Posted on 05/21/2005 2:58:06 PM PDT by Lukasz
ISN SECURITY WATCH (20/05/05) - The EU on Thursday said it would not suggest starting accession negotiations with Bosnia and Herzegovina because of the country’s failure to implement police and media reforms.
The European Commission on Thursday said Bosnia had not fulfilled the necessary requirements to begin Stabilization and Assocations Agreement (SAA) talks - the first step towards EU membership talks.
“The two conditions have not been satisfied, and there is no recommendation today,” said Reinhard Priebe, the head of the European Commission’s Western Balkans Enlargement Directorate.
The European Commission’s negative response comes only days after talks between Bosnian politicians on sweeping police reforms collapsed when Bosnian Serb officials rejected the changes, which would have created a nationwide multi-ethnic police force.
The Dayton peace agreement - which ended the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia - divided the country into two separately administered entities, the Bosniak- and Bosnian Croat-dominated Federation and the Bosnian Serb-dominated Republika Srpska. Each entity has its own government, police, and armed forces.
But over the course of the past few years, the international community has come to realize that the entity system is not working.
The international community in Bosnia has worked to unite the two entities, first by introducing joint customs and border control reforms and then by reforming the country’s armed forces, creating a unified command.
Those reforms also met with much opposition by Bosnian Serbs, who believe the reforms are thinly-veiled attempts to remove Republika Srpska’s entity status, in violation of the Dayton accord.
Reforming the police would have been the final major step in unifying the entities - a development that Bosnian Serb politicians feared would mean the end of the entity itself.
In December last year, the international community’s Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia, led by Paddy Ashdown, proposed reorganizing the country’s police structures into 11 inter-ethnic regions. But Bosnian Serb officials have insisted on retaining the existing five police regions that are strictly under their mono-ethnic control.
Since the reform was initiated, Ashdown has organized several rounds of negotiations between Federation and Republika Srpska politicians, but those talks all ended without any agreement.
Ashdown has threatened to call for international sanctions against Republika Srpska if it refuses to yield on police reform.
“The negotiations failed because the RS delegates were unable to conform to the principles laid out by the European Union […] citizens of this country will pay a heavy price for that, especially the citizens in the Republika Srpska,” Ashdown told a Thursday press conference.
“I’m not going to call more police reform talks. I’m not going to waste more time. When the RS is ready to negotiate for success, they can tell us and we can continue,” he said.
During last talks, which took place in May, thousands of Bosnian Serbs demonstrated in the RS capital of Banja Luka against the reforms, which they called the “experimenting and dismantling of RS institutions”.
The protesters accused Ashdown of trying to eliminate the entity and of aiming to create a Muslim-dominated Bosnia.
They called for a referendum on independence to be held if the reforms were pushed through.
A new broadcasting law was approved by the state parliament earlier this week, but Croat deputies in the upper house threatened to block the bill, which they said discriminated against their ethnic group.
The Croat politicians are demanding that Bosnia’s Federal radio and television be dismantled and that a third, “Croat” channel be created. They are seeking the creation of three ethnic- rather than entity-based channels. Under the new law, the Bosnian Federal Television (FTV) would have three regional centers, one for each ethnic group.
There are not many Americans who can point to Herzegovina on a map.
I’m sure that many European have similar problems. It would be great if they would start searching in the Balkans :-)
Oh yes I can. It is North East of Outer Mongolia. So there!
I thought that Bill Clinton, outside the UN, Unilaterally, fixed this problem. Unilaterally.
And that "Mdam War" Albright did her best to bomb them.
It was all OK because Clinton gets his self-worth from pinky-finger-outstretched Europe.
Meanwhile, our long-time allies, the Serbs, got slaughtered.
bump
The Bosnian Croats bought into clinton's Federation plan and like many people that dealt with clinton, they are screwed.
Put some ice on it!
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