The Serbian leader in Bosnia and Herzegovina is openly seeking to withdraw from the peace agreement, the UN warns.
In the Balkans Bosnia and Herzegovina is undergoing a serious political crisis, with ingredients even for a new conflict.
UN-appointed peace envoy Christian Schmidt warned last week that the US-mediated peace deal was in danger of crumbling. This could have unpredictable consequences in the south-east of Europe.
The crisis at the heart of the escalation is the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, which has repeatedly threatened Bosnian Serbs to go their separate ways.
Russia and China, which support Dodik, are also responsible, but also the EU and the United States, whose interest in the region has waned, experts say.
UN Ambassador Schmidt and many experts have warned in recent weeks that Bosnia and Herzegovina is on the brink of the worst crisis since the devastating war in the Balkans in the 1990s.
“The potential for deeper division and conflict is very real,” Schmidt wrote last week in its report To the UN Security Council.
He referred to Serbian leader Dodik, who is seeking to secede from the joint armed forces, tax administration, supreme judiciary and other institutions of the already divided country.
“This is practically an exit without declaring it,” Schmidt continued. He warned that tensions in Bosnia could be reflected in increasing instability in neighbors, such as relations between Serbia and Kosovo.
Dodik, the leader of the Republika Srpska, who has repeatedly spoken about his desire to secede, has said he is not seeking a new conflict.
In The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement ended a three-and-a-half-year war between Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. The country was then divided into two autonomous parts according to ethnic divisions: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska.
The Yugoslav break-up war of 1992-1995 was the worst war in Europe since World War II. An estimated one hundred thousand people died in the war, and two million people were forced to flee their homes.
New and increased tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population of just over three million, have made observers very nervous. After all, this is a country where the escalation of ethnic tensions has previously led to serious war crimes.
The worst and best known of the war crimes is the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. At that time, Serbs killed more than seven thousand Bosnians.
“There is no question that this is the most dangerous crisis since 1995 and that this could lead to a new war,” said Director of the NGO Advocacy Center in Bosnia Ismail Cidic news channel for CNN.
Monument to the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thousands of Bosnians, mostly Muslims, were subjected to the massacre.
Many Serb-backed Serbs, as well as Russia, deny that the massacre was a genocide. The issue has also been debated in the UN Security Council, but Russia has prevented the genocide from being declared a genocide. One of the contestants is also Serbian leader Dodik.
The escalation of tensions in the Western Balkans could benefit Russia, which supports Bosnian Serbs. Russia is trying to play without the new Balkan countries joining the European Union.
At the same time At present, Western countries and their political communities seem powerless.
Last week, the UN Security Council voted unanimously for a European military secondment in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Still, Russia does not recognize in practice even the mandate of the UN ambassador, the German Schmidt, in the region.
Speaking anonymously to CNN, a NATO official criticized Russia for inciting instability.
“We call on Russia to play a constructive role in the Western Balkans. We regularly see Russia acting differently, ”a NATO spokesman said.
Its part criticism has also come from the EU, which seems indifferent to what is happening at its gates.
EU Eufor troops in a military parade in Sarajevo in October 2019.
Founding member of the Democratization Policy Council, an incubator headquartered in Berlin Kurt Bassuener describes as humiliating the fact that the Western powers, which have long played an important and stabilizing role in the Western Balkans, have gradually lost their credibility in the region.
This benefits authoritarian-led big states like Russia and China.
Published last week in their criticism Mr Bassuener pointed out, among other things, that the permanent members of the UN Security Council, France, Britain and the United States, bowed to Russia’s “blackmail” in last week’s Security Council resolution on the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This led to the weakening of the mandate of the UN Special Envoy for the Balkans.
At the same time, the EU has seemed phlegmatic.
“Bosnia’s slide towards a possible conflict without guardrails is not only the fault of the EU, but has a ‘made in the EU’ stamp,” Bassuener wrote incubator on the Carnegie Europe website.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s UN envoy Schmidt says he still hopes that international pressure could change the situation in the Western Balkans in a “more sensible direction”.
According to him, the border will go there if the Republika Srpska, led by Dodik, secedes from the joint army and creates its own armed forces for the Serbs.
“If this is to happen …, the international community needs to think very, very seriously, about how to proceed,” Schmidt warned last week, according to Reuters.
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