Bosnia: West Confused over OHR Future

Representatives of local leaders and top world countries charged with overseeing peace-implementation in Bosnia and Herzegovina are continuing talks today on the future of the international presence in the troubled country.

Some western countries, particularly EU members, had hoped this meeting of the Peace Implementation Council, PIC, would offer a final decision about the closure of Bosnia’s Office of the High Representative, OHR, by the end of the year.

Yet a complete political deadlock among local leaders as well as a complex standoff among key international players are making a decision at this stage almost impossible, western diplomats who participated at the PIC meeting told Balkan Insight.

Because of this, the PIC meeting, which opened in Sarajevo on Monday and will close Tuesday afternoon, is not expected to produce any groundbreaking news. Instead, in addition to listing achievements and failures of local leaders in the past six months, the conference is expected to postpone a final decision yet again, until the next meeting in October this year, sources told Balkan Insight.  

The beginning of the PIC meeting on Monday highlighted conflicting local positions, diplomats said.

At the beginning of the meeting, Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity of Republika Srpska, strongly reiterated the Bosnian Serb position that the OHR should close its doors here as soon as possible.

“I have told PIC members that Republika Srpska will not accept [the use] of [the OHR’s governing] Bonn powers anymore,” Dodik told media after the meeting, adding that Republika Srpska may even “press charges” against OHR employees for political manipulation and unwarranted use of governing powers.

He tried to better explain his positions in a column published on Monday in Austrian daily Der Standard. In the article, he compared Bosnia with a child on a bicycle, and the OHR with the training wheels.  

“Some countries accept that the people of Bosnia must be allowed to self-manage. Others seem to fear that when the training wheels of this international experiment are removed, "the bicycle" might fall over together with the child. But Bosnia and Herzegovina is now 15 years old. Is it not the time to give it a try?” he wrote.

Yet most other Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Bosnian Croat, as well as some western officials, warned that this present time - in which the country is undergoing its worst post-war crisis - is the wrong time for such a dangerous experiment. They say that Bosnia still needs the OHR as the ultimate guarantor of country’s territorial, constitutional and institutional integrity.

“I want to warn once again that the closure of the OHR during this political [crisis] and [given the state of] the political system in Bosnia and Herzegovina can lead to the obstruction of the work of Bosnia and Herzegovina's institutions, then soon towards divisions, even conflict,” said Bosniak leader Sulejman Tihic in his address before the PIC.

The PIC is expected to announce its conclusions on Tuesday afternoon.