Eurasia Press & News
What, in an ideal world, might the chief international envoys in Bosnia and Herzegovina say to make this week’s 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords really a day to remember?
Imagine the scene:
It is November 21, 30 years to the day since the Dayton Peace Accords were initialled at an airbase in Ohio, and the press has been gathered for a joint press conference by the international community’s peace overseer in Bosnia and Herzegovina, German Christian Schmidt, and Luigi Soreca, the Italian head of the European Union delegation and the EU Special Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
After some 100,000 deaths, the Dayton Peace Accords – ceremonially signed in Paris on December 14, 1995 – ended three-and-a-half years of war in Bosnia and handed the international community the role of overseeing implementation.
Messrs Schmidt and Soreca were not consulted on the following text. It is not what they will say, should they indeed hold a press conference on November 21, nor does it reflect their positions or those of the institutions they represent.
What follows is simply what I and – I believe – many other people living in this country would like to hear.
Schmidt: Thank you all for coming to hear our remarks today on this Friday morning, this 30th anniversary of the initialling of the General Framework Agreement for Peace – more commonly referred to as the Dayton Peace Accords. That peace, preserved to date, is precious beyond measure, and has enabled the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina to pursue a future. We can never allow ourselves to forget that peace is the very foundation of the possibility of progress.
Yet the velocity of progress has too long been stifled – in many cases even reversed over the past 15, even 20 years of peace implementation. Addressing this head-on, so that all future anniversaries can reflect the development of this country in all sectors – socio-economic, political, educational, cultural, and so on – will be the focus of our remarks today.
I say “our” because I am pleased to be joined here by my colleague, friend and ally Ambassador Luigi Soreca, Head of the European Union Delegation, just down the road from my office. I’ll precede my opening remarks simply by stating that our points today reflect our individual roles and mandated tasks – but we deliver them together because we want to underscore that we are together on the lot of them. And we’ll back each other up to achieve our common goals.
I also know that what’s said today, while I believe reassuring most people of this country, will deeply irritate, anger, and threaten a host of powerful people. And not just politicians from this country! In neighbouring countries, in nearby capitals, and even among some leaders of our respective stakeholders. Yet we both believe it is essential to arrest the continuing retrograde dynamic here and in the region. This begins with honesty first and foremost to the people who have suffered the consequences of a collective failure on our part: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s citizens, however they identify. There is a reason – a rational one! – why the citizens of this country are the most dissatisfied people in the region, why they feel the least hope for a better future, and why more of them claim that they will not vote in the next elections than any of their neighbours. We can only encourage change and overcome the deficit in popular trust ourselves by demonstrating that we get it. So, we are willing to take that necessary risk to our own positions to finally get out of this feedback loop.
I’ll begin with my own Office. What the Peace Implementation Council discovered the hard way in the first years after Dayton was that the primary concern of the political leaders who signed the Accords, or those for whom they signed as proxies, was ensuring their control of what they grabbed during the war. Their will to meet their black-letter Dayton obligations was low, to say the least. So, 28 years ago, the PIC endowed Carlos Westendorp and all who came after him with the now famous Bonn Powers, to ensure compliance with the Accords by all concerned. And thus began an accelerating wave of progress which all could see and feel. When the door opened to the EU and NATO in 1999, this no longer sounded like a fantasy novel, but a genuine possibility. By 2006, this country had a unified armed forces, to give but one example.
Furthermore, contrary to the sad, shopworn talking points of some veteran critics of this Office, most of these institutions and procedures were not imposed by my predecessors but agreed between the entities and then adopted through Parliament. But this was only feasible because the unity and strength of the EU and NATO, in particular, behind this Office (which was for some of this period double-hatted with the EU Special Representative) was evident. Furthermore, the strategy wiring all these coordinated international and Bosnian elements together was largely assembled here, in this Office. And the chief beneficiaries were you, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is easy to forget that optimism; I was following it from the Bundestag back then. But so many of you lived it and often recount it to me in intimate, animated, wistful detail. The 10th anniversary was probably the peak of this optimism. The assumptions that were made then have since been proven overconfident – even complacent. That the fruits of progress were irreversibly durable. That the only open question was the velocity of progress, not whether it would occur at all. That our ‘partners’ among Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political class would remain so even if the incentives for that progress changed. And that they would be motivated to do the necessary work by the positive inducement of EU and NATO membership. All that has since been demonstrated absolutely wrong. But we’ve never owned up to it or changed our tune. Until today.
While my job is clear and limited – to enforce Dayton’s terms, in concert with the deterrent/peace enforcement mechanism now embodied in EUFOR Althea, commanded by Major General Florin-Marian Barbu (nods to him) – it’s clear that Dayton is an evolutionary dead end for this country’s development as a functioning society, let alone as a potential member of NATO or the EU. Its prime beneficiaries are political leaders, who have no incentive to make things better. They get to keep what they stole, keep stealing, and remain unaccountable – both legally and, sadly, politically too. They’ve demonstrated that they are individually interchangeable in terms of the survival of this initiative destroying machine.
I hate to say it as a career politician, but no wonder you voters puzzle over whom to vote for! You’ve had damn near everything on the menu at least once; you know how bitter the taste and unpleasant the indigestion… You have all for too long lived in a warped Dayton system that has devolved to favour [and enrich] its prime beneficiaries even more than it had at the outset. They now openly advocate optimising it further to make the system even more feudal, leader-centric, and unaccountable. This must be confronted. And that is what we will do.
I’ve already taken up too much airtime. I will pass the floor to Luigi to show the right direction to a real future.
Soreca: Thank you, Christian! No pressure then [chuckles amiably].
We come to both praise Dayton for what it delivered – peace – but also tell you that to advance toward a future, the people of this country must consign Dayton to history in favour of something better. But you, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, can only do that together. And we [turning to Schmidt] have to finally make it easier for you to do so.
As you know, we just issued a really damning country report for Bosnia and Herzegovina. There was no progress on a majority of the points we assessed with regard to this country’s progress toward EU standards. And some of our civic partners, who live this stuff, still observed – no doubt with good reason – that we were actually too kind… So it’s evident that the will among this country’s politicians has been lacking not just for that reporting period, but reaching way back across that 20-year span Christian explained.
This has gone on so long that one can easily overlook the fact that there was a time when Bosnia and Herzegovina led the pack, with [now North] Macedonia, as an aspirant to join the Union. Its relative regional standing degraded as this country’s politicians grew confident that they defined the terms of engagement to join our club. They made a bet that they could get us to lower our standards. And while I can’t speak for NATO, I can be reasonably confident [looking to NATO HQ commander Brig.Gen. Matthew Valas] that this is simply not so for the Union or the Alliance [Valas nods].
What’s given these politicians such confidence? Partly just getting away with it at no cost (or a modest one) for so long. But also recognition that their business model – remember, I was an organised crime prosecutor in Sicily before my career at the Commission, so I recognised this ugly reality very quickly – could rely on our indulgence.
Part of this was simply out of the bureaucratic staple of not wanting to admit a mistake to those at the political commanding heights. The political elites in this country decided that they could wield their capacity to generate chaos and instability as an extractive tool from both you and us. Why would they change if they didn’t have to?
They also saw that many in the Union viewed the Office of the High Representative and often EUFOR as well as anachronisms and impediments to the ‘membership perspective’, rather than as an essential enabler and force multiplier to realising the success and full promise of that perspective. And not just in this country, but Serbia, Montenegro, and – I know I will catch hell for this – member state Croatia, too.
Bosnia’s becoming an open question again – after we’d successfully closed it! – almost 20 years ago impeded the democratic development of all the immediate neighbours, by keeping the nationalist dream alive among their leaders. They have dusted off their old agendas and appetites, while dressed up as statesmen on the EU stage. And this serves reactionary actors further afield – sadly in all directions…
Citizens of this country know from brutal experience that the only winners of the last war are those who run things in this country now, in their new-model black Audis that you pay for. The rest of you – whatever you did then, if you were around – lost. And you know it. Lost loved ones. Lost treasured friendships. Lost cherished homes in places you loved and where your ancestors lived for generations. Lost dignity that comes from living in a society that is fair, and functions. And worse yet, lost hope in the future.
So today, we’re here to say that on this 30th anniversary, we are restarting the engine that once made this country’s progress, and optimism, genuinely possible: our strategic, assertive institutional partnership.
Because, to reiterate a point Christian made – we get it. We see that Dayton Bosnia is an evolutionary dead-end. Sure, theoretically it can be amended. But what incentive do these guys have to change a system that was already designed to work for them, other than to make it work even better…for them? And even worse for you.
When I began preparing to come here, I was told so many times “it’s so complex”. But now I recognise that while one’s initial impression is of complexity, that is part of its defence and maintenance mechanism. It’s actually really simple in its essence. This place under Dayton has the façade of a democracy, but the operating system of an oligarchy. The true ‘coordination mechanism’ is a handful of phone numbers. And the people who occupy offices are often not those with the real power. Yet unfortunately, we’ve been willing to play the game. Until today.
Christian? [motioning Generals Barbu and Valas to step forward to join them at the lectern].
Schmidt: Grazie, Luigi. What this means going forward is quite straightforward. For me and this Office – as well as EUFOR – it means that we will enforce the bad old rules of Dayton until the people of this country assemble behind a new set of rules. That would start with a social contract. I know we need one, but I and EUFOR cannot make that happen. We can only create a conducive environment for it, by radically reducing the scope for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political class to leverage fear and patronage.
Soreca: My Delegation will pick up from there to assist in catalysing such a genuine popular social contract – which Dayton could never be – protected from the inherent corruption of prevailing formal and informal politics. To be viable, this would need to garner the support of a supermajority of the country’s people, representing each self-described community. If it coalesces, this could then be codified into a new, post-Dayton constitution. Only when that political operating system is in place and functioning can the enforcement mechanisms cease.
Until then, we’ll work in concert to ensure that citizens know they are in a safe and secure environment and that – pardon the allusion, “no one should dare to beat you!” But we’ll also stop bankrolling misbehaviour in the hope of softening it, or declaring progress in the hope of it becoming real. We know by now it won’t.
We’ll redirect resources to our true partners in this society: citizens who want to live under clear, fair rules that they can arrive at together. And we’ll facilitate their efforts to come to that vision. Not with a prescription or a script. But clarity on what our requirements are, if you want to join our clubs. And real support on making a better system for everyone, listening to you, from communities like this, and building from the bottom-up.
Schmidt: For it ought to be self-evident, that Dayton Bosnia will never be able to enter the EU or NATO due to its own dysfunctionality – and the risks it poses to our already strained Union and Alliance. The European Commission’s 2019 Avis and subsequent Priebe report made that clear. But this reality has since been soft-pedalled by all involved – both in the PIC Steering Board and the EU. It demands regular articulation and emphasis.
Soreca: Right. Christian kicked our remarks off; I will now conclude them. We have deep, strong belief in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its people and their common future among democracies. We have zero faith in the Dayton system getting you there. So, to twist Ronald Reagan’s dictum for the moment, our posture will be to distrust and verify in our necessary engagements with the Bosnia and Herzegovina authorities, while recognising our real partners are you, the people of this country. Let’s put them out of business together.
