Yugoslavia Redux

Third Quarter 2001

by Steven E. Meyer

Nearly six years after the Dayton Accords cobbled Bosnia together and more than two years after the "international community" took control of Kosovo, the future of the former Yugoslavia is once again a topic of disagreement and debate. The debate surfaced full bore at a unique conference in Belgrade in May, the first major international security conference held there since the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the fall of Milosevic a year later. The event was organized by the Center for South Eastern European Studies (Belgrade), the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Berlin), and the Open-Society Fund (Belgrade).

The conference provided an important forum for assessing the "success" of the Dayton Accords, the status of Kosovo, and the new Albanian insurgency in southern Serbia and northern Macedonia. The conference, which is likely to have an impact on the evolving security policy of the new Yugoslav government, took on added significance because the new Bush administration is in the process of rethinking American policy towards the Balkans.

Those participating in the conference quickly split between defenders of the current approach of the "international community" and critics of the status quo policy.

The defenders, led by a host of "international civil servants" and NGO leaders, argue that for Bosnia there is "light at the end of the tunnel." Bosnia is "healing," they argue, and it is vital that we "stay the course." Refugee returns are up, international authorities continue to pursue war criminals, and there are new "non-nationalist" governments in Bosnia and the Muslim-Croat entity. At the same time, the "international community" is making progress in Kosovo. Massive rebuilding is under way, local elections late last year produced "moderate" governments, and democratic elections for province-level offices will be held in mid-November. And the insurgencies in southern Serbia and northern Macedonia, they argue, can be contained with the right combination of policies and Western support. Alarmed by the pressure in the Bush administration to reduce its commitment to the Balkans, the defenders of the status quo insist that this is the wrong time to withdraw outside support or substantially reduce the West's military commitment.

The critics will have none of this. The light, they point out, has been seen at the end of the Bosnian tunnel every year since 1995 and every year it has been an illusion. Bosnia is neither healing nor unifying into the kind of stable, multi-ethnic democracy envisioned by the architects of Dayton. Instead, Bosnia remains essentially divided into three ethnically cleansed communities. There is virtually no integrated Bosnian economy and the economy that does exist is supported overwhelmingly by international largesse and crime. And although refugee returns were up last year, they remain, after almost six years, a dismally small percentage of the two million refugees who fled the area. The elections of the past year, say the critics, have been held more to justify Western self-righteousness than to benefit the people of Bosnia and Kosovo. To describe governments as moderate or non-national is a self-serving attempt by international civil servants to justify their efforts. War crimes indictments, too, say the critics, are primarily the product of victors' justice and have been unevenly and arbitrarily applied to make a political point. "Progress" in Kosovo is as much of an illusion as it is in Bosnia. Kosovo is a nasty, deadly place that also is virtually ethnically cleansed. Indeed, Kosovo may come as close as any place on earth to what Thomas Hobbes had in mind when he described the state of nature as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

From the point of view of the critics, the "international community" and the Bush administration have to take a fundamentally different approach. It must be an approach that admits the failures of the past six years; an approach that takes a much more region-wide approach to security questions; one that accepts the fact that borders and populations can—and probably must—change in conformity to ethnic realities; one that admits that the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague has failed and adopts the kind of truth and reconciliation process that worked in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. Only after the political and justice issues are resolved will it be possible to tackle the massive job of economic reform, which also must be approached from a region-wide perspective. The Bush administration has some decisions to make and it does not have much time.

[Dr. Meyer is professor of political science at the National Defense University; meyerse@ndu.edu. He was among the U.S. representatives at the Belgrade conference, which brought together high-level members of the new Yugoslav government and a variety of academics, government officials, and representatives of NGOs from the United States, Europe, and Russia.]