After Pristina, Sarajevo

After Pristina, where I’ll visit next week, I am headed for Sarajevo.  I confess I’ve lost track of how long it has been since I was last there, but it may be 10 years.  My friends at European Stability Initiative would tell me that is why I am so out of touch and worry about things like the possibility of violence resuming, which they think highly unlikely (but Paddy Ashdown disagrees).

Important as that question is, I agree with my ESI colleagues that policy should not be set on the basis of threats to peace and stability but rather on the basis of what is good for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  So the questions on my mind as I begin to prepare for the trip are these:

• Are Bosnians serious about getting ready for NATO and the EU?
• What is holding them back?  Are there serious alternatives?
• How can the obvious obstacles in the Dayton constitution (discrimination, lack of central government authority to negotiate) be overcome?
• What other obstacles are there?  How can they be overcome?
• How can governance in Bosnia be made more functional?
• What can be done to reduce corruption and improve the rapport between citizens and their various governments?
• How serious is the obvious financial difficulty of Republika Srpska?  The Federation?
• What is generating the Croat push for a separate entity?
• Why has civil society in Bosnia not developed as fully as many of us would like?
• What should be done about the High Representative?  Can the EU handle Bosnia, and does it have serious plans to do so?
• How can international community performance in Bosnia be improved?

As some readers will know, my familitarity with Bosnia stems mainly from my time as U.S. Special Envoy for the Bosnian Federation during and immediately after the war (October 1994-June 1996), followed by more than a year directing the State Department intelligence office that followed Dayton implementation and a dozen years at the U.S. Institute of Peace following the Balkans.  I confess to a good deal of Bosnia fatigue–it sometimes seems to me talking with Bosnians here in Washington that they haven’t noticed the world has changed a great deal since they held the spotlight in the mid-1990s.

That said, nothing that has happened in these last 15 years would make the world happy to see Bosnia and Herzegovina break up into Croat, Serb and Muslim ministates.  The question Bosnia faces is therefore the one my Sudanese friends failed to answer:  what will make unity attractive?  The Dayton state is proving inadequate to that task.  So what state would do the job better, and how can the Bosnians come to terms and agree to create it?

This was taken on my last trip into Sarajevo during the war: