WASHINGTON IS to launch a fresh attempt to resolve years of dangerous drift and paralysis in Bosnia today when US secretary of state Hillary Clinton travels to the Balkans for the first time as a senior government official.
But Ms Clinton’s push will run into the hardline opposition of the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who, newly elected as president of the Serb half of Bosnia, Republika Srpska, looks bent on contriving the country’s slow-motion dissolution.
Following elections in Bosnia last week won by three nationalist parties representing Muslims, Serbs and Croats, the Americans and the Europeans are hoping to revive efforts at political reforms to stitch the country together.
For years the country’s corrupt rival political parties and elites have manoeuvred against one another, deepening ethnic divisions, making it impossible to pass laws and stoking fears for the country’s ultimate viability.
Previous international attempts, most recently a year ago, to redraft the unwieldy constitutional set-up agreed to end the war in 1995 ended in failure. The country remains a ward of the international community.
“Bosnia requires constitutional reforms. We regret that those reforms weren’t undertaken before this election,” US assistant secretary of state for Europe Philip Gordon said in Washington.
Fifteen years after the US mediated an end to the war that left 100,000 dead and the country split in two, Bosnia is troubled. The economy is dominated by political cronyism and almost half the people are without jobs. Ethnic divisions remain entrenched.
Mr Dodik is determined to keep it that way. “Bosnia-Herzegovina is a mistake created during the disintegration of the old Yugoslavia,” he told a Serbian newspaper. “The foreigners want to maintain it . . . Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot be, never could be, and never will be a state. That’s the only reality.”
The Europeans and the Americans are split over the way forward. While the US and Britain push for a more coercive policy, with the high representative encouraged to be “more muscular”, many in the EU say Bosnia has to be left to its own devices. – (Guardian service)