Bosnia | Where the past is another country | Economist.com

Odličan članak o presudi Međunarodnog suda pravde i općenito situaciji u Bosni

Bosnia
Where the past is another country

Mar 1st 2007
From The Economist print edition
Three big decisions about Bosnia's past and future

SOMETIMES the response to a judgment is more predictable than the judgment itself. When the International Court of Justice ruled on February 26th that Serbia was not responsible for genocide in Bosnia during the war in 1992-95, newspapers in the Bosniak (Muslim) and Croat region of Bosnia called it a “fraud”, an “insult” and a “disgrace”; those in the Serb part of Bosnia talked sanctimoniously of the “truth”.

Bosnia launched the case in 1993, when the situation in the Balkans was different from today. Hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats had been ethnically cleansed by Bosnian Serb forces; Sarajevo and other cities were under siege; and the Serbian flag flew from the coast of Croatia to the southernmost tip of Kosovo. Now Bosnia is an uneasy federation of two autonomous bits, one Serb and the other Bosniak and Croat.

The judgment did not go wholly the Serbs' way, because it declared that genocide had indeed taken place in Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, in 1995. It also reprimanded Serbia for failing to stop it. But to Serbia's relief, it added that Bosnia could not demand reparations.

Conspiracy theorists think the ICJ delivered its verdict under political pressure. The argument is that Serbia, which faces the loss of Kosovo, its southern province, had to be appeased in some way. A bigger question concerns the evidence before the court. Serbia had to give incriminating transcripts to the United Nations war-crimes tribunal, which like the ICJ is in The Hague—but it did so only on condition that cases were heard in camera, to stop the evidence falling into the ICJ's hands.

Two other decisions this week may prove as important for Bosnia's future as the ICJ judgment is for its past. On February 27th the European Union confirmed its provisional decision to cut the size of its peacekeeping force. At the end of the Bosnian war, 60,000 NATO-led peacekeepers went in. In 2004 they were replaced by a 7,000-strong EU force, the biggest the union has ever deployed. That force will now be cut to 2,500 by the end of the year.

Does that mean that Bosnians can on their own sustain the peace and rebuild their country so that it one day joins the EU? Not quite, apparently. For the other decision was to extend the office of the high representative in Bosnia. This job, which carries powers to sack elected political leaders and impose laws, was due to be wound up by the end of June 2007. But it will now go on for another 12 months.

The present high representative is a German, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, who came to office determined that Bosnians must soon run their own country. But he has now changed his mind—or at least decided that it is too early to give up the job's powers. The question is whether all Bosnians will agree. Bosnian Serb leaders are hinting that they may not. They are talking rather of holding a referendum on independence, if and when Kosovo gains its own independence from Serbia.

After the ICJ judgment one commentator argued that Bosnians had to find a common history, otherwise they would have no common future. Today Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs teach children radically different stories about the war. Yet fate has decreed that they must share their state. Bosnia has made great progress over the past decade. The trick will be to get its citizens to co-operate, and not let the past rob Bosnia of a future.

Bosnia | Where the past is another country | Economist.com.