Bosnia & Herzegovina
External Relations
In the period 2004-2005 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) faced various foreign political challenges connected to its much desired association with the EU and NATO, as well as with its stalled relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Developments were greatly influenced by EU's changing role in European security matters, and by purely internal reforms and transformations in the making in both entities of the country.
Relations with the EU developed along two separate lines. On the one hand, there were the plans for handing over peacekeeping authority in BiH from NATO-led to an EU-led force as an important step in the development of Europe's defence and security policy. On the other, opening talks for the signing of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) were viewed by BiH government and the EU alike as a first step to a prospective BiH integration into the Union.
The final decision to pass control over NATO's Stabilisation Force (SFOR) in BiH to 7.000-strong EU troops was taken at NATO's Istanbul summit that took place on June 28th-29th 2004. Prior to it, the EU-led operation was endorsed at a session of the EU's 25 foreign ministers on May 17th 2004. Further, an agreement was concluded in Brussels on the envisaged scope of the mission between the Netherlands, Luxemburg and the UK, on the one hand, and BiH's prime minister Adnan Terzic and defence minister Nikola Radovanovic, on the other. The agreement represented an unprecedented involvement of BiH as a third party, along with the NATO and the EU, in the transformation of SFOR into a EU-led force.
EUFOR, known also as Althea Operation replaced SFOR in December 2004. It is endowed with three main tasks: working with the international community toward stabilisation of the country, providing security guarantees, and helping local authorities move toward joining NATO and its Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme, and the EU. A special focus of the mission is combating organised crime in close cooperation with a separate EU mission, the EU Police Mission, launched in January 2003.
Despite the existence of various similarities in the functions of EUFOR and its predecessor SFOR, the missions are not completely identical. While SFOR executed much more interventionist type of functions, EUFOR is only intended as a security presence in the country. At the same time, war crimes and fight against terrorism will remain a joint EU-NATO responsibility, as long as NATO preserves a limited presence in BiH.
The conclusion of an SAA was the other priority in BiH-EU relations, whose realisation turned into a touchstone of BiH's maturity to introduce the political, economic and legislative reforms as outlined in the European Commission (EC) Feasibility Study of November 2003. A March 31st EC report indicated a very slow reforms progress, which delayed the initiation of talks on the signing of the SAA for another year and a half. Throughout the entire period major impediments before BiH were Republika Srbska's (RS) continuing reluctance to cooperate with the ITCY, as well as the deadlocked police and media reform, designated as prerequisites for the country's EU association.
The rejection of a package of laws aimed at creating a unified police force by the RS's parliament on May 30th 2005 resulted in another postponement of the SAA negotiations. The police reform was not launched until October 5th 2005 when the Bosnian Serb parliament yielded to international pressure and adopted a decision in the following 5 years to surrender control over RS's police force to a united police force funded from the state budget.
Consequently, on October 21st 2005 the EC recommended to the European Council the opening of negotiations for an SAA, and transmitted the relevant draft negotiating directives. On November 21st, the Council adopted the draft negotiating directives and authorised the EC to open negotiations, which were officially launched in Sarajevo on November 25th 2005.
BiH-NATO relations in the period 2004-2005 revolved around Bosnia's aspirations for joining the Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme. The implementation of military reforms that established a unified command structure of the BiH armed forces, though not a unified army yet, gave Bosnian authorities hopes that the country would be given a green light at NATO's Istanbul meeting in June 2004. However, NATO's dissatisfaction with RS's failure to arrest a single war criminal suspect turned out decisive for BiH's dismissal in mid-2004. The country's accession to PfP is still pending, with the main obstacle before it remaining the lack of full compliance with the ICTY.
Even after the conclusion of the NATO-led SFOR mission and the transferral of the Alliance's peacekeeping responsibilities to EU-troops in December 2004, NATO made it clear that it would maintain a presence in BiH. A NATO headquarters remained at Camp Butmir in Sarajevo to assist the country with defence reform. Further, NATO is carrying out some operational tasks, in co-ordination with the EU. These include counter-terrorism and assistance in apprehending persons indicted for war crimes.
Reluctance to fully cooperate with the ICTY in 2004 and 2005 resulted in serious ramifications not only as regards BiH's EU and NATO future, but also for the overall political environment inside the country. Though certain efforts at the apprehension of war criminals were made, those were viewed by the international community as superficial attempts at diverging international attention, especially in the case of RS, from the very obvious complicity on behalf of senior RS officials with wanted war criminals. In connection with the suspected sheltering by the entity's authorities of ICTY prime indictees Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic on April 2nd 2004 High Representative Paddy Ashdown blocked all state financing for RS's ruling Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) over suspicion that the party provides resources to its founder Karadzic. Ashdown also demanded a detailed account of SDS's spendings. The financial sanctions were accompanied by the exclusion of 59 RS representatives from office, a move widely viewed by Bosnian Serbs as an attempt at changing RS's constitutional status.
In mid-April 2004 RS special police forces launched an operation to arrest indicted war criminal Milan Lukic in his parents’ home in Visegrad. The operation, however, ended in complete failure.
The lack of political will for cooperation with the ICTY both on an entity and national level was also emphasized by Carla Del Ponte in her address to the UN Security Council in December 2005.