particularly discouraging about Serbians’ views on EU membership is that according to that recent poll, young people seem to be losing interest in joining it.
The Church is hanging on stubbornly in Macedonia and Montenegro, too. In a discussion of a similar problem of the Russian church refusing autocephaly to the Ukrainian church it was said that under canon law this was supposed to happen when the government recognized the independence of another state. (Any idea about this?) But all that real estate, not to mention authority, seems to be too hard for mortals to give up.
“What is particularly discouraging about Serbians’ views on EU membership is that according to that recent poll, young people seem to be losing interest in joining it”.
Yes, that’s true. Most recent polls have revealed that – depending on which particular poll you look at – between 53 and 55 percent of young people are vehemently opposed to Serbia’s eurointegration.
But it is not that surprising that younger generations feel animosity toward the EU and the West in general, given how strong anti-Western propaganda in some of Serbian mainstream media is, and also given that young people are by definition most pliable to inflammatory rhetoric. Much more surprising to many is that, in terms of regional distinctions, residents of capital Belgrade have turned out to be most opposed to EU membership.
I would like to hear on this as well.
My advice – now that the lights have started to flicker and the first limb of the old apple tree has come down: eat the ice-cream first!