Denis Bećirović, candidate for Bosniak membership in the Presidency Council of the Social Democratic Party casts his vote for the election of members of the cantonal, entity and national parliaments and the Presidential Council in Tuzla, BiH, on October 2 (Credit Ahmed Bešić/Anadolu Agency)

Mahomed Faizal

The recent elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have once again exposed the dangerous fissures in a state, arbitrarily cobbled together by Western powers more interested in creating forced stability than championing the cause of justice and real democracy.

The eighth election since the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995 that ended the three-and-a-half-year Bosnian war, further entrenched the ethno religious state and the resultant detritus of ethnic cleansing.

The Accords were never meant to democratise Bosnia, rather it was a stop-gap measure to end the war and allow Western powers to slink away unashamedly from their disastrous policies in the Balkans.

The architects of the Accords drafted an overly complicated constitution that outlined a mixed presidential and parliamentary electoral system, cleaved along ethnic and sectarian lines between two partially autonomous entities and three religious-ethnic denominations within the state: the majority Orthodox Serb-populated Republika Srpska (RS) and the majority Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH).

While this convoluted constitution led to relative peace and incomprehensible power-sharing, it did nothing to promote genuine democracy.

Ultimately, Dayton rewarded extremist nationalistic forces in Serbia and Croatia that indulged in the most primaeval forms of violence against Bosniaks. The swathes of territory gained through the total decimation of the local Bosniak populations became the imprimatur that sanctioned the prescripts of the Accords, further enshrining the spoils of war.

David Scheffer, an adviser to the then US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, who was attending White House meetings on Bosnia, wrote to a colleague: “It’s a very slippery slope. The Serbs have seized enormous territory through ethnic cleansing, and then we hold a ‘democratic’ referendum to confirm such aggression, a very transparent act of appeasement.”

The elections ushered in historic firsts. A left-wing member of the ethnically diverse Social Democratic Party (SDP) under the leadership of Denis Bećirović, backed by 11 opposition civic-oriented parties, won the Bosniak seat over Bakir Izetbegović, whose Democratic Action (SDA) party held power since the end of the war in 1996.

Bakir is the son of the late President of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegović. In a highly disputed result, incumbent Željko Komšić won the Croat seat with support from Bosniaks in western Bosnia, and the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats candidate, Željka Cvijanović, an ally of the Bosnian Serb separatist Milorad Dodik, won the race for Serb member of the Bosnian presidency. The result in RS has gone to a recount, although Dodik, a pro-Vladimir Putin loyalist, is set to retain his position.

Minutes after the polls closed, Christian Schmidt, the Office of the High Representative (OHR), an internationally-appointed diplomat who serves as the final authority on the implementation of the Dayton Accords and chief interpreter of Bosnian constitutional law, announced controversial electoral law reforms.

The OHR was established in conjunction with the Dayton Peace Agreement. Schmidt is seen as a divisive figure whose political party in Germany, the Christian Social Union, is accused of being a supporter of the far-right ruling Croatian HDZ in Zagreb.

In 2020 Schmidt was awarded the Order of Ante Starčević by the Prime Minister of Croatia, Andrej Plenković. Starčević is seen as the father of the idea of a ‘Greater Croatia’ that would include present-day Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia.

He viewed the South Slavs who inhabited the regions as Croats, regardless of their religion. Since 2013, Schmidt has been the co-chair of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, and in Berlin; he was a member of the Advisory Board of the American Jewish Committee.

At the heart of the new law is how delegates would be chosen from the House of Peoples, the upper chamber of the Bosniak-Croat Federation entity’s Parliament. Once enacted, the Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs will lose representatives of their ethnic communities in a federation canton (municipality) if their population there is less than 3 per cent.

Currently, at least one Bosniak, one Croat, and one Serb delegate are elected from each canton. Critics of the new law say it is discriminatory and designed only to assist the main Bosnian Croat party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).

The HDZ is the Christian Democratic Nationalist party representing Croats in BiH. Its leader is the hard-line nationalist Dragan Čović.

For the past year, Dodik and radical elements within RS have been threatening to secede from BiH and form their state with separate institutions, including the military. Serbian President, Aleksandar Vučić, is the primary enabler of Dodik’s secessionist activities in Bosnia.

Despite Dodik’s reactionary and ultra-nationalistic tendencies, EU countries have turned a blind eye to his outbursts while acquiescing to his funders in Belgrade.

With accommodation comes appeasement which EU leaders have for years, during the Bosnian war and post-Dayton, been eager to bend their collective knees to an assortment of fascists and right-wing zealots in Eastern Europe.

While Russia has nurtured Dodik, more recently it has also thrown its support behind Čović, whose secessionist tendencies are viewed favourably in Zagreb and Belgrade.

It is no wonder that pro-Putin Dodik, Čović, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, and Croatian President, Zoran Milanović, are seen as Russia’s principal allies in the Balkans.

Russia has been actively exploiting ethnic tensions and agitating Orthodox Serb nationalism in BiH by funnelling hundreds of millions of pounds into proxies in the region to create instability and unrest while expanding its geopolitical agenda.

During the aggression against Bosnia, Serbian national leaders, using the crudest and most violent rhetoric, appealed for Orthodox Christian solidarity among their neighbours and to Russia, the one-time protector of the Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire.

It would not be absurd to believe that Vučić, Dodik and other nationalist leaders in the region are not held as Europe’s last bulwark against the Muslim presence in Europe.

Bosnia has always proved awkward for EU leaders, especially during the war. That it took untold massacres, nightly broadcast on the world’s media, to finally get western leaders to act to stop the genocide is a testament not to their humanitarian concerns, but more to an extremely cynical plan, deeply embedded in centuries of Islamophobia, white supremacy and racism.

In the Clinton Tapes, Taylor Branch notes European leaders believed: “An independent Bosnia would be ‘unnatural’ as the only Muslim nation in Europe… President François Mitterrand of France had been especially blunt in saying that Bosnia did not belong and that British officials spoke of a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe.”

In his autobiography, My Life, Clinton is clear about why European leaders were reluctant to take military action against Serbia and its supporters: “Some European leaders were not eager to have a Muslim state in the heart of the Balkans, fearing it might become a base for exporting extremism, a result that their neglect made more, not less, likely… In my first meeting with French president François Mitterrand, he made it clear that, although he had sent 5,000 French troops to Bosnia as part of a UN humanitarian force to deliver aid and contain the violence, he was more sympathetic to the Serbs than I was and less willing to see a Muslim-led unified Bosnia.”

It was left to the late David Owen, the former British Foreign Secretary and the European Community’s appointed negotiator on Bosnia during the war and who ultimately became the single most vilified individual among Bosniaks and symbolised the West’s broad diplomatic capitulation in Bosnia, to observe that: “The European Union has no reason to be suspicious or to fear a new Muslim state emerging within Europe. For Europe, over the centuries, has been enriched by Islam.”

The New York Times correspondent, Roger Cohen, cogently captured the handwringing amongst Western leaders even in the face of increasing Serb savagery: “This anxiety, like some ghost of ancient fears of the Terrible Turk against whom Europeans fought for centuries, has been an unspoken subtext throughout the talks on how to end the Bosnian war.

For all the horror over the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims from land that Serbs covet, Europeans have never been ready to fight to preserve a Bosnian state led by Muslims.”

The Muslims of the Balkans have always been viewed by European leaders, intellectuals, popular nationalists and the ever-expanding coterie of fascist rulers as followers of an alien religion and “foreigners” who had to be “cleansed” from European territory. The manifestation of the “Terrible Turk” mentality was the intellectual raison d’être underpinning the genocidal policy against the Bosniaks.

It is no wonder that Josep Borrell, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, in a recent speech to the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges, publicly expressed what many have said in hushed tones: “Europe is a garden,” but “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden”.

Borrell’s racist musings are neither new nor shocking. In a prelude to the war in Bosnia, Serb leader Slobodan Milošević rallied nationalist forces in Kosovo by invoking the spirit of the heroic Serbs who fought against the Ottomans: “Serbia was at that time the bastion that defended European culture, religion, and European society in general.” In doing so, Borrell treads a familiar path of xenophobia, Islamophobia and European supremacist mythology.

Ironically, a few days after the elections in BiH, the European Commission recommended that BiH be granted the official status of a candidate country to join the European Union. The spectre of Muslims within Pax Christiana has sent shivers down the spines of the ruling European elites. The battle, for Muslims, has only just begun!