Archive for the ‘Bosnia’ Category

Impending Train Wreck in the Balkans

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

Former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (the man who brokered the Dayton Accords ending the war in Bosnia), has a column in today’s Washington Post in which he describes the impending train wreck in the Balkans.

According to Holbrooke, the nightmare scenario goes like this: The EU-US-Russia working group on Kosovo announces that it has failed to find a solution to the problem of Kosovo’s status. Following that announcement, the elected government of Kosovo will declare independence and be recognized by the US and the EU, but not by either Serbia or Russia. Egged on by the Russians, the Serbian region of Bosnia would then declare it’s independence, thereby abrogating the Dayton Accords and significantly increasing the likelihood of renewed war in Bosnia. And, just for good measure, the Russians will, Holbrooke asserts, use the situation in the Balkans as a precedent for encouraging two regions of the Republic of Georgia to declare their independence, possibly leading to more conflict there.

The losers in this scenario?

  1. Everyone in Bosnia regardless of nation, because none of the three nations of that state stand to gain from the renewal of the war there;
  2. Serbia, because no government in Belgrade can sit on the sidelines while Kosovo declares its independence and war breaks out again in Bosnia. Serbian military (or even logistical) intervention in any subsequent fighting will derail any hope that Serbs have of joining the EU in the next decade or two, leaving Serbia as the potential permanent pariah of Europe;
  3. The EU and the US, because eight years of peacemaking in Kosovo and twelve in Bosnia will have been derailed and NATO will once again be fighting in a war it wants no part of;
  4. The peoples of Georgia who will have to revisit the wars of the early 1990s that left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands as refugees.

The winners? That’s easier–Russia.

I wonder when the Serbs are going to figure out that Russian policy in the Balkans has never been about what is or isn’t good for the Serbs–not in the 19th century, not in the 20th century, and now not in the 21st century. Russian diplomats, whether in 1878, or in 1914, in 1941, or the 1990s, have blustered on about the kinship between the two “Slav brothers”, but when the rubber hit the road, the Russians have left the Serbs high and dry again and again and again.It’s a virtual guarantee that they will do so again in this case.

Posted in Bosnia, Kosovo, Mills, Serbia | 1 Comment »

Policing in Bosnia

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

Here’s a link to a story in today’s post about the difficulties of running a police force in multi-ethnic and still partially divided Bosnia. The first paragraphs say:

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia — The tip was vague but promising, like so many other recent leads that had failed to pan out.

“One of the accused could be attempting to cross the border near the village of Bratunac” was the message relayed to Dragan Milosevic, chief police investigator in Republika Srpska, the Serb-governed sector of Bosnia. “The accused,” Milosevic recalled in an interview, could have referred only to five Bosnian Serb fugitives charged with committing crimes against humanity during their country’s 1992-95 ethnic civil war.

Milosevic and two dozen of his officers proceeded to the small farming village, where they came upon a sickly-looking man in a baseball cap, walking alone on a dirt road. They recognized him as Zdravko Tolimir, a former Bosnian Serb commander who had allegedly helped lead the massacre of as many as 8,000 Muslim prisoners at Srebrenica in July 1995.

Posted in Bosnia, Mills, Yugoslavia | No Comments »

Bosnia in the news

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Bosnia has been in the news a fair amount over the past few days and two of the stories attest to the continuing legacies of the wars of the 1990s. The first, from yesterday’s Washington Post is about the attempts by the Bosnia central government to expel from the country foreign fighters (mostly Islamic fighters who came to fight on the side of the Muslim forces during the war) who received citizenship after the war. It’s not clear from the story whether the government in Sarajevo is trying to expel this newish citizens because they are security threats to the state, whether it is because the United States and several European countries want them expelled and the government has a strong interest in good relations with the EU and the US, or because the presence of these men in the country is an ongoing irritant and public relations problem with the population of the Serbian regions of Bosnia.

The second story concerns the problems the continuing nationalist tensions in Bosnia are creating for an attempt to build a major highway from Hungary to the Adriatic via Bosnian territory. Serb-Muslim/Croat tensions over the highway have essentially stalled the project in its tracks with potentially serious economic consequences for all the citizens of Bosnia.

But not all the news is bad. It seems that the population of Tuzla has claimed the world kissing record. So even in a deeply divided society, there is still time for some smooching. According to the city’s mayor, “We cherish the philosophy of love and not hatred. Let the love revolution start from here.”

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