PARIS (International Herald Tribune) The electoral victory of nationalists last Saturday in Bosnia Herzegovina suggests that it is time for the international community to make a serious re examination of what is happening in that country, and of what eventual outcomes can reasonably be expected.
The Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina is an artificial state improvised at the Dayton negotiations of 1995. It was imposed on the people of that unhappy country under American and NATO pressures, to stop interethnic slaughter.
Three years of ghastly fratricidal war had followed Bosnia Herzegovina's declaration of independence in April 1992, following a referendum boycotted by the Serbs of Bosnia. This was a new step in the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, inspired by Slobodan Milosevic's program to create a Greater Serbia at the expense of Croatia and Bosnia.
Fighting immediately broke out, mainly instigated by the Serbian and Croatian communities bent on creating ethnically pure territories, with a view to union, respectively, with Serbia and with a newly independent Croatia.
The Muslims of Bosnia Herzegovina were the group that suffered most, but a major purpose of the attack was also to destroy cosmopolitan Sarajevo, a multiethnic city that was a center of liberal and tolerant political and cultural values.
The siege of Sarajevo, and the ethnic cleansing that took place during the Serbian attempt to gain domination of the city and its region, provided the most appalling violence Europe had experienced since World War II.
The European nations' irresolution and impotence in the face of this crisis seemed a frightening augury concerning the future of the European Union. The doubts then inspired about Europe have yet to be entirely dissipated.
When the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization eventually intervened, in the summer of 1995, all of the parties were convoked to the U.S. Air Force base at Dayton, Ohio, where, sequestered, and under intense pressures, they were made to accept unwanted compromises.
Bosnia Herzegovina was divided into a Serbian republic composed of 49 percent of its territory, with an uneasy Croatian Muslim Federation occupying 51 percent.
A central government with members from the three groups was established, with modest responsibilities under UN and subsequent NATO supervision. That supervision was politically timid and failed to pursue war criminals or give energetic support to reform.
Despite billions in international aid, the new state has not been a success. Living standards are low, the economy feeble, the unemployment level 60 percent. This has accelerated emigration of the young, mobile and talented. The country is being drained of its future.
Last Saturday's elections for the multiethnic presidency, the legislature and the cantonal governments, were the first organized by the Bosnian authorities themselves since the war ended. With a low electoral turnout (55 percent), and final results yet to be announced, the three individuals apparently elected to the collegial presidency all represent the nationalist parties. A similar outcome seems apparent in the other votes.
Compromises and coalitions will be necessary before the final complexion of the government becomes clear, but liberal, secular and multiethnic forces have lost. It now seems necessary for the international community to admit that the Dayton solution was not a solution. It was a way to end a war. It did not provide the foundation for a modern state. It did not offer a structure conducive to national reconciliation. It may be that the constructive response now is simply to concede the failure, to concede to the nationalists what the international community was mobilized to deny them.
Accepting the fact that Bosnia Herzegovina has, for practical purposes, already been ethnically cleansed, and accepting the consequences, now may be the only way to terminate this part of the problem of Yugoslav succession.
This would mean the Republika Srpska's union with Serbia; union of the Croatian territories of the Croat Muslim Federation with Croatia; and the Muslim territories made into a new state centered on Sarajevo, possibly as an internationalized city state, with guarantees, possibly as an independent republic.
The Serbian and Croatian nationalists would be politically disarmed, and would disappear into the larger communities to which they fought to belong societies that now have been through the transition to democracy or are well on that road.
Nationalist and integrist forces inside the new Muslim identity would survive, part of a community dominated by traditionally cosmopolitan Sarajevo. On the other hand, Muslim integrist forces in Albania and Kosovo might be strengthened and given new ambitions.
This certainly is not a solution the international community has wanted, nor the surviving liberal forces inside today's Bosnia Herzegovina. It amounts to a defeat for those forces.
But the defeat is to a political artifice with a dim future. Democratic values may better prosper if Bosnia Herzegovina is partitioned once again. Realism demands that this be discussed.
Los Angeles Times Syndicate International
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