By GUDRUN STEINACKER
A year and a half ago, I was able to publish an article on the situation in the Balkans for the Deutsche Welle, “Den korrupten Eliten die Stirn bieten” (Defying the Corrupt Elites), in which I criticized the corrupt complicity of the EU and individual EU states, including Germany, with the corrupt elites of the Balkans, which provoked some commotion.
Of course, such an opinion piece has no significance. In 2020, the director of Transparency International in Bosnia, Srđan Blagovčanin, had already written a study about the rule of cartels in Bosnia, to which I referred in my Deutsche Welle contribution.
Transparency International’s latest report on Bosnia confirms Blagovčanin’s unfortunate assessment. He, too, sees a high degree of collusion between the so-called West and the responsible political and economic elites in Bosnia. Conditions in the other six Western Balkan states are hardly different, and Vučićc’s election victory in Serbia is hardly a signal for hope.
But how did the situation in Bosnia unfold, a state that is de facto divided into three parts, with each part largely “ethnically cleansed” of the people of the non-dominant population group?
War, which broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991, initially in Slovenia and Croatia, and which led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, was not a spontaneous incident. In Serbia, the war option had been chosen early on to carve out as much “Serbian” land as possible from the bankruptcy estate. Wherever Serbs lived, even as a minority, was Serbia. Greater Serbia, a country for the “nebeski narod” (the heavenly people) was the objective. The course of the fighting in Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 may have been rather unplanned and chaotic.
In Bosnia, the goal from the beginning was to “conquer” land and “ethnically cleanse” it. To this end, paramilitary groups were deployed, trained months before the war, as well as the Yugoslav People’s Army, which had effectively brought Serbia under its sole control. To this day, the almost complete ethnic cleansing of the so-called, Bosanska Krajina that was conducted from Belgrade, as described by former Bosnian diplomat Dr. Muharem Krzić in his book published a year ago, has not been recognized as genocide even though here the direct chain of command to Belgrade can be proven.
The so-called international community accepted the partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina almost from the beginning. It successfully pushed the weakest, Bosniak side to accept this solution. By the summer of 1992, after the course of the military operations, it must have been clear to the so-called international community where it was all headed.
As a result, in three and a half years of murderous war with countless war crimes, massacres, mass rapes, whereby the main perpetrators were Serbs, followed by Croats and only then the Bosniaks, who primarily resisted the expulsions from their ancestral settlements, today’s Bosnia with three entities emerged. Despite some international efforts to repatriate refugees and displaced persons, the tripartite division still remains the status quo today.
All three parts of the dysfunctional state are ruled by corrupt elites that arose from the war profiteers, closely linked to organized crime and with frequent complicity of Western actors, the prospects for a democratic Bosnia based on the rule of law are bleak.
From the very beginning of the war in former Yugoslavia, the EU accepted the logic of war, of partition. The Bosniaks hardly had a chance to resist militarily. Croatia was strengthened with American aid to the extent that it was able to recapture Serb-occupied territories. It suits both the protagonists in Belgrade and Zagreb that they are now dealing with a weak Bosnia that they can exploit for geopolitical games. The international community is chasing a phantom, the creation of a democratic, rule-of-law and prosperous Bosnia, which to this day has no chance of being achieved due to the interests of the corrupt elites. The EU Court of Auditors has just given EU programs to promote the rule of law a disastrous certificate.
What does all this have to do with the war in Ukraine, except that Republika Srpska under its long-term ruler Dodik is proving to be a loyal Russian vassal?
In Ukraine, too, the so-called international community has evidently already accepted Russia’s minimum goal, the partition of Ukraine. It also seems that they have already accepted the ethnic cleansing of the territories claimed by Russia.
Anyone who does not identify as Russian has no place in the emerging Russian state in eastern and southern Ukraine, regardless of what it will be called (Nova Rossiya or otherwise). Putin, too demands that all territories settled by “Russians, or which “traditionally” belonged to Russia be restored to a “Russian World – Russkij Mir” again. And the war in Ukraine, like the war in Bosnia 30 years ago, opens up untold opportunities for self-enrichment for many protagonists. Will we then have two new, dysfunctional states in Europe, mired in corruption and criminality. We‘ve seen this before!!
Or can we learn from the past instead? Hope dies last.
PS. These parallels have already been drawn by various Balkan experts, such as Nikolaus Moll. Philipp Cunlife, Peter Maass, Ed Vuliamy:
The Wars in Bosnia and Ukraine: Can We Learn from Sarajevo? | Balkan Insight
Putin is following the Bosnia playbook – UnHerd
Putin’s Endgame Is Not a Mystery. It’s Regime Survival. (theintercept.com)
Ukraine matters, but so did Bosnia 30 years ago. Where was the outcry then? | Ed Vulliamy | The Guardian
The Author, Gudrun Steinacker is a retired German diplomat, currently involved in green and environmental initiatives and projects.
