Intervention in Civil Wars--Bosnia and Herzegovina

Draft

"The United Nations can only help parties to conflict to make peace if they cooperate in the process. If parties are determined to fight, it is impossible for the United Nations to stop them."

Thorwald Stoltenberg, United Nations Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia ₂

"If the parties don't want peace, we can't bring it to them."

Chairman Shalikashvili ₃

On December 20, 1995, a NATO-led military intervention force composed of units from 32 countries entered Bosnia and Herzegovina to implement a peace agreement. The general framework and its 11 annexes, negotiated the previous month at Dayton, Ohio, committed the international community to assist the three warring parties with both military and civilian assets in reestablishing political cooperation within one state. The agreement also committed these political leaders to reintegrate their populations into a single, multiethnic state and society, reversing their territorial separation into three national communities and political-economic systems by restoring freedom of movement across military confrontation lines and allowing displaced individuals and families to return to their prewar homes.

Despite the rhetoric of assistance, the elaborate institutional design for common institutions and power-sharing for a new Bosnian state, and the provisions for arms control, transparency, confidence-building measures between armies, and monitoring of local police and human rights, the agreement and its chief American negotiators did not presume that the causes of war and obstacles to peace lay in a security dilemma. The cause in Bosnia, as also in the previous wars in Croatia and Slovenia, was considered to be Serbian aggression, planned and executed against the territorial integrity of these three republics in the former Yugoslavia. In defense against plans by Serbian president Slobodan Milo\??\sevic to create a greater Serbia, the common wisdom goes, four of the six republics of federal Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia) had no choice but to leave. War is driven by leaders who choose violence to stay in power or expand their power. When they have achieved their aims or calculate that they will lose more by continuing to fight, they shift to negotiation to consolidate their gains. International intervention can only work if they agree to cooperate and accept the peace agreement as their own; the peace agreement will fail if those leaders are not sincere, viewing a return to war as an option in the future, or if leaders who have proven themselves unreliable in that regard (in the Bosnian case, labeled "war criminals") are not removed physically from the scene.

This view distinguishes political elites from their followers, however. The Dayton peace agreement also assumes that the Bosnian population--both soldiers and civilians of all three of its national communities--were largely unwilling participants in the war, victims of their leaders' extremist nationalism and fear-mongering. Here there is a glimmer of recognition for the role of security fears and vulnerabilities, but also the assumption that these fears would disappear if warring armies were temporarily replaced by a foreign military deployment providing "a secure environment." Then citizens would be freed once again to return to former neighborhoods, reestablish old friendships, and rediscover mutual interests in peace and commerce.

International intervention from the early days of the descent into violence in the Yugoslav crisis vacillated between these two schools of thought: (1) aggression that should be stopped and could only be stopped by military intervention against the aggressors, and (2) systemic collapse that unleashed popular fears and ancient ethnic hatreds and could not be solved but could be contained. The second explanation, a revival of historical ethnic conflict, was most influential in the early days of the conflict when major powers (particularly the United States) refused to intervene on a preventive mission because they thought it hopeless. Because intervention, when it came, was at every stage a collaborative effort, with no individual state or coalition with direct interests in stopping the war, it incorporated both views and a resulting mix of strategic and tactical prescriptions.

To what extent does the analytic tool of a security dilemma applied to this conflict help to understand the relative effectiveness of some interventions and ineffectiveness of others? Can the tool aid in predicting the success or failure of the current international deployment to bring the war in Bosnia to an end? Will "Dayton" work?

Cause and Prevention

There would have been no war in Bosnia and Herzegovina if Yugoslavia had not first collapsed. Mobilization for war followed a classic security dilemma in 1990-91 when all parties scrambled to adjust to the uncertainty about the future raised by Slovene and Croatian announcements, beginning in July 1990, that they would seek independence. (Until December 30, 1990, in Slovenia, and May 19, 1991, in Croatia, these announcements were threats, although they were fully credible by July, 1990; on June 25, 1991, they were implemented.) As early as November 1990, the newly elected president of the seven-member collective presidency of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic, announced that he would not permit Bosnia to remain in a rump Yugoslavia. ₄ If Croatia seceded, therefore, Bosnia would seek independence also.

In the ensuing year, Bosnian citizens reacted with growing unease and then horror at the "collapse of the system (raspad sistema)," from garbage collection to presidential decision-making, and the resort by neighbors to arms. The political and behavioral dynamic at both the individual level and the level of the three nationally defined political parties of the governing coalition (each representing one of the three constituent nations of Bosnia) is easily captured by the security dilemma, including information failures (and deliberate distortion), declining trust and credibility, and the escalating spiral of defensive armament (by individuals, localities, paramilitaries, and eventually armies). In contrast to the deliberate actions being taken by leaders in the dominant three republics of federal Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, Bosnian leaders and citizens were largely reacting to a situation of increasing anarchy and uncertainty over which they had no control and little influence.

The definitive moment, by most accounts, was the legal recognition of Slovene and Croatian independence by the European Community in December 1991 (to come into effect 15 January 1992, but preempted by Germany, which had organized the winning coalition in favor of recognition). Izetbegovic warned Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in talks in Bonn in November, 1991, that this would mean war in Bosnia. He proved correct in March 1992.

The conditions for that war had been laid in the previous two years, however. As Xavier Bougarel neatly sums up the dilemma to be explained: "how a Bosnian, population, which had in mid-1990 pronounced itself 74 per cent in favour of a ban on nationally or confessionally based parties, could, six months later, vote in the same proportion for precisely such parties." ₅ His answer, a "deep logic of Bosnian society, reminiscent of the sociological theories of the `prisoner's dilemma' and the `self-fulfilling prophecy,' in the difference between "the political conception and the everyday conception of community relations":

The practice of kom\??\siluk [the culture of good neighborliness] ... represents not so much abstract tolerance or social interaction, as a permanent guarantee of the pacific nature of relations between the communities, and thus of the security of each of them. If political developments place a question-mark over this pacific nature, each community will seek to ensure its security through communitarian mobilisation and isolation, tending in this way to reinforce the general feeling of insecurity and precipitate breakdown in the codes of kom\??\siluk. ₆

The behavior of the three national parties ruling in coalition after November 1990 elections took the next step, parceling out ministries, benefits, and jobs to their supporters, while municipal governments declared local control for whatever national group was in the majority, moving this process toward territorialization. From political partition to increasingly territorial partition of power, they evolved to a dispute over independence and the character of the state. By October, 1991, the Croatian and Muslim parties had formed a parliamentary coalition against its former partner, the Serbs, and its memorandum on sovereignty was not the beginning but the end of the Bosnian state. Nonetheless, European Community sponsored negotiations among the three leaderships, beginning in February 1992, had some success in restoring communication and reviving hopes that a new political pact of constitutional principles and division of Bosnian territory into three ethnically defined cantons could prevent war. Instead, American insistence on immediate recognition gave president Izetbegovic the support he had been seeking to reject those talks.

Whereas commentators on the Yugoslav conflict focus on aggression and on culpability for the violence, the crux of the problem as the decade of the 1980s sped events toward war was the spiraling dynamic of mutual insecurity. A breakdown in routine expectations about the future, involuntary and voluntary pressures for change but great disagreement about what that change should be, and growing uncertainty and opportunity was taking place at all levels--individual, household, local, national, and international. ₇ The economic depression, growing unemployment to such an extent that it hit the middle class in previously protected public sector jobs and their children, an austerity policy of demand repression to reduce the trade deficit and repay foreign debt, and hyperinflation that destroyed the value of the currency and led shops to demand payment in foreign hard currency even for necessities all combined to pull the supports out from under the livelihoods of the population--up to 80 percent were experiencing an escalating decline in living standards without a break since the early 1970s. But this growing sense of material insecurity, that there was no sign of relief, occurred in the context of international change and domestic economic and political reform that also pulled the rug out from under the mechanisms by which social peace had been guaranteed in the country since World War II.

Guarantees had aimed at two types of vulnerabilities: social destitution, and national extinction. The ruling Communist Party reacted on ideological grounds to the effects of the Great depression on the livelihoods of peasants, workers, and "free professionals," and on practical grounds to the political exigencies of building an anti-fascist coalition in wartime and to buying the loyalty of nationalists (primarily in Croatia but also in Serbia and Slovenia) who had defected to the fascist camp in an all-peoples' national liberation front after the war. The welfare mechanisms were guaranteed subsistence (income from a public sector job, social insurance, or employment in the independent sector where limits were placed on landholdings and employment) and federally mandated redistribution in a local solidarity fund for wages, a federal development fund for less developed republics or provinces, and supplements to local budgets too poor to cover social assistance. The national mechanisms were constitutional rights and jurisdictions to guarantee equality of each constituent nation regardless of numerical size, such as republican autonomy over culture, education, and most economic activity, proportional or parity representation (varying with time and issue) of persons and beneficiaries in all positions of public authority and government funding, and decision-making rules of consensus, countervailing vetoes, and obligatory consulation to prevent tyranny or exploitation by one national group against another.

In the course of the 1980s, these mechanisms disintegrated. Economic austerity and market reform undercut the resources for economic equality and welfare. Wealthier taxpayers launched an assault against the redistribution that remained with a rhetoric claiming their nation to be exploited by other nations, legitimizing a country-wide discourse of vulnerability and victimhood in which every nation was imperiled (ugro\??\zen). ₈ Technocratic approaches to economic reform, encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and economic reformers to bypass the delays and budgetary complications of political debate and compromise, led to rule by temporary decrees rather than parity representation, abandonment of the power-sharing principles of republican rotation of the prime ministership and national quotas for cabinet ministers, and several (failed) efforts to replace the rule of consensus in both party and government with majority voting. Revolts by one or another of the republics and provinces against federal taxation, monetary policy, conscription, wage and income controls, foreign exchange and customs regulations, introduction of a land market, and constitutional amendments led during the second half of the 1980s to blatant defiance of federal authority, from the prime minister's office to the federal army and defense ministry, the constitutional court, the central bank, and the federal parliament.

At the same time, changes taking place in Europe ever more blatantly threw Yugoslavia's secure international position off balance. Whereas most Yugoslavs had benefitted from Tito's success in creating a special security and economic niche for the country in the Cold War order, they had different interests and opportunities in the contradictory developments of the 1980s: for example, between a debt crisis, requiring massive cuts in state expenditures including defense, and a Reagan-led arms race and increased NATO pressure in the southern flank, requiring the opposite; between the collapse of markets in the eastern bloc and Middle East and the Western opportunities opened by East-West rapprochement; between the "deepening" process of European integration after 1985 that threatened a more protected, "fortress Europe" and the end of the Cold War that promised an end to the limits on neutral and eastern states; between the economic requirements of Westernization and the increased competition from central Europe for Western markets, finance, and alliances.

The distant goals of economic reform and the international conjuncture were a total overthrow of the existing system: from a system of state-sponsored protection and welfare, cooperative firms and banks (the "self-management system"), proportional distribution of public positions and funds according to nationality, consensual decision-making, legal limits on speech that could incite national hatred, one-party Communist rule, and special access to foreign finance and secure markets in exchange for an independent international identity ("national communist" and nonaligned) and a strong defense, to a market economy and pluralist democracy emphasizing individual rights without quotas, redistribution, welfare, or political privileges, a single market, private ownership of firms, multiparty democracy, majoritarianism, and an international position more in line with its capacities. Conditions unleashed three separate, interacting struggles: anti-communism (led by a coalition of non-party urban professionals who resented party vetting and national quotas on desirable jobs with right-wing nationalists opposed to the Titoist principle of "brotherhood and unity") versus the ruling party; states' rights and parliamentary sovereignty advocates (Slovenia, Vojvodina, Croatia, Kosovo) versus reformists seeking improvements in federal executive capacity to manage the economy (Serbia, economic reformers, poorer republics); and separatism (from activists in the Serbian province of Kosovo demanding a separate republic to Slovene and Croatian Catholics seeking membership in a vague central European federation outside Yugoslavia) versus proponents of a reunified Yugoslav economic and political space necessary for a market economy and political pluralism.

The common denominator of all these struggles against the ancien regime, whether revolutionary or reformist, was nationalism: in the ideological belief of anticommunists among local intellectuals and emigré activists and the defiance of oppositionists in the media and emerging social movements because national identity was the only political choice for individuals after party membership while nationalist speech was subject to legal and ritual restrictions; in the rhetoric of states' rights (as national rights) that pervaded the constitutional struggles; and in the primary accusation of employment privilege next to Communist party membership (national dominance and discrimination) that motivated rebels in the younger generation and increasingly captured popular discontent with unemployment, educational reform, and falling standards of living. These were not post-communist struggles, however. The claims were made not in terms of interests but rights, and therefore state power; not in terms of individual, human rights, but of group rights to economic assets and benefits; not in terms of freedom but of protection.

The one slight exception to this backward-looking politics was the evolution over the course of the decade from legalistic and constitutional arguments over republican rights or federal authority to the mobilization of popular support behind political claims. Nonetheless, even the appeal to nation for popular support by politicians, from Slovenia and Croatia to Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, was made in terms of arguments about survival, in which the fate of the individual depends on the fate of the group, and the role of the group and its leaders is protection. The distinction between economic and social rights, cultural identity, human rights, and physical survival was deliberately blurred in the search for supporters and national loyalty. Hence the ready use made in normal political discourse of the term, genocide. For example, Serb nationalists in Kosovo claimed that antagonism and pressure to leave from the Albanian majority were acts of genocide; the threat felt by Serbs at the discriminatory speech in election campaigns of Croatian presidential candidate Franjo Tudjman was associated with memories of genocidal policies against them in World War II; the Bosnian Party of Democratic Action (the primary Muslim party of Alija Izetbegovic) called the formation of a federal, reformist party by prime minister Markovic an act of genocide; and mutual accusations of genocide were tossed frequently between the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat parties in the same governing coalition.

The language of political conflict and politicians, and even their inability to cooperate in resolving disputes on economic, political, and foreign change with one outcome for the country, choosing a descent instead into secession, violence, and war, does not automatically result in popular support, however. The security dilemma assumes an element of credibility--why politicians could evoke a fear for survival itself and the willingness to become enemies to one's former compatriots or neighbors. In fact, all they needed was a choice at a critical moment for republic and nation, in place of the many alternatives arising from peoples' complex identities, normal networks of interaction, and possibilities for cooperation which would have thrown the political balance in favor of moderates. That receptivity lay in the very structural conditions of Yugoslav society that had seemed to require protections against nationalism but which were now being challenged or discarded. Violence, however, required guns and live ammunition.

If Yugoslavs are classified as members of ethnonational groupings, everyone belonged to a numerical minority. The fears engendered by this situation under anarchy are enhanced by the fact of frequent local (territorially concentrated) majorities. The primary response to economic or political conflict in the Communist period was to increase budgetary autonomy, as an incentive to efficiencies and growth--autonomy to firms, social services, republics, provinces, and localities. The whole was reintegrated by the party network and by guaranteed representation of all officially identified interests and groups and by power-sharing among the elite. With the progressive collapse of that party network and demands for majoritarianism, there were few institutional checks against local tyrannies and exclusivity on the basis of majority dominance. This problem was greatest in mixed communities, such as the border areas of Croatia ₉ and much of Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the census of 1991, Muslims, for example, were a plurality (44 percent) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but a small minority (about 8 percent) in the entire country. Bosnian Serbs were 33 percent, and Bosnian Croats, 17 percent. These precarious numbers, if numbers matter, had been subject to much public discussion in the preceding three decades as a result of high birthrates among Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. Change in population proportions in Bosnia itself had been striking over the postwar years: individuals identifying themselves as Serbs comprised 44.3 per cent of the population in the censuses of 1948 and of 1953 and as late as the census of 1961, 42.9 percent, whereas people choosing the Muslim identifier comprised 43.7 percent by 1991.

Second, the perceptions of being a minority at risk were intensified by the unequal distribution of the resources of wealth, political power, arms, and international patrons in the country. Unlike the nonviolent breakup of Czechoslovakia which is frequently cited in support of a culturalist explanation for the wars of Yugoslav succession, resources in Yugoslavia were not so unequally distributed as to have a cumulative impact making one group clearly stronger or weaker. In addition to the complication of multiple parties, contested internal borders, and greater inequality within each political subunit than between the units, groups perceived the resources of other groups as more threatening (more "offensively capable") than their own. Slovenes interpreted their own refusal to abide by federal rulings as a matter of rights and safeguarding the constitution of 1974, whereas others who depended on the common umbrella for security and transfers saw this act as a threat to their survival and selfish interest in their own lifestyle against the reforms necessary for everyone to improve. Slovenes were unaware of the power of their wealth over government policy, Serbs of the fears others held of their past dominance and warrior tradition, Croats of their fascist past, and Muslims and Albanians of the fears engendered by their birth rates and new national assertiveness.

Thus, although politicians and oppositionists were reckless in their rhetoric and political demands, their aggressive actions are better captured by the defensive perceptions of the security dilemma than by grand schemes and plans. Slovenes perceived their own refusal to abide by federal rulings as a matter of rights and safeguarding the 1974 constitution, whereas others who depended on the common federal umbrella for security and transfers saw Slovene actions as a threat to their survival and a selfish interest in a Slovene lifestyle above reforms to improve the common welfare. Slovenes declared the Serbian government violation of central bank restrictions by printing money to pay pensioners, farmers, and workers as an attack on the constitution and their common state (through its currency) while Serbs saw the Slovene withholding of customs revenues earned by Slovene firms and collected at the Slovene border as the same. The emergence of intellectual and political nationalism in Serbia in the 1970s-80s was a response to Tito's purges of enterprise directors and liberal politicians in the early 1970s, to balance purges of Croatian nationalists, and to the 1974 Constitution because it appeared to continue the parcellization of Serbia begun with the republican borders drawn in 1945 (derided as "Tito's borders" by Serbian nationalists) and the creation of two autonomous provinces within Serbia and in no other republic. While the "Tito borders," in the derisive label of Serbian nationalists, were for many Serbs a deeply felt injustice with new consequences even for their standards of living, however, the borders and autonomy were considered necessary protection by the numerically smaller nations such as Slovenes and Croats against a repeat of their interwar experience with what they (also in nationalist rhetoric) called an expansionist and domineering Serb political culture. The rumblings of revolt by ethnic Albanians for turning Kosovo province into a separate republic, revived in 1981, occurred when intellectual and political circles in Serbia proper were bemoaning the drain of federally distributed or mandated resources to Kosovi from equally poor communities in Serbia, the fact that their tax assessments for such redistribution were equal to those of Slovenia and Croatia whereas their economy was in far worse shape, and the loss of federal voting power by the separate voting power granted its two provinces in 1974. Slovenes, on the other hand, saw the growing repression of political rights in Kosovo and the mobilization of Serb nationalists and the Orthodox church against Kosovo Albanians (replete with prejudice) as demonstration that Serbia was different--Balkan, aggressive, undemocratic, and therefore a threat to its Western culture and stirrings for greater political pluralism. Slovenes saw themselves as the vanguard of democracy in Yugoslavia, held back from initiatives for political pluralism by Communists in other republics but above all in Serbia, but attempts by 40,000 Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo, angered at the Slovene government shift to support for Kosovar rights, to hold a "meeting of truth" in Ljubljana on December 1, 1989, were seen as threats to Slovene sovereignty, refused permits to assemble and stopped at the border.

These perceptual differences were reinforced by what might be called a culture of distrust, grown in the soil of peasant society, a long duré of externally imposed uncertainty, arbitrary rule, and real experience with civil war (three times in this century alone, in response to international crisis or war), on the one hand, and by the extreme decentralization of systems of information (radio, TV, newspapers, journals, but not political networks which spanned the country), on the other. In the course of the 1980s, the attempts to reverse the extreme decentralization of the political and economic system and create a market economy led instead to a collapse of federal authority altogether which ended the political contract of national equality and individual welfare on which stability was based and left the country without a final arbiter in the increasing competition for rights and priveleges and nationalist claims.

In contrast to the anarchy ascribed to the international system, however, this situation had no balancing principles or norms to prescribe behavior. Politicians acted as free riders on a security system that had vanished, with the exception of the federal army whose training and doctrine were designed for external defense. Each acted as if there were out there some force that would, like Tito, slap them down when their behavior went too far, as if the balance of power among the eight federal units had not been eliminated by the polarizing mobilization of anti-federal views on the basis of anti-Serbism and as if one group's claims had far more truth value than those of any other group and deserved a hearing. They issued threats of violence as warnings so as to be taken seriously, but were instead heard as planning violence and aggression, and when bluffs were called, the threats escalated, each time increasing the level of inchoate fear in the population. The collapse of order and political competition also led to increasing criminalization, corruption, and formation of paramilitary forces attached to political parties and local elites.

There was more than a security dilemma moving toward catastrophe. It was a real contest for economic position, political power, and reform proposals in which some would be losers and many choices were zero-sum with no cooperative solution. Yet there were also many other trends moving toward successful economic reform and political coalitions of non-nationalist parties (as did emerge in Macedonia), cooperation among unions, intellectuals, and managers across republican lines and national divisions, and civic organizations outside the political sphere. But the path to violence was clearly being plowed by the escalating spiral of aggressive rhetoric and defensive preparation at a speed that allowed little opportunity for lengthy negotiations to find compromise positions, countering rumors, forming coalitions across republics, or challenging nationalist goals with new elections.

Given the speed of developments and their direction toward claims for international recognition of independent states, the actions of outsiders were critical. What then did international actors do to prevent the violence? The leverage of explanation gained by recourse to the security dilemma is best demonstrated in the effect of external action. Despite frequent predictions that disintegration and bloodshed were a high probability and calls for help from various Yugoslav and regional parties, outsiders contributed to the conflict by strengthening the elements making for a security dilemma.

Raising external and national uncertainty. The first critical acts were the messages communicated in 1988 to the federal government by the United States, that it no longer saw Yugoslavia as of strategic interest to the West, and by Soviet leaders that its Western-oriented reforms would no longer allow support--implicit, financial, or military--for fraternal parties. Neither offered an alternative, nor was Yugoslavia included in East-West European talks. NATO maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean two years in a row were perceived by the Yugoslav federal army as aggressive threats, against which they developed a new defense plan (RAM) reorganizing military regions, commands, conscription, and doctrine to make the country more defensible against invasion in light of concerns they had that social and political trends were draining readiness, such as rapid urbanization leaving vast territories unpopulated, disinterest among youth from wealthier regions in army careers, and the possibilities of anti-federalist coalitions of nationalists in the republics. But these preparations were in turn seen as aggressive within the country, by Slovene young activists and then the government, who perceived the new plan as an attack on Slovene national rights and a potential threat to its territorial integrity.

Hardening zero-sum choices.

By 1985, the social discontent at material insecurity and specific protests of firms, workers, farmers, pensioners, and others, all as a result of the austerity program and tightened IMF conditionality in 1982 for refinancing its foreign debt, worried federal prime minister Mikulic, who reversed course toward a more heterodox and growth-oriented policy. But the result were fiscal and trade deficits and worsened inflation, leading Paris Club bankers and the IMF and World Bank to intensify their pressure for stabilization and to call for "radical surgery" to reform the state and economy in rapid order along the lines of the federal reform program that Slovenia totally opposed.

At the same time, in 1989, the new American ambassador began his tenure with public criticism of the Serbian government for the violation of human rights in Kosovo and exhortations for democracy. But this added fuel to the resentment of nationalist Serbs that the threat of Kosovo secession was not properly understood and persuaded Serbian politicians and federal army leaders, according to federal president in 1990, Borisav Jovic, that the Western anti-communist campaign, still aimed at destroying Yugoslavia, had only changed tactics. Calls for democracy were veiled support for the "secessionists."

The "secessionists" (Slovenia and Croatia), still fighting for federal powers they could live with while moving toward independence, were by this time looking outward with growing anxiety at the European Community decision to hasten the pace of integration, with the Maastricht Treaty, and at the change in Western attitudes toward the region in 1989, differentiating between a stable, welcome central Europe and an unstable, problematic southeastern Europe. Looking back to 1988-89, the Slovene representative to the Yugoslav presidency at the time, Janez Drnovsek, ascribes overriding explanation for the momentum toward independence to the Slovene fear that Serbian policies in Kosovo would prevent Yugoslav membership in the Council of Europe and the other memberships (eventually the EU) that depended on admission to the Council. ₁₀ As an acute observer of the Yugoslav scene explains, "There was always little doubt in Slovenia and Croatia, that underdeveloped regions like Kosovo or Macedonia would never make their way into an integrating Europe. The speedy way to Maastricht changed this feeling into a last minute panic." ₁₁

Mediation without impartiality.

The fate of Yugoslavia, and therefore Bosnia and Herzegovina, was riding in 1990-91 on the Slovene determination to leave the federation and on the lack of central capacity to mobilize an alternative coalition in favor of Yugoslavia or a third way. Both were hastened by external action. The forty-year patron of the federal government, the United States withdrew support on the grounds that the federal prime minister Ante Markovic and his government were too weak to last and that to support the federal army in restoring order would be undemocratic. The third option, recognizing Slovenia and Croatia, was seen to lead directly to war. They thus handed the lead to the Europeans. Yet renegotiations in 1989-91 of the 1982 EC agreement (which had been better terms than the one negotiated with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in 1991) floundered during 1989-91 and was in serious trouble beginning in July 1990, when the agreement was blocked by Greece. The aid program created in July 1989 for eastern Europe (PHARE), beginning with Poland and Hungary, was extended to the rest of the former eastern bloc in April 1990, but did not include Yugoslavia. Simultaneously, central European politicians, most notably the Austrian foreign minister, had made clear for more than two years that the Slovene choice to defect would be supported economically and diplomatically.

But once Slovenia intended to leave, the lessons of Croatian politics in 1967-71 were that it would be encouraged to follow suit. With Slovenia gone, moreover, the balance of power system among the republics would be unbalanced, and because it would be seen as a victory for anti-Serb and anti-army rhetoric, others who could employ that rhetoric for independence would also be encouraged. Fears of Serbian political domination in a majoritarian system, if people voted their national identity, were also more plausible. Despite foreseeable complications over the fate of Serbs in Croatian border regions who did not want to leave Yugoslavia or their ancestral homes and had reason to fear a continuation of harassment from right-wing gangs, employment discrimination, and human rights violations, Croatian government moves toward independence gained early German advice and support. This then added a layer of historical memory to the opposition of the Yugoslav federal army, born in the antifascist alliance of World War II, and of the Serb population, who had been real victims of the massacres and attempted genocide by the wartime Croatian state. Serbs in many parts of the country began to argue that World War II had not ended after all.

The European Community did attempt a mediating role in July-September 1991, but they did not provide means to overcome information failures. Far from opening channels of communication, the mediators sought delay, and then within the three-months' moratorium imposed on Slovene and Croatian moves toward independence, took sides in the quarrel, refused military intervention and negotiation of new borders, and deployed unarmed observers into Croatia (but not into Bosnia) whose reports they ignored.

Many outsiders grasped the element of fear and vulnerability in the Yugoslav environment, but they tended to focus on only one national group, whether out of interest, sympathy, or greater knowledge. They thus accepted that group's defensive point of view in perceiving other groups as threats and aggressors rather than as similarly fearful and defensive. Few if any seemed to grasp the security dilemma--the spiraling dynamic when all sides perceive themselves at risk. They could not imagine that those whom they called rebels (such as the Serbs of borderland Croatia) did believe that their very survival was at stake. And their sympathy for some groups, and rush to label the federal army and Serbs as aggressors even before war ensued, opened themselves up to exploitation, first by the Croatian government and then the Bosniac leadership, by a strategy of victimization that included deliberate sacrifice of their own people to internationalize the conflict and alter the domestic relations of military force.

Border Deployment

The one exception in international failure to take preventive action occurred toward Macedonia. On December 9, 1992, the United Nations Secretary General authorized a deployment of peacekeepers along the northern and eastern border of the republic, at the request on November 11 of elected president Gligorov. Although Gligorov was seeking to counter Greek opposition to recognition of Macedonian sovereignty, which held the E.U. and United States off until late 1994 (and was only negotiated separately with Greece in September 1995), the argument he used was the need for protection against Serbian military aggression from the north. Fearful of war on NATO's southern flank, the United States and its transatlantic allies would not challenge Greece, but would act to prevent a scenario of war spreading into this strategically volatile and significant zone.

The apparent success of this deployment, in the absence of violence and civil war in Macedonia which many feared, seems to demonstrate the effectiveness of this action. But this has little to do with Serbian ambitions, which would be difficult to demonstrate in this case, but to the role of borders in exacerbating a security dilemma. Studies of ethnic tolerance emphasize the critical precondition that individuals perceive their country's borders to be secure. ₁₂ And according to officials of the Macedonian government, the border deployment had this effect, of reassuring Macedonian citizens that they were safe from invasion with direct benefit in calming domestic tensions.

At the same time, however, international action has also exacerbated internal relations, leaving in doubt the long-term effect of the United Nations peacekeeping deployment. Sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro have nearly destroyed the economy, exacerbating social tensions, uncertainty about the future, and its criminalization through smuggling rings. Intrusive European preoccupation with minority rights (in particular, the commission on minority rights of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, the High Commissioner for National Minorities of the OSCE, and the Council of Europe Census Monitoring Mission) and the Albanian population (the largest but not the only minority in Macedonia) have given legitimacy to radicals claiming separate rights and undercut the moderates in the Albanian political party who had participated in Gligorov's ruling coalition, forcing them to take an nationalist position for autonomy and group rights rather than one based on political ideology and cooperation. While pushing many moderate Macedonians into the nationalist camp, their intervention has also made the main Albanian party available for an anti-regime electoral alliance (beginning at the municipal level) with the right-wing (anticommunist) nationalist Macedonian party, VMRO, and threatened to destabilize the inadequate but functioning mechanisms of political cooperation and moderation about the time that international attention threatens to dissipate.

Nonetheless, the role of border deployment in calming the fears within a country that feed an internal security dilemma raise questions about the effect that such a deployment would have had in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There were repeated requests for such a military deployment around the republic, beginning in early fall 1991: first of the United Nations by president Milosevic and then in November by Bosnian president Izetbegovic and again in 1996, by Bosniac leaders and opposition parties that the NATO-led multilateral forces (IFOR) be redeployed, from its positions along the internal confrontation line (the interentity boundary line between the Bosniac-Bosnian Croat federation and the Serb Republic) and near possible "flashpoints" of violence to the external borders. Each request was rejected.

Stopping the War

The months leading up to war in Bosnia and Herzegovina were filled with threats and counterthreats by the leaders of the three nationalist parties, now each maneuvering toward a political outcome defined by national sovereignty. "The Bosnian conflict," Bougarel writes, "resulted less from a unilateral act of aggression than from a spiral of verbal, institutional, and physical violence." ₁₃ It is difficult to distinguish in real time, however, between the point when people feared the future because paramilitaries formed, neighbors appeared with weapons distributed from local stocks, and politicians exchanged threats, for example, that "constitutional violence against the Serb nation would be followed by all other forms of violence" (Radovan Karadzic) or that a vote for independence would not provoke war (SDA politicians), ₁₄ and the point when these fears were reality. Interspersed with efforts to find an internal agreement in Bosnia was a terror campaign in the Drina Valley of eastern Bosnia waged by radical gangs from Serbia, spillover of fighting from the Croatian war into eastern Herzegovina and up the Neretva Valley all the way to Mostar, and the shelling at Croatian Serbs taking refuge in northern Bosnia. In addition to the stockpiles, armaments factories, and military installations for an all-national defense centered on "fortress Bosnia," the Bosnian presidency received a report the day before European recognition of Bosnian independence estimating 600,000 armed persons in a republic of 4.4 million. ₁₅ Tone Bringa's film of war coming to a mixed Muslim-Croat village northwest of Sarajevo, We Are All Neighbors, shows its breakdown into separate communities, mutual fears, and eventually war when an HVO (Bosnian Croat army) artillery gun simply appears on the hill overlooking the village.

Seen as a security dilemma, the three communities in Bosnia all perceived themselves to be vulnerable and aggrieved minorities. Outside political, logistical, and military support from neighboring Croatia and Serbia to their two national communities, Bosnian Croats (17 percent before the war), and Bosnian Serbs (33 percent), made Bosnian Muslims (44 percent) feel a truly vulnerable minority. Repeated discussions of a Croat-Serb partition of the country exacerbated these fears, while the primary war aim of each party, to displace populations and create ethnically pure areas under their control by terror, forced expulsion, voluntary exchanges, or published lists of enemies and "war criminals," affected the Bosnian Muslim population the most, ₁₆ threatening to turn their fears into reality and for some even threatening complete extinction of the nation. At the same time, Bosnian Muslim insistence on a single, integral, independent Bosnia in which Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats would be minorities make the latter feel truly vulnerable. The fear of becoming a minority in someone else's nation-state was exactly what was motivating each community to fight, from Croatia to Macedonia.

International responses to the war that quickly engulfed the republic were of three kinds: (1) humanitarian intervention (aided by a Chapter VI United Nations military force operating on peacekeeping rules of engagement, with elements of Chapter VII authority) aimed at saving lives while the war raged; this included deliveries of food, shelter, and other necessities to civilian populations and military protection of six towns declared safe areas for civilians; and it was motivated largely by Western interests in curtailing the flow of refugees; (2) efforts to reduce the intensity and duration of the war through an arms embargo, ₁₇ a no-fly zone, economic sanctions on the external patrons of one of the Bosnian parties, neighboring Serbia and Montenegro, heavy-weapons exclusion zones, and monitoring by human rights and military observers; these measures did, until serious leaks in the arms embargo and non-enforcement of the no-fly zone against violations of the Bosnian government and Bosnian Croat armies beginning in 1994, limit the offensive capability of all parties, forcing them to defensive or low-intensity warfare; and (3) diplomatic mediation to achieve a political settlement, carried on throughout the war with the three local parties on the basis of the Lisbon concept of a map and constitutional principles, ₁₈ and accompanied by smaller scale negotiations by United Nations peacekeeping officials of local ceasefires, creating weapons exclusion zones, separating forces, and handing authority over to U.N. peacekeepers.

No efforts were made, however, to change the parties' definition of their interests, fears, or identity. The Lisbon talks, aimed at providing assurances of mutual survival in power-sharing arrangements for the political elite (in principle, but not yet developed) and a tripartite territorial division of the country into ethnic cantons of local self-governance, were preempted by the one act most feared by Bosnian Serbs, immediate international recognition of Bosnian independence. International rhetoric tied to the Bosniac war strategy and its supporters abroad, that Serbs were "aggressors," "landgrabbers," and "war criminals," seriously undercut the credibility of diplomatic negotiations with Serbs. Efforts to isolate Serbs economically and diplomatically intensified their defensiveness and security fears, feeling that the world was against them and that they had to rely on their own protection. ₁₉

For Bosnian Croats, the act of international recognition and further diplomatic negotiations treated Muslim party leader Alija Izetbegovic as the president and representative of Bosnian sovereignty, although Bosnian Croats (whose turn it was in the presidential rotation and who feared Muslim rule as a small minority) considered his rule illegitimate after December 1991. In contrast to the accusations against Bosnian Serbs and Serbia, however, Bosnian Croat behavior and Croatian military intervention were treated to international silence, with occasional threats at imposing sanctions on Croatia that were always deflected by its Western patrons, the United States and Germany. This silence did not increase trust in the Bosniacs of Bosnian government, however, while it encouraged Bosnian Croats to make commitments they had no intention of implementing. Protected internationally as long as they cooperated with the Bosniacs, from the Lisbon talks to the Washington and Dayton agreements, Bosnian Croats felt no protection internally to put down their arms and no real pressure to change their ways.

For Bosnian Muslims (and all Bosnian citizens in general), no security guarantees against external involvement were offered. Having defined their protection in international support and their claims on victimhood, Bosniacs could not cooperate as long as there was hope that outside support would increase. If support appeared to lag, incidents could be provoked and television cameras positioned to revive attention and interest and renewed blame on the enemy. And although international support was unreliable and never up to their demands, until 1996, such as the lifting of the arms embargo or NATO involvement in the war, this support was enough to make them unreliable negotiators, changing their mind often when international signals led them to believe they could hold out for more. In their view the neutrality of U.N. peacekeepers and aid agencies was a denial of their moral position and thus enhanced their sense of insecurity.

In general, however, the containment policy did just that: it attempted to keep relations among the parties in balance in hopes of moderating the violence. Bosnian Serbs perceived humanitarian deliveries as aiding and abetting the Bosnian army, including covert delivery of arms and ammunition, while it is also clear that more than half of humanitarian aid went to the war effort, feeding and supplying soldiers on all sides. Control over the distribution of aid was the main source of local power, giving an incentive to continue the war, and the need to negotiate with those who control supply routes made humanitarian organizations inadvertent accomplices of nationalist warriors. Studies of the war in Bosnia record an entire network of cooperation among the mid-level elites--army commanders, arms traders, local authorities, even party leaders in some instances--to wage their war. Finally, the safe areas did not become havens for Muslim civilians, as some had intended, but international support for Bosnian government military strategy, as bases for rest, recuperation, resupply, and expansion into Serbheld territory to interrupt the contiguity and control of that territory at strategic points; and they were treated as such by Bosnian Serbs.

In the end, the Bosnian Serbs proved correct. The Muslims had full international support, and the United Nations forces were used as a Trojan Horse for NATO air strikes and heavy artillery attacks by the British-French-Dutch Rapid Reaction Force against Serb positions. Combined with covert American training for the Croatian army and American and Islamic arming of both Croats and Muslims, this air-ground campaign was used to force Serbs from about 35 percent of the land they controlled, including areas 99 percent Serb-inhabited for many generations, from any claim on Sarajevo, and to a political settlement requiring them to remain in an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. This did little to prepare them to cooperate or feel less insecure in the post-settlement phase.

As in the case of preventive border deployment, the international community did not test the hypothesis that a security dilemma was driving the parties. Had efforts been made to alleviate those fears and justifying interactions, there would have been far more evidence to check the validity of the assumptions undergirding the Dayton peace agreement: that Bosnian parties and citizens can cooperate on their political future given the proper conditions and the elimination of a few Bosnian Serb leaders. Dayton

"History has taught us that not a single honest man of ours can be unarmed; every single one will have a rifle to defend himself." (President Izetbegovic, speaking at an election rally in Gorazde, May 4, 1996, in his first public appearance since the signing at Paris, on December 14, 1995, of the Dayton [Paris] Accord) ₂₀

Whatever the causes of war in Bosnia, its termination finds the entire population in a grand security dilemma. They fear the future, ₂₁ are insecure in their physical security in the present, and remain vulnerable to manipulation by leaders who claim that their only safety and prospects lie with a state ruled by their nominal national leaders. Before the war, the terms Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat, and Bosnian Serb did not refer to separate enclaves with distinct cultural borders; they referred to the voluntary choice on a census form by individuals, many of whom had a mixed identity, lived in mixed environments, and preferred a non-ethnic identity for their political preferences and social interactions. To create the groups now identified with the three warring parties, the war had to take place: forcing people to make a choice among only three alternatives (many never did, by the way) and then forcing them to move to create distinct territorial enclaves. There would have been no reason for violence if communities had already been separated or if individuals and families had moved voluntarily. The violence and nationalist propaganda were means to force people by fear and circumstance to separate psychologically and then physically into certain groups. By the signing at Paris on 14 December 1995, the territory of the republic had been subdivided into three separate homogeneous areas, with three separate economic, communications, and political systems. One European Union official working in Mostar contrasted Germany at the end of World War II and Bosnia in 1996. Germans, he argued, welcomed the security of the international protection and got on with their lives because no one was afraid. In Bosnia, one cannot even reason with people because of fear; everyone is afraid, even if in some cases this is paranoia. ₂₂

The design of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP) and its operational annexes addresses the security fears of the population in several ways. `To reassure Bosniacs, the agreement is signed by president Izetbegovic representing Bosnia, in a signal that sovereignty cannot be divided, and by the leaders of Croatia and Serbia, as guarantees of territorial integrity in its republican borders. To reassure Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats that they will not be endangered minorities in a Muslim state, the Dayton constitution creates a single country that recognizes the right of self-determination of its three peoples. It is divided into two entities, recognizing a Serb Republic and a Bosniac-Bosnian Muslim Federation of two equal peoples, with substantial devolution of power and jurisdictions, including entity control over defense. The political system is based on national representation in their common institutions, such as a three member presidency (one for each of the three nations).

To break the spiral of a true security dilemma, a heavily armed international military deployment (IFOR) under robust rules of engagement was deployed to oversee the separation of armies behind a four mile zone of separation between the two entities, the cantonment of all heavy weapons, the demobilization of more than half those under arms, and frequent meetings of military officers chaired by IFOR officers to share information, inspections, and future plans as confidence and security building measures. Unreported caches of weapons have been destroyed, unauthorized movement of tanks, artillery, and aircraft reversed, and police bearing more than the allowed number of rifles and ammunition have had to hand them over. International troops were extended an additional 18 months after the initial 12, at half the size, to continue to provide this "security environment."

Alongside this temporary military presence, international civilian officials are to orchestrate an end to the insecurities due to anarchy, creating a common government as rapidly as possible. Within 10 months of the Paris signatures, elections were held for the national and mid-level governments (conditions were considered too insecure to proceed with municipal elections), and the office coordinating civilian implementation (Office of the High Representative) compiled a list of all offices, committees, agencies, and commissions that would have to be created and filled and drafts of all major legislation necessary to establish common institutions, such as a central bank, a common currency, and harmonized customs and tax laws. After almost two months' delay negotiating innumerable compromises to get the three presidents to meet together (such as the terms by which Bosnian Serb President Krajisnik would swear loyalty to a Bosnian state and where to meet), this "quick-start-package," including emergency economic reconstruction, became a matter of daily pressure on the parties to execute and legislate.

To reassure all three communities, but particularly Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats, that they will be safe in a common state, the Dayton constitution builds in strong guarantees against any threat of national tyranny [Rae language: ₂₃ ]. For example, the parliament can only take decisions by qualified majority. Any one of its three constituent nations can choose to define an issue in its vital interests, blocking proceedings by abstention and return to its provincial assembly for a vote, followed by a vote in parliament requiring a majority of each nation (and two-thirds if the decision at issue was made by the presidency) and tallied by entity (and each nation within the federal entity). In addition to the presidency, the upper house of the parliament has 15 delegates elected on parity terms: five Bosniacs, five Croats, and five Serbs. Although the lower house does not specify national qualifications for election, its members are elected proportionally "within their respective entity," thus one-third each from each of the three nations. Citizens can choose their residency freely and vote accordingly, but they can only be elected to the presidency and upper house in the territory identified with "their" nation.

A Commission of Human Rights for all of Bosnia, and an Ombudsman for each entity, aim to give judicial protection and publicity against violations of individual rights. An International Police Task Force is charged also to monitor human rights and the activities of the local police while it engages actively to reform the police through downsizing, vetting, training, and transparency. An International Tribunal on War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia, sitting in The Hague, is tasked to indict and judge individuals for serious violations of international humanitarian law during the Bosnian war; any community not cooperating with the work of the tribunal will be denied economic aid; and all persons indicated for such crimes are not allowed to run for office or play any other public role and are liable to arrest and extradition. Although no international agent is obliged to guarantee the right of people to return to their prewar homes, the presence of international troops to prevent violence clearly has provided some protection for people crossing the IEBL and has been perceived accordingly. ₂₄

Most critical of all the provisions in the international strategy for implementing peace in Bosnia is economic reconstruction. It is widely believed that economic incentives can bring parties to cooperate and that economic reconstruction, above all jobs for demobilized soldiers, can wean leaders from war, replace war profits with commercial profit, shift the balance of power to businesses interested in peace, and bring individuals from all sides of the war back into contact through markets and trade. Economic revival is viewed as the primary confidence-building measure, and a massive World Bank-led program of economic reconstruction and a shift from humanitarian aid to reconstruction by bilateral donors aim to succeed.

Does the Dayton accord and its international implementation change the incentives, interests, or identities of the warring parties or the Bosnian population? Do the institutions established delegate power and responsibility to others who have different interests or incentives? Dayton negotiators and optimists refer often to its implementation as a process which, given time, will work.

The behavior of the parties during the first year of implementation gives a resounding no to the question, with one exception. Like the Cambodian settlement, the Dayton accords have not altered the ambitions or goals of the three political leaderships and their political parties or reduced the insecurity felt by citizens about their future. The accords establish a ceasefire in which the war continues by other means, and none have renounced the resort to violence to achieve those goals.

First, there has been no change in the central focus on territorial control. Throughout the war, outside negotiators focused on the "map," drawing lines that assigned areas to each of the three parties that placed a premium on territorial control as bargaining chip and conceded to the logic of separation. Population transfers have continued since the ceasefire, with more people leaving homes than have returned and territory more ethnically homogeneous than at the time of the settlement.

These post-settlement movements have been largely involuntary, as a result of two processes. The Dayton-designed map assigned territories to one community that were populated at the time of Dayton by another, and the transfer of those territories was accompanied by a massive movement of people, including looting, firebombing, and trashing of homes and industries. For example the transfer of the Mrkonjic Grad and Sipovo area (the "Anvil") back to Serbs was preceded by their near total destruction by occupying Croat forces while United Nations soldiers stood by, with no mandate in the interim between forces to act. The greatest single exodus came with the transfer of five Serb-populated suburbs of Sarajevo to federation control, in February 1996, when international military and civilian officials tried in vain to persuade local Serbs with a last minute blitz of pamphlets and speeches that they would be safe, despite decidedly mixed messages coming from the Bosnian government (including deley until the last moment of the parliamentary vote on amnesty that was agreed at Dayton ₂₅ ) and from fear-inducing propaganda from Bosnian Serb official media. In a pattern that has become more blatant over the year, the Bosniac leadership wanted no minorities in Sarajevo, and the Serb leadership had strategic interests in a wholesale Serb flight to populate areas still considered insecure and vulnerable to assault, such as the town of Brcko and corridor between the western and eastern halves of the Serb Republic which Dayton negotiators could not settle and handed to international arbitration. Violance was reduced only by IFOR support for Serb busses to transport evacuees, while radicals from both Serb and Bosniac camps looted and burned. The second process is the continuing consolidation of political power through territorial control by all three ruling parties (the warring parties, elected in country-wide canvas in September to govern the country). Hundreds of villages have been exchanged in negotiated changes in the IEBL to make areas more ethnically pure. Dayton designed a country of corridors and buffer zones that interrupt crucial lines of communication within each national territory so as to break up the contiguity of territory and prevent secession by the Serbs and Croats. The effect has been to create vulnerable enclaves of mixed population, such as Croats in central Bosnia, Serbs in the "anvil," and Muslims in the Bihac area and Gorazde, who are neither welcome nor secure; to create borders difficult to defend and critical communication lines they do not control (such as the road between Trebinje and Pale for the Serb Republic and the road between Sarajevo and Una-Sana canton for Bosniacs); and to strengthen the incentive to maintain troop deployments and raise police checkpoints around points of dispute or insecurity. The delay in deciding the fate of Brcko and the arbitration decision to internationalize the area (and thus delay a settlement further) keeps the Serb Republic on constant war footing and mobilization. The Bosniac leadership in Sarajevo does not control any of its borders with neighboring states, and tensions with its federation partner make Croatian commitments on access to a free port at Ploce untrustworthy and the access through the Brcko area and Sava River basin to central Europe a necessary alternative. Each party used the ceasefire and international presence to consolidate their control over insecure territories by harassing and expelling remaining minorities and by preventing the return of members of a minority. American emphasis on putting time limits on its military deployment also keep these uncertainties alive, and armies prepared for a renewal of war.

Moreover, the program for military separation and confidence-building is accompanied by a program for military stabilization that, on the one hand, defines force ratios in the arms control program according to population, which leaves Bosniacs at a ratio of 1:12 if it should have to defend against a combined Croatian-Serbian campaign (whether instigated by Bosniac campaigns or by a drive for a two-way partition), and on the other hand, includes a "train and equip" program for the federation that is based on the assumption that Bosnian Serb military aggression remains the greatest and most likely threat to the state. The American view of war termination is that only with a military balance between the two entities (the Bosniac-Bosnian Croat federation and the Serb Republic) will aggressors be deterred from resuming war. But the effect of the "train and equip" program appears to override the arms control arrangement, for it reinforces the perceptions of vulnerability among Bosnian Serbs, has encouraged them to cheat on arms control agreements and to maintain a military presence at weak points of their internal frontier, and requires them to continue to view protection in political and military relations with neighboring Serbia. ₂₆ Croatian President Tudjman announced, upon signing the arms control agreement, that he has no intention of implementing it. The train and equip program also encourages the militants in the Bosniac leadership to entertain the prospects of an eventual military victory to liberate territory from Bosnian Serbs, despite the near certainty, as assessed by outside military experts, that they would lose. Although the program applies to a joint defense structure for the Federation, quarrels between Bosnian Croats and Bosniacs over every issue of integrating their armies into one led the American officials behind the program to concede, allowing command levels to take three years to unify and army units to remain separate.

Second, the power-sharing arrangements of the constitution institutionalize the ethnic division of power sought by the three nationalist parties who went to war and legalize the ongoing partition of the country. Michael Steiner, to create a special regime for Sarajevo as a model for the capital of a multiethnic Bosnia. The Bosnian Croat leadership were too cocky in their demands before the elections, far in excess of what they could expect on the basis of their numerical showing in those elections, Steiner was told.

Third, as long as each state unit within the Dayton Bosnia remains insecure, police will remain arms of those insecure states rather than the community policing services envisioned by international programs for police reforms. ₂₇ All three armies have their reserve units in the police forces, there are fewer provisions for international forces to monitor their weapons holdings, the Bosniac leadership refuses to disband its Agency for Information and Documentation that gathers information and trains against domestic "terrorists," and all households are being actively encouraged to "keep that rifle in the barn." The primary perpetrators of human rights violations, restrictions on freedom of movement, and violence during 1996 were police officers. ₂₈ The international intervention has no adequate mechanism to protect citizens against internal insecurity--violations of civil rights, banditry, looting, roaming criminal gangs, drunken armed soldiers running amuck, and state terror.

Fourth, economic aid has partitioned the country further, by giving 98.7 percent of all public assistance to the Federation in 1996 and 1.3 percent to Republika Srpska, and by creating tensions within the Federation by favoring Bosniac areas overwhelmingly. A priority on infrastructure and on building the institutions for a market economy and cost recovery over jobs has provided no peace dividend to improve a sense of well-being and a positive future or to reduce dependencies on political leaders for survival. Regional forums loyalty to nation and to unity as a precondition of collective survival. This in turn supports an authoritarian approach to politics, while the voting protections hardwire alliances, preventing the essential busines of democracy. Even if few issues are classed as vital, the vital interests will encourage caucusing by nation on most issues, discourage voting on interests that do not align by nation, place non-nationalist parties in a permanent opposition, and give an incentive--in the "opt out" clause--to radicals to keep tensions high.

The political compromises of the Dayton accords keep this insecurity alive. Bosnian Muslims have their state, but insufficient territorial control; Bosnian Serbs have their republic, but it is challenged daily by the campaign of orchestrated Muslim returns to strategically located villages and towns and by the insistence of international donors that there can be only one representative of the Bosnian state, with its seat and occupant in Sarajevo; and Bosnian Croats have recognition of their right to self-determination and many parity arrangements in the Federation, but they have been denied their republic. Bosnian Serbs act to protect all measure of sovereignty within their republic, to the point of receiving no international assistance (1.3 percent) in the first yerar because international financial institutions required them to sign contracts with the wartime, Muslim prime minister Muratovic, and because economic aid is denied to communities unwilling to hand over indicted war criminals (applied in practice only to the Bosnian Serbs for the entire republic). Bosnian Croats insist on separation and parity wherever they share territory or offices with Bosniacs, including refusal to participate in the Federation parliament until legislation redrawing administrative boundaries to divide the remaining mixed (Bosniac-Bosnian Croat) towns on the Mostar model is considered and passed. The Bosniac leadership insists on majoritarian rules wherever it has a numerical majority, including rejection of extensive efforts by the Deputy High Representative, The consociational arrangement appears to work at the elite level, within limits of extensive autonomy, because the three leaders have resumed their prewar `practices of collaborating on a division-of-spoils principle by competing over party control of specific ministreis and jurisdictions and over the distribution of benefits going align by nation, place non-nationato each national territory and party while looking competitors out. Co-presidencies have multiplied as a solution to quarrels over common institutions, and the resources of the international operation--humanitarian, housing, and reconstruction aid, and assistance in demarcating territory, running elections, establishing governmental ministries, and resettling populations--have been used to increase the ruling parties' advantages over opposition parties, to control state media, and to distribute benefits in exchange for votes. The opportunity for different interests and groups to emerge and gain expression is tiny. Election campaign rhetoric continued the theme of insecurity and protection--the SDA slogan in 1996 said it best: "a vote for the SDA is a vote for survival of the Muslim nation"--and voters rewarded this rhetoric by voting overwhelmingly for the three nationalist parties in the September elections. ₂₉ The Dayton constitution makes this difficult not to do, at the level of the presidency and upper house of the legislation, where voters elect representatives of their nation only. An individual in the "wrong place"--a Croat in Muslim territory, a Serb in Croat territory, a Muslim in Serb territory, a Jew, Romi, Turk, Vlach, Bulgarian, or other minority or person of mixed background anywhere, and so on--has no representation. But the uncertainty of the political outcome in the future has supported leaders' continuing calls for organized by the OHR for enterprise directors across confrontation lines have restored contacts and hopes for business but lack economic aid, open borders, and political stability for serious business. Bosnian Serbs have no evidence that they will win more by cooperating. And Bosniacs have no reason to abandon their successful resource acquisition strategy of victimhood.

The one exception to the conclusion that the Dayton accords and their implementation have not changed the interests, identities, or expectations of future behavior that led to war is the effect of the ceasefire and its causes on Bosnian Croat-Bosniac relations. The strategic shifts favoring Croats and the cessation of hostilities with Serbs removed the primary reason for Bosnian Croats to cooperate (to defeat Bosnian Serbs) and gave them greater determination to stick to the HDZ's definition of national rights. Similarly, explicit American support for the Bosniac leadership has witnessed greater assertiveness on their part to do the same.

In sum, the GFAP is ambivalent about whether the trust necessary for a lasting peace will be more likely if radical leaders are removed from power and conditions laid so that the population can reintegrate, or if territorial separation behind hard borders, legally recognized and militarily defended, is the better guarantee. It declares inviolable the external borders of Bosnia and the goal a restoration to a multiethnic state, but instead of methods aimed at getting individuals to unseparate psychologically from those groups and to feel safe independently of national communities to entertain other possible forms of social interaction, it institutionalizes a fixed idea of three ethnic groups, rewards cooperation that is "multiethnic," and treats the rights of individuals at risk for their beliefs or jobs within their own community, such as the growing risk felt by non-religious Muslims, as an internal matter for local police and occasional monitoring by outsiders. One measure of changed attitudes for the future comes from polling results that show up to 70 percent of youth in all three communities wanting to leave.

The provisions for reducing fears and increasing trust in the Dayton agreement do not follow from an understanding of the security dilemma. They reflect an automatic borrowing of peacekeeping blueprints embedded within an interpretation of the war as an act of aggression by one of the three parties who cannot be trusted to remain at peace. As one OSCE operative in the Serb Republic suggests,

Any international action in Bosnia, in order to be successful, should defeat its opponents on the same terrain: at first the propaganda machine must be deactivated, mainly by promoting local sources of information . . . ₃₀ (no foreign sponsored media). Secondly, the general feeling of security must be enhanced, by enlisting the Serbs as active participants in the process of building the country. ₃₁

Equally important for a lasting settlement is the nature of the political system. According to Walter, "Only when new political systems are established that promise to deter future aggression does the mutual trust needed for long-term cooperation emerge." ₃₂ Yet the political system of Dayton Bosnia is most vulnerable to constant stalemate, insufficient revenues, and inability to manage macroeconomic policy and trade. It is most vulnerable, in other words, to the tensions and quarrels that destroyed the former Yugoslav state, creating an environment that could not prevent the spiraling fears and potential for violence of a security dilemma. Given the origins of that Yugoslav state in wartime and the contradictory international pressures of the first days of the cold War, one cannot help but wonder whether a military concept of security fears and an international community more concerned with containment and ideological positioning than with peace can produce a lasting settlement.

Notes

Note 1: Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. This article draws on the author's Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: Brookings, 1995) and running commentaries on the Dayton accords and implementation. Back.

Note 2: Cited by Bertrand de Rossanet [pseud.], Peacemaking and Peacekeeping in Yugoslavia, Njihoff Law Specials vol. 17, (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996), p. 107. Back.

Note 3: [get full citation; December 1995?] Back.

Note 4: BBC five-part series, "The Death of Yugoslavia." [Silber and Little:] Back.

Note 5: Xavier Bougarel, "Bosnia and Hercegovina -- State and Communitarianism," in David A. Dyker and Ivan Vejvoda, eds., Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth (London: Longman, 1996), 99. Back.

Note 6: Bougarel, op. cit., 98-99. Back.

Note 7: Ivan Vejvoda calls this the "Great Fear," analogous to 1789, which spread progressively among leaders, all of the population, slowing building up to the point that the "identity haven of ethnos/nation seems an ideal harbour for those stricken by stifling fear and discontent," in "By Way of Conclusion to Avoid the Extremes of Suffering ...," in David A. Dyker and Ivan Vejvoda, eds., Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth (London: Longmans, 1996), pp. 253-54. Back.

Note 8: A Serb woman in Sarajevo, originally from Serbia but living in Bosnia much of her life, announced to me at dinner in February, 1992, in defiance at the nationalists: "I don't consider myself ugrozen!" Back.

Note 9: See Paul Shoup, "The Future of Croatia's Border Regions," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Report on Eastern Europe, November 29, 1991, where his demographic figures for the region show that districts in Croatia most affected by the fighting were "not those where either Serbs or Croats are in a clear majority but those where the two groups are more or less evenly balanced." Back.

Note 10: At a seminar held by Ambassador Zimmermann on May 7, 1966, at Johns Hopkins SAIS. In fact, the Slovenes were already prepared to exit, and had the necessary external support. But their perception is important. Back.

Note 11: Norbert Mappes-Niediek, "EU Peacebuilding: The administration of Mostar," paper presented to EU-funded conference on, London, November 1995, p. 13. Back.

Note 12: Mary McIntosh, Martha Abele MacIver, Daniel G. Abele, and David B. Nolle, "Minority Rights and Majority Rule: Ethnic Tolerance in Bulgaria and Romania," Social Forces (March 1995). Back.

Note 13: Xavier Bougarel, Bosnie: Anatomie d'un Conflit, p. 11. Back.

Note 14: Both quotes from Bougarel, op. cit., p. 10. Back.

Note 15: "Croatian `Pro-Fascist' Party Members in Bosnia," TANJUG, April 6, 1992, reported in FBIS East Europe, April 7, 1992, p. 38. Back.

Note 16: See Table 1 on the population distribution, by national community, in opstine, for a structural explanation of why Muslims paid far the largest costs of this type of war, and why it was easier for Serbs and Croats in Bosnia to cooperate than each with Muslims; taken from Bougarel, Bosnie: Anatomie d'un Conflit. Back.

Note 17: Many view the arms embargo, imposed on all of the former Yugoslavia by United Nations Security Council Resolution 713 adopted September 25, 1991, as giving, perhaps intentionally, an advantage to Yugoslav federal army and its allied Bosnian Serb army forces. The Bosnian government called repeatedly for its repeal on the grounds of rights to self-defense, allowed member states by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. Those who supported it, however, argued that it was a measure of prevention, aimed at preventing radical escalation of war, the breakdown of all humanitarian aid and negotiation, the likely spread of war into Kosovo and Sandzak, and a most probable outcome of Croatian-Serbian partition of Bosnia. For one such summary, see Bertrand de Rossanet, Peacemaking and Peacekeeping in Yugoslavia (The Hague: Kluwer, 1996). For the opposite argument, see: Back.

Note 18: The full range of proposals and their alternation between two general models are discussed in Paul C. Szasz, "The Quest for a Bosnian Constitution: Legal Aspects of Constitutional Proposals Relating to Bosnia," Fordham International Law Journal, Vol. 19, no. 2 (December 1995), 363-407. Back.

Note 19: Shashi Tharoor, special advisor to then Undersecretary General of the United Nations for Peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, and desk officer for former Yugoslavia throughout the wars, argued at the Columbia conference on International Intervention in Civil Wars, May 17, 1996, however, that economic sanctions were a way of punishing the Bosnian Serbs without saying so, so that international representatives could keep talking to them. The need to keep open lines of communication with all parties was a cardinal principle of the civilian head of UNPROFOR, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General for former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, for which he was mercilessly criticized when it led him to negotiate with Croatian Serbs in Knin or Bosnian Serbs in Pale. Back.

Note 20: Reported by BBC on May 5, 1996, and cited by Patrick Moore in OMRI Special Report: Pursuing Balkan Peace, Vol. 1, No. 18, 7 May 1996. Back.

Note 21: This qualification by David Lake and Donald Rothchild, in Ethnic Fears and Global Engagement: The International Spread and Management of Ethnic Conflict, Policy Paper #20, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California, January 1996, is particularly useful in my opinion. Back.

Note 22: Interview with von Helldorff, in Brussels, at E.U. Commission headquarters, November 11, 1996. Back.

Note 23: The institutions that Weingast proposes to create the trust necessary to prevent preemptive war, by "t[ying] the hands of a potential aggressor" (Walter, p. 13 [cite original]), have been designed to tie the hands of all three parties. Back.

Note 24: The experience of American officers and soliders in Bosnia under IFOR in 1996, for example, persuaded them that Bosnians would not cross the interentity boundary line (zone of separation between the two entities) if IFOR were not there. Back.

Note 25: Annex 7, Article VI. Back.

Note 26: All assessments of the Bosnian Serb army are that it is so weak, disorganized, and unable (still) to conduct offensive operations that it is no threat to the Federation. Moreover, they have no territorial aspirations, only to protect what they have now. If, however, the argument that has much validity for March 1992, in explaining the Bosnian Serb preemptive attack on Sarajevo at the start of the war, that violence is chosen when one group is growing progressively weaker or believes that the other is becoming increasingly hostile, and so decides that it is better to fight sooner rather than later, then the effect of the program for "military balances," Bosniac campaigns to push returns, and the Brcko arbitration could still be Serb military action. Back.

Note 27: See David Bayley," Back.

Note 28: The SDS police network in Doboj, Tesanj, and is the best documented for abuses; the Mostar police (HVO soldiers in different uniforms) the most notorious; and the provocations of Bosniac citizens the least transparent. Back.

Note 29: Ironically, given the general assumptions about Bosnian parties, the smallest percentage--less than 70 percent--was cast for the nationalist Serb (SDS) leader, Krajisnik. The highest vote for opposition parties went to Serbs, and secondly to Bosniacs, while there is no political competition in Bosnian Croat areas (opposition Bosnian Croat parties function in Bosniac areas). [give figures] Back.

Note 30: He adds, "from within the Serb community" but this applies in all three cases. Back.

Note 31: Tomas Miglierini, "Political Perspectives of the Serb Republic," in Marie-Janine Calic, Friedenskonsolidierung im Ehemaligen Jugoslawien: Sicherheitspolitische und Zivile Aufgaben (Ebenhausen: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik - S 413, November 1996), p. 125. Back.

Note 32: Barbara Walter, "Domestic Anarchy and Civil War," 9 [see new version] Back.