A Separate Peace
By THOM SHANKER
Published: August 19, 2007
WASHINGTON
TWELVE summers ago, Bosnian Serb fighters rounded up 8,000 Muslim men in the village of Srebrenica, herded them into nearby woods and slaughtered them.
The massacre was one of the final acts of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict, a three-year war of siege, expulsion, rape and execution. And it so jolted the United States and allies in Europe that they threatened bombing to compel the warring factions to meet peaceably at an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio.
They met. There in Ohio, they signed an armistice that created separate lives and separate leadership to assure a semblance of peace among the Catholic Croats, the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims. The solution — partition — was history’s familiar first choice among last resorts.
Perhaps predictably, it could be said that a kind of Bosnia nostalgia is taking hold in Washington these days over the quandary of Iraq, at least among those who look to its lessons for a way to end the violence.
Nobody wants multiple Srebrenicas in the deserts of Iraq.
And so a growing number of legislators, diplomats and analysts, including at least one Democratic presidential candidate, have taken to citing the Bosnia model as they consider what to do if Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurd cannot muddle their way to a stable shared state.
They ask whether the United States should marshal its military and diplomatic energy to push Iraq’s factions toward a “soft partition” of secure and sustainable regions, home-ruled and homogenous, to prevent full-blown civil war in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East.
Bosnia is an attractive analogy. Armistice reigns. And the American-led stabilization force never lost a soldier to hostile fire.
There’s just one problem — make that three — with comparing Iraq 2007 to Bosnia 1995. The three conditions that made Bosnia susceptible to peace under the Dayton accords simply do not exist for Iraq.
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The first crucial condition for the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia was that it was already carved up. When negotiators gathered at Dayton, the raging violence had succeeded in paring, pushing and repulsing Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims into mostly coherent enclaves. War created a sustainable map on the ground. The task facing diplomats was to get it in ink.
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The second unmet condition is that by 1995 in Bosnia, all three sides had fought themselves to utter exhaustion. In Iraq today, polls show that average citizens are exhausted by the war, but militia-style fighters loyal to the three sectarian factions remain fully tooled for combat — just warming up for advanced bloodletting. Foreign fighters and foreign weapons continue to flow into Iraq over its porous borders.
Which underscores the third condition not visible in Iraq. A genius of the Dayton process was that the outside powers arming and inspiring the Bosnian violence — Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian dictator, and Franjo Tudjman, the Croatian strongman — were at the table along with their Bosnian proxies and Muslim representatives.
With their signatures on the accords, the flames of outside agitation were extinguished.
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Similarly, while Bosnia-like conditions do not exist in Iraq, partition may still be Iraq’s fate — and therefore the United States must prepare to make it as painless and sustainable as possible.
Leading advocates for partition include Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination; Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador to Croatia.
The Biden-Gelb plan, proposed in spring of 2006, was the first to call for “decentralizing Iraq.”
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But Reidar Visser, a specialist on Iraq’s sectarian issues at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, said that “apart from the Kurds in the north, there is no unanimous, popular demand for federalism or soft partition or any partition at all.”
Mr. Visser, who edits a Web site for posting historical research on Iraq, www.historiae.org, said that despite arguments by those in favor of partition, “Iraq has no tradition of being compartmentalized into neat, sectarian entities,” except for a relatively brief period between 1880 and World War I.
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Modern history offers few examples of politicians’ ability to plan for partition, especially as a prescription to forestall pending violence or to guarantee the resolution of long-term tensions, particularly on the Asian continent.
Last week marked the 60th anniversary of the British partition of Pakistan and India, which created 15 million refugees, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in riots and left the subcontinent devastated for years.
The British left Palestine a year later, leaving behind the State of Israel, which has fought a series of major wars and minor skirmishes with Arab neighbors.
A recent amicable separation should be noted: The Czech Republic split from Slovakia after the collapse of Communism, a time when both societies were developed and conflict was neither desired nor anticipated.
But advocates of decentralization and separation in Iraq, including Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argue that “the time may be approaching when the only hope for a more stable Iraq is a soft partition of the country.”
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But senior military planners caution that should partition become American policy, withdrawal almost certainly wouldn’t. Partition would require a stabilization force — code for American military presence — of 75,000 to 100,000 troops for years to come. And Bosnia’s record of no soldier lost is hardly likely to be repeated in a post-partition Iraq.
moreDon Hays, R. Bruce Hitchner and Edward P. Joseph Published: January 19, 2007
Of all the ironies of the American adventure in Iraq, perhaps none is larger than using the "success" of Bosnia as a model to solve the sectarian violence now raging in Baghdad. True, the Dayton Agreement, which just marked its 11th anniversary, ended Bosnia's bitter war (which remains, per capita, more lethal than that of Iraq.) Thanks to American-led diplomacy, Dayton has provided an opportunity for the country's three peoples to bargain in institutions and not on the battlefield.
But after 11 years of intensive international effort, it is time to face up to the sad reality. Bosnia's Serbs, Croats and Muslims simply do not share a common vision for the country. The Dayton legacy of balancing power at the central, cantonal and local levels is hopelessly dysfunctional. And the notion that European Union membership will serve as the panacea for Bosnia's ethnic struggles and institutional complexity is increasingly a pipe dream.
As with Iraq, the first step toward a solution in Bosnia is owning up to the magnitude of the problem. Bosnia, a country with a little over four million citizens, has no less than 13 different assemblies and governments. Elections were held three months ago, but not one government at any level has yet been formed. The unwieldy structures impose a severe cost on the country's struggling economy. Inside the semi-autonomous Serb "entity," there has been some progress, but rather than moderate Serb attitudes towards their neighbors, it has had the opposite effect. Serbs are as adamant as ever about their autonomy.
With neighboring Serbia now poised to lose Kosovo in early 2007, there are threats from the Bosnian Serbs to secede outright from Bosnia. While secession is most unlikely, the Kosovo decision is sure to exacerbate tensions.
Two of the authors (Hays and Hitchner) opened painstaking negotiations early last year to reshape the Constitution — an absolute must to lift the country out of stagnation and put it on track to become even a potential EU member. For the first- time since the peace agreement was negotiated in November 1995, the parties were again discussing — among themselves and with limited international direction — how they wanted to improve and strengthen the central government.
The U.S. embassy eventually took over the process and the parties reached a consensus. But in a narrow vote last spring, the package of constitutional reforms failed to pass Parliament. And now, following an acrimonious election campaign in which Haris Silajdzic, the chief opponent of the deal, triumphed, the prospects for constitutional reform have slipped markedly. Indeed, opposition to the reform package has emerged as a bellwether issue in the struggle to form a government in the country's Croat-Muslim Federation.
For foreign diplomats, now preoccupied with containing the potentially destabilizing situation on Kosovo, the temptation to paper over the problems in Bosnia is strong. It is also fraught with risk. With Serbia's democracy in question and the coming burden of having to nurture a fledgling, unstable new state in Kosovo, the last thing the region needs is to be blindsided by crisis in Bosnia.
moreThis is simply an American imposed plan for a long-term occupation.
While everyone talks, the one thing they leave out of the equation is the
extremely violent civil war still raging, the
Pandora's box Bush opened in Iraq.
michael e. o'hanlon and edward p. joseph
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United States Department of Least Bad Iraq OptionsWashington, DC 20499
ACTION MEMORANDUM
TO: POTUS
FROM: Michael E. O’Hanlon and Edward P. Joseph
DATE: January 1, 2007
RE: The Bosnia Option for Limiting Civil War in Iraq
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The Bosnia Option
Paradoxically, the explosion of sectarian violence and the onset of Balkans-style ethnic cleansing in much of Iraq may suggest an avenue toward stability. If the Iraqi government, with U.S. assistance, helps Iraqis relocate to parts of the country where they feel safer, violence can be dampened and the groundwork laid for a political solution. A model that can work for Iraq comes from Bosnia and its neighbors.
The war in Bosnia ended only after as many as 200,000 civilians died and half the country’s population had either been expelled or fled from their homes, leaving the country a patchwork of ethnically homogeneous pieces. NATO airpower, a reinforced UN contingent and the military successes of Muslim and Croat armies were critical elements leading to the 1995 Dayton Accords. But Dayton could not have been negotiated had not ethnic relocations already occurred, creating definable and mostly defensible territories. As the UN stated in the seminal “Srebrenica Report”, “there is no doubt that the capture of Srebrenica and Zepa by the Serbs made it easier for the Bosniacs and Serbs to agree on the territorial basis for a peace settlement.” Only after considerable ethnic consolidation was it possible to negotiate and then implement land swaps among Serbs, Croats and Muslims, creating a map that a decade later is still in place while the country remains, however unhappily, at peace.
In a disintegrating Iraq, our goal should similarly be to create militarily defensible sub-regions. That will stanch the violence and, in time, a unitary state could be preserved--to share oil revenue, conduct foreign policy, maintain certain national institutions, and hold out hope for a more cohesive Iraq in the future.
Ethnic relocation is very distasteful and hardly free from risk, but if carried out as government policy it can occur with less trauma than in the Balkans. Indeed, with Sunni death squads and Shi‘a militias now attacking even hospitals, there may be no alternative. As the Balkans demonstrated, competitive campaigns of ethnic cleansing can unleash an uncontrollable, self-sustaining dynamic. More than 500,000 Iraqis have been displaced since Saddam fell, and that number is rising fast. Citizens of Baghdad, ground zero for the country’s violence, are increasingly fleeing their homes. To stem the vengeful sectarian spiral, we should assist in a more humane process of relocation, providing alternative housing and jobs for those who leave their homes.
This approach worked in war-torn Bosnia. As a UN peacekeeper there, one of us (E. Joseph) co-ordinated the movement of several thousand Muslim women and children from the Zepa enclave in July 1995. The evacuation occurred after General Ratko Mladic and his Serb forces had seized the “safe area”, contemporaneous with the slaughter in nearby Srebrenica that left more than 7,000 Muslims dead. The UN decision to participate in moving Muslims out of Zepa was controversial, so much so that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees refused to assist. But that agency’s officials did not witness the shrieks of terror from the huddled Muslim women as Serb jeeps rolled by--a sound that erased any qualms we had about the propriety of our mission.
The same approach is now needed in Iraq. If U.S. and Iraqi forces cannot protect civilians, there is little moral dilemma about facilitating their movement to safer areas. Indeed, doing so can help defeat the jihadists and former Ba‘athists who are intent on causing an overall collapse of the government. This plan could help preserve that government, and it can save lives.
Operational Considerations
Facilitating voluntary relocations is difficult to time correctly. If done too soon, government-assisted relocations could codify an ethnic segregation process that most Iraqis do not inherently desire. It could even encourage some militias to accelerate violence against minorities within their neighborhoods in the belief that it would be relatively easy to drive people from their homes if they knew that new jobs and houses awaited elsewhere. If done too late, however, much of the killing that we hope to prevent would have already occurred (as in Bosnia). This is why the Bosnia Option needs to be discussed now, even if it might not be implemented for several more months as we try to salvage success from the current strategy.
more(edited to add O’Hanlon's article)
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