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The Bosnian Elections
Allan Little reports
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Talking Point:
Bosnian Serbs have again voted for nationalist parties who want, ultimately, to separate. Should the West persist in its policy to force them to reintegrate? Is it realistic to "impose" and "artificial" state on the peoples of Bosnia? 成人快手 Correspondent Allan Little writes:
Lord Owen, the former EU Peace Envoy, made a speech earlier this week calling for a radical rethink of Balkans Policy. He said that if Kosovo were be granted independence from Yugoslavia, then Yugoslavia should be compensate with a chunk of Bosnia "hectare for hectare".
There are many reasons to oppose this. The first is that the territory now known as "Republica Srpska" could only be created through ethnic cleansing. In the summer of 1992, when UN commanders were overwhelmed by the siege of Sarajevo and steadily condemning all sides in equal measure, three quarters of a million people - most of them Muslims, some of the Croats - were being expelled from their homes in northern and eastern Bosnia. The prime minister of the Bosnian Serb entity told me cheerfully at the time that he policy was to reduce the non-Serb population of those territories to fewer than five per cent. Typically, those being driven out were characterised by western governments as refugees "fleeing the fighting". In reality there was no fighting on most of their home towns and villages. It took the world many months to face up to the reality of ethnic cleansing. And by then it was too late. Recognising the secession of Republika Srpska would be to reward ethnic cleansing. It would set an almighty precedent.
Second, if you grant the Serbs of Bosnia the right to secede, then you cannot deny it to the Croats - and they will not let up until they have it. This would be to undo the great progress that has been made in reintegrating the Croats of western Bosnia. They have produced some brave and principled non-nationalist leaders who have taken stands that can easily be represented as unpatriotic and even treacherous by their hard line compatriots. They鈥檝e done this in the name of civil society and the rule of law. To concede the principle of secession - to accept the partition of Bosnia - would be to betray the very ideals that western democracies are supposed to represent.
And it would leave a slither of territory in the centre of Bosnia for the Muslims - or Bosniaks - of Bosnia. It would be economically unsustainable and permanently dependent on outside support. The Muslims of Bosnia have the least nationalist record of the three ethnic groups. Their leaders have shown the most co-operation with the international community from the start. In last week鈥檚 elections they voted in large numbers for the Social democratic Party - the only party of mass support that is not only non-nationalist but actively anti-nationalist. The High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch told me last week that if you take the Serb and Croat entities out of Bosnia you will be left with a small impoverished "Gaza Strip" in the heart of Europe. The Islamic countries would rush to its aid. A European people who have shown more loyalty to the democratic ideals of western Europe than either of their two predatory neighbours would look increasingly to the east for its political inspiration and its economic support. The security and stability implications are obvious.
Finally there are those who argue that a reconstituted Bosnia would in some sense be an "artificial" creation, and that if the "gravitational" pull of the region is towards separation then - however noble the ideal - it is futile to try to hold it all together.
I鈥檝e been reporting on the Balkans for the last decade. My own view is that there is nothing artificial about Bosnia as an integrated entity. Nothing in its geography, its shape, the way it functions economically, argues for partition. The regions of Bosnia complement and need each other. When the country is performing normally - and not straight jacketed by the artificial distinctions of nationality - the gravitational pull is absolutely towards integration. That鈥檚 why the peoples of that republic are so inter-mixed in the first place. That鈥檚 why, in 1992, when you asked a Sarajevan how many of the students in his final year high school class were Serb, how many Muslim and so on, they could not answer the question. It seems to me that it is these distinctions that are artificial.
I am convinced that the peoples of Bosnia will want to live together again, in a state that is decentralised and in which the rights of minorities are properly enshrined in law. The alternative is to create three small dependencies, ham-strung by artificial borders, that will be permanently antagonistic toward one another and whose political leaderships will never have to answer to their respective electorates because they will always be able to blame the enemy at the gate for the woes of the day.
To partition Bosnia would not only be to reward the ethnic cleansers. It would also be to condemn the region to a semi-permanent state of fear, conflict and poverty.
REPORT 1
- Hundreds of war criminals remain at large
Hundreds of Serbs suspected of involvement in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia during the 1991-95 war are still living in freedom in the Serb-controlled east of the country. The Bosnian Serb war leader Radovan Karadzic has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), yet he is believed still to be living in Bosnia. Many scores more are holding on to positions of power on local authorities and in police stations across the region. This is preventing refugees like Ziga Avdija who fled the brutal ethnic cleansing of the war from returning home and it is undermining confidence in the Dayton Agreement that brought the war to an end.
REPORT 2
- Double standards from the international community
Many of those refugees fled to the capital Sarajevo in search of a place to live. But as the wounds of the war begin to heal Muslims again feel their needs are being ignored in the rush for reconciliation. After the Dayton Agreement was signed many Serbs fled Sarajevo, fearing retribution for the atrocities committed by the Bosnia Serb military. Now they are returning to reclaim those properties from the Bosniaks who took refuge there, creating resentment among Bosniaks at what many see as double standards by the international community.
REPORT 3
- 5 years later: Bosnia's future and international wrangling
The war in Bosnia ended on 21st November 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Agreement. 5 years later the country is still struggling to put right the wrongs of the war, with mixed success. Recent elections passed off peacefully, but saw nationalist parties take around half the vote. Allan Little spent much of the war in Sarajevo. He used his final report to assess how far Bosnia has come and to examine the threat to the country's rehabilitation of differences of opinion in the international community.
LINKS
- www.unhcr.ch/
- www.ohr.int/
- hwww.ohr.int/gfa/gfa-home.htm
- www.seerecon.org/Bosnia/Bosnia.htm
- www.bosnet.org
- www.oscebih.org/languages.asp
- www.crisisweb.org/icghome.htm
, the Nato-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia - www.nato.int/sfor/
- www.unmibh.org
- www.un.org/icty/
- www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VI-01.htm
www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/srebrenica/srebrenica.html
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