Bosnia is On The Brink of War Whilst the West Watches On (Again)
Bosnia and Herzegovina is facing one of its worst political crises since the end of the Bosnian War in 1995. The high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, has warned that the country is in imminent danger of breaking part, with a “very real” prospect of a return to conflict.
The Bosnian War was marked by some of the worst atrocities to be committed on European soil since WW2, resulting in approximately 100,000 people killed, 2.2 million people displaced, as well as the indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns, ethnic cleansing, and systemic mass rape. The war ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, in which warring parties agreed to a single sovereign state and implemented a tripartite presidency – a rotating three-member presidency consisting of a Bosniak, a Serb and a Croat leader, overlooked by a high representative. This single sovereign state agreement resulted in Bosnia and Herzegovina as it is known today, which is composed of two parts: Republika Srpska (a largely Serb-population area), and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (a mainly Bosniak-Croat area), as well as the self-governing region of Brčko District.
In recent months, Milorad Dodik, the Serb leader of the tripartite presidency, declared that Republika Srpska would be quitting the key state institutions to attain full autonomy within the country, in a direct violation of the 1995 peace agreement. Dodik’s threats of the succession of Republika Srpska have been going on for the past fifteen years, however, they have escalated exponentially in recent months as a response to Valentin Inzko (the then high representative) banning genocide denial and the glorification of war criminals. Now, he has the support of Russia in making these threats.
Dodik’s succession of the Republika Srpska involves the removal of the state from the three key institutions: the armed forces, the top judiciary body and tax administration. Ultimately, this will result in a mono-ethnic Bosnian Serb army in Republika Srpska, supported by Russia, which Dr Emir Suljagic (the director of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre) wrote in a column for the Anadolu Agency, were “vehicles for genocide in the 1990s… at the centre of organised and systemic violence against non-Serbs”. The creation of a Bosnian Serb army threatens the safety and security of non-Serbs within Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a failure to deter these threats could result in another genocide.
This threat means that Bosnia is now facing one of the most precarious challenges to its stability and security since the end of war, and there is now a serious prospect of a return to the violence and conflict that we saw across our screens in the 1990s.
The Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) successfully co-opted civic society through a careful and systematic process of dehumanising Bosnian Muslims so that the agents of death and their collaborators found common and easier cause in achieving their goal of ethnic cleansing. This was done in pursuit of a ‘Greater Serbia’, in which the systematic and industrialised murder of just under 100,000 people, displacement of 2 million people and genocidal rape of 50,000 women because of their Muslim identity was used to try and achieve this goal. Bosnian Serb forces are claimed to be responsible for 90% of the ethnic cleansing that was committed during the Bosnian war, with atrocities such as the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995, in which an estimated 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were brutally murdered by the Bosnian Serb Army. The Bosnian Serb army also committed other war crimes across different parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as in Sarajevo (9,429 Bosniak, 3,573 Serb, 810 Croat and 140 other minority civilians killed), Prijedor (4,868 killed or missing - 3,515 Bosniak civilians, 186 Croat civilians and 78 Serb civilians), Zvornik (3,936 killed or missing – 2,017 Bosniak civilians), Bijeljina and Višegrad (approximately 3,000 Bosniaks murdered), amongst others.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court of the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) both ruled that the mass execution of Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica constituted genocide, with the UN describing these killings as the “worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War”.
Whilst the situation today is not directly comparable to the past – the war being triggered by the break-up of Yugoslavia and subsequential expansionist ideologies of Serbia and Croatia – it stems from Dodik’s and Republika Srpska’s secessionist ideologies and continued aspirations for a ‘Greater Serbia’. The succession of the Republika Srpska would result not only into a potential descent back into conflict in Bosnia but could also perpetuate a spiral of violence to the neighbouring countries of Kosovo, Montenegro, and potentially North Macedonia. It could cause a significant loss of diplomatic influence for the UK in the region, with powers such as Russia and China taking a stronger influence through the deployment of similar methods we saw in the Cold War.
Beyond the political, this would result in a new refugee crisis across Europe, with many more people displaced by a conflict that the West could intervene with now, before it is too late. We have seen what happens when the West turns a blind eye and loses its heart when we look to recent events in Afghanistan, where Taliban oppression has taken over once again. We try and keep our toes out of the water because we don’t want to get wet. But, when we stand by idly and let these situations surge out of control, we allow innocent people who deserve our support to drown.
Every time we say “never again”, we continue to neglect these issues until it is too late. This time, we need to mean it, and we need to use our voices to ensure that those in charge in the UK truly commit to “never again” and push for intervention before things escalate once again.
References
Burg, Steven L.; Shoup, Paul S. (1999). The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention (2nd ed.).
Written by Geena Whiteman
Geena is a PhD student researching how young people are entering the workforce, particularly, how they are pursuing entrepreneurship, and what entrepreneurship means to them.
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