Bosnia in the balance

On my first evening with the Bildt team, last December, we were camped around seafood and frites in a Belgian restaurant. The conversation was animated but we were not talking to each other. Everyone at the table was chattering into a mobile phone: the military adviser negotiating the aircraft for Sarajevo; the private secretary arguing about the wording of a joint text; Carl Bildt himself recruiting staff. The post-modern dinner party from hell.

Since then the internationals have moved into Bosnia in force. Not just the 60,000 heavily armed troops but at least 100 civilian organisations, too. Can these teams of superprofessionals led by one of the most tough-minded politicians of them all, Carl Bildt, make a difference?

Few people return from the Balkans with their life or reputation enhanced. How much they have achieved on the ground is always open to question. Negotiators all recall with sympathy the mediator who, when presented with a new idea halfway through a negotiation, announced that he personally liked it but the Serbs would never buy it. "We are the Serbs," came the reply.



This century began in Sarajevo. As the century ends it is some sort of progress that the awfulness here has not brought nations beyond the Balkans into conflict. But we carry the painful awareness that we in Europe, or the "international community" which we invoke, were powerless to prevent the decline into savagery. Whether we could have prevented the worst, no one knows. We could have done better.

But regret is no basis for a policy. The only relevant questions when we leave Bosnia are these: have we done anything to reinforce the values of tolerance and democracy? And are we closer to a new international system that works?

Halfway through this assignment, it could go either way. The conventional wisdom is that making the military provisions of the Dayton agreement stick is going to plan, but the civilian programme is lagging behind. There is some truth in this. Recreating the richness of civil society is a more complex and long term business than disengaging armies-difficult though that is. Admiral Leighton Smith can threaten air strikes in cases of non-compliance. Carl Bildt can, in the first instance, issue press releases.

If we can end the war but not impose a peace, does it really make sense for us to expend huge amounts of capital-financial, political, diplomatic-on Bosnia? The Bosnians may have been ill-treated by their history, but they often seem very little disposed to build peace on the basis we think is sensible.

After 42 months of war it is hardly surprising that the three groups within Bosnia-even the two in the Croat-Muslim confederation-cannot stand the sight of one another. But they are condemned to work together sooner or later. The reason for doing so now is that there will never again be the same constellation of US, European and international involvement-not just in the shape of troops but in the promise of $2 billion aid and more to come if the settlement sticks.

The implications for us, the internationals, are also far reaching. Bosnia's agony was only so protracted because the Europeans and the US saw the conflict in different terms and undermined each other's efforts to help. The moral is that transatlantic co-operation will not guarantee success, but transatlantic discord can guarantee failure.

Carl Bildt is high representative of all of the signatories to the Dayton and Paris peace agreements. He answers to a board which includes the US and Russia, but his constant liaison is with the EU, and in particular the French, British and German governments. A body of case law is being created for future European foreign policy co-operation.

Yet it will all be tainted if Dayton goes wrong. The peace process is under pressure as we aim to achieve refugee return, open media access, free and fair elections, the creation of joint institutions involving the three groups-and all before the end of the year.

One criticism is that we and the military should come off the fence, back the Bosnian government, which all along stood for a multiethnic society, and move speedily to force Serb compliance-whether by escorting Muslim refugees to their homes, or arresting Radovan Karadzic and other war criminals.

But from the start the west decided it would not risk a full scale military enforcement role-seeking a settlement through consent of the parties not the defeat of one. The consent does exist for disengaging the rival armies. In the civilian field, it must be negotiated, persevered at, and sometimes compelled-and with each of the parties, not just the Serbs. For example, Carl Bildt has had to blackmail all parties into releasing prisoners of war through leverage over economic assistance.

It may seem unheroic, especially for those who would have liked a speedy equivalent of the Nuremberg trials and the launching of a new democratic state. But Bosnia today, following its unconcluded civil war, is the most divided society in the world, with the possible exception, as Bildt observes, of Korea.

There is still a place for idealism. Decent Bosnians of all stripes want to make Dayton work. Will their embittered political classes allow it? Whether the internationals, with their mobile phones, laptops and clever ideas about free elections and open media, can really make the difference remains to be seen. But this process will not work without us. We must not turn our backs on Bosnia now.