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29th Mar 2024

EU entry carrot not enough for Bosnia, NGO says

  • The EU should take over as the key player in Bosnia, argues the NGO (Photo: EUPM)

The EU should take over as the main international player in Bosnia after the UN's office in the ex-Yugoslav country is closed by the end of this year, according to a new NGO report which also suggests Europe needs more than just enlargement promises to overcome Bosnia's ethnic divisions.

The new report by International Crisis Group published on Thursday (15 February) argues that "the international community has not yet reached a point where it can safely declare victory and leave [Bosnia]", which remains "badly scarred" by the 1992-1995 war.

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The document comes days before the gathering on 27 February of the Peace Implementation Council, an international body which guards the implementation of the Dayton Agreement that brought the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995.

The council should decide in which way the international community would remain present in the country after the closure of the so called Office of the High Representative, currently chaired by UN man Christian Schwarz-Schilling, by the end of 2007.

Mr Schwarz-Schilling's performance last year has been criticised. He announced that he would leave by the middle of this year.

The IGC argues that the council should shift the current powers of the UN's high representative to the EU, to be exercised through its own Special Representative (EUSR).

According to its report, the previous UN people on the ground were supposed to use their powers - which made their office into Bosnia's ultimate authority - to dismiss, where necessary, senior officials and politicians and enact controversial legislation.

But these powers have been hollowed out by "the present incumbent's deliberate and announced reluctance to use them," and also by "dwindling enforcement capability" of EUFOR, an international military force under EU supervision.

The ICG argues that the EU should now establish itself as the key international player in the country, by providing "much larger" funds and use or withhold them as necessary "to persuade Bosnian politicians to make tough decisions and compromises."

"The notions that Bosnia, which is still badly scarred by the 1992-1995 war, could be treated as any other applicant and that the mere attraction of membership at a distant date would suffice to overcome its polarising ethnic nationalism have proven mistaken."

"The EU must deploy new and different policy tools to keep peace implementation and progress toward membership on track," the ICG says.

"Disengagement before essential reform benchmarks are met and self-sustaining institutions established would put at risk all the gains made and the survival of a unified Bosnia, as well as increase the prospect that much of the Western Balkans would return to chaos."

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