Mr. Dodik came to Washington too
The President of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, is careful. Unlike Slobodan Petrovic, the Kosovo Serb deputy prime minister who spoke in public to a group at Johns Hopkins/SAIS that included people who do not agree with him, Dodik declined an invitation to do a public event and instead talked to a SAIS class taught by David Kanin, a retired CIA analyst for whom I have a lot of respect. But he is also a sympathizer with ethnic separation in the Balkans. The message is clear.
I was not invited to the class, or to last night’s reception for Dodik. The reception was held at an institution run by retired Foreign Service officers, presumably in order to give it the air of an official diplomatic reception and avoid using the Bosnian Embassy, which belongs to an institution (the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina) that Dodik wants to weaken.
I’m particularly amused by the effort to restrict exposure to those who might disagree with Dodik because Obrad Kesic, one of his Washington handlers, is someone whom I invited to speak repeatedly during my years at the United States Institute of Peace though he espoused views I do not agree with. When he wanted, I published a dissent from a USIP paper on Bosnia he prepared with colleagues.
Dodik had trouble getting good meetings on the Hill but was supposed to see Senator Inhofe (R-Oklahoma). At the State Department, Phil Gordon was unable to see him due to a family matter, so he talked with Deputy Assistant Secretary Phil Reeker. Dodik forgot to push Republika Srspka independence there. It was all about Dayton and EU membership, without any mention of the now well-established incompatibility between the Dayton constitution and a state capable of meeting EU requirements. I am pleased to report that this charade fools no one at State.
Dodik doesn’t owe me anything. I’ve got more than enough lectures and diplomatic receptions to attend. He can appear or not in front of any audience he chooses in this open society, and invite or not invite to his liking. But someone who chooses to avoid rather than engage his critics and tries to give the impression of engaging in public discourse at a university when he really hasn’t is not my kind of guy. I trust he’ll impress his carefully chosen audiences in Chicago more.
PS, November 3: A Bosnian visitor called this video from Dodik’s Columbia event to my attention yesterday. He discusses Russia, Srebrenica and other interesting topics:
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The witch is dead
Reuters published this piece today, under the heading “Libya’s Democracy Has a Real Chance”:
Libyans will be getting up late tomorrow morning, having enjoyed a spectacular celebration tonight. “The Wizard of Oz” comes to mind: “The witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead!”
Now begins the hard work of building a more open and democratic society with some distinct advantages, and Libya has vast resources—not only the oil and gas in the ground, but also cash in foreign bank accounts. Qaddafi’s ironic legacy is that his ill-gotten gains will fund Libya’s reconstruction.
The population is small (about 6.5 million) and more or less homogenous. There are tribal and geographic distinctions, there are Berbers as well as Arabs, there are blacker people and whiter people and there are rich and poor. But none of these differences has yet emerged as a source of widespread violence.
All the Libyans I talked with during a visit to Benghazi and Tripoli last month showed confidence in the National Transitional Council (NTC), which has drawn a roadmap for preparation of a constitution and elections that is widely accepted as reasonable and legitimate. Much criticized by the Western press for bungling a few public announcements, the NTC has managed to continue paying social security benefits and subsidizing bread. In Benghazi and Tripoli, the water and electricity are flowing, markets are open and well stocked, police are on the street and at least some of the garbage is being collected. For most Libyans, that counts for a lot more than whether an announcement of Saif al Islam’s capture was true or not.
Most of Libya was rid of Qaddafi regime more than a month ago. The main sources of friction so far have been two: fighters, mainly from the Nafusa Mountains in the west, who have not wanted to leave Tripoli; and Islamists who seem ready to push for a less secular society than many Libyans would like. Islam is already pervasive in Libya—most women cover their hair, alcohol is prohibited (and not generally available), mosques are ubiquitous and, I am told, well attended. Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood is relatively moderate, as are its secularists.
But there will have to be political differentiation: left and right, Islamists and secularists will begin soon to form political parties. That process will not be an easy or smooth one for people with no democratic experience and a lot of guns, including surface to air missiles looted from Qaddafi’s armories. There is a real risk of revenge killing by militias and of insurgency by Qaddafi loyalists.
But Libya has better prospects than much larger and poorer Egypt, where the protesters handed power to a military that is now reluctant to surrender it. Nothing is guaranteed, but a democratic Libya that enjoys good relations with Europe and the United States is a real possibility.
PS: The details of how Qaddafi came to his end are still unclear, but disturbing. There are videos circulating on the internet that show mistreatment, even cruelty. He was evil, but that does not justify evil treatment. Libyans need to demonstrate much greater discipline and restraint if they want to improve their chances of installing a real democracy.
PPS: NPR is reporting that burial has been delayed to allow the International Criminal Court to investigate the circumstances of Qaddafi’s death. That sounds like a good idea to me, though I wouldn’t bet on the odds of a prosecution.
PPPS: Qaddafi’s motorcade, in an AP video:
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Mr. Petrović comes to Washington
Slobodan Petrović, the leader of the largest Serb political bloc in the Kosovo parliament and a deputy prime minister in the Albanian-majority country, has visited us previously in DC, but this is the first time we’ve had him as a solo act at Johns Hopkins. He appeared previously with then Finance Minister Ahmet Shala. Petrović outperformed, as they say on Wall Street (when it isn’t occupied).
He starts from a simple premise: he can do more to protect his constituency, attract Serbs back to Kosovo (or keep them from leaving) and improve their economic and social conditions by political participation than by isolating the Serbs and refusing to vote or serve in parliament, which is what Belgrade prefers. This is a marvelously simple, even self-evident, but decidedly non-Balkan notion.
It has worked reasonably well for Serbs south of the Ibar river, where most of them live. Forty per cent of them voted in the last Kosovo election. They are less isolated than five years ago, when Petrovic launched his Serb Liberal Party, and their rights are more widely respected. The Pristina government has funded housing and infrastructure for Serb communities, and the international community has pitched in as well. Decentralization, in accordance with the Ahtisaari peace plan that Belgrade rejected, has provided Serb-majority municipalities with a wide degree of autonomy. Freedom of movement has improved. I won’t say all Albanians have learned to embrace the Serbs, but they are certainly far more accepting of them today than in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 NATO/Yugoslavia war, when something like half the Albanian population of Kosovo returned from having been expelled by Serbian forces.
There is lots more to be done for the Serbs south of the Ibar, but the big problem is northern Kosovo, where Belgrade has not permitted Pristina’s institutions to be established, even those that are guaranteed autonomy by the Ahtisaari plan. As Petrović recounted, Belgrade instead maintains barely functioning municipal governments with large payrolls. Nationalist Serbs from all over Kosovo have retreated to the north, including some Croatian Serbs relocated to Kosovo in 1995. The result is a lawless area where courts don’t function, services are poor and extremists are determined to resist not only Pristina’s authority but also the UN, EULEX, NATO and the EU.
Ultimately, this is a European Union problem. The EU Commission has recommended candidacy status for Serbia, provided it improves cooperation with Pristina. The question is how far Belgrade will go. The smart money is betting not far, since Serbia has elections early next year and the EU is believed to have set a low bar, apparently in the hope that will boost Serbian President Boris Tadić’s reelection prospects.
Some believe things are moving in the right direction and we just need to patiently keep them on track. Eventually, Serbia will have to accept Kosovo independence as a reality. Some even believe that Tadić, if reelected, will bring nationalist Tomislav Nikolić into the government as prime minster, reducing Kosovo’s salience as a competitive issue in Serbian politics and enabling both to accept reality sooner rather than later.
I’m not ready to sign up to optimism on Serbia’s acceptance of the Kosovo reality. I’ve been disappointed too many times. But I am optimistic about the prospects for the Serb communities south of the Ibar. Petrović is leading them in a good direction, one I hope the Albanians of Kosovo will appreciate and reward. Pristina’s fate still depends, as it has since 1999, on how fairly it is prepared to treat Kosovo’s Serb population. That is also the key to the north, where it is not going to be easy to gain the confidence of the population.
One note of appreciation: to the Kosovo embassy in Washington, which handled its deputy prime minister’s visit well. As those of us who deal with the Balkans in Washington know only too well, Washington embassies sometimes provide support that depends all too obviously on the ethnic background of the visitor. Thank you, Ambassador Spahiu, for showing that Kosovo knows better!
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Tehran’s options
While the world debates the significance of the Hamas/Israel prisoner exchange, let me turn back to something that really counts for the United States: Iran’s nuclear program. In the aftermath of the Iran(Car)Tel plot, friend Rashad Mahmood, formerly of Cairo, asks “What would be reasonable Iranian policy to having their nuclear scientists killed (by admittedly much finer spycraft since they haven’t aired any proof of who has done it)?”
This is a reasonable question with some scary answers. Let’s look at some of the (not mutually exclusive) options:
1. They can respond by killing the nuclear scientists of those countries they think responsible for the attacks on their own (presumably Israel, but as Rashad says there is no proof in the public domain). I assume they’ve tried this and haven’t succeeded, or at least we haven’t heard about it.
2. They can accelerate their nuclear program, hide it better, protect the people who work in it and try to get nuclear weapons as soon as possible. They may be trying, but they appear to be failing.
3. They can begin to wonder whether the nuclear program is worth the trouble it is causing and reach an arrangement that reassures friends and foe alike that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons even if it acquires the “fuel cycle” technology required to do so. President Ahmedinejad has proposed something along these lines, but no one is taking him seriously yet, so far as I can tell.
4. They can kill diplomats or citizens of third countries, say Saudi Arabia, that may have little to do with the killing of the Iranians but are hated enemies anyway.
My impression is that they’ve tried at one time or another Nos. 1-3, so far without success. No. 4 doesn’t make any sense to me, but maybe it does to someone in Tehran (and certainly it does to some in DC). The jury is still out on the extent of official Iranian involvement in the IranTel plot.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration seems to me to be doing the right thing: keeping the focus on the nuclear program and ratcheting up sanctions implementation. This may not bring immediate results, but at least it provides some incentive for no. 3. The trick is knowing when to take Ahmedinejad’s proposition seriously. It is really difficult for outsiders to judge when the right moment comes–we are going to have to trust the White House to call that shot.
Here is the version of what Ahmedinejad has said about limiting uranium enrichment published by the Washington Post:
Q: I understand that you were in favor of the deal you had reached with the United States in 2009, according to which the U.S. would sell you 20-percent-enriched uranium in exchange for Iran exporting low-enriched uranium. But you were attacked by your critics and came under assault and people here could not reach a consensus and the deal fell apart.
Ahmedinejad: In Iran, people are free to express their views. Every day some people criticize the policies of the government. This doesn’t mean that the government is going to abandon their policies. We felt that they wouldn’t give us the fuel required here for our reactor. There were some political leaders who gave interviews in the United States and Europe and they said they want to keep Iran from having access to such fuel. So we realized that they wouldn’t give us that fuel so we had to do it ourselves. Even if they gave us now uranium grade 20 percent, we would not continue with the production of this fuel.
Q: So if the United States sold you the enriched uranium, would you stop enriching yourselves?
Ahmedinejad: Yes. We don’t want to produce uranium of 20 percent. Because they did not give us that uranium, we had to make our own investments. If they start to give us that uranium today, we will stop production.
Q: You reached a deal in Geneva in 2009, and you came back here and the deal fell apart here, and now people in Washington don’t believe a deal is possible.
Ahmedinejad: If they give us uranium grade 20 percent, we would stop production. Those negotiations took place in Vienna. Apparently they know everything. I repeat: If you give us uranium grade 20 percent now, we will stop production. Because uranium grade 20 percent can only be used for such reactors, nothing else.
This is the proposition some commentators think worth considering. Many think it a mirage, but time is on Tehran’s side: even if their nuclear program has slowed, they will eventually get there if there is no verifiable agreement for them to stop.
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Listen to the choir
I am finding myself in good company on Pakistan, where I argued early this month that we need to pick our friends with care even as we target those who are our enemies. In one form or another, I am finding Ann Wilkens of the Afghan Analyts’ Network (whose paper predates my blog post), Bruce Riedel and Christine Fair–all of whom know more about Pakistan than I will ever know–in agreement.
Their arguments lean in favor of befriending civilians who are truly committed to democracy and willing to build serious democratic institutions while recognizing that elements of the military and intelligence services are our enemies and need at least to be contained if not slapped with sanctions. Ann Wilkens adds a word in favor of establishing the Durand line as the border with Afghanistan. Chris Fair goes into detail on the kinds of diplomatic contacts and capacity-building we need to get into while Bruce Riedel, less interested in the civilian potential, is explicit about slashing military aid and moving towards an adversarial, containment-focused relationship with Pakistan’s military. All favor trade over aid.
It seems to me that the Administration would do well to listen to this chorus of calls for reorienting America’s relationship with Pakistan. How about announcing a re-assessment of the U.S. relations with Pakistan? Or convening a wise persons’ review? The main reason Afghanistan really counts for the United States is Pakistan. We owe it to the forces fighting there and the civilians trying to build an Afghan state to have a hard look at whether adjustments to our Pakistan policies can make their jobs easier.
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Next week’s “peace picks”
Good stuff, especially early in the week. Heavy on Johns Hopkins events, but what do you expect?
1. Strengthening the Armenianj-Azerbaijani Track II Dialogue, Carnegie Endowment, October 17, 10-11:45 am
With Philip Gamaghelyan, Tabib Huseynov, and Thomas de Waal
With the main diplomatic track negotiating the conflict over Nagorny Karabakh apparently deadlocked, more attention is being focused on how tension can be reduced and bridges built through Track II initiatives and dialogue between ordinary Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
Mohamed Salah Tekaya, Tunisian ambassador to the United States; Tamara Wittes, deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs and deputy special coordinator for Middle East Transitions at the U.S. Department of State; Mohamed Ali Malouche, president of the Tunisian American Young Professionals; and Kurt Volker (moderator), managing director of CTR, will discuss this topic. For more information and to RSVP, visit http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2279443878/mcivte
4. Mexico and the War on Drugs: Time to Legalize, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, held at Mount Vernon Place, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Cato Institute, to be held at the Undercroft Auditorium, 900 Massachusetts Ave., N.W. October 18, noon
Mexico is paying a high price for fighting a war on drugs that are consumed in the United States. More than 40,000 people have died in drug-related violence since the end of 2006 when Mexico began an aggressive campaign against narco-trafficking. The drug war has led to a rise in corruption and gruesome criminality that is weakening democratic institutions, the press, law enforcement, and other elements of a free society. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox will explain that prohibition is not working and that the legalization of the sale, use, and production of drugs in Mexico and beyond offers a superior way of dealing with the problem of drug abuse.
To register for this event, email events@cato.org, fax (202) 371-0841, or call (202) 789-5229 by noon, Monday, October 17, 2011.
Monday, October 17, 2011
7:30 PM – 9:00 PM
Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
1957 E Street, NW
5. Revolutionary vs. Reformist Islam: The Iran-Turkey Rivalry in the Middle East, Lindner Family Commons, room 602, 1957 E St NW, October 18, 7:30-9 pm
Ömer Tapinar, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Hadi Semati, Iranian Political Scientist
Mohammad Tabaar, Adjunct Lecturer, GW
The Arab Spring has brought Iran and Turkey into a regional rivalry to sell their different brands of Islam. While Tehran is hoping to inspire an “Islamic awakening”, Ankara is calling for a “secular state that respects all religions.” The panelists will discuss this trend and its influences on domestic politics in Iran and Turkey.
The Middle East Policy Forum is presented with the generous support of ExxonMobil.
This program will be off the record out of respect for its presenters.
RSVP at: http://tinyurl.com/3ntfx9o
Sponsored by the Institute for Middle Eastern Stuides
PS: I really should not have missed this Middle East Institute event:
Troubled Triangle: The US, Turkey, and Israel in the New Middle East, Stimson Center, 1111 19th St NW, 11th floor, October 18, 4:30-6 pm
The trilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel and the United States has deteriorated in recent years as Israel’s and Turkey’s foreign policy goals in the Middle East continue to diverge. Despite repeated attempts, the United States has failed to reconcile these two important regional allies since the divisive Mavi Marmara incident in May 2010. Please join us for a discussion of this critical yet troubled trilateral relationship in a time of unprecedented change in the Middle East. The discussion will feature Prof. William B. Quandt, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Professor of Politics at University of Virginia, Lara Friedman, Director of Policy and Government Relations and Gönül Tol, Executive Director of MEI Center for Turkish Studies, and will be held on October 18 at the Henry L. Stimson Center.
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