Kurt Bassuener December 10th, 2009

Below is a sign-on letter addressed to HR Valentin Inzko, calling on him to impose the extension of international judges and prosecutors in the Court of BiH, whose terms expire on Dec 14th.  A number of Peace Implementation Council (PIC) members are resistant to such a move, fearing the reaction of the RS Premier Milorad Dodik.

Should these personnel NOT be extended, a number of investigations and cases would need to be re-started.  Furthermore, the viability of the Court of BiH may well be in question.  

The letter below, with former HR Christian Schwarz-Schilling and a number of European politicians, international justice professionals, civil society actors, and other concerned persons was conveyed to the High Representative today, and also sent to the attention of the PIC Ambassadors. 

Please note that a number of additional signatories have been added since the letter was initially delivered on Thursday afternoon.  These signatories, as of 1800 hrs Friday, 11 December, are integrated into the overall list.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Dear High Representative Inzko,

The entrenchment of the Rule of Law has been a key focus of the international community’s postwar engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The inclusion of international judges and prosecutors in the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, sitting in the special chambers for War Crimes and Organized Crime, are essential components in this effort, as the Chief Prosecutor and President of the Court attested to you and the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) Steering Board last month.  These professionals are required to complement the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as well as the domestic struggle against organized crime and corruption. Should the international judges and prosecutors not have their mandates renewed by December 14^th, a number of ongoing cases will have to be restarted.  Years of effort toward ensuring justice will have been wasted.

More than half of the international personnel serving in the Court last year have left, uncertain that their contracts would be extended.  Domestic authorities have made no provisions to fund these positions or fill them with Bosnian and Herzegovinian professionals.  The result would not only affect a number of ongoing and pending cases in both chambers, but perhaps the viability of the Court of BiH itself.  That seems to be precisely the objective of a number of Bosnian politicians, who are wary of investigation and potential prosecution at the Court.  

We the undersigned wish to express our deep concern that most PIC Steering Board members are counseling against extension of these judges’ and prosecutors’ mandates for reasons of political convenience and expediency, wishing to avoid additional friction following the failed “Butmir process” of talks on constitutional reforms.  Such a stance not only threatens to undermine the rule of law in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but is politically shortsighted as well.  The political conflicts these PIC members hope to avoid will certainly occur in any case - after they have further weakened their own ability to address them by their clear failure to respond on this matter, which is widely recognized as pivotal.

As High Representative, you have the executive authority and moral responsibility to act to protect the Dayton Accords and the achievements of over a decade of efforts to entrench rule of law in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  On Human Rights Day, we believe the most significant action towards fulfilling that responsibility would be the imposition of the simple changes to the law that would extend the mandates of the international legal personnel at the State Court for an additional three years. We therefore urge you, in your capacity as High Representative, to take this step.

Sincerely,

SIGNATORIES

Former High Representatives

Dr. Wolfgang Petritsch 

Dr. Christian Schwarz-Schilling

International Parliamentarians/Politicians

Marieluise Beck, MP Bundestag, Bündnis90/Grüne, Berlin

Franziska Brantner, MEP, Group of Greens, European Free Alliance

Cem Özdemir, Co-Chair Bündnis90/Grüne

Jelko Kacin, MEP, Liberal Democracy Slovenia, ALDE Group

Diana Wallis, MEP, Liberal Democrats Party, ALDE Group

NGOs and Civil Society Organizations/Leaders

ACIPS, Sarajevo

Ahmet Alibasic, Lecturer, Faculty of Islamic Studies, Sarajevo

Kurt Bassuener, Democratization Policy Council, Sarajevo

Sonja Biserko, President, Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia

Darko Brkan, CA Why not? (UG Zasto ne?), Movement Dosta!

Dr. Svetlana Broz, Director NGO GARIWO, Sarajevo 

Tobias Bütow, Schwarzkopf-Foundation Young Europe

Center for Advanced Studies, Sarajevo

Center for Civic Cooperation, Livno: Zulka Baljak, Managing Director, Kata Marijan Krzelj, Program Manager

Jelena Golubovic, Belgrade Center for Human Rights; Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada

Ljuljjeta Goranci Brkic, General Manager, Nansen Dialogue Center, Sarajevo

Mirela Grünther-Djecevic, Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, Head of country office for Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo

John W. Heffernan, Director, Speak Truth To Power, Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, Washington, DC

Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo

Jim Hooper, Managing Director, Public International Law and Policy Group, Washington, DC

Tim Hughes, former Head of Investigation and Verification Department, Independent Judicial Commission (IJC); Washington, DC

Valerie Hughes, Ireland Action for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dublin, Ireland

Human Rights Centre, University of Sarajevo.

Human Rights House of Sarajevo

Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco, Chairperson, Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights (YUCOM), Belgrade

Branka Magas and Quintin Hoare, The Bosnian Institute, London

Alma Masic, Head of Office, Youth Initiative for Human Rights, Sarajevo

Dzenita Mehic Saracevic, Community of Bosnia

Andrej Nosov, Heartefact Fund, Belgrade

Zoran Pusic, president of the Civic Comittee for Human Rights, Zagreb

Philipp Ruch, Center for Political Beauty, Berlin

Vehid Sehic, President, Citizens’ Forum, Tuzla

Mirsad Tokaca, Director of the Research and Documentation Center (RDC), Sarajevo

Vesna Terselic, Director, DOCUMENTA - CENTRE FOR DEALING WITH THE PAST, Zagreb

Transparency International, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Peter Julian Walsh, Ireland Action for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greystones, Ireland

Bodo Weber, Democratization Policy Council, Berlin

Justice and Human Rights Professionals/Academia

Vlado Azinovic, Ph.D., School of Political Science, University of Sarajevo

Nina Bang-Jensen, Public International Law and Policy Group, Washington, DC

Annika Björkdahl, Associate Professor / Docent, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden

Tanya L. Domi, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs, Columbia University

Kelly M. Greenhill, Assistant Professor, Tufts University and Research Fellow, Harvard University

Tomasz Kamusella, Thomas Brown Lecturer, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Jeremy Kinsman, former Canadian Ambassador and High Commissioner, currently Regents’ Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Zvonimir Kubinek, Chair of the Advisory Board, Missing Persons Institute, Sarajevo

Professor Noel Malcolm, Oxford University

Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University, New York

Lara Nettelfield, Post Doctoral Fellow, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals; Assistant Professor, School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University Vancouver

Ambassador Mark Palmer, former US Ambassador to Hungary

Dr. Olga Martin-Ortega, Senior Research Fellow, Centre on Human Rights in Conflict
University of East London

Andras Riedlmayer, editor of International Justice Watch

Prof. Dzemal Sokolovic, Institute of Comparative Politics and Rokkan Center for Social Studies, University of Bergen, Norway

Professor Chandra Lekha Sriram
Chair in Human Rights and Director, Centre on Human Rights in Conflict, School of Law, University of East London

Iva Vukusic, Sense Agency, The Hague

Andrew Wachtel, Dean of the Graduate School, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

Jon Western, Ph.D., Five College Associate Professor of International Relations Mount Holyoke College and the Five Colleges, Inc.

Concerned Individuals

Steve Albert, former editor of BosNet, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Neven Andjelic

Diego E. Arria, former Representative of Venezuela to the UN

Nidzara Beganovic, Sarajevo

Maja Drnda, Barcelona, Spain

Douglas Ebner

Rev. John Feighery, Dublin, Ireland

Marshall Harris, former State Dept official, Alstan and Bird LLC, Washington, DC

Ivana Howard, MA in Democracy and Human Rights in SEE, Sarajevo

Zlatko Hurtic (international development expert), Sarajevo

Senka Jahic, Berkeley, California ,USA

Raza Jahic Micic, Iteon consulting, San Francisco, California, US

Senada Kreso, Sarajevo

Selma Mustovic, New York City, USA

Sabrina Pryce

Prof. Inela Selimovic, St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, US

Conor Smith Gaffney, Chicago, Illinois, USA

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Kurt Bassuener December 3rd, 2009

On October 1, the Clingendael Institute in The Hague and DPC hosted a policy roundtable entitled “The Future of International Involvement in Bosnia and Herzegovina: What is the Strategy?,” involving policymakers from PIC members and policy analysts from Europe and North America.  It readily became that there was no strategy.  Two months later, the ill-planned and -executed “Butmir process,” announced on October 2nd, has collapsed.  The Clingendael roundtable proceedings,  linked here as a PDF document, can give readers a sense of why these talks were doomed to failure as devised.

The authors of the summary, Clingendael’s Marianne Rogier, the University of Amsterdam’s Maja Nenadovic, my colleague Bodo Weber and myself, also added a postscript to the summary, which I paste in its entirety below.

Postscript by the Authors

The round-table failed to produce concrete recommendations to be put forward to the next PIC meeting as initially envisaged by the organisers. However, we would like to seize the opportunity of this report to issue our own assessment of the current situation, taking into account the recently launched “Butmir process” and the last PIC steering board meeting in the form of a post-script. The following only represents the views if the authors of this report, and not the opinions expressed by the 1st October roundtable participants.

- The Dayton instruments, an executive OHR and operational Chapter VII EUFOR, must remain until BiH’s constitutional and governance structure has evolved to the point they are no longer required. There is no expiration date. Furthermore, these instruments should be used as needed. Since their credibility has been allowed to diminish, it may be necessary to resort to them to show BiH actors that the will is still there to use them.

- There is a clear necessity to differentiate the role of the High Representative from the EUSR. Both functions have different goals and require different tools to fulfil them. The OHR will remain until Bosnia shows itself consistently capable of functioning and reforming itself in the interest of its citizens. This is of particular importance at a time when attempts are being made against the territorial integrity of the state. The EUSR’s role is to support Bosnia’s EU integration process. Hopefully, both processes are self-reinforcing ones, and should go in parallel. We firmly believe that they should not be sequenced: Bosnia may still need the OHR while progressing on the European path. Both instruments may have to be reinforced, but not at the expense of each other. Furthermore, we believe that further clarification is needed on what type of mandate and power a “reinforced EUSR” will have. The EU is currently reorganising its foreign policy under the new Lisbon Treaty, and will have to come up with concrete proposals on what role it foresees for the EUSR in Bosnia.

- We note that the “5+ 2″ approach has been reaffirmed by the November meeting of the PIC Steering Board as the hurdle for OHR’s closure. We agree that no action to close the OHR should be undertaken so long as those conditions have not been fulfilled. We urge the PIC steering board members to hold this line, and not hollow-out these conditions for expediency’s sake, as has been the case with international conditionality with BiH before.

- International engagement must continue to achieve meaningful constitutional and governance reform, but should expand beyond the standard “let’s make a deal” approach with local political leaders. There needs to be a much more sustained, concerted effort to engage citizens directly on these issues in order to apply pressure from below on what amount to oligarchic and unrepresentative structures. The Bosnian population needs assurance that the country will not be allowed to dissolve, and nor will the necessary constitutional and governance reform be undertaken without popular consent. The EU and NATO also need to clarify what types of structural changes would need to be seen implemented (beyond the standard acquis communautaire) to achieve BiH’s Euro-Atlantic integration.

In addition to these specific points, we would like to stress our deep concern regarding the current deteriorating situation in Bosnia and the lack of adequate response by the international community. We are profoundly worried at the indications that some wish to see the country partitioned, and fear that they might feel encouraged by the appeasing attitude advocated by some EU states. Have we forgotten that the main war aim of the Bosnian Serbs was to detach Republika Srpska from the rest of the country? If this is allowed 14 years after Dayton, after unprecedented international investment of political, human and financial capital to reconstruct a multiethnic, democratic Bosnia-Herzegovina, this would constitute an admission of ignominious defeat. Such a policy would reward ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the heart of Europe and with the support of the European Union. Is this the message that we want to send to future generations and to the world ridden with other secessionist conflicts? Can the EU’s still nascent Common Foreign and Security Policy afford such a resounding failure on its own doorstep?

Bosnia can not be compared to Kosovo or Montenegro. There is no valid argument, either political or legal, to support Republika Srpska’s independence. Furthermore, such a process would not be a peaceful one: it would most certainly throw the whole region back into conflict and instability. It is thus time to take a resolute stand to protect the peace that we have been building in the past 14 years, to protect the values for which the European Union stands, and to avoid any further conflicts in the region.

Sarajevo, The Hague, Amsterdam, Hanover, 27 November 2009.

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Bodo Weber December 1st, 2009

On December 1st, Balkan Insight published an OpEd by DPC Senior Associate Bodo Weber, a reaction to a comment by Mathew Parish (Balkan Insight, November 19th), former chief legal adviser to the Brcko district mediator Robert Owen, in which Parish calls the disintegration of the Bosnian state “inevitable” and advises the international community to start mediating a peaceful way to Republika Srpska’s independence. Bodo Weber in his reaction explains why Bosnia’s disintegration is far from being inevitable and why it could not proceed peacefully. With the ill-designed Butmir talks having obviously failed which both the EU and the US have entered without a Plan B, Weber argues, talk of partition as “inevitable” is nevertheless in danger of becoming an attractive excuse for the International community to make a speedy exit from Bosnia’s current stalemate. You can read the full article here.

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Kurt Bassuener November 18th, 2009

On Monday, the online journal Global Europe published an op-ed by DPC Senior Associates Bodo Weber and Kurt Bassuener calling for German and American leadership on Bosnia policy.  Among the recommendations was the separation of the High Representative, who has a peace enforcement role, from the EU Special Representative, who has an EU enlargement facilitation role.  The article notes the potential of Germany to lead the EU out of its current policy dead-end.

The full article can be found online here.

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Kurt Bassuener November 3rd, 2009

 (posted for Bodo Weber): 

The latest issue of the German weekly Die Zeit, published last week, carries an op-ed by me in which I argue that after the failure of the “Butmir process” initiated by  the EU’s Swedish Presidency it is time for the EU to finally take serious course in its policy towards Bosnia and that such a turn will demand Germany to take the lead. You can go to the link here for the article. An English version of the text is below.

Suddenly there is talk about war again

Die Zeit, 29.10.1009    Bodo Weber

This week the trial against Radovan Karadzic finally opened. Bosnia-Herzegovina may reach the soccer world championship in South Africa. And in all postwar countries of the former Yugoslavia, politics revolves around EU-integration. Sounds like successful calming and stabilization of Europe’s most recent theatre of war? Wrong.

High-level representatives of the European Union and the U.S. are currently en route to Bosnia-Herzegovina as crisis managers. For three and a half years ethnonationalistic rhetoric is escalating there and preventing political reform. For the first time in over a decade, the terms “war” and “violent conflict” have been resurrected in public debate. In this process Milorad Dodik, prime minister of the Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb entity in Bosnia is acting as the most vociferous agitator. He maintains an authoritarian regime with nationalistic populist speeches and regularly snubs the international community.

The international community had planned to stabilize the post-war state with the help of a semi-protectorate, but then initiated a phase-out. Its rationale: Over a decade after ending the war it was time for Bosnians and Herzegovinians to take over full responsibility for their country. From this view, the existence of international watchdogs is itself basically undemocratic. This putatively self-critical argumentation obscures two crucial problems: First, the international community wanted to get rid of the Bosnian problem child. And second, it wanted to hide the fact that at no point over the last fourteen post-war years has it developed a strategy for a long-term political stabilisation of the country without authoritarian international control.

One of the causes of the problems lies in the very Dayton-Agreement that secured the ending of the war in 1995. The Dayton post-war order has contained the aggressive effects of ethnic nationalism, it restored security and freedom of movement. The war armies have been dissolved, the military removed as a conflict factor.

But peace came at a special price: Instead of a functional Bosnian post-war state Dayton created a weak, dysfunctional and unsustainably expensive state; a complex state structure in which the constitution secures the decentralization of power and the predominance of ethnic political parties. At the same time, it sets hurdles too high for reaching substantial constitutional change from within, even though the majority of the population has long turned its back on the political elites.

The international community had tried to take corrective action through the Office of the High Representative (OHR). Its head was equipped with the authority to enforce laws or suspend them and to fire state officials whose ethnonationalistic policy and rhetoric represented a threat to Dayton. But this strengthening of the OHR was less motivated by the will to develop a real strategy for political stabilisation than by the wish to end the expensive and not very effective engagement in Bosnia in the foreseeable future.

When the U.S. took the Balkans off its top priority list after 9/11, the complete responsibility for the region fell to the EU. Without further ado, it declared the EU integration process to be the new statebuilding strategy. The High Representative additionally became the EU Special Representative for Bosnia. Europe put the EUFOR military mission in place for securing peace, thus turning Bosnia into one of the first test cases for its common European foreign and security policy. This sounded good – except for one shortfall: Brussels never had a strategic discussion on whether the prospect of EU membership could be a sufficient incentive for the local political elites in the southeast European countries (especially Bosnia) to take on the necessary economical and political reforms.

As the gap between the EU’s pretension and the Bosnian reality widened, “Bosnia-fatigue” inside the union grew. Instead of reacting politically Brussels turned on the bureaucratic autopilot and in 2006 decided to flee forward: The EU ascribed political maturity to the domestic elites and announced the imminent closure of the OHR. As the political elites’ zeal for reform vanished with the announcement of the pullout the EU dropped a central condition for signing an association agreement with Bosnia. The immediate consequences were: The expected reform dynamics did not take place. Two High Reps perished, the OHR sank into ineffectiveness. The EU lost the rest of its authority in Bosnia.

Brussels takes comfort in stating that the outbreak of a new war is unthinkable, if not for other reasons then because there do not exist ethnic armies any more. That is correct but still diverts from the real dangers. Bosnia lacks reliable state actors that could prevent an outbreak of violence.  Neither does there exist a de-politicized police nor a judiciary that could function in a way that guarantees the rule of law without external assistance. Without these instruments and a state monopoly on force, it is very realistic to imagine a local outbreak of violence as trivial as a clash between fans of two rivalling soccer teams to escalate into a regional ethnic conflict. And there is no lack of weapons in Bosnia even today.

Despite all that the EU remains politically motionless. Inside the union advocates of a harder approach (mainly Britain and the Netherlands) are standing vis-à-vis supporters of a softer course (lead by Sweden). But none of the European governments is prepared for a reinforced engagement in Bosnia. And yet the EU would neither need to reinvent the wheel nor invest additional resources. In Bosnia today, authoritarian-nationalistic forces are substantially weaker than they had been a few years ago. The recent political escalation is less the expression of a new strength of the political elites then of the power vacuum left over by the EU.

What then, should the EU do? It has to reengage. And it has to understand that both forceful interventions into the Bosnian sovereignty and the existing European military contingent will still be necessary through the course of the EU integration process. What is necessary is political will and a long-term perspective that will give the population security and curtail the elites’ space for manoeuvring and manipulation. With its current politics of ignorance, Europe risks generating considerably higher political costs in the long term.

Germany could take a leading role within the EU and thus bring the community back to a serious course in Bosnia. Both the emergence of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy and Germany’s pretension to become a global player are inseparably linked to the Srebrenica genocide and Europe’s failure in Bosnia. That should actually be motivation enough for Germany. It remains to be seen in the upcoming weeks and months whether the new conservative-liberal government is going to move away from the Bosnia-fatigue of its predecessor. It then also remains to be seen how big the discord between pretension and reality in the German foreign policy will be.

Bodo Weber is a Berlin-based Senior Associate of the Democratization Policy Council (DPC)

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Kurt Bassuener October 22nd, 2009

Today the Heinrich Boell Stiftung, the German Green Party’s political foundation, published a longer analysis of mine of the situation in Bosnia after the failed Butmir talks.  In this piece, I had a bit more room to map-out a potential way out of the current dead-end.  The article, “What next in Bosnia?,” is on Boell’s website at: http://www.boell.de/intlpolitics/europe-north-america-7682.html

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Kurt Bassuener October 22nd, 2009

Today’s issue of the weekly the European Voice carries an op-ed by me in which I argue that the “Butmir process” pursued for the past two weeks in Bosnia by the EU’s Swedish Presidency and the US has failed, and for a different approach: strengthening the Dayton instruments of OHR and EUFOR and extending them until Bosnia undergoes sufficient constitutional reform to obviate the need for them.  You can go to the link here for the article.  The full text is below.

It is time for a Plan B for Bosnia
 
The international approach to Bosnia needs a strategic re-think.

For more than three years, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political situation has been deteriorating. Fears have re-surfaced that the state may violently collapse. The international community, without a strategy for years, has responded irresolutely.
 
The international community has now re-engaged, at least. On 10 October and again on 20-21 October, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for enlargement, and Jim Steinberg, the US deputy secretary of state, called most of Bosnia’s political party leaders together at Butmir, outside Sarajevo, where they outlined a ‘package’ of reforms necessary, as they sold it, for deeper Euro-Atlantic integration.
 
The effort, though, has failed. Most Bosnian party leaders rejected the package. And there has been collateral damage: Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Republika Srpska, called for his largely Serb-populated region to have the right to a referendum on independence. The Butmir process further weakened the international community’s high representative, Valentin Inzko, who was relegated to the sidelines.

This highlights one of the core problems in the EU’s current approach: its fixation on the Office of the High Representative (OHR). The EU’s Swedish presidency and many EU states believe Bosnia is a ‘protectorate’ as long as there is an OHR, the peace implementation body created by the Dayton peace accords. They are categorical that they cannot negotiate with Bosnia on further steps toward the EU until the OHR is closed.

As a result, the aim of the ‘Butmir process’ appears to be more to close the OHR than to halt Bosnia’s downward political spiral.

This poses tactical problems: while Bildt seems willing to give anything away to achieve that end, Dodik seems unwilling to give anything.

But the bigger issue is that the real criterion for closing the OHR should be whether Bosnia can function as a state without it. The European Commission has, to its credit, gone some way toward defining the EU’s demands by enumerating constitutional reforms needed for Bosnia to gain candidate status. NATO too should clarify its requirements.

But Bosnia’s politicians have long shown little willingness to expend political capital to meet EU and NATO standards, a response conditioned by years of the international community fudging its own standards to create the illusion of progress. Those habits will be hard for both sides to break.

Now that the Butmir effort has clearly failed, the entire international approach must be re-thought. What key elements should a Plan B contain?

First, it should be made clear that Dayton’s executive instruments – the OHR and the military side of peace implementation, EUFOR – will remain in place until Bosnia has undergone deep reform. A clear, open-ended commitment would signal to Bosnia’s politicians that they cannot simply wait out the international community.

The roles of OHR and EU Special Representative should not be occupied by the same person, as is the case now. Linking these missions at the top ensures a lowest common-denominator approach, with the EU attempting to veto the use of the extensive Bonn Powers that the OHR has.

The EU and NATO should approach constitutional reform strategically, by forming an international commission tasked with identifying popularly legitimate solutions for Bosnia’s governance.

The status of state (public) and military property, included in the five objectives and two conditions set for the OHR’s closure, must also be resolved.

International judges and prosecutors should remain involved in war-crimes and organised-crime cases beyond the end of this year. The OHR should impose a three-year extension.

Finally, the West needs to develop and demonstrate a long-term common strategy. This was clearly lacking at Butmir. The fact that Bildt can have such influence shows that few member states have firm policies. A US special envoy may need to be the catalyst for any common strategy, working with EU members that share Washington’s concerns, primarily the UK and the Netherlands. They and others in the EU that back a tougher approach now need to bring Germany on board.

Kurt Bassuener is a senior associate of the Democratization Policy Council, a global initiative for accountability in democracy promotion.

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Kurt Bassuener October 6th, 2009

International Community Still Divided on Bosnia Strategy as Situation Deteriorates

The Hague, October 6:  The Clingendael Institute and the Democratization Policy Council on October 1 held an expert policy roundtable “The Future of International Involvement in Bosnia and Herzegovina: What is the Strategy?” The aim of the meeting was to attempt to forge a coherent and strategic approach toward the deteriorating situation in Bosnia among members of the EU and NATO.

Participants included diplomats from EU member states, North America, and Turkey, as well as the European Union institutions, the Office of the High Representative (OHR), NATO, the OSCE, and other international organizations and policy experts from a variety of nongovernmental and academic institutions.
 
The political situation in Bosnia is deteriorating at an accelerating pace. Progress has not merely stalled on most fronts, but is actively being rolled back. All participants seemed to agree that the international community’s current collective policy approach is delivering diminishing returns. 

Yet deep fissures were evident, both between Europeans and North Americans and among EU members themselves, on what policy is required. Some advocate reinvigoration of the Dayton instruments, OHR and EUFOR. Others call for accelerating transition to a double-hatted EU Special Representative/Head of EC delegation.  Despite efforts to clarify what sort of Bosnia the international community collectively would like to see, and how to get there from here, these remained nebulous at the end of the roundtable.  There remains no long-term international strategy to ensure Bosnia’s stability and functionality. 

The organizers will publish a summary report on the roundtable’s proceedings well before the November Peace Implementation Council Steering Board meeting. It will be posted on both the Clingendael and DPC websites.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Marianne Rogier, Senior Fellow, Clingendael Institute (+31 70 374 6692, mrogier@clingendael.nl)

Kurt Bassuener, Senior Associate, Democratization Policy Council (+387 61 489 653, kbassuener@democratizationpolicy.org)

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Kurt Bassuener September 23rd, 2009

NOTE:  due to a communications error between the author and the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje, which ran Mr. Will’s Sunday Sept 20 Washington Post piece in translation, Oslobodjenje ran my response in translation on Sept 22, while it was still under consideration by the Post, which has not run the letter.  I regret the confusion this may have caused.  Below is the original English-language version of the letter, as sent to the Washington Post on Sept 21.

Kurt Bassuener

 —-

To the Editor,

George F. Will wisely recommends that the President read Patrice McMahon and Jon Western’s article “The Death of Dayton,” (“Bosnia’s Lesson,” Sunday Sept 20th).  Yet his conclusion that Bosnia is failing because it was doomed to fail is flawed.
Bosnia is degenerating both because of structural elements in Dayton and its attendant election law and due to false assumptions the international community, and particularly the European Union, continue to hold dear.
 

The postwar structure of Bosnia has always been more of an oligarchy than a real democracy, allowing politicians almost complete lack of accountability to their citizens.  All they need do in an electoral campaign is promise “we will protect you from them,” and distribute public largesse.  They can then safely ignore the electorate for another four years. Until this dynamic is broken, Bosnia is inherently unstable and gravitates toward violent dissolution.
 

By 2005, the international assumption was that Bosnia was irreversibly on a path to being able to join the EU and NATO under its own power.  To compensate for the lack of forward movement from 2006 on, the EU has faked progress, hoping reality will catch-up to its declarations.  Brussels is sticking to its line that ending peace implementation will force Bosnian politicians to be responsible.  Nobody wants to admit that the magical EU formula isn’t achieving that result. Both Bosnia’s current political system and the international approach are at a dead end.
 

Neither blood or treasure, but rather high-level and sustained policy attention is required.  Only the US can catalyze a Western strategy.  Given that President Obama and Secretary Clinton have a lot on their plate, a presidential special envoy might be required to conjure a coherent Western strategy out of the current entropy.
 

The guardrails that have prevented the re-emergence of conflict – the executive High Representative and the EU military force, EUFOR – need to be reinforced.  Bosnians need to be clear that they will remain until a popularly legitimate governing system that can operate without these international failsafes is in place and seen to work.  Without these in place, a solution is impossible.
Even before NATO troops entered Bosnia in late 1995, the US and its allies were telegraphing their will to withdraw quickly.  We have been trying to undo the mistakes of those first two years ever since, with varying degrees of success.  Bosnia’s lesson should be that there are no shortcuts to establishing self-sustaining democratic governance.

Sincerely,
Kurt Bassuener
Senior Associate
Democratization Policy Council

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Kurt Bassuener August 7th, 2009

DPC Senior Associate Mark Lenzi, who formerly headed the International Republican Institute’s office in Tbilisi, Georgia, and his then-National Democratic Institute counterpart Lincoln Mitchell, have an excellent op-ed in today’s New York Times, “Georgia, One Year Later.” In their article, they warn of the danger of conflating a pro-American (and/or anti-Russian) policy with democracy.

In the year since the war between Russia and Georgia, it has become clear that in addition to the vague intention of resetting U.S. relations with Russia, Washington must develop distinct policies for Georgia and the other countries on Russia’s periphery and not continue to simply lump bilateral relations with post-Soviet governments together or in terms of their individual relations with Moscow. This new approach must reflect the reality of the Russian threat, but also the need for concrete political reform, which is the key to regional stability.

The authors also observe

Unfortunately, like its predecessor, the Obama administration often blurs and confuses the terms ‘friend’ and ‘democracy’ with regard to Georgia. This undermines the development of democracy in the former Soviet Union and beyond…the highly personalized nature of relations between the U.S. and Georgian leadership has contributed to bipartisan American reluctance to criticize the steps Georgia has made away from democracy in recent years.

While Georgia has indeed been a friend to America, demonstrating this by sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, it is certainly not a pure democracy. Yet this is how Georgia generally has been viewed by the Obama and Bush administrations. This was especially true during the war with Russia, when Georgia was often simplistically touted as the democratic David battling the authoritarian Russian Goliath.

Lenzi and Mitchell go on to recommend that the US redirect its assistance to Georgia away from arms and toward “media, civil society, and electoral and judicial reforms” and to make clear to the Saakashvili government that “Washington has higher standards for its allies and will no longer accept empty promises of democratic advancement.”

This message is one that is overdue and has implications for US policy elsewhere, and not only in the post-Soviet space.  Al Jazeera English’s brilliant “People and Power” series has just aired a devastating episode on the nature of the Bakiyev regime in Kyrgyzstan, which came to power in 2005 after what many dubbed the “Tulip Revolution,” the last and by far least transformative of the “color revolutions” in the former USSR.  The documentary illustrates the corruption and brutality of the regime, which appears to far outstrip the merely corrupt one it replaced, headed by Askar Akayev, and juxtaposes it with the lack of criticism from the Obama adminsitration, desperate to maintain the Manas airbase to support expanding military operations in Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan is the only country in the world with both US and Russian military bases, and as many third world dictatorships did in the Cold War, manipulates both to get greater tribute.  This money never seems to reach the people.  Surprise, surprise.  Well worth watching.

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