Slow, unsteady progress

Fifteen years ago this week, the leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia were holed up at a US Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, and cajoled by Richard Holbrooke, a US special envoy, to agree a peace deal for Bosnia. Today, the US and the EU are eager to declare mission accomplished and close down the Office of the High Representative, the main international body tasked with implementing the Dayton accords. Bosnia, EU officials keep saying, has to move from the Dayton stage to the Brussels stage.

The main difficulty with this approach is that, in core aspects, Bosnia still requires considerable propping up from the outside, as the European Commission’s progress report acknowledges.

The common institutions that span the country’s divide between the Croat-Muslim Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska lack political authority and resources. Milorad Dodik, for the past few years the undisputed leader of the Bosnian Serbs, has used his control of the central government to prevent any reform that might undermine the de facto autonomy of Republika Srpska.

At the same time, Dodik – who is supported by Boris Tadic, Serbia’s president – has made increasingly vocal calls for a referendum on independence, an open challenge to the Dayton settlement.

Maintaining order

The EU’s current approach has three pillars. The enlargement process, to which all Bosnian leaders pay lip service, is supposed to provide momentum for domestic reform. The EU special representative, who is also the international high representative, is supposed to facilitate such reform while protecting the Dayton achievements. Eufor, the EU’s peacekeeping force, is supposed to prevent hostilities. But according to observers, Eufor has been hollowed out to the point where it is no longer a credible military deterrent. Eufor refuses to release troop numbers, but figures obtained by European Voice show that it has dropped to 1,600 following the withdrawal in October of most Italians and Spaniards. The largest contingents today, with some 300 men each, are Austrian and Turkish.

A strong international presence is needed because the country’s institutions are weak and divided along communal lines, a division that has been institutionalised by Dayton. Bosnia’s politicians have failed to change the constitution, which discriminates against citizens who do not belong to the Croat, Muslim or Serb ‘constituent peoples’, a fact that could open up the result of the general election held on 3 October to legal challenges. The election, not surprisingly given the institutional bias in favour of nationalist parties, has not fundamentally changed the political landscape. Even so, the formation of a new government is likely to drag on well into next year – yet more time lost for reform and a renewed bid for closer ties with the EU.

On Monday (8 November), one day before the Commission releases its progress reports, EU interior ministers are expected to lift visa requirements for Bosnian and Albanian citizens. The move will ease the burden on ordinary citizens of cumbersome, expensive and frequently humiliating visa procedures.

It is a rare piece of good news as Bosnia seeks closer ties with the EU. But the fundamentals of the country’s predicament, a twin legacy of the 1992-95 war and of the Dayton accords that ended it, remain unchanged, as Tuesday’s progress report will make clear.

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