Bosnia and Herzegovina

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is easy to forget how close the Yugoslav succession crises came, during the 1990s, to destroying or at least severely damaging both the UN and NATO, not to speak of the appalling death toll culminating in the genocide of Srebrenica; and to forget how those crises ended the golden era when, following the reversal of Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait, it looked as though the international community was really going to live up to the precepts of the UN charter. We should not forget those events, and we owe a debt to the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, for reminding us that, now, even the second-best outcome to the Bosnian war—the compromises reached at Dayton—are under severe threat, and that even the much solider outcome to the Kosovo crisis is not yet safely consolidated.

Both these settlements are at some risk: both are challenged by Serbian separatist movements in Bosnia and Kosovo encouraged by the authorities in Belgrade, albeit surreptitiously. The success of either would be highly welcome to Vladimir Putin, who would see their progress as a counterpart to his own aggression against Ukraine.

What is to be done to prevent these risks progressing? First, in Bosnia, the UK needs to give the firmest support to press ahead with the appointment of an international representative with proper powers, whose task will be to resist the attempts of Republika Srpska to destroy or render inoperable the provisions of the Dayton agreements. Are we doing that? Are we considering making a peacekeeping contribution to the EU’s deployment in Bosnia—Operation Althea—which surely fits well, does it not, with the Government’s commitment to strengthening the European pillar of our defence?

The long-term solutions to both Bosnia and Kosovo must surely lie in the accession of both of them, as well as that of Serbia, to the EU. Unfortunately, due to Brexit, we have no say or influence over those decisions, but we need to realise that the success or failure of those membership applications will affect our own security, just as the turmoil in the Balkans did in the 1990s—a realisation at which we arrived all too slowly during the period when I was Britain’s Permanent Representative at the UN .

One thing we could do is to increase our co-operation with all the countries of the western Balkans in combating international crime, which plagues both them and us. Can the Minister tell the House what we are doing now in that respect and what we are planning to do in the future?