Mr. Charles Crawford is a political consultant and retired diplomatic officer. During his long career in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he served as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Sarajevo and to Belgrade. He frequently comments on Balkan affairs on his website, http://www.charlescrawford.biz.
“Remember the Bonn Powers for Bosnia and Herzegovina – the supposed authority bestowed on the High Representative by the ‘international community’ to allow him/her to remove recalcitrant Bosnians from office or otherwise ‘move forward’ the ‘peace process’?
The impressive thing was that as far as I could see the Bonn Powers had no real legal basis at all. They amounted to an international political power-play bluff which successive High Representatives wrapped up in legal language to make the whole thing look imposing and inevitable.
And they worked, for many years. Senior BH politicians and officials were indeed sacked. Yet the perverse if unsurprising result of sacking people whose elections we had proclaimed to be free and fair was only a diminished sense of local responsibility for real-life outcomes, rather than enhanced effort. Inat?
Thus familiarity bred contempt. Sooner or later a direct legal challenge to these ‘powers’ was going to be mounted somewhere.
The whole idea of these ‘powers’ (not granted under the Dayton Peace Treaty) was at best ambiguous. The more they were used, the more likely they were to become counter-productive: they amounted to an arbitrary use of power with no serious legal checks and balances.”
Read Crawford’s piece in its entirety here.
