Source: Washington Post
It doesn't take long to get from Croatia's sparkling coastline -- flush with palm trees, lush resorts and Italian tourists -- to the heart of Croatian nationalism. Heading north from Dubrovnik recently, I turned right off the coastal road and followed the aqua-blue Neretva River. Half an hour later, I crossed into the independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Suddenly, Croatian flags proliferated. They hung over main streets and from government buildings. Cars sported Croatian license plates. Bosnia's Croats, it seems, don't want to be part of Bosnia.
Ten years ago, the United States and its allies began to build a nation out of three warring ethnic groups. In December 1995, 20,000 U.S. troops and almost 30,000 from other NATO countries flooded across the Sava River to end a genocidal war and impose a constitution written by Western diplomats. Bosnia, they said, would be a unified, multiethnic state. Yet they also crafted a clumsy federal structure that made major concessions to separatism for the Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, most of whom profess unwillingness to live in a Muslim-dominated state. (Bosnia's generally secular Muslims -- ethnically and linguistically indistinguishable from the country's Serbs and Croats -- are about half the population.)
It was a different world when the Bosnia mission began. Humanitarian intervention -- not terrorism or Iraqi insurgents -- preoccupied the Clinton administration. The European Union was beginning a dramatic expansion eastward and was full of hope. Now, with the United States consumed with Iraq and Afghanistan, and Europe coping with economic sclerosis, Islamic unrest and a failed constitution, Bosnia has faded from public view. But the quiet campaign to salvage a small Muslim-Christian state on the edge of Europe limps on.
Fifty miles inland, the Neretva River meanders to the city of Mostar. Sharply divided between Croats and Muslims, machine-gun fire chewed whole city blocks to a pulp during the war. Afterward, the European Union decided to make Mostar a showcase. Money has poured in, and glassy new buildings have risen next to bombed-out facades. The centerpiece of Mostar's revival is the fabled Stari Most -- the bridge spanning the Neretva that Ottoman Turks constructed in 1566. In November 1993, Croat forces sent it crashing into the river in one of the war's most wanton acts. Last year, it was rebuilt.
Metaphors proved irresistible at the bridge's dedication in July 2004. "There is another bridge as clearly visible as Stari Most -- a bridge which Bosnia needs to cross," intoned Chris Patten, a European Union minister. "On the other side one can clearly see Bosnia's future: a European future. Your country will cross that bridge one day soon, I hope, to join us in the wider European family."
Only a short walk from the bridge, however, is another kind of construction. Mostar's Muslims and Croats are apparently locked in a fierce competition to see who can construct the highest house of worship. Precariously tall Catholic steeples glower across the river at gargantuan new mosques, some built with funding from Saudi Arabia.
Still, on the chilly day I visited, Stari Most actually looked like a bridge to Europe. A stream of visitors -- Spanish nuns, British tourists, French gendarmes and German troops -- passed over its smooth white stones. The German soldiers by the bridge were armed only with cameras. There is no Bosnian insurgency, and not a single NATO soldier has died in combat since 1995. During that time, the peacekeeping force has dwindled to 7,000 from more than 50,000. Eight years ago, when I was living in Bosnia, NATO troops in Humvees and armored cars seemed to be around every bend; now, they appear only fleetingly.
The violent and the deranged had their day in Bosnia. For three years in the early 1990s, they strutted around like lords, carved out fiefdoms and terrorized civilians. Society turned upside down; even besieged Sarajevo sometimes turned to criminals for its defense. The ferocity of the fighting led opponents of international intervention to despair. How could Western soldiers ever stop the bloodshed? And yet, after a brief and forceful intervention, it happened. Perhaps the combatants were exhausted. Perhaps the schizophrenic Dayton Accords -- the 1995 document that ended the war and established the framework for peace -- showed all sides a face they liked. Perhaps the huge peacekeeping force stilled all thoughts of violent resistance.
Whatever the reason, nationalist politicians opted for a campaign of political resistance in lieu of insurgency. First, they obstructed the return of refugees displaced during the war. Then they impeded the arrest of war criminals and fought the unification of the armed forces. At every step of the way, international overseers have had to cajole and coerce the nationalists of all stripes that Bosnian voters have stubbornly returned to office. The war's aftermath has not been bloody, but it has been bruising. International officials have fired dozens of elected nationalist politicians. Others have been carted off to the Hague tribunal as war crimes suspects.
For the last three years, the man responsible for the Bosnian state-building project has been Paddy Ashdown, the former leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats. His spare office overlooks Sarajevo's own river, the Miljacka, which runs from the city's charming downtown to its ponderous, Communist-era suburbs. When I interviewed Ashdown, the former Royal Marine commando looked tired and sounded testy. I asked whether the Serbs and Croats were committed to a unified state. "Ten years ago, they fought a war of genocide designed to ethnically obliterate the other," he said. "Do you expect them suddenly in 10 years' time to believe in the country that they fought not to exist?"
I asked about Bosnia's schools, which are often still segregated by ethnicity and stocked with nationalist textbooks. "Have you ever been to Belfast?" he snapped, insisting that Bosnian schools are no more divided. I conceded that I hadn't. "Well, try going there."
A mile from Ashdown's office, in the city's old quarter, a vendor hawked a cartoon of the British diplomat, scepter in hand, ruling over the country's squabbling politicians. Ashdown admits that his title -- High Representative -- is something out of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. "I have power that should make a liberal blush," he has said. Ashdown used those illiberal powers during my stay to nix an effort by Sarajevo's authorities to name the international airport after the revered Alija Izetbegovic, the former president who died two years ago. Slapping the name of the wartime Muslim leader on the airport, he decided, was simply too provocative. "Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of where they reside in Bosnia and Herzegovina and their ethnicity, have a right to land in their capital, at an airport which represents a consensus and which makes them feel proud and pleased to come home," he said.
Awkwardly for Ashdown, the next week marked the anniversary of Izetbegovic's death. And so on a brilliant Saturday in October, the High Representative gamely traveled to a hilltop cemetery overlooking the city to attend the ceremony. With Sarajevo's diplomatic community and the city's establishment crowded into the cemetery, a Muslim cleric read prayers in Arabic and delivered a short sermon that seemed pointed at Ashdown. "Our right to remember Alija Izetbegovic is our right to freedom," he said. "Denying that remembrance in any way denies us our freedom." Izetbegovic was more than a president, he was "the symbol of our dignity, our Bosnian rising, and our Muslim existence." As the ceremony ended, the loudspeakers hung on the minarets around the cemetery crackled as Sarajevo's mosques burst into prayer.
European leaders are hoping that the prospect of joining the EU will sand down the jagged edges of Bosnian politics. This fall, Ashdown played the Europe card for all it was worth as he lobbied Bosnian Serb politicians to accept a unified police force. Bosnians, Ashdown lectured, "want their politicians to lead this country forward into modern Europe, not chain it to its past." After months of wrangling, the Serbs yielded. The EU instantly opened negotiations with Bosnia, a tentative first step toward membership. "From today the agenda has changed," Ashdown exulted, "and from tomorrow Bosnia is another country."
In another country is where most Bosnian Serbs would like to be. Banja Luka, the capital of the Serb "republic" within Bosnia, is a three-hour drive northwest from Sarajevo toward the heart of Europe. In May 1993, Serbs destroyed its famed Ferhadija mosque and all 15 others as part of a campaign to erase the Muslim presence. Driving into Banja Luka, I spotted a few lonely minarets in nearby villages. Supported by the United Nations and international donors, some Muslim refugees have trickled back to their homes. Yet very few have returned to the downtown, and the spot where the Ferhadija mosque stood is now a vacant lot surrounded by a 10-foot-high wall, almost as if the city itself were embarrassed by the savagery.
Some Serbs may now be remorseful about the war's atrocities, but none that I spoke to, even the most moderate, seemed willing to create a genuinely multiethnic state by surrendering the enclave that Serb forces brutally carved out during the war. Only a handful of Serbs would even consider giving up their autonomy, estimates Branko Todorovic, a Serb human rights activist. "Neither Serbs nor Croats want to be on the margins," he said. Afraid of being overwhelmed by Bosnia's Muslims, they cling tenaciously to their ethnic brethren in neighboring Serbia and Croatia. With the guns silent, the passion and fear erupt in other ways. When the Serbian soccer team defeated Bosnia's side in an October qualifying match, jubilant Bosnian Serbs in Banja Luka thronged the streets while a sullen Sarajevo watched.
Nation-building in Bosnia -- one-fifth the size of Iraq -- is really just beginning. It's a convoluted process, and the absence of blood keeps the camera crews away. Yet the thankless diplomatic slog is making a unified state possible. And someday, Bosnians may even root for it together.
David Bosco is senior editor at Foreign Policy magazine. He worked in and reported from Bosnia between 1996 and 1998.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/23/AR2005122301960.html