Ukraine, Bosnia, and Russia
Twenty-seven years ago, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a dangerous precedent was set in Eastern Europe in which pro-Russian and anti-Western forces committed war crimes against their newly-minted democratic neighbor, only to be rewarded for its violence with a peace treaty that legitimized a genocidal campaign by creating a new statelet within.
This is precisely what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine today. In fact, the atrocities that ensued was established by Serbia. In 1992, upon declaring its independence from Socialist Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) was attacked first by Serbia and their Bosnian-Serb loyalists, and then in 1993 by Croatia and their Bosnian-Croat loyalists, with the goal of expanding Serbia and Croatia by so-called “ethnically cleansing” Bosnia of Bosniaks (a reference to centuries-old South Slav people with historical and cultural ties to Bosnia). The Croats were defeated by the Bosnian army in 1994. However, Bosnian Serbs were given the entity they called Republika Srpska (RS) by the Dayton Peace Accords brokered by the U.S. in 1995. Not anticipated by Dayton, today RS is anti-NATO, anti-Western, and pro-Russian. And it has significant political power in the Federation of BiH.
While Dayton defines RS as merely an entity within BiH, combined with the genocide committed by the Serbs in the early 1990s, and the lack of interest by Western governments to implement and enforce the Accords to its fullest to protect the rights of the genocide victims, RS has become de-facto ethnically pure anti-democratic statelet in the middle of the Balkans. And its friends in the Kremlin have been supporting it since its inception.
Dayton’s blueprint may have begun in BiH, but it has been successfully used by Russia several times, Ukraine being just the latest example. It began by testing the waters with the invasion of Chechnya in 1999. Then, in 2008 it invaded a part of Georgia with a significant ethnically Russian population. In 2014, it invaded Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk under the same pretense. More recently, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine as independent states, a now-familiar pattern of conquest. Recent news reports appear to show that Russia is establishing in Ukraine’s captured region of Kherson a pro-Russian government willing to declare Kherson as a sovereign entity of Russia.
In each case, Russia’s rationale was that those regions discriminated against ethnic Russians requiring Russia to “rightfully” incorporate them into its sphere of influence and, what has been recently termed, “Sovietize” those places it claims belongs to it.
As it did with Belgrade in its invasion of BiH, up until Ukraine, the West has ignored or appeased Moscow allowing Russia to occupy and assume control by installing puppet governments under Putin. Of course, just like in RS, this has resulted in undemocratic and illiberal governments unfriendly to the West.
The Dayton blueprint has clearly created a pattern of abuse against Eastern European democracies, starting with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and currently afflicting Ukrain, and yet neither Europe nor the United States has done much to stop it. RS, with its genocide-denying political leader, Milorad Dodik, along with its equally nationalist Croatian political party known as HDZ, have openly challenged Western democratic values and beliefs with threats of violence against Bosniaks. Western governments continue to resort to appeasement rather than supporting a democracy struggling to get beyond Dayton’s ill-conceived establishment of RS, and an unmanageable ethnically-based tripartate presidential council.
With this laissez-faire approach, the pro-Russian RS leadership has been openly breaching the intent of the Dayton agreement, which was primarily devised to stop the war. This past December 9, the RS National Assembly voted unanimously to start secession from BiH in clear breach of Dayton. The West’s reaction was limited to verbal criticism. Then, on January 9, in violation of the BiH Supreme Court ruling that such action is unconstitutional, Dodik and his allies organized a military parade with its Russian-trained paramilitary on full display in Banja Luka, RS’ de-facto capital. The Russian delegation was in attendance and in open support of their Serb and Croat hardline allies, with no signs of fervent opposition from the West. True, recent sanctions against Dodik personally by the U.S. showed a recognition of his exceedingly disruptive presence in BiH, but that’s not enough.
The West’s stance toward pro-Russian statelets is simply not tenable if democracies are to prevail. If Dodik’s desire to destabilize BiH succeeds, the EU and U.S. lose. The West should use this opportunity in Ukraine to recognize and repair the problems that Dayton created. It must thwart the aggression and genocidal legacies that RS represents, and send a message to Russia and any others following suit, that Western democracies will not tolerate those seeking authoritarian rule with newly created puppet states. This must include dismantling Dayton where the blueprint began.
