I will try to address each of the members' questions in turn. On Deputy Treacy's query regarding the unified military, we probably are beyond the point where the military qua military is a potential conflict factor in the immediate term. It is one of the few visible successes of the state building project that is reasonably durable. Units are no longer composed on an ethnic basis as the military was unified on a functional basis. However, to allow the Republika Srpska and federation military forces to preserve some element of esprit de corps and self-respect, the unified military adopted what they call a regimental system. Consequently, one can have a regimental flash that states one previously was a member of the Bosnian Serb or federation armies or the Croatian force, the HVO. Although these have no operational character, the problem is that Bosnia is a small country and everyone knows who everyone else is. Theoretically, were enough stress placed on the system, the Bosnian military could disintegrate, but it would take quite a bit of stress for this to happen.
What is much more dangerous in the immediate term and were there to be a conflict, the potential conflict actors would be the police and the interior ministry forces, which in Republika Srpska are handled at the entity level. In the federation they operate at the canton level. The federation has one more level of Government than the Republika Srpska. If one is a federation citizen, one has one's municipality, canton, entity and the state. In the Republika Srpska, one has one's municipality, the entity and the state and policing is handled at entity level. Moreover, there are many private security companies employing people who guard buildings and so forth. While it is not necessarily the infamous American private security model as seen in Iraq and pertains more to guard services, essentially such people are paramilitaries in waiting. In addition, one has hunting clubs and veterans' organisations. Consequently, there is no shortage of small arms in Bosnia. While attempts were made to disarm people, everyone has what I call their backyard insurance policy, that they can dig up, scrape the cosmolene from and either protect themselves or do something very bad. These are the immediate conflict factors.
It is much more likely that something might happen not by design but because tensions are high. For example, someone might throw a grenade through someone's window in a returnee community. Some people come back in the summertime from Sweden, Ireland and Germany. Although they live here now and already are citizens of the European Union, they go home in the summer and occasionally get into fisticuffs with people in the communities from which they were originally expelled. These are all potential flashpoints that under normal circumstances might not be a real security threat. At present however, the situation has become much more polarised than was the case when I moved to Bosnia three and a half years ago. I have worked on Bosnia for 11 years and have lived there for almost four years and the present environment is infinitely different from when Ashdown left.
Part of the reason is that the international community took its hands off the wheel. It thought it was done. It was sort of the way I used to treat my maths homework, three problems from the end. That is how the international community has approached this issue. It thought it is no longer a problem. One will find people in Brussels who will admit to one's face that they did not deal with Bosnia because they were worried about Kosovo and Serbia and that they could come back to Bosnia once the latter countries have been dealt with. While this has a certain bureaucratic logic, it is rather myopic. Those are the potential conflict players.
Much of what one hears may simply be grumbling to scare the international community into backing up the Bosniak leadership. However, we have gravitated towards a point at which the Republika Srpska can stop anything from working at state level and has made clear its intention, at the very least, to claw back many of the competences and powers that have gravitated up to state level. Consequently, one hears comments from certain high level Bosniak political leaders. My colleague who wrote this segment of the report interviewed the people in question. They stated that there are only 70,000 Serbs between them and the Drina. Mobilising for war would be difficult unless something horrific occurred, but quickly creating something that could spin out of control is more believable. Irrespective of whether such statements are bluster, they represent real frustration.
As the international community, the main component of which on the ground in Bosnia is the EU, has reduced its engagement and the credibility of that engagement, everyone believes that he or she will not be stopped in following unfinished agendas. Republika Srpska is of the opinion that it could pursue independence quietly or allow the EU to restore its powers because no one will stop it. If the sense is that no one will stop such from occurring on the Bosniak side, people will hedge their bets.
The advantages that made the Bosnian Serbs formidable during the war are gone. Since they have no heavy weapons, it would be light infantry and small unit combat. Bosniaks always had a plurality of the population and a manpower advantage. If no one intervened, it is likely that the Serbs would end up on the short end as opposed to what would have been the case between 1992 and 1995.
Stopping the situation from accelerating would be easy. As usual, it is a question of political will. The EU should make it clear that it will not accept secession and will physically prevent Republika Srpska's western and eastern elements, which are joined by a narrow corridor, from connecting. Brcko, the corridor, was not decided on in the Dayton Agreement and was left to arbitration because it made Republika Srpska viable as a potential independent entity. Remove it from the equation and Republika Srpska cannot secede. It is an unresolved issue in Republika Srpska's constitutional status within Bosnia. Taking it off the table and having visible and operationally credible troops on the ground would eliminate the fear factor. The problem would not be solved, but it would become solvable. It is a prerequisite for dealing with the fundamental constitutional problem. In the immediate term, we must arrest the situation from accelerating because it is sliding in that direction, although it is impossible to predict when we will go over the edge.
Regarding Senator Quinn's question, the greatest leverage that the EU can apply is the door marked "Enter". Everything it wants must be done before anyone can enter, which relates to the complaints about Romania and Bulgaria. To be blunt and cynical, the enlargement model worked in Romania and Bulgaria because a political and social consensus could be reached to at least pretend to meet the EU's conditions. Bosnia does not even have that consensus. This is how far we are on the wrong side.
It is not that a social consensus could not be reached from the ground up. While this is a problem, there is also a transmission mechanism problem. An empowered political class feels unaccountable to its citizens because it is not required. All that one must do in an electoral cycle is scare the hell out of constituents and tell them that one will protect them from someone else. It does not matter if people know someone is a thief. Bosnians cannot be shocked by corruption. They assume people enter politics as a for profit enterprise. If someone is stealing, Bosnians believe that all politicians are like that irrespective of how astronomical the amount stolen.
Citizens feel disempowered. The word "apathy" is wrong because it means that someone does not care. Politics is the only item of discussion over numerous cigarettes at cafés. However, there is a sense that people cannot do anything about it. Members of the empowered political elite know, rather than love, each other. Bosnia is approximately the size of Ireland and many among the elite served together in the Communist Youth League and drink together. While there are some hatreds, they have a common interest in not being accountable. They have competing agendas. The Dayton constitution is a second best for everyone because they at least got to keep what they stole without needing to answer to the population.
Allowing a political centre to develop is what Bosnia needs if it is to survive as a state, let alone become an EU member state. The EU is in a position to demand that development. There are many theological, dogmatic arguments against the EU doing so. For example, it would be telling member states how to organise their internal structures, but this is a specious argument. Once someone is in the door, no one will demand constitutional changes. Bosnia is a clearcut case. Changes are necessary for state functionality and the chance to become a productive contributor to the EU as a member state.
Making the price of entry clear could receive significant political support from the bottom, after which the politicians would be squeezed because they would need to react. There is a price to pay when people know who is not doing his or her homework. Unfortunately, the EU's message to Bosnian politicians is that its conditionality is infinitely flexible because it must be seen to be progressing. It does not know what to do other than to follow the standard boiler plate enlargement model developed for a different sort of society, namely, Hungary and Poland where political centres could be formed.
Making the price clear is obvious, but how to make it clear is the fun part. Unfortunately, the way in which the international community selects people to operate on the ground has been on the supply side of the equation rather than the demand side — who can be got for the job, not what type of person is needed. This is how the current high representative was found. He is nice and smart, but he is a diplomat with a diplomat's mentality. He reports up the chain of command as a reporting officer, not as a political actor, which would be necessary to get over the hump. His narcoleptic predecessor was worse.
No one wants the job because it is not sufficiently high profile. Regardless of whether the person in question is competent or qualified, member states argue for the position because it went to someone else last time. It is a job for a big city mayor, someone with political acumen, the ability to play hardball and experience of administering because it is an administrative and political role. There are many such people within the EU. Someone in that population of 500 million would fit the bill and love the job. The difficult part is making the selection in the face of the EU's bureaucratic structures, but this is not impossible. Bosnia's marching orders could be to achieve constitutional reform before being allowed into the EU and to let the new person help in that regard.
None of us knows what background level of nationalism Bosnia has, but it exists and is being magnified by a constitutional system that allows politicians to use fear as leverage and provides them with almost unrivalled unaccountability in European politics. They comprise the most stable political class of any European country. The only way out of the upper echelons is to die, go to jail, be on the run from jail like Radovan Karadzic or become politically irrelevant by forming a new party. Otherwise, there is complete mapping of the political elite of 18 years ago after the first free elections in October 1990. This situation is unsurpassed anywhere else in Europe.
Dayton was designed to give jobs to these people because they were the people who fought the war. One cannot gainsay, one made the deal. Now that the door is open to the EU and NATO, which has been open in theory since 1999, we must move to a different model. It has been a long soliloquy but the point I make is that the EU has the potential to do this.
Deputy Joe Costello asked me about the EU and the US. There is no differentiation of goals. Rather, the perverse situation is that we both have faith-based policies towards Bosnia. The EU believes its enlargement model will work and the US wants to believe that too and hopes the Europeans are correct. I do not sense an inherent friction. It is perverse that the Americans are more articulate than the EU regarding structures for Bosnia's European vocation. That is bizarre but that is the way it works. I say this as an American — the US is skating on credibility that it does not deserve in Bosnia. Among Bosnian Muslims, in particular, the US has credibility for having finally intervened, albeit three and a half years late. The US gets credit for having done it as opposed to not having done it. The Americans have an unrivalled ability to twist arms and play bad cop to the European good cop. If a strategy is based around that, it can work. There is no strategy, one cannot have a strategy without a clear goal and we have no clear goal. We have a variety of approaches among EU member states. At one end of the spectrum are the British and the Dutch, the most hardline. At the other end are Carl Bildt, Italy, Austria and the idea that the EU recipe will solve the problems through the process and that the process will make them free. There is not a set of competing strategies but competing postures or attitudes. It is not part of a great power game.
The Russians are in a win-win situation whatever way one slices it. The role of Russia in the Balkans is to stick its fingers in the eyes of the Americans and the EU because it can. The Russians are not a major factor if we have a clear policy. That we do not makes it much easier for them to do so.
