Bosnia on the brink: the crisis brewing in the Balkans
Thirty years ago this autumn, Bosnia was plunged into a political crisis that led to three and a half years of war – and “the worst humanitarian atrocities committed on European soil since WWII”, said Hamza Karcic in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). Now, that anniversary is at risk of being marked “in a particularly macabre way”. Tensions in the country are at their highest since the signing of the Dayton accords that ended the war in 1995, dividing Bosnia into two semiautonomous regions: Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation. And the blame for those tensions lies with one man: Milorad Dodik. An ethnic Serb and genocide-denier (he has called the Srebrenica massacre a “myth”), Dodik is a member of Bosnia’s national three-person presidency, which includes one Serb, one Croat and one Bosniak. But in recent months he has launched an assault on the state institutions that guarantee Bosnia’s postwar order, threatening to withdraw Republika Srpska from Bosnia’s tax authority, judiciary and, crucially, its armed forces – sparking fears that Bosnia could once again be sliding towards war.
Dodik’s “reckless” political experiment has been going on for years, said Balkan Insight (Sarajevo). Desperate for the Bosnian Serbs to secede and unite with Serbia itself, he has been under
US sanctions since 2017 for seeking to undermine the Dayton accords, and has repeatedly called for a referendum on secession. But it’s his desire to create a Bosnian-Serb army that is causing most alarm: last week, the international community’s chief representative in Bosnia, Christian Schmidt, warned in a report to the UN that the country could break up if his threat is realised.
“For many Bosnians, the similarity to the 1990s feels almost eerie,” said Adelheid Wölfl in Der Standard (Vienna). Yet the West doesn’t seem alive to the threat. Russia, meanwhile, has spotted an opportunity to sow chaos on the EU’s doorstep: Dodik has previously said he has “friends” who are willing to support the Serb cause – a presumed reference to the Kremlin. The evidence backs up that claim, said Miralem Ašcic in Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo). Moscow recently threatened to veto the UN Security Council from renewing its peacekeeping mission in Bosnia unless mention of Schmidt’s report was left out of its statement. Other UN members duly fell into line, and a watered-down version of the resolution was passed last week. With Dodik showing little sign of tempering his rhetoric, and the EU and US apparently unwilling to stand up to him, many Bosnians have profound fears for the future.