Bosnia on the brink
Last year, I visited Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In my account of the holiday, I wrote:
“There has been a great deal of reconstruction and investment is slowly coming in from abroad, but there is still unemployment of around one-third and the divisions are greater than ever: this small country with half the population of London has no less than three presidents (Bosniak, Croat and Serb); there is much, much less integration of communities than before the war; children are being taught three different histories in their respective schools; and there are even three different mobile systems used by the three ethnic communities. As one very knowledgeable observer of the political scene put it to us on our visit: ‘The bottom line is that the situation is a mess – and it’s getting worse'”.
Today, in this article, Paddy Ashdown (the international community’s high representative and EU special representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006) and Richard Holbrooke (the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement) issue this warning:
“Almost exactly 13 years ago, American leadership brought an end to Bosnia’s three-and-a-half-year war through the Dayton peace agreement. Today the country is in real danger of collapse. As in 1995, resolve and transatlantic unity are needed if we are not to sleepwalk into another crisis.”
They propose:
“Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, should initiate an independent study tasked to produce a new transatlantic policy, backed by Washington’s full engagement and strong EU conditionality, which can lead to deeper and broader international involvement in Bosnia. A collapse of the Dayton peace agreement would be an unnecessary and unwanted additional problem for the new White House administration.”