http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/e ... uture.aspx

A Three-Entity Bosnia

If Bosnians are unsatisfied with muddling through, they must cut the Gordian knot of their constitution. One way would be to give the Croats the entity they want. The FBiH would be split into two entities, with a Bosniak and Croat majority respectively.
To avoid “third entity” language toxic for Bosniaks, a federal district around Sarajevo could be added as a fourth entity. The RS could remain as it is, since a large majority of its residents support its continued existence. That option was explored in
the 2008 initiative, and it may return in the future. Croat leaders insist that any new dispensation must include control of their own middle level of government, with executive, legislative and judicial branches. There is nothing inherently wrong with a Croat entity. It would solve many problems: there would be no further need for cantons, and relations between state and entity, and between entity and municipality, could be consistent throughout Bosnia. Instead of a tangled federation of entities and peoples, the country would be a normal federation of territorial units, a design with many successful European examples. Ethnic quotas could be replaced by regional representation and protection of fundamental human rights.

At the beginning, FBiH was a federation not of cantons but of two political communities and the areas they controlled: the “Muslim-Croat Federation”. The federal partners were the rump Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina headquartered in Sarajevo with its army, and the breakaway Croatian Community (later Republic) of Herceg- Bosna, with its military wing, the Croatian Defence Council. Traces of Herceg-Bosna persist, notably in the electricity utility Elektroprivreda HZ H-B, which covers most areas of Croat habitation. Croat leaders cite this to illustrate their vision for selfrule. The utility’s structure, divided into several non-contiguous areas, is in this
view a model for a future Croat-majority political unit. The Croatian postal service is another vestige. The main obstacle to a Croat-majority entity is political: it is highly offensive to Bosniaks. Yet, rationales for their rejection ring hollow. A senior SDA leader ruled
out the entity because its leaders allegedly would call a referendum and secede. RS has not done this, and a small, scattered Croat unit would lack capability to break away and face opposition from Zagreb and Brussels. Others have emotional objections to realisation of the wartime “dream” of Herceg-Bosna, an ethnically clean Croat territory achieved by war crimes. Some simply ask the international community to
rule a third entity out of bounds.

http://www.peacefare.net/?p=20281


ICG’s unfortunate Bosnia finale
Posted in Balkans - 16 July 2014 by Daniel Serwer - 1 comment
I feel an obligation to explain my tweet from last week:

#Bosnia’s Future http://bit.ly/1tvlLch @CrisisGroup shows again analytical prowess does not entail good policy judgment, or even clarity.

One hundred forty characters really does not allow for a full explanation. So here goes, in 900 words.

The ICG report is correct in fingering the Dayton constitution as the culprit responsible for the country’s current dysfunction. But when it comes to discussion of what to do about the dysfunction, it meanders into a thicket of ill-defined options, premised on this key phrase: “the Croats are a fundamental difficulty”:

In Dayton, they were forced to merge with the Bosniaks in the FBIH [Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina], partly due to the West’s effort to expatiate its sense of guilt for allowing a genocidal war of ethnic separation to go so far.

This is wrong factually, historically and (contrary to what I tweeted about prowess) analytically. No one forced them, there was no “merger,” it did not happen at Dayton and it was not done to expiate guilt feelings.

The Federation was created more than a year and a half before Dayton, in order to stop the fighting between Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims to Americans). The Bosniaks were winning that war against the Croats but needed to stop it because it prevented them from success in the war against the Serbs, which raged simultaneously. The Croats were having their clocks cleaned, with disastrous consequences for their presence in central Bosnia.

The Americans and the UN convinced Croatian President Tudjman that continuing the Muslim/Croat war would result in a “non-viable, rump Islamic state in central Bosnia that would be a platform for Iranian terrorism in Europe” (I’m quoting from many memos to the Secretary of State).

Tudjman saw the danger of such an entity on his border and decided it would be better to form a Federation, provided it offered absolute equality between Croats and Bosniaks (and he wanted it confederated to Croatia, something that was never done). The Bosniaks, who numbered at least twice and likely close to three times the population of Croats, agreed to this patently disadvantageous formula because a) it would enable them to focus on fighting the Serbs, b) Tudjman controlled the flow of arms from the Adriatic into the Bosniak-controlled territory.

At Dayton, the Croats were anxious–even determined–to maintain the Federation, because it gave them a large measure of self-governance in a structure they thought would guarantee–through its group rights provisions and ethnic quotas–dominance of Croat nationalists. They also insisted on one-third of the central Bosnian “state” government and got what they asked for. I know because Kresimir Zubak, then the (Croat) President of the Federation, came to me and asked that the Americans reduce the six (or was is seven?) member presidency to just three, one seat reserved each for a Croat, Bosniak and Serb.

The ICG report thus goes badly wrong when it suggests that the Croats need to get a better deal in the future than they got at Dayton, when they got an excellent deal that reflected their strong wartime cards. Today, they no longer have a stranglehold over central Bosnia, which is accessible from the north and east as well as the south. When asked, Croats are hard-pressed to cite specific examples of disadvantage in a Bosnia that does largely leave them to govern themselves, at least in those cantons of the Federation where they are the majority. Their one consistent complaint is that the current Croat member of the the presidency is not a nationalist and may have been elected by a margin smaller than the number of Bosniaks who voted for him.

That makes him an interethnic hero in American eyes, but it makes him insufficiently Croat in nationalist Croat eyes. The nationalists want no serious competition for that seat from non-nationalists. It is interesting to note that the analogous thing happened when Vojislav Kostunica beat Slobodan Milosevic in the Yugoslav election of 2000, by a margin smaller than the number of non-Serbs who voted for him. I never heard Serbs complain about that.

But I wander from the ICG report, which takes the Croat question as fundamental and then spins four possible options. The first is a vague muddling through that takes as its starting point a proposal from several years ago that blew up over boundaries. The second proposes a third, Croat entity, without worrying about its boundaries. Even Zagreb’s fantasists think the time for that has passed. The third proposes three non-territorial communities, cover for creation of a “virtual” Croat entity. The fourth simply dissolves the Federation, which under today’s conditions would mean independence for Republika Srpska and three-way partition of Bosnia.

Only in the fifth, shortest option does ICG doff its thinking cap to “federal but liberal Bosnia”:

The simplest solution is also the most radical: abolish entities and cantons and build the state anew without reference to community rights, protecting only individual rights.

The eleven lines devoted to this proposition betray it as a throw-away, meant to satisfy those of us in the international community thought to harbor it as our preference, but not worthy of more than cursory attention.

Oddly, ICG never does discuss returning to the 2006 “April package,” which it describes as “the nearest BiH got to comprehensive constitutional reform.” Not surprising, as the April package would not satisfy Croat nationalist ambitions, which is the not so hidden agenda lurking in this unfortunate finale to ICG’s long series of reports on Bosnia, many of which are far more worth reading than this one.

More on the April package option in a future post.

Daniel Serwer is hardly an impartial observer. In fact, he is very partial to the vision of a Muslim dominated Bosnia, obscured by a cloak of "individual rights" which obscure the fact that such a setup would see a "terror of the majority", and a winner takes all electoral system which is incompatible with multi-national states. He is a frequent fixture in Sarajevo media.

The Dayton agreement that was struck didn't favour the Croats in any particular way, and the concepts of parity in the key institutions date all the way back to the foundations of the modern B&H, struck in 1943 by the communists - reflecting the power sharing agreement and balance between the three constituent people.

He goes on to obscure Zeljko Komsic's election to the Croat seat of the presidency. The fact is that there is hardly anyone left in Bosnia (Bosnian Muslim leaders included) that doesn't acknowledge that he was elected by the Bosniaks, and that this was a grave error in judgment as it led to a deterioriation of Croat-Bosniak relations, and gave the Serbs in RS additional arguments against closer integration. Every vote count proved without any doubt that Komsic's percentage of the vote in Croatian cantons and municipalities was in the single digits. Since when was electoral engineering something to be proud about.

I also take issue with his inflammatory language regarding the war in Central Bosnia. No Mr. Serwer, a minority being chased out by a majority, accompanied with war crimes and ethnic cleansing isn't having their "clocks cleaned". Would he accept that those Muslims in Srebrenice had their "clocks cleaned"?