Tag: European Union
Returning to Sarajevo
This is an interview that appeared this week in the Sarajevo weekly Dani. I arrived in Bosnia’s capital just this afternoon, and it has certainly fulfilled my expectations of being livelier and more normal than during the war.
Dani: When was the last time you visited Sarajevo? Are you looking forward to coming again next week and what are your expectations, if any?
A. I’m not entirely sure when I was last in Sarajevo, but it is about 10 years ago.
Yes, I am looking forward to coming next week. I expect to find a much livelier and more normal Sarajevo than the one I knew during the war, when I had to worry when walking to the Embassy about making sure I couldn’t be seen by snipers. On the morning of the day the Dayton agreements were signed in Paris, I was awakened in the “Holiday Inn” by a barrage of anti-aircraft fire hitting the façade just one room from where I was sleeping. I expect nothing resembling that!
It seems to me that some of the same conflicts that were once fought with snipers and anti-aircraft guns are now fought in the political arena. That is progress, but it is not the kind of progress I had hoped to see. I’d prefer to hear that Bosnians are discussing how they can cooperate to accelerate their progress towards EU membership rather than how they can protect their own ethnic group.
Dani: You are a Senior Fellow at CTR – SAIS. At the conference, you will moderate session on Regional Cooperation and Reconciliation. This ended up to be very high level panel, looking at the speakers list. You have vast experience in issues of Regional Cooperation and Reconciliation. Which one of them you consider to be the best and which are the worst, from your own experience?
A. My view is that every country needs to decide for itself what level of reconciliation and regional cooperation is appropriate to its particular circumstances. There are lots of things I would not want to ask people to be reconciled to. But at the same time it just isn’t possible to live always in the past. The countries of the Balkans need each other and will need to cooperate if they are going to prosper in the future. My job is to help people find the right balance, not to tell them what to do.
Dani: Do you think that Mladic arrest will help this process in our region and first and foremost in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
A. I don’t know—it is one of the issues I’ll be interested in discussing with Bosnians. It seems to me that the prospect of justice in this case should help at least some Bosnians to see their way to greater cooperation. And others may begin to see that those who claimed to be protecting them were in fact criminals who created problems rather than solving them.
At The Hague, Mladic clearly acknowledged the heinous nature of the crimes of which he accused—he couldn’t bear to have them read out. But he claimed all he was doing was protecting his people. What he in fact did was to deepen a conflict that put his people at great risk and created the conditions in which his army came close to defeat—it was saved only by the Dayton ceasefire. For those who are seriously interested in this history, let me recommend Ingrao and Emmert’s “Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies,” which is now available in—what shall I say—“the language.”
Dani: How do you comment on obvious differences between the US and EU in respect to Dodik and how to deal with him? Is there any way out from this situation now and have a jointly agreed and firm policy towards Dodik, and to that end, anyone else who would obstruct national building process in BiH?
A. This is a serious problem. The Americans and Europeans have been telling everyone for years that they are on the same page in the Balkans, but Lady Ashton’s agreement with Dodik was not only a surprise to the Americans, it was also unwelcome because it undermined in both style and substance the Bosnian state. I am entirely with the Americans on this—the agreement suggested that the Europeans were prepared to discuss Bosnian state institutions with Republika Srpska, whose president gained in prestige from Ashton’s going to Banja Luka and appearing with Dodik without even a flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina present. I hope a lot of this will be walked back now: the “structured dialogue” should deal with the RS court system as well as the state courts, the question of a supreme court will have to be raised, and state officials will, I hope, lead the Bosnian side, in particular because the EU will be represented by the enlargement commissioner.
This is all very surprising at a moment when the EU has been doing a good job with the Belgrade/Pristina talks. It is important to get the Americans and Europeans back on the same page. The headline on that page is this: Bosnia and Herzegovina will need to qualify for EU membership, not either of the entities.
Dani: Dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. Do you think significant progress will be made soon and what the Mladic arrest means for both Belgrade and for Pristina?
A. The Mladic arrest helps Belgrade to argue with Brussels that it should be given candidacy status for the EU, though of course there is still one indictee outstanding. I don’t think it affects Pristina much, though it is certainly an indication that this Serbian government is capable of acting responsibly and doing the right thing. I hope it can also see its way to doing the right thing on Kosovo.
President Tadic’s failure to go to the regional meeting in Warsaw last month was unfortunate and I imagine will have annoyed the Americans a good deal. It is time for Serbia to accept that the authorities in Kosovo are democratically elected and legitimate, regardless of status. The Serbian chief negotiator did the right thing visiting Pristina, and the Kosovars did the wrong thing to protest his visit violently.
Dani: If you were government official and you have religious leaders interfering with the Government policy, what would you do? We know that one of the pillars of healthy democracy is separation of church and state businesses.
A. Since you’ve asked me what I would do, here’s my answer: I’d tell them where to go.
But there are lots of countries in which religious leaders have a good deal of influence—I spent 10 years in Italy, where the Vatican has at times been decisive in Italian politics. But I would add this: religious leaders put themselves in peril, and ultimately reduce their own influence, when they even appear to favor one politician over another. The Vatican has learned to stay out of most Italian government business, a habit that increases its prestige.
Dani: Many prominent US and EU people are coming to the upcoming conference. Strong follow-up is planned. Civil society organizations in the whole region are excited about this. Sarajevo did not have a major conference of this magnitude. Do you think it came at an late hour already? Or you think there is still time to make BiH a functional and truly European country?
A. No it is not too late for BiH to become a functional and truly European country. I would even say it made a great deal of progress in the first decade after the war, and that progress was not been completely reversed in the subsequent five years of political stalemate. People forget too readily how truly terrible the war and immediate post-war period were.
That said, there are real challenges now. People don’t feel sure they will be treated fairly, regardless of ethnicity, and throughout the whole country. That is a serious problem, one that the European Court of Human Rights decision requires be fixed not only in the constitution but in fact as well. Non-discrimination is fundamental to the rule of law. The day all Bosnians feel they are treated equally will be a day on which a lot of problems disappear.
Bosnia also needs a new bargain that will empower the state government to do the business it needs to, especially negotiating membership in the EU and all that entails, while leaving a lot of other things to the entities and the municipalities. I hope Bosnian citizens of all groups will demand functional, accountable governance at all levels. It is overdue.
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In weakness strength
On reflection a day after the fact, I’d like to reiterate what Kurt Bassuener has already eloquently asserted: the arrest of Ratko Mladic was certainly a triumph for the Dutch. Both stubborn and racked by guilt, as Jerry Gallucci suggests, they deserve credit for sticking with their insistence on Mladic’s arrest.
But here is the deeper point: the EU’s famous weakness–its need for unanimity–becomes a strength when it comes to imposing conditionality. For Serbia to achieve candidacy status for membership, all 27 member states have to agree. The Netherlands’ hard line on arrest of Mladic as a precondition for its agreement to candidacy is what made the arrest happen.
I have little doubt that several years down the pike, when Belgrade has fulfilled all the technical requirements for EU membership, that the Dutch and others will insist that it also needs to resolve the issue of Kosovo (good neighborly relations being in any event an EU requirement). Many in Belgrade already know this; the sooner the EU makes it explicit, the quicker Belgrade will make the necessary moves.
Of course this capacity of member states to block EU decisions can also work against what I might consider a good idea. Witness EU relations with Kosovo, which are stymied by the five EU members that don’t recognize the government in Pristina as sovereign and independent, even though most of them seem to acknowledge its legitimacy and authority. But look what happened when those five joined the other 22 in insisting that Belgrade and Pristina begin a dialogue: it happened quickly and seems to be proceeding well.
The EU’s leverage is a powerful force, one that will need to be brought to bear both in Kosovo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina if the remaining Balkans problems are to be resolved peacefully. The disturbing thing is that the EU seems so infrequently capable of wielding power effectively.
Lady Catherine Ashton’s sudden visit to Banja Luka earlier this month to prevent a referendum in Bosnia on the authority of the state justice system got President Milorad Dodik to postpone his plans, but it also strengthened his position as an EU “interlocutor” and gave him the opportunity to sideline the Sarajevo government and institutions. I am not convinced the EU came out ahead with this maneuver, which undermined the international community’s High Representative and annoyed Washington. It is still not yet clear to me whether Dodik will cancel the referendum altogether, or hold it over the heads of his antagonists. But I can guess what he would prefer to do.
I can only hope that the EU will use its leverage well. Projecting power is not its strong suit, but its need for unanimity on important issues provides a strange kind of strength when it comes to imposing its will on those who aspire to membership.
With respect to Serbia, Kurt draws the right conculsions:
Serbia has proven it responds to rational incentives – and there is no reason to believe that this is not a reality across the party spectrum. So instead of bending over backwards to ensure Tadic and the Democratic Party’s re-election, the EU and wider West should instead insist that standards be met whoever is in power, and cut Serbia no more slack.
The same should go for other Balkans leaders.
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Gaddafi won’t stop or go
While Bashar al Assad won’t stop the repression in Syria and Ali Abdullah Saleh won’t leave office in Yemen, Muammar Gaddafi is willing to do neither in Libya.
NATO is pounding Gaddafi’s command centers more seriously than in the past, and the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council is gaining diplomatic prominence. Yesterday, the European Union’s “foreign minister” Catherine Ashton opened an EU office in Benghazi. I think some Americans are already there, though they have not made a big deal about it. President Obama said in his Middle East speech on Thursday that Gaddafi would “inevitably” leave power–when Americans use the i-word, they usually mean that they are trying hard to make it happen.
The Libyan oil minister has defected, Gaddafi’s wife and daughter are reportedly in Tunisia and the International Criminal Court prosecutor has requested a warrant for his arrest. As the prosecutor put it:
The evidence shows that Muammar Gaddafi, personally, ordered attacks on unarmed Libyan civilians. His forces attacked Libyan civilians in their homes and in the public space, repressed demonstrations with live ammunition, used heavy artillery against participants in funeral processions, and placed snipers to kill those leaving mosques after the prayers.
Also included in the request to the judges for arrest warrants are Gaddafi’s son Saif al Islam and brother-in-law, who heads the military intelligence service.
This real-time use of judicial proceedings is controversial, as it appears to close off options for Gaddafi and give him an incentive to continue his resistance. My own view is different. He has had lots of opportunity to stop the repression and leave Libya. The arrest warrants, if they are issued, will be a clear and compelling warning to his subordinates that they face the same fate if they don’t act soon to stop Gaddafi’s criminal behavior.
It is impossible to predict how much longer the military campaign against Gaddafi will have to continue before he leaves the scene, one way or the other. Smarter folks are saying there is a stalemate, but my sense is that Gaddafi’s military capabilities are gradually eroding and that at some point the Libyan people will discover that his fortress is largely empty. I wouldn’t want to be identifiable as being on his side when that day comes.
PS: On Saif and his relationship with Muammar, see yesterday’s New York magazine piece, “The Good Bad Son.”
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Saleh won’t go
President Saleh of Yemen today again refused to sign the Gulf Cooperation Council agreement that would have him step down in 30 days. This time he is insisting on a public signing, while flooding the streets with loyalists who have trapped the American and EU ambassadors along with others in the United Arab Emirates embassy in Sanaa.
It is anyone’s guess how today will wind up. Brian Whitaker, who certainly knows Yemen better than I do, sees little possibility of the president wriggling out, mainly because the Saudis won’t let him. But I think it is a pretty good bet that we are more than 30 days from Saleh stepping down.
If he is smart–and generally he is at least wily–his security forces are likely to “rescue” the American and other ambassadors, after letting them stew a while. Even if he ends up having to sign the agreement, implementation is going to be difficult. He has slipped the leash before and will certainly try to do it again. Only when he sees the real possibility of needing the immunity provided for in the agreement will he go.
In the meanwhile, there are tensions between the opposition political parties and the protesters who have sustained the effort to oust Saleh. They have never really been united. It is the opposition parties, not the protesters, who have signed the agreement. They will need to retain the capability of putting large numbers of people in the streets if they want the transition to be a real one and not just a reshuffling of the Yemeni elite.
That is certainly what the Saudis have in mind, though that may give them more credit for a coherent view than Ginny Hill of Chatham House did in an appearance last week at the Middle East Institute. The aging and health problems of the Crown Prince seem to have cut off payments to the Yemeni tribes and reduced Saudi Arabia’s ability to impose a solution in Sanaa. Maybe Saleh’s latest maneuvers will awaken them to the need for decisive action by the GCC. Failing that, Saleh could continue to not go for a while yet.
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The Yugo-second is over
A friend in the Balkans, whose perspective is not far from mine, writes:
Richard Holbrooke often referred to the “Yugo-second,” the amount of time that passed between when a Balkan politician made a promise and broke it.
The EU’s High Representative for foreign policy Lady Katherine Ashton and her Balkan Director Miroslav Lajcak, traveled to Banja Luka last Friday in a poorly planned, poorly conceived and poorly executed trip, where they met with Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik. The official purpose of the trip was to dissuade Dodik from holding a referendum and to have him revoke the 24 problematic RS National Assembly (RSNA) conclusions. Lajcak’s hidden agenda was to demonstrate the EU’s ability to take over from the OHR and prove that Bonn Powers are not necessary.
The EU came away with a “triumph” that represents a contemporary “peace in our time.” Rather than have Dodik travel to Sarajevo and meet Lady Ashton at the EU House, Lady Ashton was forced to travel to Banja Luka and have a photo op in front of a large map of RS that shows Brcko belonging to RS. The meeting also took place with only RS flags present — no Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) state flags. Dodik was accompanied by a large entourage of more than ten people. And after the meeting Dodik emerged triumphant in the RS media, touting victory.
A longtime pro-Serb activist in Washington, Obrad Kesic, hit the nail on the head when he described the outcome of the Ashton/Lajcak visit. “The agreement reached in Banja Luka presents a great achievement for the RS. When I look at that agreement, I see three already recognizable results. Firstly, the High Representative has been completely excluded, not only from the process of negotiation, but from all future actions… Secondly, this is the first time the RS has been given legitimacy by the EU when it comes to one of the more important state issues… Thirdly, this presents affirmation of political and legal status of the RS, not only as a negotiator, but as a partner.”
The EU came away thinking that Dodik had committed to annulling the referendum conclusion by the end of this week. The EU also thought that Dodik would annul the RSNA conclusions shortly thereafter. In exchange the EU had committed to send enlargement commissioner Fuhle to Banja Luka to negotiate with RS over the state courts and prosecutors.
Within only hours of the Dodik/Ashton meeting, RSNA president Radojcic announced that he wouldn’t call a special RSNA session before the end of the month. Dodik hinted then that the RS would only delay the referendum and would wait until Fuhle arrived to see what those discussion produced. Only then would they consider annulling the referendum.
Today Dodik came out and made it official: no annulment of the referendum until they see what gifts Fuhle has to offer.
My own guess is that the RS objective is to begin a conversation with Fuhle that will enable RS to claim that it is applying the acquis communitaire on its own and doesn’t need the dysfunctional Sarajevo government to qualify for EU membership.
What should Brussels do? It should agree to schedule the Fuhle meeting only in Sarajevo with the BiH authorities present and only after annulment of the 24 conclusions and the referendum decision. Odds of that are very long.
PS: Lady Ashton and Hillary Clinton discussed Bosnia today in Washington. According to the State Department,
Mrs. Clinton “…raised concerns regarding the political deadlock in Bosnia and Herzegovina and any efforts that could undermine the Dayton Peace Accords and the stability of the country. We fully support the authority of the Office of the High Representative Inzko in Bosnia and Herzegovina and want to see the people there realize their hopes for necessary reforms, effective government, and a European future.”
Note the emphasis the Americans put on the the High Representative.
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Here are some bright ideas
This is OPI (other people’s ideas) day:
- Reinventing the Palestinian struggle as a nonviolent protest movement has been a good idea for a long time, but the Arab Spring may make it viable as a mass movement. It would put the Israelis in a tough spot: a harsh response would make them look like worse than your garden variety Arab autocrat. Real democracies don’t shoot at nonviolent protesters.
- Rethinking the war in Afghanistan in light of Osama bin Laden’s death was the subject of an excellent piece this morning: no evidence yet of changed attitudes among the insurgents (Biddle), but the personal connection with bin Laden was an important factor in the alliance with the Taliban. And Pakistan might stiffen its attitude toward al Qaeda presence (Khalilzad), if only to prevent further American raids.
- North Africa is Europe’s backyard. The Bertelsmann Foundation has asked eight North Africans for their views of how Europe can help the political transitions there. The resulting report makes interesting reading and reminds us that we need to follow the lead of host country nationals in thinking about how to make the Arab spring last into a more democratic summer and fall.
Still, there is a dearth of good ideas on several subjects: how to manage the U.S./Pakistan relationship in a more productive way (but see Dennis Kux’s blog post yesterday), how to hasten Gaddafi’s exit from Libya and what to do to stop the killing of demonstrators in Yemen and Syria, as well as their mistreatment in Bahrain. Anyone want to offer thoughts?
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