It's always somebody else's fault...

Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/paddy-ashdown- ... eu-1442932

Paddy Ashdown: Bosnia Failure is Fault of EU

The international community's former high representative in Bosnia, Lord Ashdown, has issued a stark warning to the West on the future of Bosnia claiming that its neglect turned the country into a failed state.

In an interview with IBTimes UK, Paddy Ashdown, high representative from 2002-06, vigorously defended his efforts to strengthen the central state institutions in the wartorn country, encourage refugees to return home, and bring many Bosnian Serb war criminals to justice.

But the former Lib-Dem leader also argued that Bosnia was far from reaching a stable position and for 12 years all the advances previously made had gone into reverse.

"Bosnia and Herzegovina made more progress towards integration and the creation of a functional state than any other post-conflict state anywhere in the world," Ashdown said.

"Then tragically, disastrously, stupidly, the European Union took their foot off the brake and decided that we didn't have to use any influence and leverage any longer.

"I blame in large measure Bosnian politicians for that but I also blame Brussels because if there's anywhere that did not continue to drive forward the political structure that would anchor those gains, it occurred in Bosnia but it also occurred in Brussels."

"Dayton is our floor but it cannot be our ceiling"

During the conflict three million people were driven out of their homes. A million returned.

"Bosnia invented, created the right of refugees normally driven out by war to return home," Ashdown said.

Bosnia became the major battleground in a violent and bitter multi-sided war. According to official estimates, 100,000 people were killed during a conflict in which Bosnian Serb forces carried out ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims across a large part of the country in an effort to create an homogenous Serb territory joining Serbia to Serbian Bosnia and Croatia.

The peace agreement which ended the 1992-95 war, signed in Dayton, Ohio, split the country into two autonomous entities: the Bosnian Federation and Republika Srpska, or Serb Republic.

"I don't think there's any single person that I know of who doesn't believe that Dayton - an untidy peace that it was - was a necessary peace to end the war. In 1995 I know of nobody who wouldn't have preferred an untidy peace to the continuous slaughter of the Bosnian war."

But Dayton also created the seeds of a future crisis. It was based on a decentralised and dysfunctional system of power-sharing that has effectively paralysed central government, scared investors, blocked economic policy and denied prosperity.

Over the last few months, protests have broken out in Bosnia's biggest cities over unemployment, corruption and political stagnation. Unrest began when a protest by workers in Dita and other factories in the industrial city of Tuzla spread to other cities – Sarajevo, Zenica and Mostar – and rioters set fire to government buildings.

Ashdown said the agreement proved unfit for purpose and could not help Bosnia achieve economic prosperity and integration with the EU.

"The problem about Dayton is that it is a barrier to build a sustainable state once the peace has been stabilised," he said. "And what you needed was the leverage of the international community to ensure that Bosnia moved beyond Dayton towards a functional state. When I went to Bosnia I said Dayton is our floor but it cannot be our ceiling."

Secession in Republika Srpska?

All the advances in Bosnia to steer the country towards a modern and functional state – a single army, a single intelligence service, a single judiciary, a single custom service – have been allowed to unravel, according to Ashdown.

In particular, in Republika Srpska, Bosnian Serb politicians led by president Milorad Dodik have undermined efforts to consolidate Bosnia as a unitary state and even called for the Republika Srpska to separate from Bosnia and join Serbia. It sounds like a familiar pattern in Europe.

"In Republika Srpska, arguably the two greatest achievements of Bosnians working with the international community - the creation of a single judiciary and the creation of a VAT system of taxation - have begun to unravel because Milorad Dodik is moving towards secession, and he's unconstrained by the powers of Europe or the international community.

"I regret that greatly."

Ashdown recently visited the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and cautioned that Russia would launch a power-grab in the country as Putin continues his aggressive expansion.

Dodik, who has gone on record as saying that Bosnia was "one unhappy country that needs to be split into three parts", visited Moscow in March and was told by Putin that he should borrow money from Russia instead of the IMF.

Putin's attempts to put pressure on the Serbian government in Belgrade to install pro-Russian ministers is a direct challenge.

Whether the Russian threat in Bosnia is real or not, Ashdown's words resonate in Brussels. Only time will prove him right.

Altered States, Paddy Ashdown, New Statesman, May 28, 1993



Now that Bosnia is, in effect, being carved up (and the Muslims carved out) by joint agreement between the Serbs and the Croats, what future is there for the Vance-Owen plan?



Vance-Owen in its present form may survive a little longer as an agreement around which we can secure an end to the fighting. But as a framework for a long-term solution in Bosnia, it has no useful future. This is not to dismiss the personal triumph of Cyrus Vance and David Owen in obtaining an agreement most people thought impossible.



It is after all not their fault that the dithering of first Europe and now the US has undermined their efforts. Nor that the west has failed to provide the military pressure on the ground that Vance and Owen needed for success at the negotiating table. Nor is is their fault that they were required to preserve what has become unpreservable – the illusion that the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina can somehow be resurrected as a going concern.



Illusions cost lives in war. And the idea that we can recreate Bosnia-Hercegovina as unitary state is an illusion, for which I would not be prepared to risk a single soldier from Britain or anywhere else.



In September last year I travelled with my colleague Sir Russell Johnston through the Croat, Muslim and Serb areas of Bosnia. Even then, it was clear that too much blood had been spilt and too many terrible deeds had been committed for these peoples ever to live in the same communities again. In an understandable mood of exhausted euphoria after his Athens breakthrough, David Owen said that he hoped that people would now return to their old communities and live together as friends. No such thing is remotely possible.



Let us assume, despite Sunday’s referendum and the Serb/Croat carve-up, that the Bosnian Serbs can be brought to sign up to the Vance-Owen peace plan. Let us assume that a ceasefire can then be established. Let us assume that, in contrast to their refusal to give up conquered Croatian territory as agreed under the earlier Vance plan of a year ago, the Serbs can be persuaded to withdraw their troops from Vance-Owen designated Muslim areas (like Srebrenica) for which they have paid such a high price in blood and international opprobrium. What then?



Vance-Owen envisages these areas as being Muslim ruled, but multi-ethnic in composition. So Serb ‘civilians’ would stay behind after their army has left, and the UN would move in to oversee the policing of the area. We may take it that most of these Serb ‘civilians’ will have been members of the very Serb local militias responsible for the worst atrocities against their erstwhile Muslim neighbours. We may also take it that they will retain their own weapons. In which case, we may also take it that no sane Muslims would return ‘home’, even if they were prepared to live in peace again with the murderers of their children and families.



So the UN would be left providing the police for the Serbs in an area designated as Muslim and nominally ruled by a Muslim administration, but without any Muslims. Whatever the words on the document, it does not take a genius to know who would form the de facto power in such areas.



But it would not stop there. While few, if any, Muslim civilians would be likely to return to their homes, Muslim guerrillas would be doing all they could to pay back old scores and drive the Serbs out of ‘their’ areas. This the UN, as the local police, would have to try to stop, so protecting the very Serbs who had been guilty of most of the ethnic cleansing. The UN troops would be subject to attack from all sides in a three-dimensional Northern Ireland, which could go on for ever. The idea of the UN conducting such an operation simply beggars belief.



I have consistently called for tougher action to stop the war in Bosnia. But we have to base that action on reality, not illusion. And the reality is that the only long-term stable structure lies in the establishment of Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croatian areas (which will inevitably over time become subsumed into greater Serbia and greater Croatia) and in the middle a recognised, separate state that provides a safe homeland for the Muslims. I know that rewards aggression and confirms ethnic separation, but that is what happens when you act weakly in the face of aggressors.



If Vance-Owen can be revived, let us, by all means, send the extra forces that are needed to establish the peace in Bosnia. But let them be tasked to do a job that is realistic in its aim and finite in its commitment.



This would require accepting Vance-Owen as a transition mechanism towards the reality of separation rather than the means to attempt an unachievable unity. If, as now seems more likely, Vance-Owen fails, then we should be prepared to expand the safe areas we are at last beginning to establish into a United Nations Protectorate in the remaining Muslim enclaves in Bosnia. The UN should then negotiate just and defensible borders with the Serbs and the Croats. After which, it should administer the protectorate, strengthen its capacity for self-defence, and move it towards self-government and UN withdrawal.



Unlike the Vance-Owen plan, this at least would give us an achievable peace for our soldiers to work for, and a clear way of getting them out at the end.

Republika Srpska's favorite red nosed foreigner, Fatty Assdown, the prime SAS instigator of The Troubles who was sent to B&H to weave peace, is continuing the UK's criminal policies and propaganda in this piece.

Nothing new. All of his anti-RS rhetoric was matched with his encouragemant of greater Bosniak fantasies at the expense of Croats, which only helped solidify and strengthen the UK's project called RS.

The UK and Russian stance was identical in the 1990s.

Paddy's mysterious turn-around has more to do with anti-Russian rhetoric that the UK has to put out on behalf of the US, than what he really thinks or does.

Dear GCHQ readers at the UK embassy which is, along with a certain unnamed embassy that is also involved with the recent "Yogurt Revolution" that Francis Boyle "happened" to call for four months before the fact, that also subsidizes the online English langauge Memorandum II in Belgrade with the who's who of Seral Fribune paid agent provacateurs - long live a free and sovereign Scotland and a United Irish Republic.

Imperialist c_nts.