The Balkans After Mladic

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Essay

The Death of Dayton

Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western

Bosnia was once a poster child for successful postwar reconstruction; today, it is on the verge of collapse. The 1995 Dayton accord ended a war, but it also created a fractured polity ripe for exploitation by ethnic chauvinists. 

The Serbian government’s May 26 arrest of Ratko Mladic, the military leader of the Serb forces during the Bosnian war, renewed international focus on the Balkans. Around 2005, after nearly a decade of postconflict state building, the world had assumed that it had successfully pacified Bosnia and could wind down its efforts in the country. NATO and the European Union reduced the size of their security presence, even signaling that after Paddy Ashdown’s term as high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina ended in 2006, they would close the Office of High Representative, which the international community created to coordinate and implement the civilian aspects of the peace accord that ended the Bosnian war.

Yet Bosnia’s institutions were not yet ready to stand on their own. When we wrote about the region in “The Death of Dayton” (September/October 2009), the political and economic situation there was in decline. The Dayton Accords had put in place a dual-entity structure, which created two semi-independent states, one for Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, and one for Serbs. The decentralized political system was born out of a necessity to compromise to end the war. But, when coupled with resurgent ethnic nationalism, it blocked Bosnia’s weak central government from addressing any of the country’s major needs, including improving education and health care, regulating businesses, and reforming the pension and social security systems.

Since 2009, the situation in Bosnia and the Balkans has only worsened. In Bosnia, political and economic reforms have languished, as the global financial crisis has further undercut weak and vulnerable economies; international interest has waned even more; and nationalist sentiment has resurged, especially in Republika Srpska (RS, the Serbian entity of Bosnia). Meanwhile, Kosovo’s still-unresolved political status, ethnic divisions, and high unemployment have contributed to domestic frustration and anxiety there.

Yet Mladic’s arrest is one bright spot, demonstrating that international law can help the international community fulfill its promises to the region -- and to the Bosnian war’s victims. Over the past decade, officials in Belgrade and the RS have routinely written off transitional justice, arguing that it was not necessary, and would even be counterproductive, to peace and stability. They routinely suggested that arresting Mladic would outrage Serbs in the region, possibly triggering renewed ethnic violence and destabilizing both Bosnia’s and Serbia’s democratic transitions.

Their fears resonated in the European Union, where officials wanted to avoid any actions that could upset the fragile peace. Although both Washington and Brussels officially demand Serbia’s cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as a precondition for membership in the European Union and NATO, they have often backed off pressuring Serbia to do so. For example, in 2006, NATO allowed Serbia to join its Partnership for Peace, even though both Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were widely believed to still be living in the country.

To be sure, ICTY’s checkered implementation did not help its cause. The 1993 creation of the ICTY did little to stem the ongoing Bosnian war’s violence. The genocide at Srebrenica, for which Mladic was indicted for war crimes, occurred two years after the international court was established. Critics note that, at a cost of more than $2 billion, the ICTY has indicted fewer than 200 people. And surveys conducted throughout the Balkans suggest that most people either are unaware of the ICTY’s trials or continue to see its activities as ethnically charged.

Still, criticisms of the ICTY miss a broader point. The ICTY has persistently retained its focus on individual accountability and helped remove all of the war’s major criminals from power. It is the only institution that has made addressing the past its primary purpose, and its doggedness has paid off. Mladic’s arrest on May 26 was directly prompted by the much-anticipated June 6 2011 report by the ICTY’s chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, to the UN Security Council on Serbia’s cooperation with the ICTY. Shortly before Mladic’s arrest, portions of the report were leaked, revealing that Brammertz planned a sharp rebuke of Belgrade for its failure to arrest Mladic and the Croatian Serb wartime leader Goran Hadzić.