THE EUROPEAN Union was allowing Bosnia-Herzegovina to become dangerously decentralised, a former UN High Representative warned at Leinster House yesterday.
Lord Ashdown, the former British Liberal Democrat leader, paid tribute to Ireland for its support when he was in Sarajevo as high representative from 2002 to 2006. The role of Ireland in Balkan issues was “one you should feel proud of”, he added.
At a joint meeting of the Oireachtas Committees on EU Affairs and Foreign Affairs and Trade in Leinster House, he said that, seven years after the Bosnian war ended in 1995, a million refugees had returned home.
“There was complete freedom of movement,” he said, which still did not exist in Cyprus today. Post-conflict resolution was more successful than anywhere else in the world.
But he said it was “a terrible tragedy” that, since 2007, that dynamic had been allowed to be reversed, and the European Union must take some of the blame.
What he described as “11 years of hard work” to create state institutions had begun to be “unstitched”, he said.
One of the “magnetic forces” holding Bosnia together was the Dayton peace agreement of 1995, and the other was the power of the EU and Nato institutions.
But then Bosnia had been allowed to return to its “dynamic of fissiparousness”. He said the independent taxation authority and the creation of a single army and a single state judiciary were being gradually weakened.
There was “a very dangerous dynamic of disunity” in operation, with separatists enjoying far too much influence, and the EU had “done far too little” about it.
If Europe could not stop this development within its own borders, how could it have influence elsewhere in the world, he asked. It reminded him of 1992, which was supposed to be the “hour of Europe”, but Europe “stood aside and became a witness, a bystander, to genocide” and the US had to move in to halt that.
Coming from Northern Ireland himself, he knew what a febrile political situation could mean. Bosnia was slipping back into “a black hole of dysfunctionality, criminality and corruption”.
He asked: “What should we do?” He was told there was no appetite for action among the chancelleries of Europe, but it was up to the institutions of Brussels to formulate a plan. But instead he was told the same policies were being followed as with Poland and Hungary.
“The EU should be much more muscular,” he said. “We should be very much more brutal about isolating the separatists.”
Bosnia-Herzegovina had been allowed “to become an abscess” now, one that was inside the boundaries of Europe. “The contagion of that abscess could easily spread wider,” he said.
Lord Ashdown concluded by quoting Bismarck’s remark that “the Balkans are not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier”, and he observed that the foolishness of that statement had been proven twice in the last century.
Labour TD Colm Keaveney said Lord Ashdown’s report was “very startling”, and Independent TD Maureen O’Sullivan said she would welcome “practical suggestions” as to what could be done to restore the integrity of Bosnia.
Fine Gael TD Bernard Durkan said it would appear that Europe had been “distracted” from the problems of the region, and Labour’s Eric Byrne said Lord Ashdown had reminded him “very starkly” of the horrors of the conflict, but he would like to hear the viewpoint of the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Baroness Ashton, on the issue.
