Though the dust in Bosnia has now settled, the area still remains culturally and ethnically diverse and divided. There is recent talk with Bosnian-Serbs, talking about seeking independence from Bosnia and forming their own Serbian state. On the Bosnian-Muslim side there is concern over the immigration of radical Islamic groups that entered the country during and after the 1990s conflicts. Both groups are working together (well, not really) to create an unstable atmosphere in the small country.
Time will tell if we will see any resurgence in violence between these two predominate ethnic groups.
Recent articles from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/world/europe/27bosnia.html?_r=1
Tensions Rise in Fragile Bosnia as Country’s Serbs Threaten to Seek Independence
PRAGUE — Bosnian Serb leaders have threatened to pull out of state institutions and are pressing anew for independence from Bosnia and Herzegovina, threatening to throw the fragile, multiethnic country into political crisis once again.
A fraud case against the Serb Republic’s prime minister, Milorad Dodik, precipitated a crisis. Bosnia is made up of a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic, and divisions are strong.
Analysts and observers of the region said the situation could unravel the United States-brokered Dayton accords of 1995, which ended a savage war that killed more than 100,000 people, most of them Muslims, between 1992 and 1995. The pact divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic, presided over by a decentralized political system that reinforced rather than healed ethnic divisions.
The crisis comes at a critical time, just a few weeks after the United Nations and European Union envoy to Bosnia, Miroslav Lajcak, was appointed foreign minister of his native Slovakia, creating what analysts called a potentially dangerous power vacuum. United Nations officials stressed Tuesday that Mr. Lajcak would continue to exercise his powers until a replacement was found.
Srecko Latal, a Bosnia specialist at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Sarajevo, the country’s capital, warned that the West, distracted by the global financial crisis, Iraq and Afghanistan, was ignoring trouble signs in Bosnia, in its own backyard. “The United States and the European Union must engage, not just for the sake of Bosnia but because the world can’t afford to allow what happened the last time,” he said.
Bosnia’s security is guaranteed by 2,000 European Union peacekeepers. But Mr. Latal said the force was not strong enough to contain hostilities, should they erupt. Sketching a worst-case possibility, he warned that if the Serb Republic declared independence, neighboring Croatia would respond by sending in troops, and Bosnian Muslims would take up arms.
Bosnian Serb officials, Western diplomats and the police said the crisis began last week when the country’s state police agency sent a report to the State Prosecutor’s Office with allegations involving the Serb Republic’s prime minister, Milorad Dodik.
The case outlined in the State Investigation and Protection Agency report related to corruption, fraud and misuse of finances involving several important government contracts in the Bosnian Serb Republic. They included allegations concerning a $146 million government building in Banja Luka.
Gordan Milosevic, a spokesman for Mr. Dodik, said Tuesday by telephone that the allegations were politically motivated. He said the case breached due process because it had been forwarded without the approval of top Bosnian Serb officials in the State Investigation and Protection Agency and the prosecutor’s office.
Mr. Dodik expressed indignation last weekend, saying he was the victim of a witch hunt aimed at undermining him and the Bosnian Serb Republic. “Even the little faith I had in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is now lost due to this farce with the criminal charges against me,” he said last week. “They have made this country pointless.”
He also vented his ire at a meeting in Mostar, where leaders of Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups were discussing how to press forward with changes to the Constitution. Attendees at the meeting said Mr. Dodik stormed out after one hour. Before leaving, they said, he delivered an ultimatum that a new constitution could proceed only if it affirmed the right of the Bosnian Serb Republic to national self-determination and enshrined its right to hold a referendum on independence.
Adding to the tensions, Mr. Dodik said recently that the investigation against him had probably been devised by the deputy United Nations high representative in Bosnia, Raffi Gregorian. In November, Mr. Dodik filed criminal charges against Mr. Gregorian and foreign prosecutors in Bosnia, accusing them of plotting against his government after they opened a corruption investigation into the Serb Republic’s awarding of government contracts.
The Serbian member of the country’s three-member presidency, Nebojsa Radmanovic, called over the weekend on all Bosnian Serb political parties, citizens and nongovernmental organizations to support the Bosnian Serb government. One Serbian veterans’ association warned that Bosnia’s Muslims were secretly arming themselves, and Bishop Grigorije, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, warned that “nobody should play around with Republika Srpska.”
But Western diplomats and officials on both sides of the ethnic divide stressed that the conflict was a political war of words that was unlikely to spill over into violence. “Dodik wants to make clear that the right of the Republika Srpska to exist is beyond dispute,” said Mr. Milosevic, Mr. Dodik’s spokesman. “No one wants war.”
Serbian analysts said that Mr. Dodik had no intention of seceding, at least in the near term, and that he was using the international political vacuum in Bosnia to cement his control over the republic.
Beyond the obvious threat of provoking a war, they said, secession was not an attractive option for Mr. Dodik, because it would mean aligning the Serb Republic with Serbia or Russia, which would severely diminish his power. It also would inevitably lead to international isolation.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 27, 2009, on page A11 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/world/europe/02bosnia.html?pagewanted=2
Bosnia Plans to Expel Arabs Who Fought in Its War
By NICHOLAS WOOD
Published: August 2, 2007
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — When Fadhil Hamdani first came to Bosnia from Iraq in 1979 he had no idea he would stay so long. But after prolonged studies, marriage to a Bosnian woman, the birth of five children and citizenship, the years turned into decades.
Raffaq Jalili, a Moroccan wounded in the Bosnian war of 1992-95, became a citizen, but Bosnia’s government has revoked his citizenship.
Now he says he feels more Bosnian than Iraqi.
But the Bosnian government does not agree. It views him as a threat to national security and is putting Mr. Hamdani and other foreign fighters who have lived in Bosnia for many years on notice of deportation.
Arabs, the largest group among hundreds of foreign fighters, fought alongside the Bosnian Muslim Army during the war here, from 1992 to 1995, against Serbs and Croats. In return, they were given Bosnian citizenship.
Most left after the war, which tore apart Muslim, Serbian and Croatian communities and cost around 100,000 lives. But a number stayed on and settled down.
Bosnian officials say their policies are merely reversing decisions that were illegally made at the war’s end. But Bosnian politicians and international officials say that the reversals are primarily motivated by a broader concern: that Bosnia should not be seen as a haven for Islamic militants.
Western officials and local politicians, mostly the Muslims’ former opponents, have accused the former fighters of promoting radical Islam and damaging Bosnia’s reputation in the process.
“Some of their structures have been very active in promoting radical activities in the form of Wahhabism,” said Dragan Mektic, Bosnia’s deputy security minister, in a recent interview, referring to a strict form of Islam. “The public feel endangered.”
Western governments have been encouraging the move.
Miroslav Lajcak, a Slovak diplomat who is the high representative of the international community in Bosnia and the senior international official here, has increased pressure on the government to move ahead with the deportations. So far, only two former combatants have actually been expelled, both last year.
“The presence of foreign fighters isn’t particularly useful for building a modern democratic state,” said a Western diplomat closely involved with the review, who spoke on the customary diplomatic condition of anonymity.
While many former fighters who stayed have managed to fit into Bosnian society, others stand out. Imad al-Hussein, a former medical student from Syria with a thick beard, became the public face of the Muslim fighters, or mujahedeen, after the war. He is one of six former fighters the government wants to expel first. The government has not publicly outlined its case against him.
His views do lie outside the norms of most Muslims here. For instance, he says that suicide bombings are justifiable but only within Israel. He said in a long interview that he and his former comrades had always acted within the law in Bosnia. But in response to the threat of being removed from his family’s home by force, he said: “I keep asking myself, will I be able to contain my instincts. If you defend yourself on your doorstep you become a martyr. And that is a great temptation.”
Other veterans are tensely biding their time, and they contend that there is nothing to connect them to any form of illegal activity. “If there was any evidence against us, then why have they let 12 years pass without prosecuting us,” said Raffaq Jalili, a Moroccan wounded in the war.
Bosnia is still recuperating from the war, and international officials who play a large role here are working to resolve stark differences among the Muslim, Serbian and Croatian populations. The high representative — currently Mr. Lajcak — still has the power to make laws and fire local politicians.
Both Saudi Arabia and the United States say that Islamic extremists have used Bosnian passports to travel between the Middle East and Europe; some Bosnian government officials say that has been impossible to confirm.
Western intelligence services and their Bosnian counterparts also claim they have uncovered two major plots in the past six years by Islamic extremists in Bosnia to attack Western targets.
In October 2001, six Algerians were arrested by the Bosnian police and later were sent to prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In 2005, a Swedish man of Bosnian heritage and a Turk who had lived in Denmark were accused of possessing explosives and vests for making a suicide bomb. They were convicted and sentenced to prison in January.
It is not known how many foreign fighters remain in Bosnia — estimates vary wildly from more than a dozen to several hundred. The government says that a commission reviewed a list of more than 1,000 names and has revoked citizenship for about 420 people so far. Mr. Hamdani was the first to be notified by the commission, a year ago.
From 1996 to 2001, many of the former fighters occupied Bocinja, which had been a Serbian village in central Bosnia. The fighters lived there under Islamic Shariah law until they were evicted by the government, and they dispersed throughout central Bosnia.
Mr. Hamdani came to Bosnia when he was 18 and studied engineering in Zenica. By the time the conflict in Bosnia broke out in 1992, he was married and had two children.
It was only natural to fight for his adopted country, he said, as Bosnian Serb forces, backed by neighboring Serbia, attacked Muslims across the country. In February 1995, nine months before the end of the war, he was granted citizenship.
As with all the other cases under review, he had no right to appear before the commission, which met behind closed doors and sent him its decision in the mail.
“I think that it does not matter when you arrived in this country,” he said in an interview. “What matters is which unit you served with during the war.” Serbs and Croats say that Muslim members of the government gave out citizenship too freely.
Mr. Jalili, a former Moroccan customs officer, bears burn marks across his face and a deformed ear from a rocket-propelled grenade. In a hillside cemetery near Zenica, he showed the unmarked concrete pillars that mark the graves of Arab fighters from his unit.
Now he and his wife and two children live in Zenica on a disabled veteran’s pension. In March, he, too, was notified by mail that his citizenship had been revoked.
“When I first came here, everyone welcomed me,” he said. “Now we are being kicked out like dogs.”
The government says its grounds for removing citizenship are that at the end of the war, the government was not properly functioning, and therefore, passports issued then were not legitimate.
“Citizenship can be revoked upon the discovery of any procedural irregularity, even if you now fulfill the conditions for naturalization anyway,” said Darryl Li, a legal researcher from Yale who is studying the veterans’ cases. “Someone living in Bosnia for 15 or 20 years with a wife and children here now finds himself in the same legal situation as a new immigrant, except half his life has been bureaucratically erased.”
