What is happening in Bosnia?

Bosnian Serbs recently celebrated an outlawed holiday with a provocative parade showcasing domestic-made armored vehicles ominously named ‘Despot,’ low-flying police helicopters and long-barrel totting special forces marching in lockstep to the tunes of nationalistic chants.

The parade took place in Banja Luka, the de-facto capital of the Serb-majority part of the country known as Republic of Srpska. The entity is a highly-autonomous part comprising 49% of Bosnia and Herzegovina which was established on territory Bosnian Serb rebels captured during the 1992-95 war with their genocide of Bosniak Muslims. Their ultimate goal was to break away from Bosnia and Herzegovina and unify with neighboring Serbia, a theme which surfaces among both Bosnian Serb and Serbian officials, journalists and intellectuals. The banned holiday marks the establishment of Republic of Srpska and the subsequent start of the war. 

Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb ultranationalist and Islamophobic leader who currently serves as a member of the country’s tripartite Presidency, spoke on the occasion to disparage the sanctions Washington recently enforced against him, boasting “This gathering is the best response to those who deny us our rights… who keep imposing sanctions on us.’’

The celebration of the divisive holiday attended by top officials of neighboring Serbia, including Prime Minister Ana Brnabić and parliament speaker Ivica Dačić, as well as Russian and Chinese diplomats in Bosnia and several officials of France’s far-right National Rally party.

Dodik has been in power since 2006, itself a demonstration of his popularity among average Bosnian Serbs. The larger objective of the current crisis is to achieve the decades’ old goal of breaking up Bosnia and Herzegovina and unifying the Republic of Srpska with neighboring Serbia.

Today however Bosnia and Herzegovina is in the midst of the greatest security crisis it has witnessed since the end of the war. Over the past weeks, Dodik has intensified his secessionist and war-mongering rhetoric, pledging to form an exclusively Serb army, judiciary and tax system.

As paradoxical as it may sound to the outside observer, Dodik, a member of the country’s joint Presidency, regularly insults the largest ethnic group in the same country  he represents, Bosniak Muslims, with deeply Islamophobic insults. He has described Bosniaks as “second-rate people” and “treacherous converts” who sold their “original (Orthodox Christian) faith for dinner.” He has also referred to Bosniak Muslims as a ‘servile nation.’  

To make matters worse, the leading Bosnian Croat political party – the Croatian Democratic Union – have been collaborating with Bosnian Serb hardliners from the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats and cozying up to Russia. Bosnian Croats are seeking now what they failed to achieve during the 1992–1995 war: an independent or at least highly autonomous statelet for themselves, which would eventually join Croatia. In everyday vocabulary, they refer to it as ‘the third entity.’ An independent Serb and Croat statelet would confine the country’s majority – its Bosniak Muslims – to a landlocked Bantustan with international borders controlled by unfriendly forces. Clearly, they oppose such a move, instead favoring a unified and multiethnic country.

Despite their incompetence, endemic corruption and willingness to trade crucial political posts for petty personal gains, one of the rare principles that Bosniak Muslim politicians have stuck to since the 1990s was their desire to preserve a unified state and oppose any territorial fragmentation along ethnic lines. At the same time, Bosnian Serbs and Croats opt to entrench the current apartheid-like system whereby the two smaller ethnic groups disproportionately outnumber the country’s majority Bosniak population in key governmental, administrative and judicial positions, in addition to having the veto power to block any decision deemed unjust to their national interests.

While Dodik’s secessionist proclivities show no sign of abating, Bosniak Muslim intellectuals and political leaders do not seem to have concrete ideas on how to deal with such a destructive force. They place their faith in the international community, hoping it will do its utmost to prevent another war from erupting. They also seem to place immense trust in the legal system, arguing that secessions are illegal and contrary to the existing international legal order.

Then, there are the regional and international factors.

Serbia is ruled by Aleksandar Vučić, an autocratic nationalist who presents himself as the poster boy for EU integration. He has been valued by EU leaders, including former German Chancellor Angel Merkel, as a pillar of stability, a reputation he has skillfully crafted over the years by artificially stoking tensions in the region and then resolving them. Vučić and Dodik meet very frequently and Dodik enjoys the former’s backing. Croatia, on the other hand, is ruled by a right-wing nationalist, Zoran Milanović, who has referred to Bosnia and Herzegovina as ‘not a state, but a big shit’ and has even questioned the judicially established truth regarding the Srebrenica genocide.

Dodik’s other patron is Russia, which supports his moves, if not directly administering them. Moscow has amped up its diplomatic interference, reaching out to its Slavic and Orthodox brethren to exploit and exacerbate existing political fault lines. Since Moscow has developed a close working relationship not only with Croatia, but also with Bosnian Croat leader Dragan Čović and will gladly support Bosnian Croat nationalists in their desire for greater autonomy. It will also support Bosnian Croats in clinging onto ethnic quotas for government positions, as this gives them outsized power relative to their numbers, as well as the leverage to block state functioning if their demands are not met. As for Putin, he is using Bosnia and Herzegovina as a bargaining chip to show the West that he can destabilize the Western Balkans region at will. As far as he is concerned, a dysfunctional Bosnia and Herzegovina or a low-intensity conflict is far better than yet another EU or NATO member state in the Balkans. Russia’s strategic objective in the Western Balkans is not only to block aspiring nations from joining NATO, but to stymie the development of pro-Western liberal democracies.

The European Union seems disorientated and rudderless. They found it far easier to foster peace and security by appeasing ethnonationalist kleptocrats. In doing so, the EU essentially treated Bosnians as tribes and undermined its own efforts in talking to elected officials and thereby failed to shore up state institutions. Among the officials of individual member states, their messaging to the upper echelons of Brussels differs, seemingly not taking the crisis with the seriousness it deserves.  

The United States, for its part, seems to be making ad hoc decisions without having a clear plan of what it wants to achieve. They have been sending mid-level diplomats who have only a limited understanding of the granular dynamics at play on the ground. These same diplomats, instead of tackling the core issues, seem to be adhering to a policy of appeasement in order to achieve short-term solutions.

The situation has now officially crossed the Rubicon and reached the point of no return. It is no longer a political crisis, but a rapidly deteriorating security crisis. If Bosnian Serbs declare independence, an unrecognized pro-Russian Abkhazia-like statelet will be formed on the borders of two NATO member states, Croatia and Montenegro. At that point, it would be no longer solely Bosnia’s problem, but a major issue for the NATO alliance as a whole.