A state of non-fighting might be the best description of the situation in former Yugoslavia. Despite elections and the snail’s pace prosecution of war criminals, the reintegrative elements of Dayton have largely remained a dead letter. The recent Bosnian local elections illustrate this. Refugees were allowed to have their votes count for their place of residence in 1991 rather than where they are now. At that time, Srebrenica’s population was largely Muslim, so unsurprisingly these internationally monitored elections gave Srebrenica a local government with a Muslim majority. Yet the newly elected councillors are not allowed near the place. So the West carefully supervises an election and then sits back without attempting to implement the result.
The West’s attitude to former Yugoslavia has changed little since the conflict formally ended. De facto ethnic partition and the distribution of power between the main nationalist parties remain the central policy, justified by the “military realities”. Yet the Dayton Accord also provides for the right of refugees to return to their homes — an intangible aspiration as Srebrenica shows. Instead, the West has encouraged — or compelled in the case of Germany — the return of refugees to so-called “ethnic majority areas”, rather than their own homes. This completes the work of the wartime ethnic cleansers and legitimises the artificial ethnic entities created by them. Thus the West continues to collude in the search for ethnic solutions at the expense of multi-ethnic societies and democratic rights.
A recent editorial from Bosnia Report, now the newsletter of the newly-formed Bosnia Institute, under the headline “Squaring the Circle”, concluded: “Everything about the Western policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina today can be seen as an attempt to square the Dayton circle. Ethnic cleansers are supposed to welcome home those they have expelled, and refugees return to areas where their tormentors still wield absolute power. War criminals are supposed to be arrested by their accomplices in crime.
“Racists, national chauvinists and profiteers are supposed to play leading roles in rebuilding multi-ethnic and democratic society, The regimes in Belgrade and Zagreb are supposed to guarantee a state they have been doing their best to destroy.
“The legitimacy of Bosnian statehood is supposed to be upheld, not by the republican institutions that made resistance to aggression possible, but by new and intentionally impotent structures, ruled by ethnic quotas, in which its staunch defenders are permanently outnumbered by its bitter enemies.”