SARAJEVO,Bosnia – Haris Silajdzic,a member of the Bosnian Presidency ,addressed the meeting of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) Steering Board Political Directors.In his address, Silajdzic said:
“First of all, please allow me to welcome you to Bosnia and to express my deep appreciation for your continued engagement toward peace and stability in our country and the region as a whole.
I am especially grateful for your assistance with our efforts to embark on the road towards Euro-Atlantic integrations, which will benefit the entire country and all its people.
The Peace Implementation Council has been engaged in Bosnia for almost twelve years now. Without a doubt, progress has been made. Immediately following the war and genocide, Bosnia was severely crippled, with some 200,000 people dead and countless wounded, with over a million refugees and displaced persons, and with its economy and infrastructure literally in ruins. We all, including all of you here, inherited that situation.
However, because of the hundreds of thousands of lives that were lost, because of another half a million that never returned to their homes, those who for a decade now have insisted on full implementation of the Dayton Agreement and on reforms, and those who have done everything to undermine Dayton and block reforms, cannot be equated, as some in the international community attempt to do. This strategy cannot bring Bosnia closer to EU and NATO and cannot guarantee long term peace and stability. In order to accomplish those goals, a serious and meaningful change in policy course is required.
Throughout the war, the international community did far too little to end the murderous campaign the like of which Europe had not seen since the dark days of the Holocaust. As the UN Report on Srebrenica said, the embargo: and I quote: “left the Serbs in a position of overwhelming military dominance and effectively deprived the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina of its right, under the Charter of the United Nations, to self-defense.” Only after the genocide at Srebrenica did the U.S.-led air strikes force Serbia and the RS leadership to the negotiating table, resulting in the Dayton Agreement. Dayton stopped genocide, but left Bosnia divided into two semi-autonomous entities, its multi-ethnic character all but obliterated and its central institutions virtually powerless.
Today, almost twelve years after the war, the future of Bosnia remains hostage to ethno-territorial arrangements. Some of these arrangements are found directly in the Constitution, which constitutes Annex 4 of the Dayton Agreement, but most of them are the result of the fact that the Dayton Agreement was only partially implemented. In particular, Annex 7, which guarantees the right of all refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes failed to be implemented in any meaningful way, particularly with respect to the territory of the RS entity.
And then, there is the judgment of the world’s highest judicial body – the International Court of Justice. As you are all aware, on February 26, the ICJ unequivocally ruled that – and I quote – “the acts committed at Srebrenica were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina as such; and accordingly these were acts of genocide,” committed by the institutions of the RS, namely by the RS Army and the RS Police.
As the United Nations Report on Srebrenica states – and I quote again – “As part of the larger ambition for a ‘Greater Serbia,’ the Serbs set out to occupy the territory of the enclaves; they wanted the territory for themselves. The civilian inhabitants of the enclaves were not the incidental victims of the attackers; their death or removal was the very purpose of the attacks upon them. The Bosnian Muslim civilian population thus became the principal victim of brutally aggressive military and para-military Serb operations to depopulate coveted territories in order to allow them to be repopulated by Serbs.”
As is evident today, it was a job well-done. After all, the name “Republika Srpska” literally means “the Republic of the Serbs,” and from the pre-war population of over forty-five percent Bosniaks and Croats, only four percent of non-Serbs remain in that part of Bosnia. Thus, the situation that has been created in Bosnia, and that has been further solidified through the partial and selective implementation of the Dayton Agreement, is a direct result of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Do not take my word for it, simply refer again the ICJ’s Judgment and the UN’s Srebrenica Report, or any of the dozens of ICTY’s judgments. Hence, Slobodan Milosevic’s project lives on.
However, the principles of customary international law, as codified in the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility, and as reproduced in a 2001 U.N. General Assembly resolution 56/83, mandate that – I quote – “no State shall recognize as lawful a situation created by a serious breach of a peremptory norm of general international law,” which includes the crime of genocide and the crimes against humanity, “nor render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation.”
It is unfortunate that some in the international community ignore these legal obligations, choosing the path of least resistance by pursuing the option of not meddling with the “situation on the ground,” while fully aware of how such a situation was created in the first place. If you ask us to accept the results of Milosevic’s project, that is something that we cannot do. It is, indeed, impossible to do so while at the same time remaining steadfastly committed to reform.
With all due respect, I must ask you: what are the bases of the international community’s current policy toward Bosnia? What are the bases of the proclaimed reform? The Dayton Agreement has not been fully implemented. International conventions and other international legal obligations have been severely violated. The ICJ’s judgment is being ignored. At the last elections the people clearly stated what they want and what they do not want. It is unclear, then, what remains. It is clear who wants status quo and who wants reform.
The only thing that remains unclear is whether the international community will adopt the legal and moral high ground, the sole guarantees of permanent peace and stability, or it will support the status quo.
We are accused of focusing on the past and not looking into the future, but let’s examine the facts for a moment. We have introduced changes to the Citizenship Law in order to ensure that over a half a million Bosnian refugees – scattered throughout the world for no other reason than as a result of genocide and ethnic cleansing – do not lose their Bosnian citizenship.
Ten deputies from the RS entity have repeatedly used entity veto to block this law with the sole – and proclaimed – goal of divesting those people of their citizenship.
We have introduced a law prohibiting denial of the Holocaust and genocide in order to criminalize behavior that we see daily on the streets and the stadiums of RS entity and which greatly stifles the return. The same ten deputies blocked that law as well. You then told that it was our fault that the law was blocked because we “did not draft it properly.” For your information, the law was modeled almost entirely on a similar Belgian law, and does not appreciatively differ from similar laws in force in eleven EU countries.
We have accepted all attempts at Police reform, even when every subsequent attempt included serious erosions of the previously agreed-upon solutions. We balked at preserving Police of the RS entity, but we offered a compromise that would have created the Police of Bosnia in the RS entity. This proposal fully follows the instructions of Mr. Vincenzo Coppola, the Chief of EU’s Police Mission in Bosnia , who unequivocally stated last month that in order to satisfy the EU standards, and I quote: “You may have the police in the RS entity, but not the police of the RS.”
You proclaim that you want us to follow the EU standards of freedom, equality and democracy, but criticize us when we actually take you seriously and attempt to apply those standards in practice.
These are the facts and they cannot be disputed, not with a straight face anyway. It is, indeed, abundantly clear who in Bosnia does not want reform and who does. The Council of Europe told us that reform must entail elimination of entity voting and we based our positions on that directive. The European Parliament then told us that entity voting may henceforth apply only to a limited set of competencies, and last month in Washington we agreed to a U.S. proposal along those lines.
Indeed, entity voting would not even be a contentious issue if the Dayton Agreement had been fully implemented. If refugees had returned to the RS entity – as mandated by Annex 7 – entity veto would not be an ethno-territorial mechanism that is used by the leadership of this entity to block any and all reform aimed at making Bosnia a modern, democratic and functional member of the European family of nations. It is the leadership of that entity that focuses on the past, with the sole aim of preserving the situation created by, in the words of the United Nations, “the operations to depopulate coveted territories in order to allow them to be repopulated by Serbs.”
While I am convinced that you are all mindful of the fact that is the RS entity leadership that is responsible for the political stalemate, you must find a political will to identify the culprit, however strategically or politically inconvenient that may be at the present time. Instead of justifying the current course by the alleged “fights” of the local politicians, it must be answered why Dayton has not been fully implemented. There are, indeed, no “fights.” There are only those who want to keep Milosevic’s project alive and those who want to end it. The international community must take the principled stance in this struggle, as any other solution threatens to further destabilize Bosnia and to seriously reflect on the stability of the region in the long-run.
Mr. Komsic and I today dispatched a letter to the UN Secretary General and to over a hundred governments and international organizations, asking for the same thing I ask of you tonight: assistance with transforming Bosnia into a modern, functional, democratic, European state, with equality and justice for all its people in every portion of its territory.
The UN Srebrenica Report said – and I quote – “The UN experience in Bosnia was one of the most difficult and painful in our history. Through error, misjudgment and an inability to recognize the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder. No one regrets more than we the opportunities for achieving peace and justice that were missed. No one laments more than we the failure of the international community to take decisive action to halt the suffering and end a war that had produced so many victims. Srebrenica crystallized a truth understood only too late by the United Nations and the world at large: that Bosnia was as much a moral cause as a military conflict. The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever.
I hope that you will recognize the value and importance of this input in order to avoid future reports, of which there are already way to many, that lament the failures of the international community in Bosnia.
I again wish to express my appreciation to the international community for bringing brutalities in Bosnia to an end.
But, while Dayton ended the military conflict, and genocide, Bosnia today remains as much a moral cause as it was twelve years ago. While Srebrenica will indeed forever haunt our collective history, the magnitude of that experience will only increase if the results of genocide are allowed to stand, and peace and stability will always be threatened”,Haris Silajdzic,a member of the Bosnian Presidency,concluded.
