Bosnia and Herzegovina

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, Bismarck in his later years was believed to have said that the next European war was bound to arise from some,

“silly thing in the Balkans”.

He was prescient, although Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was no mere “silly thing” 100 years ago.

It is testament to the difficulty of dealing with the Balkans that the last war in Europe happened there. I went there shortly before the Dayton accords brought peace, returning several times to help build a democracy —if one could have called it that at the time—through work with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy and its programmes. It was evident, even then, that whatever form the peace took, it would be very difficult.

It will therefore come as no surprise to the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, that I do not share his optimism. Indeed, I share the grave concerns that my noble friend Lord Ashdown has articulated so powerfully about the lack of progress. Dayton was supposed to be a settlement to end the fighting and to bring some governance structure to a deeply divided society. Let us remember that war had left about 100,000 dead, yet 20 years on there is little for the ordinary people in Bosnia to celebrate as a peace dividend. They have had seven general elections in the period since, but still the stratification of the country proceeds along both ethnic and religious lines.

For my part, I see three interlinked problems in the situation there. First, there is the enormously complicated —and in the long run unsustainable—constitutional architecture. While Dayton might have drawn the borders, it did not change the mindset, and the institutional structure serves to entrench separateness. The horse trading that we have seen—even within Bosniak parties over the last decades—is also a sorry sight, but the system provides for it. When politicians are paid six times the average salary, it is unsurprising that a rentier class of politicians holds forth. If political office is the main route to personal financial advancement, it naturally tends towards corruptness. When political identity is so closely identified with group belonging, then naturally any concessions towards the common good are measured as a zero-sum game. Moreover, when one part of a tripartite decision-making process is bent on obstructiveness, as Milorad Dodik has been, in order to demonstrate that the settlement can never succeed, stalemate is naturally the order of the day. Therefore, in a sense, it is some small comfort that his party has lost its seat on the presidency to Mladen Ivanic, although we wait to see whether his rhetoric is less nationalistic or anti-EU.

The second problem is the dire economic situation, which noble Lords across the Chamber mentioned. If nothing changes, that will lead to further unrest. Gone are the days when the high representative presided over a growth in real GDP of some 30%, which had an impact on real wages and living standards. There was a peace dividend at that time. I pay tribute to the time of my noble friend Lord Ashdown there, because it was under him that the somewhat stable period we saw in Bosnia and Herzegovina took place. The unemployment rate is now around 27%, and my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece described how less than 40% of the workforce is in employment. Two-thirds of young people are without jobs. If that is not a cauldron for unrest, I do not know what is. The international community has become distracted by the Middle East and other crises, and partially because of Bosnia’s dysfunctionality, it puts it on a shelf in a box labelled something like, “Too hard to handle but on a slow burn, so we don’t need to worry”. It has stopped applying pressure for change. However, unless we engage soon, we may find the situation becoming even more unresolvable than it is now.

Finally, while the international community might look away from the Balkans for the moment, Russia will not. Putin is a long-standing supporter of Milorad Dodik and his secessionist agenda. Only last week Serbia pulled out the red carpet for Putin in its biggest display of military prowess the two countries have mounted together. The less than helpful role of Serbia—and here I will disagree again with the noble Lord, Lord Lea—should give us cause for concern. We need to be vigilant. As much as Serbia is in Russia’s sphere of influence, so, too, is it our own back yard. Therefore, while Putin vows never to recognise Kosovo’s independence —that was only last week—the deal is that Serbia’s President Nikolic vows never to bow to EU pressure to take part in sanctions against Russia for its role in annexing Crimea.

In conclusion, as regards what we will do, I completely endorse what my noble friend Lord Ashdown said. However, I am a little less optimistic that we can revert to those better times, when he was high representative, without reform of the institutional structure. Let us remind ourselves that the EU representative does not have the powers of the high representative, even though the high representative often did not exercise the Bonn powers—but at least they existed. They were a method of leverage. When they were not exercised, we have to reflect that that was because there was not support from Brussels, which has not played a good hand in this saga.

Public opinion is now turning away from the EU in Bosnia; young people are not interested in an EU future because they do not see it coming, and they see our disengagement. I accept that the new EU plan to bring about economic and social improvements might buy us time, but the structural discrimination that is built in might just mean that what comes now may be too little, too late. I therefore hope that my noble friend the Minister will take this debate as encouragement to prod the FCO and the EU—but also, importantly, to move the United States—to engage again with this very urgent problem.