WILL BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA TURN OVER A NEW LEAF?
By Patrick Moore
The international community is putting pressure on politicians in
Bosnia-Herzegovina for a thorough constitutional reform. It remains to
be seen whether the deeply-entrenched power structures will prove
sufficiently pliant.
The 10th anniversary of the conclusion of the Dayton agreements that
ended the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict falls on 21 November. That peace
deal, backed by NATO-led troops, has been a success in that the guns
have remained silent and the constitution included in it has remained
in force.
But the Dayton system has its critics, both at home and abroad. They
charge that some of the structures set in place 10 years ago have
proven dysfunctional and led to the consolidation of gains by the
Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian nationalists who have effectively ruled
their respective ethnic groups since the first postcommunist elections
that took place in November and December 1990.
Critics note that Dayton set up two parastates, or entities, namely the
Republika Srpska and the Croat-Muslim Federation. The Serbs in
particular have been adamant defenders of the entity system, arguing
that Dayton confirmed the sovereignty of the Republika Srpska. Those
who consider Dayton dysfunctional stress that the entities prevent the
proper functioning of the central state, which must become the locus of
real power if Bosnia is to achieve the long-sought aim of Euro-Atlantic
integration and membership in the EU and NATO.
Support for the central state within Bosnia-Herzegovina is confined
chiefly among the Muslims and some small nonnationalist parties. The
Muslims are the largest single ethnic group and, unlike the Serbs and
Croats, have no nation-state outside Bosnia that they might aspire to
join or look to for protection. Exact population statistics will emerge
only with a new census, but many observers feel that the breakdown
among the three main ethnic groups would be something like 44 percent
Muslim, 38 percent Serbian, and 18 percent Croatian.
Starting with the 1990 elections, most voters returned to the
precommunist pattern of supporting parties associated with their own
ethnic group, with notable exceptions in places like Sarajevo and
Tuzla, where nonnationalist parties have been strong. Muslims have
tended to favor the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) founded by late
President Alija Izetbegovic. The SDA seeks to assert Muslim primacy
within the federation and Bosnia as a whole and contains both secular
and clerical currents.
Serbian voters have generally gravitated to the Serbian Democratic
Party (SDS) set up by Radovan Karadzic, who is now a leading fugitive
war crimes indictee. The SDS stresses the sovereignty of the Bosnian
Serb entity and has long fought the police reform demanded by the EU
because this would create new police structures and administrative
units that would cross the interentity boundaries. It should be
recalled that former Republika Srpska President Biljana Plavsic
convinced Serbs to accept Dayton in 1995-96 precisely because it
affirmed the sovereignty of that entity. Bosnian Serb sentiment remains
strong in favor of joining Serbia rather than accept a centralized
Bosnian state. It might be noted that the ideological basis for the
Serbian revolts in Croatia and Bosnia at the beginning of the 1990s was
the desire to "remain in Yugoslavia," meaning under the rule of
Belgrade, rather than become a minority in a state dominated by others.
Ethnic Croats, particularly those in western Herzegovina, tend to
support the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ), which was closely
linked to the Croatian party of the same name, particularly during the
rule of President Franjo Tudjman in the 1990s. The Croats main concern
is not to become a powerless minority in a state dominated by Muslims
and Serbs. Croatian sentiment has accordingly been strong either for a
wholesale reorganization of the internal boundaries on a multiethnic
basis or, for the creation of a third, Croatian entity based on but not
limited to Croat-majority cantons within the federation, despite the
vigorous opposition of the Muslims and the international community to
this proposal. The Croats of central Bosnia and Sarajevo are used to
living in ethnically mixed areas, but the temptation for the
Herzegovinians in the southwest and the Posavina Croats in the north
has always been to turn their backs on Bosnia and join Croatia, which
their homelands border.
The legacy of the war and nationalist rule goes far beyond voting
patterns, however. Critics of Dayton charge that the borders of the
Republika Srpska in particular have served only to set in stone the
results of ethnic cleansing campaigns during the war. In fact, members
of all three ethnic groups lost their homes in the course of the
conflict and have little hope of going back to an area now controlled
by another nationality, to the extent that they have not begun new
lives elsewhere. Many who do return do so simply to sell their property
and leave again, even though statistics might record them as returnees.
Moreover, the SDA, SDS, and HDZ are all linked to power structures that
emerged during the war and encompass the interlocking worlds of
politics, business, the security forces and, in the last analysis,
organized crime. These structures are the real beneficiaries of Dayton,
which in practice largely left each ethnic group to manage its own
affairs.
The central state remains weak and is best epitomized by the
three-member Bosnian Presidency, which consists of one member from each
main ethnic group, each of whom has a veto. This is but the latest
manifestation of the "nationality key" principle associated with the
last decades of communist rule in former Yugoslavia to ensure that no
one ethnic group can lord it over the others, but in practice it has
meant the paralysis of Bosnia as a state. Dayton Bosnia, in fact, is an
impoverished country of just over 4 million people that supports 14
governments: the central body, two entities, 10 cantons, and the
special UN-administered Brcko District.
The only way in which decisions ranging from the issuing of uniform
Bosnian license plates to the firing of top nationalist officials for
corruption have been taken was that Dayton established the post of high
representative, who is a European foreigner appointed by the
international community. The Office of the High Representative (OHR)
has virtually unlimited powers and is not subject to any control by
elected Bosnian officials. More than once the high representative has
found himself in the position of overruling or sacking elected
officials -- who happen to be nationalists -- in the name of promoting
democratic values.
This paradoxical situation of imposing democracy by fiat has led to a
lively debate in recent years about reforming the Dayton system, in the
course of which four models emerged (see "RFE/RL Balkan Report," 15
July and 14 October 2005). One calls for strengthening the OHR on the
grounds that it is the only institution that is capable of breaking the
structures that emerged in wartime. The second advocates phasing out
the OHR in the name of promoting democracy. The third approach would
throw out Dayton and call a new constitutional convention, even if it
would be dominated by the nationalists. The fourth model is the most
radical, in that it calls for declaring the Bosnian state a failure and
partitioning it between Serbia and Croatia, with the Muslims left with
a rump ministate or the option of joining one of the neighbors.
In recent months, the discussion has begun moving in other directions,
namely in favor of setting up a functioning centralized state. The idea
is to have a new constitutional system agreed to by the Bosnian
politicians themselves, albeit under great foreign pressure. What has
made the centralized state a realistic option at the end of 2005 is
that the Bosnians now have the clear assurance that the road to EU and
NATO membership is open to them following the agreement on military
reform that was a prerequisite to joining NATO's Partnership for Peace
program and similar progress on police reform that the EU demanded
before agreeing to launch talks aimed at securing a Stabilization and
Association Agreement (SAA), possibly in the very near future (see
"RFE/RL Newsline," 7 and 8 November 2005). The argument runs that
Euro-Atlantic integration will come all the faster if the
dysfunctional, entity-based state is scrapped for one in which
effective power lies in a single cabinet headed by a prime minister. In
addition, one directly-elected individual would act as a largely
ceremonial president. The state would have a unicameral, popularly
elected legislature in which the veto rights of the three ethnic groups
would be limited. Any reform that would speed the prospect of full EU
membership would, moreover, have great appeal to the voters, who
associate Brussels with aid money, job-creating investments, and the
visa-free travel that all former Yugoslavs remember from the last
decades of communist rule.
The international community's initial attempt at bringing leaders of
Bosnia's eight main political parties to accept a new state model
designed primarily by U.S. diplomats took place in Brussels from 12 to
14 November. The meeting did not produce even a final declaration, but
U.S. representative Donald Hays said nonetheless that he hopes an
agreement can still be reached by the spring of 2006 so that
constitutional changes could take effect in time for elections due in
October of that year. A second round of talks is slated for 19-20
November in Washington, on the eve of Dayton's 10th anniversary.
Although the EU, and the EC before it, have sought to play a dominant
role in the Balkans, the circumstances leading to the 1995 Dayton
agreement -- which was concluded on a U.S. Air Force base -- and to the
end of Serbian atrocities in Kosova about four years later, have shown
that the U.S. military and diplomatic role has been crucial in regional
affairs. And in 2005, even with the prospect of EU membership as the
main "carrot" being offered to Bosnian politicians and their voters,
the U.S. still appears to be the necessary catalyst if real change is
to have a chance of taking place.
A recent broadcast of RFE/RL's South Slavic and Albanian Languages
Service noted, however, that the international community bears a good
deal of the responsibility for the present dysfunctional constitutional
system and the continuation of ethnically-based politics in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The commentators argued that it will ultimately be
the task of the Bosnians themselves, with foreign assistance of course,
to bring about a society based on the civic principle through elections
in which civic-based parties triumph over the nationalist ones. This
will be a tall order, indeed.
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