Bosnia and Hercegovina provides an important experience for Ukraine. The hot phase of the war there was ended by an intervention of the international community, a scenario that might repeat in Ukraine.
During a study trip to the Balkans in October and November 2017 representatives of the “Coalition Justice for Peace in Donbas” could familiarize themselves with the current political system of Bosnia and Hercegovina.
The compromise that eventually halted the worst violence in Europe since the end of World War II was the Dayton Peace Agreement of November 1995. It is made up of a basic agreement and 11 additional protocols. Its main goal was to regulate the situation of Bosnia and to end the Bosnian war. By the way, Kyiv was another place under consideration for the peace talks to end the Yugoslav Wars.
However, eventually the peace negotiations were held on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. They laid the legal base for the current political system of Bosnia and Hercegovina. The Dayton Agreement turned the country into a confederation of the federal state of Muslims and Croats and the Republika Srpska .
Bosnia and Hercegovina can serve Ukraine as an example of a conflict regulated under international pressure and in which the international community provided the main contribution to the compromise.
Today, Bosnia and Hercegovina is a state of unique form and procedures that combines elements of federation and confederation.
In each of the two constituting units, the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina and the Republika Srpska, has its own president, government, parliament, police, and army. Both units form part of a central government, a collective presidium. The country runs a collective presidency. This means that at elections, three presidents stand as candidates, one for each of the three biggest ethnic groups, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. The three presidents replace each other in turns every eight months. In their respective regions they are elected in a secret ballot for a period of four years.
Under these circumstances one cannot speak of a progressive development of the country. The example of Bosnia should warn Ukraine not to repeat the experiment of a separate confederation, which will very likely slow down the development of the country. It is hard to plan for the future when the mere existence of one of the country’s units is oriented towards a different value- system (different geopolitical orientation?) that is hard to square with the other parts of the country.
The Dayton Agreement is an unfortunate example of how to conserve a conflict instead of solving it. The administrative structures of Bosnia are practically paralyzed. They will hardly enable an effective government or a dynamic country. Some of the reasons are the high number of state structures and problems to reform the country because the central governments competences are so limited. All this in a country the hydroelectrical resources of which are among the biggest in Europe.
This is why the members of the Ukrainian delegation expressed their opinion that the Minsk process should not repeat the mistakes of the Dayton Peace Accord. During the negotiations about Ukraine’s future it would be unhelpful to set high hopes on some form of complicated administrative subdivision of post-conflict Ukraine.
This publication is part of the project “Empowering civil society for a transformation of commemorative culture - nonviolent ways of dealing with the Donbas's violent past”, funded by KURVE Wustrow - Centre for Training and Networking in Nonviolent Action in the framework of Civil Peace Service, a program of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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