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Lessons from Bosnia

The lessons learnt in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in other parts of the region demonstrate what troubles arise when bad moves are made on the basis of a bad definition of the problem, or when no moves at all are made. On the basis of a pragmatically inconsistent, actually uncritical, support to Tito's Yugoslavia, the Greater Serbian aggression against Croatia and Slovenia was defined as civil war. Until the publication of the findings of the Arbitration Commission of the International Conference on Yugoslavia (the so-called Badinter Commission, named after its chairman, French lawyer Robert Badinter), Greater Serbian aggression was declared a conflict between secessionist republics and the central government in Belgrade. It was only after the Commission's findings that the former Yugoslavia had disintegrated and that there had been no secessionism that the definition of the conflict was slowly changed. This was an opportunity to characterise more precisely Greater Serbian aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, but again preference was given to terms like inter-ethnic conflict and civil war. Naturally enough, the measures taken on the basis of such definitions were all wrong. Sometimes no measures at all were undertaken, and the world calmly looked on when Sarajevo bled, when massacres were carried out, especially of Moslems, when concentration camps were set up, and so forth. As a result, Dayton may go down in history as an apt metaphor of the impossibility to attain mutually contradictory political goals. It is hard to say whether things might have been different if a precise definition had been given in time. Had it been established that the wellspring of all the subsequent events was Greater Serbian aggression, it would have been logical to neutralise Milosević's Serbia, even by force of arms, or at least to express a strong and sufficiently convincing threat. This may have given power to a different political group, which could have made Serbia a stronger factor of regional stability than it is now. No opportunity was granted for a Serbian Adenauer to emerge. This may have been unrealistic to expect at the time, but it is even less realistic now, when Kosovo crisis erupted again. And therefore, Serbia still presents the main potential source of conflict in the region (see Kosovo case) and the main reason for the failure to implement the Dayton Agreement, the only difference being that now, in addition to external elements, internal factors exert a stronger influence than before.

war; NATO; stability; Dayton

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