![]() ![]() The ban applies to all ethnic groups, but many Bosnian Serbs see it as targeted at them. They now claim that Bosnian Serbs are being unfairly picked on, after a decision in July by Schmidt’s predecessor as UN envoy that outlawed the denial of genocide. Many Bosniaks view Dodik’s disruptive actions as proof that Bosnian Serbs should never have been allowed by the Dayton deal to hang on to their own domain, an entity midwifed by men like Karadzic and Bosnian Serb former commander Ratko Mladic, who have since been convicted of genocide at The Hague for the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995 and other atrocities.īut Dodik and many of his fellow Serbs still deny war crimes committed by ethnic kin and instead see themselves as victims, as they did during the war. ![]() ![]() The federation, in turn, is divided into 10 “cantons,” each with its own government. Under the Dayton settlement, Bosnia is divided into two largely self-governing parts: Dodik’s Serb territory, known as Republika Srpska, and a federation controlled by Bosniaks and ethnic Croats. But Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, recently visited the Serb region’s capital, Banja Luka, to offer support to Dodik and has vowed to veto any move by the EU to impose sanctions. Germany and Britain are discussing sanctions. In Europe, the response to Dodik’s provocations has been mixed. A quarter of them, she said, were killed in the fighting that began shortly after. One student recalled that his parents had lived through the horror of Bosnia’s 1992-95 conflict and asked, “Can you promise us that this won’t happen again?” Another told Schmidt, “I can’t wait to leave this country where the word ‘war’ is being used more and more.”Ī teacher displayed a photograph from 1991 that showed a dozen of her male students at the time, all looking relaxed and happy. When Schmidt met in mid-December with students at a vocational school in Tuzla, a town where Bosnia’s different ethnic groups have tended to live in rare harmony, he was repeatedly asked what he was doing to prevent a return to war. Schmidt, in a recent interview, played down the risk of a return to bloodletting and said he expected Dodik to back off his threat to form a separate ethnic Serb army.Īmong many Bosnians, however, fear is again on the march. A report in October by the United Nations’ senior official in Bosnia, Christian Schmidt of Germany, described the situation as “the greatest existential threat” to the country’s survival since the early 1990s. The trio of elected presidents are Dodik, who represents Serbs Dzaferovic, who represents Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks and Zeljko Komsic, an ethnic Croat.ĭodik has made noises about Serb secession for more than a decade but has never before prompted such a volatile crisis. ![]() The deal stopped the fighting but created an elaborate and highly dysfunctional political system, with a weak central authority in which different ethnic groups share power. The frictions in Bosnia are rooted in the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, brokered by the United States. Russia, which wants to prevent Bosnia from joining the bloc or NATO, is already siding with Dodik. Now the United States and the European Union, which Bosnia aspires to join, are desperate to stop the new crisis from escalating into conflict or creating the sort of political instability that Russia could exploit. Those Balkan wars left roughly 140,000 people dead, drew in NATO warplanes and soldiers, and created a rift between Russia and the West that remains today. It was in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, that a teenage Serb nationalist set off World War I by assassinating an Austrian archduke in June 1914 and where the seemingly deranged rants of a Serb psychiatrist, Radovan Karadzic, presaged a three-year spree of bloodletting in the 1990s. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |