Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state actors are walking their country into a Cyprus-style partition. Their spokespeople may insist that all is well. They may even bat away people’s alarm with a dismissive “there is no conflict, there is no problem”, but the truth rarely cares about PR. The partitionist coup being escalated by convicted criminal and Republika Srpska president, Milorad Dodik, has one of two end points: the ash heap of history or a de facto partition. For reasons that remain a mystery, few in BiH’s federal government, police or intelligence agency seem to be acting as if the former is possible. Nor do they seem to be aware that a de facto partition does not need to have international support to butcher a state’s territorial integrity. Take it from a Cypriot: de facto doesn’t sweeten the pill.
Perhaps it bears repeating— as BiH’s police and intelligence philosophically dither about the courts’ arrest warrant on Dodik— Cyprus’ partition has provided much inspiration to the Republika Srpska project.
It was the Serb genocidaire and founder of the RS, Radovan Karadžić, who first gave us a clue. In the sixteenth session of the “Assembly of the Serb Nation in BiH”, on 12 May 1992, Karadžić discussed the recent declaration of the “Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Bosanska Krajina”, one of the many self-declared oblasts that preceded the establishment of the RS. Curiously, it was a then fledgling partitionist experiment in the Levant which was providing the blueprint for the RS chief: “in the Turkish Republic of Cyprus it was the same as it is in Krajina, [UN] deployment across entire territories and later the green line was drawn back”, he informed his colleagues.
Of course, UN peacekeepers are no longer in BiH – “there is no conflict, there is no problem”. If but it were that simple. The 1992-1995 context is over but that doesn’t make a de facto partition in the style of the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus any less pertinent to the RS project.
To understand this, one must pause to reflect on the absurd notion that is the ‘three constitutive peoples’ of BiH. It is a term that is iterated and reiterated by the most obviously partitionist forces in BiH, notably Dodik’s SNSD and their Croat allies in the HDZ. With every escalation they perpetrate, they claim to be acting for the sake and protection of BiH’s ‘three constitutive peoples’. Yet this very term reveals the partitionist foundations on which post-war BiH stands, foundations which therefore require strong state institutions to protect the country’s integrity.
Karadžić hammered the notion of three separate peoples into BiH’s political lexicon in the 1990s. As his forces prepared for an imminent genocidal assault, in December 1991 he begged his colleagues to instil in the international community the idea that BiH has “THREE NATIONAL COMMUNITIES, not THREE PARTIES, BUT THREE NATIONAL COMMUNITIES”. Lo and behold, just two years before, a similar refrain was being sounded in the Levant when Turkish-Cypriot partitionist Rauf Denktash rejected a UN plan to reunify Cyprus on the basis that it did not recognise “two peoples” on the island with equal sovereignty (Ker-Lindsay, The Cyprus Problem). In Cyprus, this logic has underpinned half a century of a divided land in which every aspect of life is partitioned in order to serve the purported interests of each sovereign people. Karadžić’s partitionist logic was both identical and overt: “Then maybe these three national communities will have three school systems, maybe even three healthcare systems etc.”
Today, Dodik is filling in the “etc.” of Karadžić’s wish upon a star. On 17 March he announced his intention to form a Republika Srpska border force to man the entity’s frontiers. But remember, “there is no conflict, there is no problem”.
We know that post-war BiH was founded on this perverse logic of constitutive peoples. We also know this logic is why the BiH state has found itself hamstrung by the SNSD’s every whim. Why, then, do BiH state actors not grasp that refusing to implement a monopoly on legitimate force across both entities means the vacuum will inevitably be filled by partitionists claiming to defend the rights of their “constitutive people”?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that BiH state actors still believe in the myth that the international community will save them. And now we return to the very first point I raised: a de facto partition does not need to have international support to butcher a state’s territorial integrity. No one knows this better than the Cypriots.
Was it not the Cypriot people who were led to believe that EU accession would mean their island would be reunified? Was it not the promise of EU accession that led the then Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government to pressure Denktash into reopening negotiations? The European Union had waxed lyrical about Cyprus being “at the very fount of European culture and civilisation”. The European political establishment as well as the UN claimed they were committed to restoring the territorial integrity of Cyprus that had been shattered by partitionist violence. The result? Cyprus’ self-serving Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot leaders failed to capitalise on international support by torpedoing the Annan Plan which they ultimately rejected anyway.
It turned out that Cyprus didn’t need to be reunified for it to gain EU membership. Likewise, the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus hasn’t needed international recognition in order to survive. Every year, the European political powers reiterate their commitment to the Republic of Cyprus’ territorial integrity. Meanwhile, Cyprus’ de facto partition remains the reality on the ground.
In other words, the international community will only support you as far as you are willing to help yourself. So while everyone from the US Congress to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to the European Commission VPreiterate their commitment to BiH’s territorial integrity, it is all pixie dust unless BiH state actors show themselves willing to use the powers they have to stop partition in its tracks.
Bosnia is not Cyprus – yet. It doesn’t have a hard border – yet. But its state actors seem to be doing everything to make it a mutated version of Aphrodite’s divided island. What is extraordinary is that, unlike in 2000s Cyprus in which partitionists had been elected to their positions of ultimate power, in Bosnia it is the political establishment in Sarajevo which has chosen to facilitate Dodik & co’s power, all in the name of a ‘European path’. In so doing, BiH state actors have normalised a partitionist juggernaut who operates along the same self-serving logic as the partitionists who hijacked Cyprus’ peace process. The ‘European path’ down which they are leading the Bosnian people is a barren road of platitudes and de facto partition.
(Georgio Konstandi is a Bosnian Genocide researcher and MA graduate in Southeast European Studies at University College London (UCL), where he graduated with a Distinction. He wrote his master’s thesis on expressions of anger in Bosniak literature. Georgio studied his undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated with a First-Class degree in Modern Languages (French, Spanish, and Russian at the Cambridge Language School). Georgio is the founder of the Bosnian Genocide educational project, Voices from the Drina, which simulates a newsfeed to imagine how the Bosnian War would have looked like had it unfolded on social media. The project will go live in 2024 and Georgio looks forward to integrating the project into British schools. He completed an internship at The Times in 2021 and at the Srebrenica Memorial Center in 2022.)
