Ethnic Hostility Still Foils Bosnia Peace, Many Say

After almost three years and more than $10 billion, the political battle to wrest control of Bosnia from hard-line nationalists is showing few signs of success, exasperated observers say.

Confirmed believers in the West’s efforts to cement the peace in this war-shattered country still insist that the international community’s carrot-and-stick strategy is working. They say the official results of this month’s elections, expected Thursday, will prove that, and they point to the apparent defeat of hard-liner Momcilo Krajisnik, the Serbian member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency.

But to pessimists such as Bosnian analyst Jakob Finci, the elections only confirmed that Western efforts to rebuild Bosnia-Herzegovina are failing because they haven’t done enough to break down the country’s ethnic barriers.

“We have wasted 30 months of time without reaching the point where we can start to think as people from one country,” Finci said. “We are still speaking like three ethnic groups from Bosnia.”

The West’s favorite Serbian candidate, moderate nationalist Biljana Plavsic, conceded defeat Monday to hard-liner Nikola Poplasen. In the race to become president of the country’s Bosnian Serb entity, Poplasen had campaigned against closer integration of Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups--Serbs, Muslims and Croats.

In the lead-up to the vote, supporters of Poplasen’s Serbian Radical Party, and even some of its leaders, threatened to attack officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who oversaw the vote, the election supervisors have charged. The OSCE disqualified other candidates for similar threats or hatemongering.

The decision to let Poplasen’s candidacy stand prompted speculation that the OSCE and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s stabilization force in Bosnia, known as SFOR, left Poplasen alone out of fear that striking him from the ballot would provoke a violent backlash.

Diplomats admitted privately that the U.S. and some West European governments were disappointed that election supervisors didn’t disqualify Poplasen.

But U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard sharply denied that Bosnian Serb radicals had scared foreign officials into backing off.

“Nobody’s going to be intimidated--neither SFOR nor the rest of the international community--by threats like that,” Gelbard said.

“If they think that kind of rhetoric will be useful to them again, then they will probably be tragically miscalculating the situation,” he said. “I would say that not only for [Serbian] radicals but for any other extremists in this country.”

One encouraging development to the West is hard-liner Krajisnik’s apparent loss to moderate Zivko Radisic, a Western diplomat said Tuesday, speaking on condition he not be named. He cited unofficial results in claiming Krajisnik’s loss.

Krajisnik, a close ally of indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, was such a tough obstacle to progress in Bosnia’s Serbian entity, known as Republika Srpska, that his defeat is “the single most important issue in the campaign,” the diplomat insisted.

Yet even die-hard supporters of the West’s peace efforts in Bosnia concede that the rabid nationalism that fueled the country’s 3 1/2-year war is still far from defeated.

“It was clear from this campaign that there was nothing magic out there that suddenly had removed the hard-liners of any persuasion from the political scene,” said a senior Western diplomat, who also spoke on condition he not be named.

“They were, and are, in that position,” he said, “because they still represent potent political forces.”

Still, Bosnia’s Serbian, Croatian and Muslim hard-liners are gradually losing ground as memories of a vicious war recede and people see a payoff from peace, the diplomat argued.

Foreign governments have spent about $4 billion on reconstruction and development in Bosnia since its war ended in 1995, according to the World Bank.

About 30,000 NATO troops enforcing the peace are even more costly. The U.S. alone is spending about $2 billion a year on its military contingent here, which numbers more than 7,000.

“For us, it is clear that as long as the foreign troops--NATO and the Americans--are on the ground, we will have peace because everybody is afraid to do something,” said Finci, a leader of Sarajevo’s tiny Jewish community who also heads a private group promoting democracy.

“But without reconciliation between the people of Bosnia, everything will be useless.”

Diplomats from the Contact Group, the international body that coordinates peace efforts in Bosnia, are scheduled to meet at Washington’s request in London by month’s end to decide their next moves in the wake of the elections.

During a visit in August, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put Bosnians on notice that Washington wouldn’t send more money to areas that elected leaders who didn’t cooperate.

“Aid is a privilege, not an entitlement,” Albright said, amid warnings that the West will also start pressing harder on the most difficult issues here, such as the return of refugees to their homes.

But foreign powers are trying to do the impossible by building democracy and free markets all at once in a country that knew only a Communist dictatorship before war tore it apart, Finci said.

He said the only workable solution is for the West to declare Bosnia a protectorate--and, instead of forcing through only the most difficult decisions, to dictate every one.

“It’s clear that with this ‘stick and carrot,’ they cannot achieve good results,” Finci said. “So they can use a stick for two years, after that a carrot, and after three years, elections.

“In the meantime, Mother Nature will do something and some of the politicians, I think, will disappear.”