Hillary Clinton to visit Bosnia

Ian Traynor in Brussels
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 October 2010 16.59 BST

Hillary Clinton is travelling to the Balkans for the first time as secretary of state.

US secretary of state to visit a week after elections in fresh bid to bring the country together

Washington is to launch a fresh attempt to unblock years of dangerous drift and paralysis in Bosnia tomorrow when Hillary Clinton travels to the Balkans for the first time as secretary of state.
But Clinton's push will run into the hardline opposition of the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, who, newly elected as president of the Serb half of Bosnia, looks bent on contriving the country's slow-motion dissolution.
Following elections in Bosnia last week won by three nationalist parties representing Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, the Americans and the Europeans are hoping to revive efforts at political reforms to stitch the country together and make the government more effective.
For years the country's corrupt rival political parties and elites have blocked one another, deepening ethnic divisions, making it impossible to pass laws and take decisions, and raising fears for the country's ultimate viability.
Previous international attempts, most recently a year ago, to redraft the unwieldy constitutional set-up agreed to end the war in 1995 ended in failure. The country remains a ward of the international community, with draconian last-resort powers vested in the Office of the High Representative in Sarajevo, currently held by the Austrian diplomat, Valentin Inzko.
"Bosnia requires constitutional reforms. We regret that those reforms weren't undertaken before this election," Philip Gordon, the US assistant secretary of state for Europe, told journalists in Washington.
"We need to leave it to the Bosnians to design their own constitution. We can't and don't intend to try to impose it from the outside. But it's certainly our view that constitutional reform is necessary."
Fifteen years after the US mediated an end to a war that left 100,000 people dead and the country split into two rival halves, Bosnia is mired in surly pessimism. The economy is a black hole dominated by political cronyism, almost half the population is without jobs and the ethnic divisions are more entrenched than ever.
Dodik is determined to keep it that way.
"Bosnia-Herzegovina is a mistake created during the disintegration of the old Yugoslavia," he told a Serbian newspaper. "The foreigners want to maintain it. But it's clear to everyone that nothing can become of it because of the history and the relationships that have always been here. Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot be, never could be, and never will be a state. That's the only reality."
The Bosnian Serb leader, shifting from prime minister to president of the Republika Srpska, the Serbian half of Bosnia, as a result of last week's elections, regularly predicts Bosnia's end and pursues policies aimed at accelerating it.
All the signs are that, armed with a new mandate, he will frustrate all attempts to encourage coherent central government, aiming to keep the country dysfunctional.
"The leaders are going to have to make adjustments to have a more functional state," said Gordon. "It's not for us to hand-carry a constitution to the Bosnians. If this is going to work, they have to be doing it and for the right reasons."
But the Europeans and the Americans are split over the way forward. While the US and Britain push a more coercive policy, with the high representative encouraged to be "more muscular", many in the EU say that, 15 years after the war, Bosnia has to be left to its own devices.

guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/11/hillary-clinton-bosnia-visit