T K Vogel — research & analysis

International policy has failed to keep Pakistan and Palestine from inching closer to the brink: both are potential failed states and both could take their entire region down with them, especially nuclear-armed Pakistan. For once, the intellectually lazy response – to blame it on the Americans – is correct.

The basic American mistake in dealing with Pakistan has been to put all its money on the country’s autocratic ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, and to dismiss a democratic alternative as too messy, an inclination which was magnified once the ‘war on terror’ came along. Indeed, Musharraf’s coup was cautiously welcomed by many Pakistanis who were fed up with the venality of their democratically elected leaders. The relatively brief spells of democracy that the country had experienced since emerging from the partition of India in 1947 had not been especially happy and Musharraf seemed a rather enlightened sort of military ruler. The decisive moment in his relationship with Washington came immediately after 11 September 2001, when the US confronted him with the choice of supporting the Americans’ anti-terrorism campaign or feel the wrath of a bellicose administration bent on revenge.

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NATO’s response to a possible flare-up of violence in Kosovo could be hampered by bad communication with the EU, diplomats in Brussels have warned.

Communication between NATO and the EU, which have largely overlapping membership, is good in the field but dysfunctional at the political level, according to officials and experts.

This could undercut NATO’s 16,000-strong peacekeeping force in Kosovo, KFOR, if the province’s unilateral declaration of independence, expected early next year, leads to unrest.

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Serbia will not be able to sign a pre-accession pact with the EU if it continues interfering in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, Olli Rehn, the European commissioner in charge of enlargement, has said.The commissioner also urged Bosnia’s politicians not to listen to the “siren calls from Belgrade or Moscow”.
The warning came less than a week after Rehn and Serbian President Boris Tadic put their initials to a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA), seen as a first step on the road to eventual membership of the European Union.

In an interview with European Voice, Rehn said that he had conveyed the message to Tadic the previous Wednesday (7 November).

“We have made it clear that we expect that Serbia will not interfere in the domestic politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Rehn said.

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As an alliance of states built on ‘soft power’, it is perhaps not surprising that the European Union has had ambivalent feelings about sanctions from the very first time it imposed them – against the Soviet Union in response to the suppression of democratic stirrings in Poland in December 1981.

The trade embargo against the Soviet Union was partial and half-hearted: Germany was opposed, Greece was exempt and Denmark’s participation was limited to refusing to allow goods to be shipped through its territory to or from states that were implementing the sanctions.

But the sanctions on the agenda of the EU foreign ministers’ meeting this week (15-16 October) were quite different. The ‘dumb sanctions’ of the 1980s and 1990s – blanket trade embargoes against rogue regimes in South Africa, Yugoslavia and Iraq – have been replaced by ‘smart sanctions’ that minimise the effects on the general population by targeting individuals who are directly implicated in the events that triggered the measures in the first place.

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The killing of ten African Union (AU) peacekeepers in Darfur on 29-30 September has given military planners and analysts pause to consider the dangers of a forthcoming EU deployment to neighbouring Chad.

A source of particular concern is that the EU operation in Chad will have to work closely with a contingent of United Nations police there and with a joint AU-UN military force in Darfur. Peacekeeping co-operation between the EU and the UN has steadily improved over the past few years, according to experts, but it still tends to be ad hoc, depending on personality and diplomatic alignments and hence vulnerable to misunderstandings and politics.

And then there is the classic recipe for peacekeeping disaster: deploying peacekeepers where there is no peace to keep. As the Darfur rebels have splintered, achieving a political settlement of the conflict may well be more difficult than it has ever been. Most of the UN’s thinking and planning has evolved around the number of troops needed in Darfur, says Richard Gowan, a research associate at New York University’s Center on International Co-operation, but Darfur’s collapse into political anarchy, of which the killings seem to be one symptom, means that the political basis for a deployment is absent.

“Just throwing troops into a situation will not help resolve it,” Gowan says.

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It may be Srebrenica’s special misfortune that to the people interested in it, it has been far more than just a small town in eastern Bosnia. Its fall in July 1995 was a great military triumph for the Bosnian Serbs, but the systematic killing of thousands of Muslim males that followed forever tainted the Serbian project of creating a separate ethnic homeland by breaking up Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Srebrenica’s fall signaled the end of the United Nations’ ill-fated humanitarian mission in Bosnia. It also prompted the United States to come up with a strategy for a military and diplomatic endgame in Bosnia, which a few months later produced the Dayton peace accords. The Dayton accords gave the Bosnian Serb entity, the Republika Srpska, far-reaching autonomy and confirmed its hold over Srebrenica.

Today, many Bosnians — though not, on the whole, the country’s Serbs — share the growing concern among international policymakers that the constitution that came as part of Dayton has outlived its usefulness. Its complex ethnic quotas and veto points have greatly complicated the country’s recovery and continue to prevent closer ties with the European Union.

 

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The international community has put a strong personality at the helm in Bosnia after a failed experiment in laissez-faire leadership.

In the past, Bosnians and Bosnia-watchers would carefully vet an incoming high representative for signs that he might depart from his predecessor’s policies or take dramatic steps in implementing the mandate of his office, the OHR. No such scrutiny awaits Miroslav Lajcak, a top diplomat in the Slovak Foreign Ministry, when he takes over from Christian Schwarz-Schilling of Germany in late June. Instead, there’s a widespread feeling that things can only get better and a suspicion that it might not matter anyway.

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Die vielleicht wichtigsten Bücher über den Irak-Krieg haben bisher nicht Politologen mit geförderter Forschung, sondern Journalisten wie George Packer oder Anthony Shadid geschrieben. Die Wissenschafter wetzten noch ihre Analysewerkzeuge, als die Reporter bereits ihre Buchmanuskripte ablieferten. Doch was deren Recherche zutage gebracht hat, bedarf oft einer systematischeren Auslegung, und allenfalls offenbart die geduldige Arbeit in Schreibstube und Bibliothek Verbindungen, die dem flüchtigeren Blick verborgen bleiben. Genau dies ist die Leistung von «Iraq in Fragments» der britischen Politologen Eric Herring und Glen Rangwala. Die Situation im Irak nach der Invasion wird hier in einen Gesamtzusammenhang gesetzt. Das ist auch die Schwäche der Studie, weil es den Geschehnissen etwas Unvermeidliches verleiht.

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When the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), a consortium of 55 governments and international organizations that oversees peace efforts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, met in Brussels on February 26-27, the mood was grim. Last year, the PIC announced that the top international body in Bosnia, the Office of the High Representative (OHR), should phase out by the end of June 2007 and hand over to a European Union special representative. But since last year’s meeting, stalled reform, a delay in signing a preaccession agreement with the European Union, a divisive general election, and the expectation of potential fallout from the upcoming Kosova status decision have all conspired to make a June handover appear unrealistic. The PIC was therefore constrained to extend the OHR’s mandate by one year, through June 30, 2008. The PIC’s decision is a recognition that international policy toward Bosnia over the last year has failed to achieve its goals. But what exactly are those goals?

The OHR was established to implement the Dayton peace agreement of November 1995 and has extensive powers over Bosnia’s domestic politics. In late 1997, after a difficult start under Carl Bildt, the OHR was handed the authority to enact or revoke legislation; dismiss public officials and bar them from holding office in the future; vet candidates for public office; and fine or ban political parties.

These so-called Bonn powers have since become the focus of an intense though largely academic debate about the legitimacy of using nondemocratic means to build democracy. The lack of an appeals or review procedure prompted particularly harsh, and justified, criticism even from observers who were sympathetic to the notion that the difficult transition from war to peace required robust tools.

High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch put the notion of “local ownership” at the center of his tenure, from 1999 to 2002, but did not shy away from using the Bonn powers where necessary. Under his successor, Paddy Ashdown, Bonn decisions reached their peak, and Ashdown’s forceful manner provoked angry shouts from the sidelines.

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On February 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague cleared Serbia of genocide charges in connection with Belgrade’s support to the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ICJ confirmed, however, an earlier ruling by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), also in The Hague, that events following the fall of Srebrenica to Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic did in fact constitute genocide, and it found Serbia in breach of international law for failing to prevent the killings or punish those responsible. The lawsuit was brought by the Bosnian government in 1993 against rump Yugoslavia and was among the court’s most complex and contentious cases in its 60 years of existence.

A genocide verdict would have required proof that the government of then-Yugoslavia (whose legal successor is Serbia) intended to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such,” as outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention. It was clear from the very beginning that such intent would be extremely difficult to prove, not least because Serbia has not been forthcoming in granting access to government documents that might shed light on the complex ties it maintained with the Bosnian Serbs.

The ruling therefore reflects the state of knowledge as of today, a little over 11 years after the war ended. It is unlikely to be the last word even though no appeal is possible: history will continue to be amended every time new evidence comes to light. This concerns above all the court’s finding that neither the Bosnian Serb republic nor its army “could be regarded as mere instruments through which [then-Yugoslavia] was acting,” and that “the acts of genocide at Srebrenica cannot be attributed to the Respondent as having been committed by its organs or by persons or entities wholly dependent upon it, and thus do not on this basis entail the Respondent’s international responsibility.”

Since it is open to revision, the verdict will not bring closure to the dispute between competing historical interpretations of the war in Bosnia. Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Republika Srpska will continue to maintain that it was a bloody civil war in which all sides committed atrocities, while Muslims and Croats will continue to see it as a war of aggression waged by Serbia on a newly independent member of the United Nations. But taken in their totality, the facts established by the ICTY and now the ICJ suggest a picture with considerably more shades of gray than either side would like to admit.

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In a landmark ruling announced on February 26, the International Court of Justice in The Hague found that Serbia neither committed nor conspired to commit genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, international media reported. “The court finds that the acts of genocide at Srebrenica cannot be attributed to the respondent’s state organs,” the court’s president, Rosalyn Higgins, said as she read out the judgment, which also cleared Serbia of complicity in genocide. But the court found Serbia in breach of international law in failing to prevent the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica and to punish those responsible for it. The lawsuit was filed by the Bosnian government in 1993, at the height of the 1992-95 war, and was among the most complex and lengthy cases in the court’s 60-year history. It was also the first genocide lawsuit brought by one government against another. The systematic killing of thousands of men and boys from Srebrenica in 1995 has been recognized as genocide by another UN court in The Hague, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which convicted two Bosnian Serb officers for their role in it. Higgins called on Belgrade to take immediate and effective action to extradite fugitive war crimes indictees wanted by the ICTY. Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim member of Bosnia’s tripartite Presidency, told Bosnian state television that “in order to reverse the results of genocide, we need to change the setup and the [Bosnian] constitution.” This is a clear reference to the abolishment of Republika Srpska, something Silajdzic has long advocated. He also said that Bosnia should outlaw genocide denial. Silajdzic said the ruling was not complete, but contained a recognition that genocide did take place in Bosnia.

The small patch of land known to Serbs as Kosovo i Metohija and to Albanians as Kosova has provided the backdrop for a clash of core principles of international relations ever since Nato chased out Serbian security forces in 1999 and turned the territory into a United Nations protectorate. After almost eight years of post-conflict convulsion, dispute and negotiation, the UN’s special envoy Martti Ahtisaari submitted a “compromise” plan for Kosovo’s future status to both Serbs and Albanians on 2 February 2007.

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When Christian Schwarz-Schilling took over the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina last February, he came to Sarajevo with a clear task: To phase out his own job. But now it’s Mr. Schwarz-Schilling who’s being phased out, while the OHR looks set to live on. Two days ago he recommended an extension of the office’s mandate beyond its current closing date of June 30, but not with him at the helm.

The Swiss are usually not given to the sort of tortured self-examination that consumes their German neighbors at regular intervals. Not for them the endless debates about national identity, their role in the world, or how to deal with globalisation: in all these areas, the Swiss with their unshakeable pragmatism have charted an independent, and highly successful, course.But now, a string of sexual assaults committed mostly by foreigners or naturalized citizens has forced the Swiss to take a hard look at the way they deal with the country’s large foreign population, some 20 per cent of the total. (In Europe, only tiny Liechtenstein and Luxembourg have a higher share.)

Just last week, the media reported from Zurich that a 13-year-old girl had repeatedly been raped, over a period of several weeks, by a gang of around ten adolescents (including her boyfriend), all of them of foreign extraction. They all confessed to the assaults but did not seem to grasp the concept of statutory rape (though some of the sexual activity may have been consensual).

Not content with fatalistic explanations that humans are evil or men are pigs, the pragmatic Swiss wanted an explanation that came with a solution attached. The most powerful of these explanations, because it touched on an uncomfortable but undeniable truth, was that ‘integration’ had failed in Switzerland. But has it?

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To anyone sitting at one of the little café tables perched on the quayside above Kyrenia’s pretty harbor in northern Cyprus, the Turkish mainland just across a few miles of water, it must seem fanciful that this small island should make or break Turkey’s bid to join the European Union. After all, a lot is riding on the ongoing membership talks — the welfare of Turkey’s 72 million citizens, the stability of a region of strategic importance, and the EU’s own shape and identity. But on Wednesday, mainly prompted by the Cyprus question, the European Commission (the Union’s executive) put a stark choice before Turkey: shape up ahead of an EU summit in December or face the prospect of a suspension of the ongoing membership talks. 

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Historians looking back on peace implementation in Bosnia and Herzegovina one day may well settle on October 1, 2006 as the moment when normality moved within reach of the country’s citizens. The state parliament that was elected on that date, and the Council of Ministers that will emerge from the new distribution of power, are expected within the first few months of their mandate to pass constitutional changes, sign a stabilization and association agreement (SAA) with the European Union, and assume full ownership of their actions as the Office of the High Representative is closing down. For the first time in fifteen years, Bosnia will be a “normal” country, or in any case more normal than it has been under the Dayton system: at peace, run by Bosnians rather than foreigners, on its way to EU membership, and equipped with a more rational constitutional set-up. The focus will shift from peace implementation to state-building in the context of European integration; Bosnia will leave the Dayton phase and enter the Brussels era.

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On October 1, Haris Silajdžic took a leisurely stroll down Sarajevo’s main pedestrian street. He had good reason to be pleased with himself on that sunny and warm Sunday.

In what resembled an anointment more than a competitive election, voters in the Croat-Muslim Federation were about to hand him the Muslim slot on Bosnia’s three-member presidency.

Silajdžic comprehensively defeated the incumbent from the nationalist Party for Democratic Action (SDA), of which he had once been a leading member.

Such a peaceful election was by no means preordained given the country’s disastrous economic situation, the enduring division between Croats, Serbs and Muslims — and the nastiness of a campaign dominated by fear-mongering and personal attacks.

But just as discontent was breaking into the open in Central Europe with riots in Budapest’s streets, Bosnians registered their unhappiness the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box.

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SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — A few impatient Bosnian youths could not wait until the general election of 1 October to express their feelings about the country’s institutions. Just days before the vote, they splashed the presidency building in downtown Sarajevo with paint balloons, in colors that stood for Bosnia’s three “constituent peoples.”

The heavy-handed reaction by policemen guarding the building sparked protests in the city. The public seemed to be mostly sympathetic to the pranksters as the presidency commands little respect. But will they vote accordingly in Sunday’s poll?

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SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — “I’m not anti-Serb,” Slobodan Popovic said. “I’m just trying to be a normal Serb.”

The difference is important to Mr. Popovic.He’s a senior lawmaker in the parliament of the Serb Republic, one of Bosnia’s two “entities” that were put under a very thin federal roof by the 1995 Dayton peace accords. His Social Democrats are Bosnia’s only truly multiethnic, countrywide opposition. In Sunday’s elections, they are campaigning against a Serb Republic government that nominally is from the same camp–fellow members of the Socialist International. But Prime Minister Milorad Dodik’s specialty is to play the ethnic card. “Dodik aspires to lead all Serbs, not just in Bosnia,” Mr. Popovic said, with just a bit of hyperbole. “It reminds me of the way Milosevic took power, by projecting the image of someone who can solve all problems,” he told me at a pit stop outside the Serb Republic capital Banja Luka in between campaign appearances.

In August 2001, after a brief civil war, the Macedonian government signed a peace agreement with representatives of the Albanian community in the town of Ohrid that enshrined the role of the Albanian minority – around a quarter of the population – in Macedonian politics. Five years on, just days after a new government has been sworn in, how has the Ohrid agreement held up?

Overall, Ohrid has been a remarkable success. The fighting has stopped, rebel groups have been disarmed to a tolerable level, relatively peaceful elections have been held. The parties representing Macedonia’s ethnic Albanians have become an integral part of the political process; municipal boundaries have been re-drawn to give greater autonomy to Albanian communities. NATO peacekeepers were replaced by a lightly-armed European Union force in 2003, and both have seen uneventful deployments. Finally, Macedonia was made an EU membership candidate on 17 December 2005, a status it shares with Croatia and Turkey.

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