Serb secessionist authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina have plunged the country into its most significant political crisis since the conclusion of the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.
Following the criminal conviction of separatist strongman Milorad Dodik by a State court in February on charges related to his systematic defiance of the international overseer of the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement, Dodik and his Banja Luka-based government in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska entity (RS) – one of the two administrative units created by the Dayton Agreement – have unilaterally sought to block the operation of Bosnian State institutions and officials in the entity. That includes the State police. This has resulted in one standoff between State and entity police to date. The Banja Luka authorities also have declared German Foreign Office official Anna Luhrmann persona non grata after she met with civil society leaders in the entity during a visit to Bosnia.
Dodik and his ruling clique claim to be restoring the country to the original, minimalist factory settings of the 1995 Dayton Agreement. Leaders in Sarajevo, as well as their counterparts in the United States, the U.K., and the European Union, however, believe Dodik has illegally pulled out of State laws and institutions that his own party helped enact in the first place. That is also the view of the Bosnian State prosecutor and the country’s top criminal court, which now also have charged Dodik additionally with undermining the constitutional order and are seeking his arrest.
All this is occurring as Bosnia and its international partners gear up to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Accords later this year. The occasion was meant to cement the pact as, arguably, the most successful peace agreement in modern political history.
Has Dayton failed – and Bosnia with it? In short, no, but the present situation is untenable.
At the same time, the current crisis, although replete with opportunities for significant and rapid escalation, also provides a generational opportunity for Bosnia, its citizens, and the international community to complete – rather than scuttle – the promise of the original peace agreement.
To be clear, the current crisis does expose some of the obvious shortcomings of the Dayton Agreement, which have spurred a succession of rulings against the Bosnian state by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Namely, the ethnic power-sharing modalities at the center of the Dayton Agreement have promoted administrative gridlock and political extremism, while also simultaneously denying basic rights to representation to as much as a quarter of the Bosnian population. Put more simply, virtually all representative offices in Bosnia are reserved for members of the country’s three “constituent peoples” – Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats – and these are further conditioned on these peoples residing in ethnically homogenous areas. Thus, for instance, Serbs in the Federation entity do not have a right to elect the Serb member of the State presidency, while Bosniaks in RS entity cannot vote for the Bosniak or Croat members of the same executive.
In that sense, Dodik, like his allies in the Croat nationalist HDZ political party, are the greatest beneficiaries of the constitutional regime embedded within the Dayton Agreement. Three decades after the end of the Bosnian War, they have been able to continue operating not as democratic politicians but as tribal warlords.
Key Steps Going Forward
But change is possible, conceptually and politically. And it is why this crisis concocted by Dodik must be seized upon to secure his undoing — and Bosnia’s progress.
Here’s how: first, the Serb opposition parties in the RS have resoundingly rejected Dodik’s call to arms. Including the SDS, the main Serb opposition bloc and the party founded by the architect of the Bosnian Genocide, Radovan Karadzic. The opposition parties know that to upturn the Dayton Agreement, as Dodik is attempting to do, is to invite renewed conflict — a renewed conflict that would almost certainly result in the dissolution of the RS entity. After all, if Karadzic and his paymaster Slobodan Milosevic were unable to destroy Bosnia in the 1990s, when they enjoyed an overwhelming preponderance of force, then Dodik and his boss Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia, will certainly not be able to do so. As NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte noted in Sarajevo recently, this is not 1992.
While there is still a host of disagreements between the RS opposition parties and political leaders in Sarajevo, there is agreement on one key point: Dodik must go. And it is this point – Dodik’s removal from political power, through his arrest and full prosecution under Bosnian law – that is the foundation for resetting the country’s political horizons.
If Dodik is removed, especially through the actions of Bosnian law enforcement (although presumably with the assistance of the EU’s EUFOR peacekeepers), it will put the lie to the cynical characterization of Bosnia as a failed State.
Ensuring Sustainability of Progress
The next step is ensuring that a Dodik-style threat can never ever emerge in Bosnia again. That requires constitutional reform. It is a significant undertaking, but it already is a legal requirement for the Bosnian authorities, both per the EU’s accession requirements and under the binding decisions of the ECtHR.
Moreover, as I laid out recently in a report for the New Lines Institute entitled Dayton Plus, the foundations for an actionable and politically palatable constitutional reform package, acceptable to all the country’s major players, already exists. This would involve rebooting the U.S.-brokered 2006 April Package of constitutional reforms and updating them in line with the decisions of the Strasbourg-based court since 2009. The report lays out one simple model for doing so.
The key would be to harness the political energy unleashed by Dodik’s fall to accelerate Bosnia’s EU and NATO accession processes. Bosnian leaders are signaling they have the appetite to seize this moment. The Sarajevo-based governing parties and the Banja Luka-based opposition in the RS entity already appear to have a coalition agreement in principle. Indeed, the two blocs met together with the UK’s Foreign Minister during his recent stay in Sarajevo and reiterated the same. This reset of relations between Sarajevo and Banja Luka is being obstructed by Dodik’s allies in the Croat nationalist HDZ BiH. But even the HDZ BiH could be made to move with sufficient political and diplomatic pressure, in particular on their patrons in Zagreb. The Dayton Plus report also offers tangible policy options for realizing meaningful structural reforms in BiH, while keeping all the major political players on-side.
All of it, however, depends on the political exit of one man: Milorad Dodik. It is critical that the United States, the U.K., and the EU provide State authorities in Sarajevo with the political and material support needed to ensure that Dodik is no longer a factor in the country’s governance. That simply requires an interagency initiative by Bosnian police and security services, aided at the margins by EUFOR, to secure his arrest and his full prosecution under the law.
Yes, arresting Dodik risks a clash between State police and Dodik’s guards. But EUFOR’s involvement can greatly reduce the odds of any armed clash because even his most hardened loyalists know that firing on EU troops is madness. And in any case, a State that no longer enjoys a monopoly of violence over the entirety of its territory, which tolerates armed insurrections within its own borders – which is, in effect, what Dodik has turned the RS entity security services into through his actions – is no longer a functional State. That is far more dangerous for BiH and the West than the risk of an armed exchange during his capture.
At its extremes, the effort to apprehend Dodik requires officials in Washington and key European capitals communicating to potential spoilers in Belgrade, Budapest, and Zagreb that their interference in Bosnia’s affairs will not be tolerated. (This is an area in which Russia – despite backing Dodik – has limited ability to actually contest Western primacy.) Such a reprimand, of course, is already implicit in U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s appeal for “partners in the region to join us in pushing back against [Dodik’s] dangerous and destabilizing behavior.” For the moment, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic have remained steadfast in their support for Dodik. But since Germany and Austria became the first EU States to impose sanctions against Dodik and his regime, the Croatians and Hungarians are increasingly isolated, even in the labyrinthine world of Brussels’ foreign policy making.
For all the fractures in the transatlantic relationship at present, neither the United States nor the U.K, nor the EU wants to see a resumption of conflict in the Balkans. In fact, all three have a vested strategic interest in checking the machinations of regional paper tigers like Serbia’s Vucic or Croatia’s Plenkovic. And a Bosnia finally on the path to stability and integration is in the interests not only of Bosnians most of all, but of the broader European and transatlantic neighborhood. The ouster of one extremist may put such a future within grasp.
