Ethnically and religiously diverse Bosnia-Herzegovina faces political paralysis and rising rancor between its peoples. Unable to resolve their disputes, war is in the air. The world watches, helplessly.
It’s late 1991. And late 2021.
If you went into hibernation 30 years ago and awoke today, you would easily understand what’s going on in Bosnia, because nothing much has changed. The 1992-1995 war tragically killed over 100,000 Bosnians and wrecked the country, only being halted by U.S.-led NATO intervention. In November 1995, President Bill Clinton locked the players in an Ohio Air Force base, forcing a deal. Thus were the Dayton Accords born. Once hailed as a diplomatic triumph, the accords have since metastasized into a millstone around Bosnia’s neck. Dayton was never meant to be a long-term solution, yet 26 years later, it remains in place, leaving impoverished Bosnia with a weak federal government, two entities (the Federation for Muslims and Croats and the Republika Srpska for Serbs), and staggering amounts of bureaucracy for a country of three million citizens.
Dayton never made any of Bosnia’s ethnoreligious groups happy: Muslims (50% of the population) want a more centralized state, while Orthodox Serbs (31%) want their own state, and Catholic Croats (15%) want at least their own entity. Things have come to a head because the Republika Srpska have had enough, and their leader, Milorad Dodik, wants out. Dodik has led the Bosnian Serbs for the last 15 years, over time becoming a nationalist who seeks freedom from Dayton’s structures. Dodik is careful to emphasize that he doesn’t mean armed secession, but that he wants to be free of the central government in Sarajevo is abundantly clear.
Last Friday, the Republika Srpska parliament in Banja Luka voted to start the process of removing their entity from Bosnia’s tax system, judiciary, and military. That vote, while nonbinding, sent shockwaves through Europe. The European Union and Washington condemned Banja Luka’s action, but this revolt has long been brewing because the EU and the U.S have dawdled for decades, refusing to fix the flaws of the Dayton Accords. Now the West has a bona fide crisis on its hands.
The crisis’ proximate cause were the actions this summer of the outgoing EU high representative for Bosnia, in effect the colonial governor, who enforced a ban on genocide denial relating to the 1992-1995 war. For Bosnian Muslims, who call themselves Bosniaks, they suffered genocide at the hands of Serbs (and Croats) during the last war, a contention that’s broadly but not universally supported by the international community. Many Bosniaks consider the Republika Srpska to be illegitimate because they believe it was birthed by genocide. Bosnian Serbs naturally disagree, rejecting any notion of genocide.
Banja Luka admits that the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Bosniaks by the Bosnian Serb Army — the war’s biggest slaughter — happened, but they categorize it as a war crime, not genocide. As I profiled in my book Unholy Terror, the ugly realities of the Bosnian war were more complex than Western narratives often allow. The EU put its thumb on the scale here in the summer, and Dodik revolted. The good news, such as it is, remains that a repeat of the 1992-1995 war is impossible.
One of Dayton’s unambiguous successes is that it created a small but unified Bosnian military. Dodik claims to want the Bosnian Serb Army back, but in reality, he only has a police force. The bad news is that the EU has just one battalion in Bosnia to keep the fragile peace, far too little. The worse news is that it’s not the 1990s anymore, and American hegemony is gone. Dodik boasts of help from his “friends” in Moscow as the crisis worsens. Any effort to reinforce EU/NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia might well be met by Russian forces openly siding with Banja Luka.
President Vladimir Putin takes deep interest in the fate of his “brother” Orthodox Slavs in Bosnia. I was technical director of the National Security Agency’s Balkans Division: our intelligence community knew years ago that Dayton Bosnia was doomed. The West must act quickly to construct a better political system befitting a multi-ethnic country — something like Switzerland’s cantons or Belgium’s federation — before this crisis gets worse and Putin seeks to “help” fix it.
John R. Schindler is an international security expert and historian who has held multiple appointments in the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and NATO. He is on Twitter at @20committee.
