Sarajevo On a quick trip to the Balkans, I found myself inadvertently following in the footsteps of Vice President Joseph Biden, who swung through Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, and Kosovo last week. Biden’s comportment during his visit, which lasted three days from May 19 to 21, reaffirmed much about attitudes in the Obama administration, while reminding us of the verbose habits of one of its most prominent chest-beaters.
Rush Limbaugh described Vice President Biden as having been “banished to the Balkans” while the White House, presumably, deals with more immediate matters. Still, Biden considers himself a Balkan expert and often speaks with pride about his support for the Bosnians and Kosovar Albanians in opposing Serbian aggression. Yet as on so many other occasions when he expatiates, Biden in the Balkans proved to be superficial, glib, and arrogant. An independent-minded, widely-respected Muslim intellectual in Sarajevo commented to me, “Biden came here as if he were the American president himself. Indeed, he acted more like a king visiting a colonial possession.”
Biden addressed the Bosnian parliament, and some of his comments would have been funny were they not tragic. His happy-face remarks about alleged progress fell flat. He was encouraged to see “on the streets, there were cars and shops and people walking freely,” none of which are new in Bosnia since the end of fighting in 1995. He praised Sarajevo as it “continue(s) to rebuild, to build and to grow.” But he ignored the undeniable reality: Bosnia still has an unemployment rate hovering around 50 percent–locals complain that veridical statistics are kept secret.
In a shell-game of promises and apparent threats, Biden indicated to the Bosnian legislators that he hopes to use his now-infamous “reset button,” applied with no discernible good effect toward Moscow, in America’s relations with Serbia. According to Biden, the U.S. anticipates the Belgrade regime “playing a constructive role in the region” at the same time as “we do not expect Serbia to recognize Kosovo.”
Unfortunately, Serbian recognition of independent Kosovo is the unavoidable basis for Serbia’s normalization as a European country. The Kosovo Republic is accepted by its neighbors in Macedonia and Montenegro, the latter which, which for complex historical reasons, considers itself more Serb than Serbia proper. To believe that Serbia can act positively while refusing to recognize Kosovo is not only to deliver absurdly mixed signals, it appears in the intrigue-heavy Balkans as deliberate hypocrisy.
Biden also delivered himself of a cliche commonly heard from foreign politicians who come to the Balkans, calling on locals to “let go of the past.” He lectured the Bosnian legislators, blaming them for taking their country–still divided into a “Serb Republic” and a “Muslim-Croat Federation” thanks to the Dayton Accords 14 years ago–away from the path to European integration. He declared, “you need to work together across ethnic and party lines so that your country functions like a country–and so that you interact with the rest of the world as a single, sovereign state.”
Yet Russian backing for the Bosnian Serbs, not the willfulness of Muslims or Croats, keeps Bosnia split. Among Serbs, bizarre, intimidating posters appear, with the Orwellian legend, “Vladimir Putin is watching YOU!” and an image of the neo-Stalinist ruler. And Biden blundered into another of his Zen-like contradictions; while calling for Bosnia to act as a unitary country, he claimed, “you can do that as a state with two vibrant entities.”
The vice president is, however, hardly a paragon of clear or original thought, or even of consistency. Two years ago, as recorded in these pages then-Senator Biden proposed the partition of Iraq. The “Balkan expert” seemed to have forgotten that the breakup of Yugoslavia, though long-expected and less arbitrary, resulted in gross human suffering.
Were the Obama administration not already defined by its habit of promising everything to everybody (except conservative Republicans), Biden’s Balkan meanderings might be surprising. Wiser folk, for their part, predictably and simply treat his speeches as clumsy manipulation–the worst possible effect for the representatives of the “new” America. The vice-president called on Bosnians to concentrate on “creating jobs, growing the economy, educating your children,” which was interpreted by optimists as assurance of U.S. aid. But so far, U.S. help for Bosnia is merely symbolic, perhaps understandably, given the unexpected presidential challenge of running General Motors.
Local media this week celebrated a U.S. gift of $98,000 for the restoration of the oldest and once most-beautiful Islamic monument in the Balkans, the Aladza mosque, leveled by Serbian irregulars during the Bosnian war, in the city of Foca. But its reconstruction will do little to improve the lives of the mosque’s congregation, scattered around the world as refugees and little interested in returning to a city still under Serb domination, with no real opportunities for work.
Serbs did not respond with greater enthusiasm to Biden’s ambiguous comments. In Kosovo, the local head of the Serbian Orthodox church, Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic, who once claimed the mantle of peacemaker while supporting ferocious anti-Jewish propaganda, tried to bar Biden from visiting the Serbian monastery at Decan, and denounced America as Serbia’s enemy.
Many Kosovar Albanians, reflecting their general affection and gratitude toward Americans, fawned over Biden. But the articulate and credible Kosovar Self Determination Movement, known by its Albanian name as Vetevendosje, reacted to his appearance more critically. Its adherents noted that most foreign observers of the postwar Balkan states call for tolerance, but said that, rather than respect for the rights of others, such tolerance ends up meaning acceptance of pain and suffering by the victims of aggression, and silence where protest would be more appropriate.
Vetevendosje paraphrased former European representative in Bosnia Paddy Ashdown, describing the current Balkan situation as “stability on the constant edge of instability,” with denied opportunities for economic, social, and political progress. The movement has a novel phrase for this condition: “de-development.”
Vetevendosje also warned Biden that Serbia, which insisted during his Belgrade visit on its repudiation of Kosovar sovereignty, has established clandestine “parallel” authorities throughout the new republic. In addition, Serbs have not ceased their campaign to split northern Kosovo off as a “Serb Republic” like that in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
But in the chaotic calculations of Joseph Biden, perhaps partitioned, mafia-ridden zones like that in Bosnia, rather than the legitimate independence originally declared by the Yugoslav successor states, embody the vision he suggested for Iraq. Either way, Biden, as is his wont, did little to offer real hope for the ex-Yugoslav countries, and merely added to the confusion.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
