With many wondering what will follow the power vacuum left in Libya by the ouster of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the contemporary debate over humanitarian intervention that began in Bosnia is ascendant. As New York Times columnist Roger Cohen recently wrote:
It will be two decades next year since the outbreak of the Bosnian war – and since the debate on interventionism began to rage, becoming one of the most acrimonious moral questions of our times. Now Libya, a successful Western intervention, will be placed on the scales.
Like Cohen, who covered the Bosnian war, many interventionists see in Bosnia the merits of humanitarian intervention and hope for Libya. “Yes, Nation-Building Can Work! And There’s a Model Out There for Libya!” exclaims a recent headline in The New Republic (TNR). Gerald Knaus, author of the TNR piece, has been writing a lot of op-eds and sitting for a lot of interviews lately to promote his new book, Can Intervention Work? Co-written with British MP and The Places In Between author Rory Stewart, the book challenges much of the conventional wisdom about intervention and argues that the 1995 Bosnian intervention succeeded because it ended a horrific war and fostered 15 years of peace. It also suggests that peace has held because local leaders were as pivotal as international actors in post-conflict state-building efforts.
But was Bosnia a successful, model intervention? In terms of ending a war, yes. Foreign military and diplomatic action came late, but NATO bombing, sanctions and international peace talks halted a three-year conflict that looked intractable until the final hours of the 1995 Dayton negotiations, a period the late Richard Holbrooke recounts masterfully in To End a War. But if we accept that intervention almost always includes a state building component, Bosnia is also a reminder of its limits.
For a little background, the Dayton Peace Accords created two-semi independent entities in Bosnia: The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS). While each entity has governing bodies, there is also a central government, and presidential power is shared between representatives of each ethnic group. On the international side, the Office of High Representative was created to implement Dayton’s civilian aspects.
This power sharing was supposed to help the Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs live and govern in peace, but it has so decentralized power that Bosnia is in perpetual political gridlock. As I write this, the country hasn’t had a central government for nearly a year because infighting has seized the gears of governance, and an EU envoy is in Sarajevo encouraging leaders to reach a compromise so citizens can “have an ordinary life.” Meanwhile, RS leader Milorad Dodik continues to threaten to hold a referendum on secession, the economy is abysmal and, according to Freedom House’s 2011 “Nations in Transit” report, primary schools are de facto segregated.
Far from a healthy multi-ethnic state, “Bosnia is like a person being torn apart by multiple personalities,” a World Bank official with regional expertise told me this summer. The International Crisis Group is also alarmed: “Bosnia faces its worst crisis since the war,” reads the first sentence of a May report. “State institutions are under attack by all sides; violence is probably not imminent but is a near prospect if this continues.”
While acknowledging some of these problems without (in many cases) directly confronting them, Knaus and Stewart counter the Bosnia pessimists: “… to argue that a mission that brought fifteen years of peace with no U.S. casualties falls in the same category of “failure” as Iraq is not a claim based on empirical weighing of the evidence.”
They’re correct. They’re also correct that Bosnia shows how the international community can effectively intervene to end humanitarian crises. But it’s in the other key to intervention – state-building – where Bosnia is less convincing. Let’s assume the authors are right that Bosnian leaders were pivotal in state formation, and that this helped consolidate peace. (This argument is dubious given the massive international aid Bosnia received: “On a per capita basis, the reconstruction of Bosnia … made the post-World War II rebuilding of Germany and Japan look modest,” Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2009.) That’s hardly satisfying when by most accounts those same leaders are creating one of the most dysfunctional states in Europe.
In any case, it’s on the-what-comes-next question of intervention where Bosnia is weak. And that’s what people are rightly concerned about with Libya now.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
November 22nd, 2012
5 Comments at "Bosnia: A Model Intervention?"
But was Bosnia a successful, model intervention?
Bosnia was far from successful, the coutry is wrose off now then it was in the 90′s. Bosnia is puppet for the US and Europe. America and Europe did more damge than good, the US told the Bosnian president that 10000 people needed to die id they wanted US to help.
The US caused the problem, made it worse and it should be the coutry that solves the problem.
Intervention in Bosnia brought peace and confined political disagreements within parliamentary structure. So in that sense, yes, intervention was success. But one additional step needs to be taken for that success to be complete; international community should strip Serb elements from their ability to hinder Bosnia’s integration into EU and NATO. Complex decision-making process allows 10 out 42 representatives in state Parliament to block passage of any law they deem unacceptable. That is 10 out of 42. Imagine if less than third of US legislative body could prevent every single law from being passed. Or less than third of French legislative body. The bar in Bosnia is set way too high and that is the source of all the problems.
There’s two sides to the whole “intervention” debate in Bosnia. One is the fact that the British, and to a lesser extent the French, systematically blocked any attempt by NATO to intervene in Bosnia, a fact which has now been clearly documented.
The other part of it is that even the hawks on the Bosnia issue, namely the Americans, took a rather half-witted and two-faced approach. Holbrooke is on the record as having told the Bosnians and Croatians, in the closing days of the war, that even they sought to overturn the losses of years prior, to take back Banja Luka from the Serb nationalists, NATO would begin launching assaults on the former in turn. In other words, even the Americans had every intention of creating in Bosnia an unworkable system.
The Dayton Accord institutionalized a segregated, apartheid “peace” in Bosnia that effectively rewarded the perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing with the majority of everything they had hoped to achieve. While the fighting may have ended in Bosnia, it is neither a just peace nor one with a long-term future. The fact that now both the Americans and Europeans have all but wiped their hands of actual, productive involvement in Bosnia has only emboldened the nationalists, in particular Dodik and his ilk.
Almost from the onset of the trouble in Bosnia, the international community took a stance against defending civil, secular values in that country, and instead chose to implicitly and explicitly support the forces if chauvinism and reaction. A model of intervention it wasn’t.
Splitting the country into two entities has created a stronger separation between the muslims/catholics and the orthadox. The Serbian orthadox leaders are searching to achieve independence and their tactics are with noncooperation, so that the two entities appear unworkable. Even though many people have some sort of dislike for the other side in some way due to the recent history, as is normal. I think it would be very counterproductive to give Republica Srbska independence or to leave things as they are, if we are hoping to integrate and build a progressive multi-cultural nation. things will change with new generations. Education and integration is key I think. peace
Intervention ended a war, and that’s as successful as it got. Creating a decentralized, two-headead administrative bureaucracy is where it failed. There was no ‘nation building’, and as a result Serbs don’t take part in a Bosnian nation and in fact are actively working on undermining it, this time not using weapons of war to do it.
No one that remembers the horrors of war in Bosnia wants a repeat, and that’s what’s holding the peace in place. I suspect as future generations come with no memories of the horrors and still living in an untenable political and economical situation, we’ll have another war or a revolution (now that would be interesting, wouldn’t it).
But hey, that’s a problem for some future set of politicians playing God with thousands of innocent lives, so current politicos will maintain the status quo.
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