Lord Ashdown on the Western Balkans

20 Jan 2012

James Kilcourse

Report on the speech by Lord Paddy Ashdown to the Joint Sitting of the Oireachtas Committees on EU Affairs and Foreign Affairs and Trade, 19th January 2012.

Lord Ashdown, the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006, addressed a joint sitting of the EU Affairs and Foreign Affairs and Trade Committees on Thursday 19th January, 2012. His message was afterwards described by Committee members as ‘very startling’ and a ‘wake-up call’ that needs to be heard across Europe. Lord Ashdown warned that a decade-long dynamic of cohesion, unity and peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina risks becoming entirely undermined. Even though the tragedies of the Bosnian war remain etched on European memory, Brussels, he argued, is not free from blame for the breakdown of Bosnia’s institutions and post-war stabilisation.

According to Lord Ashdown, Bosnia was the poster-boy of conflict resolution and post-war stabilisation for the first decade after the signing of the Dayton Agreement. Free elections occurred peacefully and were organised by the local authorities rather than the OSCE or UN. An unprecedented one million refugees of the war returned to their homes. The life-level structures of the state were firmly established and Bosnia followed a consistent dynamic towards peace and unity. In 2006, according to Lord Ashdown, there was no other place in the world that had recovered so successfully and so quickly from such a devastating conflict. However, since 2007 this dynamic towards peace and unity has been reversed. Republika Srpska has been drawing up parallel institutions that are weakening the state’s taxation authority, single army and independent judiciary. This threatens the single state system on a daily basis. The reversal of the initial dynamic has given separatists greater influence in Republika Srpska and has created a reaction among Bosnian Croats and Muslims, who are also beginning to give up on the state and focus on their own federal entities. 

The increasingly difficult political situation in Bosnia is a disaster for the country and a threat to the entire region. A return to violence is highly unlikely, at least in the short term, though the possibility cannot be ruled out. What is more likely, according to Lord Ashdown, is that Bosnia will remain a black hole of corruption, drug trafficking and organised crime while the rest of the Balkan region moves closer to the European Union. This situation, he added, is also a tragedy for Europe. The EU has put all of its available instruments to use in Bosnia – vast amounts of aid, an EU Special Representative, visa liberalisation, the prospect of membership – and has not been able to prevent the breakdown of the Bosnian state. If the EU cannot stop these destructive developments on its own border, how can it possibly function as a serious power in the rest of the world? According to Lord Ashdown, the EU today resembles Europe of the early 1990s, when it stood aside and failed to take action to prevent a dangerous situation from exploding in its own neighbourhood.

What can Europe do to address the current situation in Bosnia, he asked? First of all, the European External Action Service and the European Commission should be more active and more willing to use all of the instruments available to them. Lord Ashdown’s experience in the region taught him that it is very important to be active on the ground when faced with such challenges. He praised the recent appointment of Peter Sørensen as the EU Special Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ambassador Sørensen (who will address the IIEA on 27th March 2012) is, in his view, an extremely capable official, but Brussels must support him on the ground and back his judgement.

The EU should apply more conditionality to the aid it provides to Bosnia. Most importantly, the EU is failing to apply the biggest lever at its disposal: the prospect of enlargement. The EU is following the same policy towards Bosnia as it did towards candidate countries like Poland and Hungary in the 1990s, despite the fact that Bosnia is not a properly functioning state. The EU has not made the presence of a fully functioning state a condition for progress in the Stabilisation and Association Process. Lord Ashdown recommends that the EU demand constitutional change in Bosnia to create a more cohesive and better functioning state. He stressed that this would not entail the creation of a highly centralised state, but a decentralised state like Belgium where the federal entities have a high level of autonomy without preventing the central state from carrying out its functions. He warned that Milorad Dodik, the President of Republika Srpska, is following the policy that worked successfully for Montenegro – making the state so dysfunctional that Europe loses patience and accepts that Bosnia is unworkable. If the EU does not begin to demand a more functional Bosnian state, he concluded, then we are sleepwalking our way back to the early 1990s.

Secondly, the EU and European leaders should be much more active in isolating separatists within Bosnia. Lord Ashdown strongly criticised the fact that Catherine Ashton meets with President Dodik in Banja Luka when she visits Bosnia. Meeting with the heads of the different entities rather than with state officials in Sarajevo suggests to ordinary Bosnians that real power does not lie with the central state. The EU should be doing everything it can to encourage the opposite impression among Bosnians.  

Finally, Lord Ashdown suggested that the EU take advantage of the linkages in the Balkan region. In the 1990s, the UN and EU prevented Bosnian Croats from adopting a destructive attitude towards the Bosnian state by putting pressure on Zagreb. Zagreb has been a very constructive partner and is now being rewarded with EU membership. Similarly, the key to Banja Luka lies in Belgrade. It is clear that Serbia wants to move towards EU membership but the EU is not taking full advantage of the leverage this provides. The EU should make it a condition of Serbia’s accession process that Belgrade actively and vocally support the integrity of Bosnia. This would, after all, be no more than asking Serbia to respect the EU’s official policy towards Bosnia. Pressure should be applied on President Tadic of Serbia to deal exclusively with Sarajevo rather than dealing with the Serbian government in Banja Luka. 

In conclusion, Lord Ashdown warned that we have created an abscess in Europe, the contagion of which could spread wide. The situation is serious, and does not preclude the possibility of violence, but it is reversible. Europe needs to take steps now to reverse the dynamic towards cohesion once again and to avoid a tragedy in the future.

 

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