Moscow the big winner as Bosnian Serbs defy the West

Vladimir Putin is always happy to stir up mischief in the Balkans. So he’ll be delighted to see what’s now going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said Don Murray on CBC News (Toronto). Just seven months ago the country was applying to join the EU. Now, after two decades of fragile peace, it’s in danger of falling apart. Back in 1995, the Dayton Accords had kept it together by arranging for it to be politically divided into two largely autonomous entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, inhabited mainly by Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats: and Republika Srpska – more than 80% of whose inhabitants are Bosnian Serbs.

And it’s the Bosnian Serbs who have inflamed the situation by holding a referendum in which they voted almost unanimously to honour 9 January as Republika Srpska’s national day, said Erich Rathfelder in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). That might sound innocuous, but 9 January 1992 was the day Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžic asserted Republika Srpska’s independence from the rest of Bosnia, and initiated a brutal war against his Muslim neighbours in which more than 100,000 people were killed and for which Karadžic was ultimately indicted for war crimes. No wonder that outraged Bosniaks see it as a direct attack on the Dayton Accords and that Bosnia’s constitutional court has ruled it illegal. But the Serbs went ahead anyway.

Doubtless, their leader Milorad Dodik hopes playing the nationalist card will help him get re-elected and pave the way for his ultimate aim: separation from the Bosnian federation.

That the Serbs weren’t stopped from holding the referendum is a clear sign of the impotence of the EU and the US, said Adelheid Wölfl in Der Standard (Vienna). So much for the Office of the High Representative that they set up after the Dayton Accords to oversee Bosnia’s political evolution: its policies have been shown up as “bankrupt”; its authority is long gone. The big winner is Putin: Dodik visited Moscow just three days before the referendum. The tragedy, said Srecko Latal in Balkan Insight (Sarajevo), is that while political leaders across the region are ramping up the warmongering rhetoric, most Bosnians – be they Serbs, Bosniaks or Croats – are fed up with ethnic tensions. They want better jobs, better healthcare, better education. And in Republika Srpska at any rate they’re not getting any of that, said Murray. It’s a “dour” place, its dark streets “infested with criminals and corruption”. Unemployment is at 60%; its moribund economy is led by smuggling, money laundering and drug trafficking. So if it did somehow manage to secede it would be “a tiny, poor and isolated country, divided into two disconnected enclaves”, said The Economist. And one suspects “even the most patriotic of its citizens wouldn’t welcome that”.