The United States and the European Union are pursuing policies seemingly designed to deepen BiH’s political crisis in the new year. Instead of confronting the true sources of BiH’s problems—attacks by the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and political Sarajevo on the rule of law and the Dayton Accords—Washington and Brussels are instead focusing their ire on the Serb political leadership’s natural and justified reaction to those attacks. Instead of dousing the fire, the Western powers are assailing the firefighters.
It is only the political leadership of one of BiH’s three constituent peoples, the Bosniaks, who charge that BiH’s Serb leadership is the source of the country’s problems. The president of BiH’s main Croat party, Dragan Čović, said in November regarding the Serb member of the BiH Presidency, Milorad Dodik, “I am convinced, since I know Mr. Dodik well, I have said this several times: if Mr. Dodik was the only problem in BiH, it would be easily solved. I think the problems are much more complex, multi-layered and that the source of the real problems is far away from Mr. Dodik.”
Similarly, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina President Marinko Cavara, another Croat, last week criticized the new sanctions imposed by Washington targeting RS leadership, saying they would not accomplish anything except to make those sanctioned “heroes of the Serbian people and the Republika Srpska.” Mr. Cavara further said, “One could say [Mr. Dodik] was hoping for this. I don’t know how he was thinking, but we can say that he made move after move as a reaction to the taking over of BiH institutions by the Bosniaks . . .. And then he made move after move to protect the RS from the decisions of these BiH institutions that have been taken over.”
The immediate trigger for BiH’s political crisis was outgoing High Representative Valentin Inzko’s utterly unilateral and illegal decree in July 2021 criminalizing certain kinds of speech about BiH’s 1990s war—a decree nakedly targeted at Serbs.
Though neither Washington nor Brussels approved of the decree, they have done nothing to undo it, to repair the damage it caused, or to end the autocratic and legally preposterous “Bonn powers” under which it was issued. Indeed, German politician Christian Schmidt, who wrongfully claims to be the new High Representative, continues to risibly lecture BiH about the “rule of law,” even as he claims dictatorial powers that have no basis in law and flagrantly violate the BiH Constitution and all BiH citizens’ human rights.
The other key reason for BiH’s political crisis is the intensified push by political Sarajevo and its foreign allies to defy and distort the Dayton Accords by further centralizing BiH and disempowering its constituent peoples.
For many years, BiH has been unconstitutionally centralized through illegal decrees, coercion, and judicial interference by the OHR. The BiH Constitutional Court, controlled by an alliance of the court’s two Bosniak members and three foreign members, has reliably upheld the unconstitutional centralization of BiH and the weakening of constitutionally guaranteed protections for the constituent peoples.
The court has also used baseless cases brought by Bosniak officials to further shrink the autonomy guaranteed to the RS under the Dayton Accords. In September, for example, the Constitutional Court held, without any legitimate constitutional basis, that the public forest land that the RS has administered for almost three decades does not belong to the RS.
BiH’s main Bosniak party, the SDA, has intensified its efforts to dismantle the Dayton constitutional system in order to achieve total Bosniak domination and has been taking over one BiH-level institution after another in order to control all key levers of power. That domination has been the SDA’s goal since its founding. The SDA has never repudiated the key principles articulated in founder Alija Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration, published in 1990, which states openly, “There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions.”
It is only natural that the RS’s political leadership would respond to the provocations from the OHR and political Sarajevo by moving more assertively to reclaim those competences—and only those competences—to which the RS is entitled under the Dayton Accords.
The rhetoric and actions of some Western powers have only worsened the crisis, stifled much-needed local dialogue, and stiffened the resolve of the RS leadership. Threatening sanctions, ostensibly for undermining the Dayton Accords, but actually for demanding that the Dayton Accords be implemented as written, has been counter-productive, and is rightly seen by the citizens of the RS as hypocritical to the point of absurdity. When powers claim to be defending the rule of law even as they insist that a foreign diplomat has the right to disregard the BiH Constitution and the Dayton Accords and rule over BiH like an absolute monarch, the natural response from any informed citizen of the RS is derision and contempt.
Instead of attacking RS leaders for their response to provocations from the OHR and the SDA, the U.S. and EU should address the provocations themselves. Instead of continuing their policies toward the RS consisting of all sticks and no carrots, and doubling down on policies that have only backfired and driven the RS further away from Western countries, the international community should work to undo the causes of the political crisis—which are well known, and simple enough to address. An obvious first step would be to urge the repeal of Mr. Inzko’s illegal decree and encourage BiH’s constituent peoples to reach accommodation through dialogue rather than foreign pressure.
