"Bosnia faces its worst crisis since the war. State institutions are under attack by all sides; violence is probably not imminent but is a near prospect if this continues.” And the chilling warning last week from the normally restrained International Crisis Group was echoed on Monday at the UN Security Council by EU/UN-backed international High Representative Valentin Inzko, Bosnias international governor.
At stake, both say, is the potential unravelling of the Dayton peace agreement brokered by the international community after the 1992-95 war and which unites the country’s semi-autonomous entities – the Serb Republika Srpska (RS) and a Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBH) – in a weak federation supposedly held together by a powersharing government. If the state does come apart, the country’s history suggests it will do so very violently.
Inzko’s most immediate concern is the decision by the hardline nationalist-dominated RS to call a referendum on rejecting centralised courts in Sarajevo, not least their trial of war criminals, and an implicit threat of an independence referendum to follow. Its president Milorad Dodik has more than once called for the country’s break-up and Inzko, who has broad powers under Dayton, warns that “I will have no choice but to repeal the conclusions and referendum decision”. It is a highly inflammatory threat endorsed by the western powers, though not by Russia, the Serbs’ traditional ally.
The referendum move takes place against the background of an ongoing stalemate inside the Muslim-Croat federation. Following elections in October, ethnic-based Croat parties used their Dayton-mandated ethnic veto to block the appointment of a president and government in the federation and have boycotted the upper level parliament since then. An election commission ruling that deemed a government invalidly appointed, was overruled by Inzko, allowing a multi-ethnic coalition to take office. But, at national level, Bosnia has as a result been without a government almost as long as Belgium.
Like Belgium the divided country is demonstrating the real limits of their shared, intensely complex systems of ethnic checks and balances and enforced powersharing. In the end such arrangements, as the North also suggests, are dependent on and last only as long as genuine intercommunal goodwill and a collective consent to be governed is sustained. That has never been achieved in Bosnia where the danger is that continued political gridlock will spiral down again into war.