Tag: United States
A bad 1995 idea that is worse now
An invitation to meet with Croatian officials this week has prompted me to think once more about the Bosnian Croats. I dealt extensively with them between November 1994 and June 1996 as the State Department Special Envory for the Bosnian Federation. The Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims in American usage, but many prefer Bosniaks because it lacks religious connotation) had made their peace by then. My role was to help them implement its provisions for creating a joint Federation. In parallel, the Croat Defense Council (HVO) and the Bosnian Army (ABiH) were fighting the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), supported by Serbia. That continued until November 1995, when the war ended with the Dayton accords.
The Bosnian Croats were uninterested in a “third entity”
The Bosnian Croats were a force to be reckoned with in 1995. The Croatian Army, fresh from victories earlier in 1995, backed the HVO to the hilt. That was a major factor in the successful HVO/ABiH summer offensive against the VRS inside Bosnia. Croatia controlled the Adriatic coast, through which arms shipments to the Bosnian Army had to pass (in violation of a UN arms embargo). So when we got to Dayton, the Bosnian Croats were in excellent negotiating position.
Dick Holbrooke did not make it easy. He refused to meet at Dayton with Kresimir Zubak, the President of the Federation. But still the Bosnian Croats got an excellent deal. Zubak asked for and got a tripartite presidency (Croat/Serb/Bosniak) despite the relatively small percentage of Croats in Bosnia even before the war. They were 17.38% in the then most recent (1991) census. They are now fewer: 15.43% in 2013.
Dayton gave them one-third of what the Bosnians call “the state” in addition to their half of the Federation, which became 51% of the territory. They also held, like the Bosniaks and Serbs, various constitutionally established vetoes. A Bosnian Croat became Foreign Minister in the state government. There were lots of other goodies along the way. No wonder no Bosnian Croat at that time asked for what is now known as “the third entity,” that is a Croat sub-state like Republika Srpska.
Now things are different
That has changed. Despite favorable election rules and constitutional provisions, the ethnic nationalist Croats have not been adept. The country has even dared elect an anti-nationalist Croat to the presidency, thrice. So the Croat nationalist leader, Dragan Covic, has conducted a major campaign to change the rules in his own favor. This despite several court decisions to the contrary.
Covic does this in collaboration with Serb nationalist leader Milorad Dodik. Russian President Putin encourages them, both because he is an ethnic nationalist like them and because it causes the US and EU heartburn. Covic gets a lot of face time with weak-kneed Western diplomats desperately seeking to make progress on electoral reform.
That effort has failed, but the Croat/Serb campaign continues. Both leaderships feel threatened. They fear a civic Bosnia. Each person would then have one vote. Ethnic nationalist institutions and vetoes would be reduced or eliminated. Dodik and Covic denounce this option as leading to an Islamic state. Bosnia now has a slight Bosniak (Muslim in their terms) numerical majority.
No one should be fooled
The real threat is different. Strengthening ethnic division in Bosnia, which is what the nationalist Croats and Serbs advocate, would lead to the formation of an Islamic state. The third entity implies two others, one of which would necessarily be Muslim. It would be land-locked and barely viable. Most Bosniaks don’t want that. They are too fractious to achieve it anyway. Only Croat success in getting a third entity could make it happen.
Franjo Tudjman, the war-time father of independent Croatia, understood this. He was no liberal democrat. He collaborated despite his ethnic nationalist politics with formation of the Federation and its role in post-war Bosnia. The reason: preventing the emergence of three entities. Somehow Zagreb has forgotten that an Islamic state next door would not necessarily be a good neighbor. Too many Americans and Europeans have forgotten it too. So I hear lots of third entity talk, either explicit or implicit, especially from Croatians as well as Bosnian Croats.
It was a bad idea in 1995. We in the State Department worried then that it would become a platform for Iranian-supported terrorism in Europe, because Tehran was providing ample support to the Bosnian Army. Sunni Islamists didn’t teach us about terrorism in the US until 2001. A democratic Bosnia has no need of ethnically defined sub-national entitites. If a third entity was a bad idea in 1995, it is a worse idea now, including for Croatians and Bosnian Croats.
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Irredentism is not limited to Russia
I am pleased to publish this piece, which I co-authored with SAIS colleague Sinisa Vukovic:
One of us has been critical of US State Department praise for President Vucic of Serbia. Some American diplomats are accepting the notion that he is genuinely pro-European and concerned only with the welfare of Serbs in neighboring countries. That is a mistake, especially in the midst of the Ukraine war. His reasoning about Serbia’s responsibilities and relations with its neighbors bears a distinct resemblance to Vladimir Putin’s justifications for aggression:
– Protection of ethnic kin, based on the assumption that the President of Russia or Serbia is responsible to defend Russians or Serbs wherever they live.
– Exaggeration of the threats Russians/Serbs face in other countries and calls for preventive action, including interference in the internal politics of neighboring countries.
– Use of gross disinformation to exaggerate urgency, while attributing the reports to others so as to maintain plausible deniability.
– Exploitation of the Orthodox Church to claim ethnic unity in the face of alleged religious persecution.
– Abuse of linguistic identity to claim that anyone who speaks Russian/Serbian is protected by Moscow/Belgrade.
These and other examples indicate that Vucic, like Putin, rejects civic identities and the notion that sovereignty stops at a state’s borders.
Vucic has moved definitively away from liberal democracy and back towards repressive ethnonationalism. The press is not free in Serbia and dissent is increasingly perilous. Vucic has befriended Vladimir Putin, refused to align with EU sanctions on Russia, and even now is allowing Air Serbia to double service Moscow. Vucic claims to support Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as he must because of Serbia’s claims to Kosovo, but he is doing little to support Kyiv.
Like Putin, who advocates a “Russian world,” Vucic has also attached himself to people who believe in creating a broader ethnonationalist polity than the territory Serbia currently occupies, the “Serbian world.” He habitually refers to his own role vis-a-vis “Serbs” (Serbi) not Serbians or citizens of Serbia (Srbijanci).
Here is some of the evidence for Vucic’s irredentist ambitions:
Serbian world
September 26, 2020, (then) Minister of Defense Aleksandar Vulin started talking it up:
Vucic must create the Serbian world. Belgrade must gather in itself and around itself all Serbs, and the President of Serbia is the President of all Serbs.
(Vučić treba da stvara srpski svet. Beograd mora da u sebi i oko sebe okupi sve Srbe, a predsjednik Srbije je predsjednik svih Srba)
On April 9, 2021, Vulin specified:
Current geopolitical circumstances do not favor the idea of unification of all areas where Serbs live, but this will inevitably happen in ten, twenty or fifty years…wherever they live, in Serbia, Montenegro, Republika Srpska. What we need is the situation where the care for all Serbs, wherever they live, is managed from one center, and that is Belgrade, and I see nothing controversial about it.
During his party convention, July 18, 2021, Vulin explained the rationale behind Serbian world:
The people that has experienced genocide in Jasenovac, that has experienced Oluja [the Croatian military Operation Storm in 1995], and the March pogrom [in 2004 in Kosovo] does not have the right to surrender its fate to the hands of others, that others decide about the future of their children. People whose experience postulates that when it does not have its own soldier, its own police officer, its own judge, it does not have the rights…Serbia needs to have an army that can defend Serbia and Serbs wherever they live.
Effectively, he is calling for protection of Serbs by creation of Greater Serbia, the idea that drove Slobodan Milosevic to war at least four times.
On the same day Vucic reacted:
The official state policy is that Serbia’s state borders are inviolable, and we do not care about others’ borders. We have to protect our own, and unequivocally demonstrate what is our policy.
No doubt having gotten an earful from Western diplomats, Vucic backed off a bit the next September:
In that notion [Serbian world] there is nothing threatening, nothing that would endanger anyone else… it does not talk about borders or anything else, and besides, it is not part of the official state policies.
But it is
It is state policy and Vucic must know it. The National Security Strategy of the Republic of Serbia, that the Parliament adopted in December 2019, is centered around the following premise:
Protection of sovereignty and territorial integrity, military neutrality, safeguard of Serbian people outside of the Republic of Serbia’s borders, European integration, and efficient rule of law
(očuvanje suverenosti i teritorijalne celovitosti, vojna neutralnost, briga o srpskom narodu van granica Republike Srbije, evropske integracije i efikasna pravna država)
Regarding the safeguard of Serbian people living outside of Serbia’s borders, the Strategy specifies it “is an existential matter for the survival of the Republic of Serbia.”
It’s dangerous to Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo
The same Strategy also exclaims:
Preservation of Republika Srpska is one of the foreign policy priorities of the Republic of Serbia
(“Očuvanje Republike Srpske jedan je od spoljnopolitičkih prioriteta Republike Srbije”)
To explain what is meant by this, Vulin (again as MoD) stated in May 2019:
Republika Srpska has always been a priority of the Government and the President of the Republic of Serbia. Republika Srpska may not have its own army, but Serbian people heve their own army.
(“Republika Srpska je uvek prioritet politike Vlade i predsednika Republike Srbije. Republika Srpska nema svoju vojsku, ali srpski narod ima svoju vojsku.”)
This is essentially a pledge to intervene militarily in Bosnia if the RS is threatened, something Milosevic declined to do.
Vucic agrees:
We are one people, as President Milorad Dodik said. There is no such thing as Croatian Serbs or Bosnian Serbs. My father is not a Bosnian Serb, he is a Serb. He may be from Bosnia, but he is not any other Serb but only a Serb.
The threat to intervene is not only against Bosnia. Responding to Montenegrin President Djukanovic’s accusations that Serbia is expansionist, Vucic stated:
Djukanovic should know that I will always defend Serbs, and I will always defend Serbia. I have not alternative, but my own country and my own people
On Kosovo, the risk is even clearer: Vucic mobilized the Serbian army when Kosovo insisted on implementation of an agreement concerning cross-boundary/border recognition of license plates (!).
Serbia is serious
I take Serbia seriously. Its vast re-armament (with Russian and Chinese as well as Western weapons) serves its national security purposes, which are clearly not limited to the current territory of Serbia. No one watching Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine should fail to recognize the risks in the Balkans.
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Lament of the Ukrainians won’t stop soon
We all needed that. But the reality is grim. Over 2 million Ukrainians are now refugees. Many more are internally displaced. Russia has expanded and intensified its attacks in western Ukraine. They are also pounding Kharkiv in the northeast and Mariupol in the south, having already captured Kherson. Only a determined stand at Mykolaiv is preventing an assault on Odesa. The Russians all but surround Kyiv:
Courage v criminality
The Ukrainians have proven courageous, agile, and stalwart. The Russian army has demonstrated clumsy logistical incompetence. It has also targeted civilian areas, proving its criminal intent. But no one should be fooled. If this goes on much longer, Russia will occupy a destroyed country whose population will mount a ferocious resistance against brutality.
NATO defanged
NATO is standing by, reluctant to intervene because doing so might trigger a wider war as well as escalation between the US and Russia. Alliance members have been sending massive war supplies to Ukraine, which is why the Russians are attacking military bases and airfields in the west. They are the reception areas for foreign assistance. Attacks there make a lot more strategic sense from the Russian perspective than pulverizing Ukraine’s cities.
I imagine there are circumstances in which NATO might intervene. Russian use of chemical weapons could trigger a cruise missile attack on whoever launches them. But such interventioins would be carefully limited and calculated not to generate escalation.
The future Russian occupation
Russia’s war against Ukraine looks a lot like its second war againsts Chechnya, when Putin gained credits for obliterating Grozny. But the post-war occupation isn’t going to be as generous. In Chechnya, Moscow rebuilt and installed a puppet government that rules with an iron fist. In Ukraine, Moscow will need to skip the rebuilding. Western sanctions will guarantee that it doesn’t have the money. The insurgency will require the puppet government to crack down even harder than in Chechnya. So even if the war ends soon, Ukrainians will not be able to return home. It will be unsafe for years, if not decades, to come.
Moscow has biten off more than it can chew
Russia is itself in bad shape and deteriorating. It has biten off more than it can chew. But there is no telling when Russians will decide they’ve had enough of Vladimir Putin and his delusional gang. Certainly the courageous protests so far don’t reach the rule of thumb for successful popular mobilizations: 3.5% of the population. But there are definitely courageous Russians speaking truth to power:
None of the oligarchs or the inner circle of former KGBers appears ready and willing to do what many of them must know would benefit most Russians. But we may not know they were willing until they do it.
Even then, the challenges for Ukraine will be gigantic. Russia should pay hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for a war of aggression. It won’t be willing or able. The West will do its part, but the scale of reconstruction requirements will be daunting, even if Russia were to withdraw today. The lament of the Ukrainians won’t stop soon. They may not even be permitted to sing Verdi’s version for Hebrews for much longer:
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This is how bad things could get
Russia is expanding its bombing in Ukraine to the west and deploying its artillery for intensified barrages on Kyiv. Poland is reaching the limits of its capacity to take in refugees. So are other near neighbors. Moscow is accusing the US of supporting biological and chemical warfare research in Ukraine. Russian forces have already taken control of several nuclear power plants. Moscow has also thrown a monkey wrench into negotiations on re-entry of the US into the Iran nuclear deal.
How bad could things get?
Pretty bad. Here are some guesses:
- The Russians could lay siege to Kyiv and obliterate its governing institutions, displacing many of those who remain of its 2.9 million pre-war population.
- They could also destroy what remains of Ukraine’s air force and its ability to operate. That is presumaby the purpose of their attacks on airfields in the west.
- Poland could limit the intake of refugees, forcing many to remain displaced and vulnerable inside Ukraine.
- Russia often accuses its adversaries of doing things it intends to do. Mocow’s obviously false accusations about biological and chemical weapons may presage Moscow’s use of them.
- Russian forces have already risked disaster in occupying nuclear power plants. Their continued operation depends on Ukrainians and electricity supplies that are at risk. A meltdown like the one at Chernobyl in 1986 would be far more catastrophic under current conditions.
- Moscow may de facto scupper the nuclear deal and try to trade with Iran despite US sanctions. That would allow Tehran to proceed with enrichment and nuclear weapons research.
- Putin is using the war in Ukraine to impose a dictatorial regime inside Russia, making dissent and protest ever more difficult.
All the while, Russia will continue to attack population centers, medical facilities, and schools throughout Ukraine. This “Grozny” strategy is a war crime, but then so is the war of aggression Moscow launched without provocation.
Sanctions aren’t likely to work quickly
The NATO Alliance meanwhile continues sitting on its military hands while Russia crosses multiple red lines. The EU and US are imposing more sanctions on trade and investment, but those rarely if ever change an aggressor’s mind quickly. You are far more likely to get what you want from them when you negotiate lifting them rather than when you impose them. The day when that might be possible is far off.
Military responses have been ruled out
President Biden has so far prioritized prevention of a wider war. He has repeatedly emphasized that Americans will not fight in Ukraine. The Pentagon has apparently blocked transfer of military aircraft from Poland to Ukraine on grounds that might cause Russia to attack Poland and trigger NATO’s mutual defense commitment. The US can’t send the best air defense systems because they require trained personnel that Ukraine doesn’t have and can’t produce in short order.
The Americans and other NATO allies are sending massive arms shipments to the Ukrainians, whose commitment to fighting for themselves should not be doubted. But it may not suffice. Ultimately, Russia has resources, technology, manpower, and immorality that Ukraine cannot equal. We are all likely to suffer the consequences.
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Blatant falsehoods parading as diplomacy
Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland tweeted today:
Pleased to speak with Serbian President @avucic to thank Serbia for its support for Ukraine, ongoing efforts to address the humanitarian crisis, and commitment to regional stability. We welcome Serbia’s good relations with neighbors & continued progress along its European path.
It would be hard to write two sentences with more misconceptions.
Other than the volunteers joining pro-Russian forces there, Serbia has offered Ukraine little. Belgrade voted for the General Assembly resolution denouncing Russian aggression. Serbia has also said it will accept Ukrainian refugees, but how many and through what channels is unclear. If it were to accept them in the same proportion as its adveraries in Kosovo, the number would be upwards of 15,000. Belgrade has also promised medical assistance, but when, where, and how is unclear.
What is clear is that Serbia has refused to join international sanctions against Russia, despite its commitment to align its foreign policy with the EU. This is nothing new. At last count, the EU viewed Serbia as 56% aligned, far less than its neighbors. Albania and Montenegro were fully aligned, with North Macedonia at 96% and Bosnia and Herzegovina at 70%.
Serbia is a primary factor in regional instability, not stability. Its leadership is calling for a “Serbian world,” analogous to Russian President Putin’s calls for a “Russian world.” That is one of the goals that precipitated the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Serbia’s Montenegrin, Macedonian, and Kosovo neighbors were already nervous about Belgrade’s massive re-armament before the Ukraine war. They now need to worry about whether Serbian President Vucic will, like Putin, claim genocide against co-nationals and invade one or more of the neighbors. Serbia’s relations with its neighbors, in whose internal politics it interferes, are notably lousy, not good.
Serbia is basically stalled on its EU accession path, for good reasons. While it implements the technical requirements, it lacks a free press and independent judiciary as well as a serious effort at transitional justice. Petrit Selimi (@Petrit), a Serbian-speaking Kosovar, tweets daily on the Serbian press. Today’s delicacies:
Here’s today’s Vesti, which has a front page big focus on “USA bringing plague to Europe”. In small letters you can read about how China and Russia have found proof USA and #Ukraine have developed many diseases to use against Russians in the war. Quite sick.
(2) oldest newspaper in #Serbia, owned now by governments is asking on front page “Who is collecting DNA of Russians”. It’s another conspiracy theory peddled by #Moscow & #Belgrade that Ukrainians & Americans have collected Russian DNA for special biological warfare. Silly stuff.
(3) Another known tabloid, famous for warmongering, hateful propaganda since 1980s, reports proudly “#Russia building its own world in East.” This is done to counter “Washington threats” and is “new global architecture”. A sinister, murderous version of @MacaesBruno’s Euroasia.
(4) the tragedy in Serbian media scene is that former liberal media have all now become affiliates or serventa of #Serbia government. B92 daily starts with Russian version of the war events in #Ukraine. Today they report Moscow lies on how “Ukraine planned for war in March”.
To be fair, one still finds pockets of smaller newspapers, regional web portals which are independent & try to counter official pro-Russian propaganda in #Serbia. NGOs protested against war in #Ukraine. However the dominant media are beholden to forces supporting death & mayhem.
@Petrit
I’m well aware that diplomats sometimes feel they have to say nice things about foreign leaders in order to bring them around. But this is a case of blatant falsehoods parading as diplomacy. #fail
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Stevenson’s army, March 6
– WaPo says declassified list of US aid shows speed up to Ukraine last December.
-WSJ says Poland plans to send Soviet fighter planes.
– NYT says US wants clear line of succession after Zelensky to make aid easier.
– The Hill sees bipartisan opposition to no fly zone.
– SAIS Prof Mary Sarotte says new cold war will be worse than before.
– The news inside Russia: WaPo sees cracks in social media. New Yorker shows breadth of Putin control.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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