Tag: Balkans
Preparing for the Balkans
I confess I haven’t done a lot to prepare for my next two weeks in the Balkans, apart from one or two subjects I need to be up to date on, but maybe my fans there will find it interesting to know what I’ll be reading to get ready. I’ll also be delighted if they would make some suggestions.
I was inspired to this blogpost by reading Ted Galen Carpenter’s piece in The National Interest. Ted does not quite merit the “Srebrenica denier” category, because he doesn’t really deny it–he just doesn’t mention it, preferring instead to refer to Ratko Mladic as “repulsive” and responsible for “repulsive” acts.
Instead he attacks inflated figures for overall civilian deaths in the Bosnian war and claims the Muslim/Croat fighting has been ignored. The civilian casualty figures were corrected many years ago, but that correction really has no bearing on the issue Ted raises of whether genocide was committed, which depends more on intent than numbers. I don’t use the G-word myself except for Srbrenica, where the Hague Tribunal has made the determination. I hardly need mention that the United States paid a good deal of attention to the Croat/Muslim fighting and was instrumental in bringing it to an end–I was the special envoy responsible for maintaining that peace from October 1994 to June 1996.
That short, disappointing piece was just an accidental read, but it reminded me of how polarized opinion on the Balkans can be. No one ever wants to let anything rest, even the Americans.
My more intentional reads are these:
- B92 (English service), which I use regularly to stay up to date with regional events–my hat is off to Veran Matic and his team for their decades of hard work;
- Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, which is a bit less every day events and more broader issues and commentary–a tip of the hat to them as well;
- Foreign Policy Initiative papers, especially their recent piece on the “myth” of closure of the Office of the High Representative;
- Matthew Parrish’s latest tirade against what the “international community” has done in Kosovo and Bosnia, published in the Journal of Eurasian Law;
- Anything interesting I find on the website of the Kosovar Stability Initiative;
- The Coordinator’s Office for Strategy Regarding the North of Kosovo, “Report on Parallel Institutions: Belgrade – with a foot on the north and an open hand in Brussels”;
- My own “Albanians in the Balkans” published more than 10 years ago (!);
- Ditto Bosnia’s Next Five Years: Dayton and Beyond;
- As an antidote, whatever strikes my fantasy on the TransConflict website;
- Everything Tim Judah has published lately;
- Anything friends–some unnameable, so I won’t name any–in the Balkans send me.
ICG’s stuff is the obvious omission, but unless they put out something new before I get to the region, I think I’ve read it all.
Some people will see obvious bias in my reading material. I like to think that I am reading broadly and gathering diverse perspectives. And I’ll welcome more if you send me links or attachments! Best to do that to daniel@serwer.org, since daniel@peacefare.net does not see to be working perfectly these days. With appreciation for those who respond,
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A brighter view of the Arab spring
I wrote yesterday about the pessimistic views of the Arab spring prevalent among experts at a Harvard/Carnegie Endowment event. They know a whole lot more about the Middle East than I do–that’s why I go to their events and write them up. But I think they are overly pessimistic. Why?
First, because I’ve seen things come out all right. I am not just talking South Africa, where admittedly Nelson Mandela’s leadership and stature counted for a lot, as did F.W. de Klerk’s. I am not seeing any Mandelas or de Klerks in the Middle East. Nor do there seem to be any Vaclav Havels or Lech Walesas. But in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia protest leaderships that were notably lacking in vision and stature had at least temporary success and left their countries better off than they would otherwise have been.
Second, because it seems to me the protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Yemen have shown a combination of nonviolent restraint and persistence that is laudable, and likely to lead in good directions. I am less convinced of the wisdom of the demonstrators in Libya and Bahrain, where it seems to me they fell victim to the temptations of violence and recalcitrance, respectively. But the Libyan Transitional Council shows at least some signs of promise. We’ll see if the Bahrainis can do better in the next “dialogue” phase.
Third, because I have more confidence in a bottom-up process than a top-down one. Here I disagree with Marwan Muasher, who explicitly prefers to see top-down reform. I don’t really know any place where that has worked terribly well in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, though obviously there are leaders like Gorbachev (or de Klerk for that matter) who made the process easier than it might otherwise have been. But people have to want democracy and freedom–it really can’t be given to them.
Nor do I think the consequences of the Arab spring will be quite as negative for U.S. interests as many of the experts say. Middle Eastern leaders who have to be more responsive to public opinion may be more supportive of the Palestinians, but they would be foolish to take their countries to war when the people they lead are looking for prosperity. So, okay, we’ll get Egypt opening the border with Gaza, but closing it was an approach that wasn’t worth a damn anyway. Hamas is likely to need to cut its margins on smuggled goods when they can enter more freely. Maybe an open border will serve American purposes better than the closed one.
I admit that it is hard to see how Yemen comes out of this anything but a basket case, which is where it was headed under Saleh anyway. Certainly it will be a while before any future government in Sanaa gets a grip on the provinces. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula may have a field day in the meanwhile, but they don’t appear so far to have been particularly effective at exploiting the chaos.
That said, the Arab spring is not about American interests, which will have to take a back seat for a while throughout the Middle East. It is however about American values. We should be happy to see them spreading among young Arabs willing to demand their rights. Let’s see where things go before we get too pessimistic.
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After Pristina, Sarajevo
After Pristina, where I’ll visit next week, I am headed for Sarajevo. I confess I’ve lost track of how long it has been since I was last there, but it may be 10 years. My friends at European Stability Initiative would tell me that is why I am so out of touch and worry about things like the possibility of violence resuming, which they think highly unlikely (but Paddy Ashdown disagrees).
Important as that question is, I agree with my ESI colleagues that policy should not be set on the basis of threats to peace and stability but rather on the basis of what is good for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. So the questions on my mind as I begin to prepare for the trip are these:
- Are Bosnians serious about getting ready for NATO and the EU?
- What is holding them back? Are there serious alternatives?
- How can the obvious obstacles in the Dayton constitution (discrimination, lack of central government authority to negotiate) be overcome?
- What other obstacles are there? How can they be overcome?
- How can governance in Bosnia be made more functional?
- What can be done to reduce corruption and improve the rapport between citizens and their various governments?
- How serious is the obvious financial difficulty of Republika Srpska? The Federation?
- What is generating the Croat push for a separate entity?
- Why has civil society in Bosnia not developed as fully as many of us would like?
- What should be done about the High Representative? Can the EU handle Bosnia, and does it have serious plans to do so?
- How can international community performance in Bosnia be improved?
As some readers will know, my familitarity with Bosnia stems mainly from my time as U.S. Special Envoy for the Bosnian Federation during and immediately after the war (October 1994-June 1996), followed by more than a year directing the State Department intelligence office that followed Dayton implementation and a dozen years at the U.S. Institute of Peace following the Balkans. I confess to a good deal of Bosnia fatigue–it sometimes seems to me talking with Bosnians here in Washington that they haven’t noticed the world has changed a great deal since they held the spotlight in the mid-1990s.
That said, nothing that has happened in these last 15 years would make the world happy to see Bosnia and Herzegovina break up into Croat, Serb and Muslim ministates. The question Bosnia faces is therefore the one my Sudanese friends failed to answer: what will make unity attractive? The Dayton state is proving inadequate to that task. So what state would do the job better, and how can the Bosnians come to terms and agree to create it?
This was taken on my last trip into Sarajevo during the war:
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Heading for Pristina
I am heading in June to Kosovo for the first time since 2003, when my colleagues and I at the United States Institute of Peace offered an OSCE-sponsored training workshop to the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government (PISG). A number of ministers participated, including the then prime minister, Bajram Rexhepi (now Minister of Interior). That’s leadership! The idea was to prepare the PISG for negotiations with Belgrade that, as history would have it, only began earlier this year. We delivered similar training to the Serbian Foreign Ministry.
The training was at the police academy in Vushtrri/Vucitrn. One morning we watched the cadets line up in the yard. The commandant welcomed them (remember this was four years after the war, and 90% of the cadets as well as the commandant were Albanian-speaking) in Serbian: “dobro utro.” That too is leadership, rewarded by a great deal of respect from the Kosovo population for their post-war police force.
I have seen enough of the Kosovo government people in visits to Washington to know that they have made enormous strides since 2003. Eight years ago I would not have said that PISG was a real state–it was still more like an agglomeration of political trends with only a glimmer of consciousness of the need for an effective bureaucracy, an independent judicial system and civil society. I trust I’ll find things much improved on this visit.
But I’m also going to be asking a lot of questions. Here is a preliminary set that I’ll no doubt expand in the next couple of weeks before my arrival. I’ll welcome suggestions from readers of other issues I should be exploring.
- Has the state established itself in a way that provides support to, and continuity between, different governments? Is there a civil service worthy of the name? Have the politicians learned to respect the bureaucrats and use them effectively?
- Is the state delivering services that are needed and appreciated?
- How well is Parliament playing its legislative and oversight roles?
- Why does Kosovo’s economy seem stuck? Why has foreign investment lagged? Why are jobs in the formal economy so hard to come by?
- Is the judicial system capable of handling high-profile cases involving Albanian bigwigs as well as inter-ethnic crime? How much longer will EULEX be needed?
- How can more be done to reduce corruption and organized crime?
- How are relations between Albanians and non-Albanians, including but not limited to Serbs ? How do non-Albanians, both those who live north of the Ibar and those who live in the south, regard the Pristina government?
- How has Kosovo’s once strong civil society fared since independence? Is the press free? Is it responsible? How can civil society be strengthened?
- What role do Greater Albanian aspirations and their proponents play in Kosovo today?
A few days visit is of course not sufficient to answer all these questions in detail, but I am hoping that putting them out for public scrutiny will allow my many friends in Kosovo and elsewhere to offer answers, both in person and in cyberspace (answers as comments on this blog are welcome, as are answers addressed to daniel@peacefare.net).
I am looking forward to seeing Pristina again. My only real regret about this trip is that I won’t make it to Belgrade, though I am also going to Sarajevo. Some questions about Bosnia and Herzegovina in an upcoming post.
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In weakness strength
On reflection a day after the fact, I’d like to reiterate what Kurt Bassuener has already eloquently asserted: the arrest of Ratko Mladic was certainly a triumph for the Dutch. Both stubborn and racked by guilt, as Jerry Gallucci suggests, they deserve credit for sticking with their insistence on Mladic’s arrest.
But here is the deeper point: the EU’s famous weakness–its need for unanimity–becomes a strength when it comes to imposing conditionality. For Serbia to achieve candidacy status for membership, all 27 member states have to agree. The Netherlands’ hard line on arrest of Mladic as a precondition for its agreement to candidacy is what made the arrest happen.
I have little doubt that several years down the pike, when Belgrade has fulfilled all the technical requirements for EU membership, that the Dutch and others will insist that it also needs to resolve the issue of Kosovo (good neighborly relations being in any event an EU requirement). Many in Belgrade already know this; the sooner the EU makes it explicit, the quicker Belgrade will make the necessary moves.
Of course this capacity of member states to block EU decisions can also work against what I might consider a good idea. Witness EU relations with Kosovo, which are stymied by the five EU members that don’t recognize the government in Pristina as sovereign and independent, even though most of them seem to acknowledge its legitimacy and authority. But look what happened when those five joined the other 22 in insisting that Belgrade and Pristina begin a dialogue: it happened quickly and seems to be proceeding well.
The EU’s leverage is a powerful force, one that will need to be brought to bear both in Kosovo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina if the remaining Balkans problems are to be resolved peacefully. The disturbing thing is that the EU seems so infrequently capable of wielding power effectively.
Lady Catherine Ashton’s sudden visit to Banja Luka earlier this month to prevent a referendum in Bosnia on the authority of the state justice system got President Milorad Dodik to postpone his plans, but it also strengthened his position as an EU “interlocutor” and gave him the opportunity to sideline the Sarajevo government and institutions. I am not convinced the EU came out ahead with this maneuver, which undermined the international community’s High Representative and annoyed Washington. It is still not yet clear to me whether Dodik will cancel the referendum altogether, or hold it over the heads of his antagonists. But I can guess what he would prefer to do.
I can only hope that the EU will use its leverage well. Projecting power is not its strong suit, but its need for unanimity on important issues provides a strange kind of strength when it comes to imposing its will on those who aspire to membership.
With respect to Serbia, Kurt draws the right conculsions:
Serbia has proven it responds to rational incentives – and there is no reason to believe that this is not a reality across the party spectrum. So instead of bending over backwards to ensure Tadic and the Democratic Party’s re-election, the EU and wider West should instead insist that standards be met whoever is in power, and cut Serbia no more slack.
The same should go for other Balkans leaders.
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At last!
Ratko Mladic has been arrested, in Serbia, details still unknown. President Tadic is quoted by the New York Times:
Extradition is happening. This is the end of the search for Mladic. It’s not the end of the search for all those who helped Mladic and others to hide and whether people from the government were involved…this is happening on the day Catherine Ashton is coming to Serbia.
Yes, the moment is a good one, not only for the occasion of Ashton’s visit but also just as Chief Prosecutor Brammertz was to release his report on Serbia’s cooperation with the Hague Tribunal. Convenient, but welcome nevertheless. So too Tadic’s reference to searching for those who helped Mladic all these years, and his reference on NPR this morning to the importance of this arrest for regional reconciliation.
But the main thing this morning is just this: at last Ratko Mladic is headed for justice.
PS: Compliments to Nenad Pejic of RFE/RL for his well done “flash analysis.”
PPS: Too bad President Tadic can’t even mention “Kosovo” without adding something incomprehensible about “our autonomy Kosovo.” And too bad The Guardian couldn’t find a Bosnian Muslim who thought Mladic has a right to be defended:
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