Warning signal from Bosnia

Bosnia has awoken from years of political lethargy with an explosion of rioting, which has taken most people by surprise. The protests that began earlier this month in Tuzla have spread violently to a dozen other towns where crowds are voicing their rage at poverty, massive unemployment and the corruption and incompetence of their political leaders. The grievances are not new, but they have been kept muffled by expectations of change, and by the terrible memory of a recent ethnic war that devastated this country in the middle of Europe.

For years the apparent stability of Bosnia has concealed a dangerous political impasse. The Dayton Accords of 1995 — which were designed by Washington and put an end to the war between Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs — gave birth to a state that was provisional, labyrinthine and dysfunctional, with two separate national “entities” — Bosnian-Croat and Serb — dozens of centers of power, and a rotational presidency. The model has turned out to be unable to stimulate economic development, and has failed to bring the country closer to membership of the European Union.

The explosion in Bosnia is that of a country without prospects for the foreseeable future, whose exasperation stems from years of inertia and the failure of a ruling class concerned more with their share of power and cronyism than with solving the pressing problems of a country of just over four million citizens. The Bosnian politicians have not even been capable of producing any advance toward constitutional reforms that would enable the country to achieve some approximation to the EU, after the 2009 ruling in which the Strasbourg Court ruled as discriminatory the provision in the Dayton accords that assigns relevant posts in the state exclusively to Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims.

Ethnic grievance

The anger in the streets has little to do with nationalism, but things might not stay this way in a country whose leaders are past masters at transforming popular discontent into ethnic grievance. The paralysis in Bosnia, which is to hold elections in October, is aggravated by the fact that its neighbors are emerging from the abyss of the wars that followed the disintegration of the old Yugoslavia. Croatia is already a member of the EU, Montenegro is negotiating to that end, and Serbia — until recently a pariah state — is moving toward access, under the guidance of former ultra-nationalists. Brussels, which has treated Bosnia as a protectorate, faces an urgent task in the Balkan country. The crisis must move the EU and the US to action in bringing about the reforms that will enable Bosnia to climb out of this quagmire.