With the referendum of 25 September, the Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina have pronounced themselves in a plebiscitary and unequivocal way: January 9 will be a national holiday, remembering the day in 1992 when they tried to break away from Sarajevo, now launched on the road to independence from the former Yugoslavia. The outcome of the vote returns to give weight to a date that is probably more symbolic than heralding practical effects at an institutional level. The real political consequences, if anything, have reflected internationally.
Let's go by degrees.
Bosnia, a nation wedged over the centuries between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, for decades was the pivot of the ethnic-cultural contradictions of the former Yugoslavia. Under Tito's staff, no one knew. With the lid removed, the third of the Yugoslav wars elected Bosnia and Herzegovina to be the scene of the greatest massacre in Europe since the end of the Second World War. As we have already written in our reportage (see below), the Dayton accords of '95 only patched a garment whose bottom seams have always been soaked.
We live in the age of politically correct and there is nothing more awkward than telling things for what they are. Few recognize that Bosnia and Herzegovina is an invented nation and the leopard-like division of ethnicities characterized by deep cultural, religious and linguistic roots has always prevented a peaceful and definitive design of borders and areas of influence.
One of the most natural solutions emerged on the field in the bloodiest phase of the civil war: in the autumn of '93, while Serbs, Muslims and Croats slaughtered each other in an all-out, Belgrade and Zagreb tried to talk to each other to put an end to the slaughter and divide two of the three strips of the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia: the Croats of the Herceg Bosna with Croatia; the Serbs of the Srpska Republika with Serbia (then still formally Yugoslavia with the remaining Montenegro). The third limb, corresponding more or less to a slice of central land of which Sarajevo was part, would have constituted a republic of its own, home of the Muslim Bosniaks who inherited the Turkish presence in the Balkans.
Officially it was the uneven ethnic distribution of the three ethnic groups that made the idea fail. The Owen-Stoltenberg peace plan, which was closer to the project and which included transfers of entire communities, was wrecked as a result.
In reality, more than the "Balkanized" distribution of the ethnic groups, the will of the international community could be strongly opposed to the creation of three mini-states and even more to the annexation of parts of Bosnia to Croatia and Serbia. In Brussels and Washington an apparently united Bosnia was needed to be able to integrate in the not too distant future to the new institutional realities then nascent. The watchword of those days was "Stop nationalisms" in order to reduce the obstacles to a European homogenization already conceived with the Maastricht agreements, matured close to those of Dayton.
From the dissolution of Yugoslavia no powers had to be born, for regional ones. It seems an oxymoron, but behind the apparent unity of nascent Bosnia hid the idea of a Divide and conquer imagined by the European Community (as it was called) and USA. Even if the entry route of Sarajevo into the EU appears to be long in all the 2016, at the time the foundations were created for a future weak and domesticated state with larger geopolitical interests.
That the war and the massacres should end at all costs comes by itself. In this respect, the peace born in Dayton was an absolute good. On the other hand, it was bad to pretend not to see: the frustrations in the Balkans have a longer memory than elsewhere.
Today the trouble returns to the surface. The promoter of the Serbian referendum Dodik, painted by the media as an anachronistic monster linked to the Milosevic era, did nothing but blow on the ash, under which he always smolders a live fire. Bosnia is officially divided into two political-administrative entities: the Croatian-Muslim Federation and the Serbian Republic of Bosnia. The two sub-state realities are the antechamber of a fragmentation of the country that is always lurking.
Identities are not erased with a pencil stroke. It is enough to turn Bosnia into a car to realize it. Especially in the Balkans, cultures grow on the territories and diktat of supranational organizations do not take hold.
Overlapping a broader geopolitical reading with the problem of the former Yugoslavia, everything seems to be done to get back to the winds of the cold war. Western government newspapers and TV stations in these hours a bit Niche and hasten to provide Manichaean readings banned from the chronicles of twenty years ago.
The crushing victory of the Yup at the referendum on the Serbian identity, it should push us to reflect, not to shake bogeys.
(photo: author)
Also read the report from Bosnia divided into three parts:
The Balkans and the bad conscience chap. 1
