The Bosnian town of Srebrenica is marking the terrible days 30 years ago when some 8,000 of its men and boys were massacred in adjoining woods and fields by compatriot Serbs. It was the first UN-recognised genocide in Europe since the Holocaust, carried out as politically hobbled UN peacekeepers stood idly by, though it tipped the US into leading a forceful intervention that brought an end to the brutal war in which 100,000 died and the former Yugoslavia was torn apart.
Three decades on, the fragile peace agreed then, the Dayton Accord, is more precarious than ever. It is a state made up of two bitterly hostile, devolved entities that nominally report to a central government: the federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for areas dominated by Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and Republika Srpska (RS), for areas dominated by Bosnian Serbs, including a beleaguered Srebrenica. An international peacekeeping contingent and an EU high representative struggle to keep the agreement on course.
While Dayton may have provided an agreed peace framework in which violence ceased, like Northern Ireland’s Belfast Agreement, it was premised on a form of mandatory power sharing and in Bosnia’s case cantonisation of the state that preserved local ethnic fiefdoms, perpetuating the divisions between communities rather than breaking them down. While undoing the treaty constraints may appear a rational way towards normalisation, consent from the minority Serb community will not be forthcoming.
Republika Srpska is led by autocratic Serb nationalist and Putin admirer, Milorad Dodik, who was sentenced in February to a six-year ban from politics and a year in prison for his defiance of the high representative. His aim is independence, though he denies it, and he is now planning a referendum on a draft new RS constitution whose provisions would be tantamount to secession.
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Bosnia Herzegovina’s disintegration would be a disastrous recipe for a resumption of violence. Standing up to Dodik is an imperative, but sending him to jail will not help.
