Who’s the Bosnian?

Balkanize: to divide a region into smaller regions that are unfriendly or aggressive toward each other. Oxford Advanced American Dictionary

“[The European Union] had proven itself capable of working against its own interests [by siding with the U.S. when Russia invaded Ukraine.]” 

Bosnian Serbian Separatist Leader Milorad Dodik

When the Soviet Union dissolved, its satellite states declared independence, but one country, Yugoslavia, did more. In 1991, “Yugoslavia,” a Balkan state, lived up to that epithet. It fractured into several states, broke into an ultra-violent set of internal civil wars led by effective war lords… genocide exploded… and new boundaries were declared. But Yugoslavia had never been a unified culture; internal units didn’t even share a common language.

The US Historian describes it this way: “Yugoslavia—the land of South (i.e. Yugo) Slavs—was created at the end of World War I when Croat, Slovenian, and Bosnian territories that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire united with the Serbian Kingdom. The country broke up under Nazi occupation during World War II with the creation of a Nazi-allied independent Croat state, but was reunified at the end of the war when the communist-dominated partisan force of Josip Broz Tito liberated the country.”

Marshall Tito, a communist dictator, had a way to combine different religious and ethnic groups into a single nation. Muslims and Catholic/Russian Orthodox faiths. By force or threat of force. But when Yugoslavia broke up, all hell broke loose among and between the various factions. And as territories were being redefined, regional factions used a new war to battle with each other. Some directly. Some through local surrogates.

Since this is a blog about here and now, two of those factions shoved into a single state, Bosnia-Herzegovina, were still engaged in murderous disunity: Bosnia Serbs (mostly Russian Orthodox) and Bosnia Croats (mostly Muslims and Roman Catholics). The roots of the tension are well-described in this excerpt from a January 2nd Associated Press article: “The Bosnian war started in 1992 when Belgrade-backed Bosnian Serbs tried to create an ‘ethnically pure’ region with the aim of joining neighboring Serbia by killing and expelling the country’s Croats and Bosniaks, who are mostly Muslims. More than 100,000 people were killed and more than 2 million people, or more than half of the country’s population, were driven from their homes before a peace agreement was reached in Dayton, Ohio, late in 1995.

“The agreement divided Bosnia into two entities — the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Bosnian-Croat federation — which were given wide autonomy but remained linked by some shared, multiethnic institutions. It also instituted the Office of the High Representative, an international body tasked with shepherding the implementation of the peace agreement that was given broad powers to impose laws or dismiss officials who undermined the fragile postwar ethnic balance, including judges, civil servants and members of parliament.

“Over the years, the Office of the High Representative has pressured Bosnia’s bickering ethnic leaders to build shared, statewide institutions, including the army, intelligence and security agencies, the top judiciary and the tax administration. However, further bolstering of the existing institutions and the creation of new ones is required if Bosnia is to reach its declared goal of joining the European Union.” But looking back, that 1992 war underscored tensions that never went away. Genocide. War crimes… until in 1995, NATO intervened (US forces very much involved) and forced the above Dayton accord.

“By early 2008, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted forty-five Serbs, twelve Croats, and four Bosniaks of war crimes in connection with the war in Bosnia. Estimates suggest over 100,000 people were killed during the war. Over 2.2 million people were displaced, making it, at the time, the most violent conflict in Europe since the end of World War II.” Wikipedia. Except that peace accord could not erase the internal hatred and desire for autonomy. Serbs always had the military upper hand, a reality which threatens to fracture Bosnia-Herzegovina today. As if Europe didn’t have enough problems with the Ukraine war.

“The Bosnian Serbs’ separatist leader [Milorad Dodik] vowed to carry on weakening his war-scarred country to the point where it will tear apart, despite a pledge by the United States to prevent such an outcome… ‘I am not irrational, I know that America’s response will be to use force ... but I have no reason to be frightened by that into sacrificing [Serb] national interests,’ Milorad Dodik, the president of Bosnia’s Serb-run part, told the Associated Press in an interview Friday [12/29].

“He said any attempt to use international intervention to further strengthen Bosnia’s shared, multiethnic institutions will be met by a Bosnian Serb decision to abandon them completely and take the country back to the state of disunity and dysfunction it was in at the end of its brutal inter-ethnic war in the 1990s… Because Western democracies will not be agreeable to that, he added, ‘in the next stage, we will be forced by their reaction to declare full independence’ of the Serb-controlled regions of Bosnia…

“Dodik appeared unperturbed Friday by the statement posted a day earlier on X, formerly Twitter, by James O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs, that Washington will act if anyone tries to change “the basic element” of the 1995 peace agreement for Bosnia, and that there is ‘no right of secession.’

“‘Among Serbs, one thing is clear and definite and that is a growing realization that the years and decades ahead of us are the years and decades of Serb national unification,’ Dodik said… ‘Brussels [meaning the EU] is using the promise of EU accession as a tool to unitarize Bosnia,” said Dodik, who is staunchly pro-Russia, adding: ‘In principle, our policy still is that we want to join [the EU], but we no longer see that as our only alternative.’” AP. While Bosnia-Herzegovina has signed an accord to cooperate with NATO, it is not yet a member. If the fracturing of that country takes place, the Serb faction will undoubtedly reject NATO and strengthen is ties with Putin’s Russia.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while most of the world is distracted by conflicts between Israel and Hamas (and its supporters) as well as the Russo-Ukraine war, such strongmen and ethnic/religious wars are threatened all across the world as well.