World Watch: Bosnia accord marks anniversary amid new talks
The deal didn't exactly usher in an era of trust and friendship among the warring parties of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But the Dayton accords being celebrated in Washington on their 10th anniversary this week did achieve something that seemed inconceivable amid the massacres in Srebrenica and the shelling and sniping in Sarajevo: a decade of peace.
Sixty thousand international troops, 20,000 of them American, rushed in to secure the killing grounds of Bosnia. An international steward known as the "high representative," armed with wide powers that included the authority to fire obstructionist Bosnian presidents, was installed to ensure that Bosnia's three communities did not slide back toward war after more than 200,000 lives were claimed. The absence of war has permitted a good deal of the country's shattered infrastructure to be rebuilt and has allowed more than 1 million people to return to their homes. Bosnia has a single currency and has moved to create a unified military establishment.
Yet many Bosnians who would be part of an ethnic minority in their old home areas are afraid to live there. The economy remains sluggish, with high unemployment. Some of Bosnia's young people are clamoring for Bosnia to become, as the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, R. Nicholas Burns, puts it, "a normal country." And the two most notorious war crimes suspects—the former Bosnian Serb chief Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic—remain at large.
So as Bosnia's three presidents—representing Serbs, Croats, and Muslims—meet early this week in Washington, they not only are touting the effect of the Dayton agreements but find themselves under pressure to seek constitutional changes that would yield a more unified and coherent state. One of those changes, not surprisingly, would be a single presidency. At a conference in Washington sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace, the high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Paddy Ashdown, warned the three yesterday against reverting to all-or-nothing positions along the lines of "If I can't get everything, I won't give anything."
That was the approach that was finally ground down by American mediators at Dayton in November 1995.
Bush administration officials, along with the Clinton-era diplomatic architect of Dayton, former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, used the conference to pressure the three leaders not to dig in their heels and avoid compromise. The Bush administration is pushing them before they leave Washington to commit to making changes in their radically decentralized government. And that marks a significant reassertion of American diplomatic clout in the Balkans after four years of what Holbrooke called "inattention and neglect."
Whether that is a fair assessment or not, the administration in its first term clearly conferred far less policy time on the Balkans than did its predecessor.
U.S. officials want not only a single presidency but also a stronger prime minister and parliament. And they want Bosnian Serb officials as well as those in Serbia itself to arrest and hand over Karadzic and Mladic to the international tribunal at The Hague.
Their flight from justice is a roadblock for Bosnia's future.
"You can't have peace without justice," said Ashdown, calling their capture "priority No.1." He added, "We need closure on the war."
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