International Crisis Group

Bosnia’s Dangerous Tango: Islam and Nationalism

Sarajevo/Istanbul/Brussels  |   26 Feb 2013

Occasional violence notwithstanding, Islamism poses little danger in Bosnia, whose real risk stems from clashing national ideologies, especially as Islamic religious leaders increasingly reply with Bosniak nationalism to renewed Croat and Serb challenges to the state’s territorial integrity.

Bosnia’s Dangerous Tango: Islam and Nationalism, the latest briefing from the International Crisis Group, examines a growing fusion between Bosniak nationalism (which can be Islamic or secular) and Bosnian state identity. Political Islam is a novelty in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and its rise is seen as threatening to secular parties and non-Muslims. A dozen or so attacks attributed to Bosniaks in the past decade have raised fears of terrorism. However, the plethora of non-traditional Salafi and other Islamist groups that have appeared on the margins of society remain small and isolated.

“Virtually every act of violence inspired by Islamism has come from places where Islamic institutions – džemat (congregation), mosque, madrasa and family – are weak or absent, and many perpetrators have a troubled past”, says Marko Prelec, Crisis Group’s Balkans Project Director. “There is a lot of anger and frustration among Bosniaks, and leading figures in the Islamic establishment have sought to harness it to advance their political aims”.

The Islamic community (Islamska zajednica, IZ) in BiH has grown from a religious organisation into an important political actor that has helped shape Bosniak identity. Its influential and charismatic former leader, Mustafa ef. Cerić, painted a BiH which, though multi-ethnic, should be a Bosniak nation-state, since, he argued, Croats and Serbs already had countries of their own. That vision is appealing to many Bosniaks, including some who are thoroughly secular, but it repels most Croats and Serbs. If this becomes the dominant Bosniak view, it is hard to see how it could be reconciled with the viewpoints of Bosnia’s other communities; persistent conflict and instability would then be likely. Instead, the IZ should foster a view of the state as a shared enterprise in which all groups feel equally at home and focus on renewing its own institutions.

Bosnia’s Salafis are divided over loyalty to the state and the IZ. Most of those who accept these institutions are fiercely patriotic, and some fought as mujahidin in the war of the 1990s. Those who reject them as un-Islamic tend to withdraw to isolated settlements to practice their faith and are more interested in the global umma (Islamic community) than the fate of Bosnia. Neither group has shown a tendency to violence; most attacks have been the work of émigrés or persons with documented criminal or psychological records. The IZ and Bosnian state officials should cooperate to engage non-violent Salafis, especially those returning from the diaspora, in dialogue to encourage their integration.

“The Islamic community has been promoting a patriotic embrace of the state. Stability depends on whether it succeeds in framing a vision of Bosnia that can be shared by Croats and Serbs”, says Sabine Freizer, Crisis Group’s Europe Program Director. “Having stepped into the political arena, the Islamic community has a responsibility to re-commit to interfaith dialogue and advance compromise solutions that can avoid the country’s further fragmentation”.

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In Bosnia, What’s Next? | Transitions Online

By S. Adam Cardais

Back in June a prominent Balkan analyst told me he was hearing more and more grumbling out of Berlin about the fate of Bosnia, with its perpetual political gridlock, abysmal economy, and pitched nationalist rhetoric, but that no one had anything close to an answer. “Nobody,” he said, “has a workable alternative to Dayton.”

FULL ARTICLE (Transitions Online)

Photo: Bob S./Flickr

Mladic and the ‘March of Folly’ | Foreign Policy

By Michael Dobbs

The Oric raids helped create what Marko Prelec, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, called “a reservoir of rage” among the Serb population of the Drina valley, the “belief that they [the Muslims] will do it to us if we do not do it to them…there was a kind of desperation, a feeling that if we do the right thing with all these prisoners of war, they will join the tsunami of Bosnians breaking over our heads.”

FULL ARTICLE (Foreign Policy)

Photo: Wall of Names at the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial

Credit: nicointokio/Flickr

Bosnia’s Gordian Knot: Constitutional Reform

Sarajevo/Istanbul/Brussels | 12 Jul 2012

Only thorough constitutional reform can resolve Bosnia and Herzegovina’s deep political crisis and implement a landmark European Court of Human Rights decision to put an end to ethnic discrimination.

Bosnia’s Gordian Knot: Constitutional Reform, the latest briefing from the International Crisis Group, argues that change is essential but a quick fix risks undermining the country’s fragile ethnic balance more than improving minority rights. The European Union (EU) has made reform a precondition for progress towards membership. But past efforts to revise the Dayton Agreement that ended the war in 1995 have failed.

Tensions between two aspects of Bosnia’s federalism – the division into two territorial entities (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska) and three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs) – have become increasingly difficult to reconcile. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2009 that minorities’ exclusion from the three-member presidency and upper house of parliament is unlawful. All main parties agree that change is needed to eliminate discrimination but they do not concur on how to preserve the rights of the three constituent peoples, especially those of the smallest group, the Croats.

“Bosnia must use the European ruling as a springboard toward a modern constitutional architecture”, says Marko Prelec, Crisis Group’s Balkans Project Director. “It should not defer taking action but reform will be a long process; and the next steps will decide whether the country survives to move towards Europe or begins a process of disintegration which will not end peacefully”.

A sound solution must clarify which constituents officials are primarily accountable to; allow voters rather than mid-level officials to choose national leaders; give all three constituent peoples an effective means of influencing state policy; provide room for those who identify as citizens rather than in ethnic terms; and avoid overly complex rules that can create obstruction.

Two and a half years after the court’s Sejdić-Finci decision, Bosnian leaders have made no progress in implementing the ruling, and this failure is delaying the EU accession process. Meanwhile, state institutions are under attack and the political crisis has grown more acute, particularly with the collapse of the government in May. A new constellation of parties is trying to assert control against former partners in state and federal government who are clinging on to their positions. Prospects are unclear and efforts to reform the constitution have focused on cementing main party leaders’ already extensive hold on power rather than ensuring greater democracy and accountability.

The EU should understand that there is no easy way to implement the ruling and satisfy all the main political parties. It should work on comprehensive constitutional reform with the Bosnian leaders as the end goal of membership talks, not its precondition. 

“Bosnia’s constitution not only increasingly is an obstacle to EU accession, it also precludes healthy relations among the country’s regions and communities”, says Sabine Freizer, Crisis Group’s Europe Program Director. “Eventually, Bosnia has to move to a stronger territorial federalism without an explicit ethnic component”.

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Photo: Ville Miettinen/Flickr

The Duty to Remember Crimes in Srebrenica

by Marko Prelec

Seventeen years ago Serbian forces took control of the United Nations safe area of Srebrenica and over the course of the following week killed about eight thousand men and boys while expelling its entire Bosniak population. Some of the victims died trying to escape (a column fought its way out through Serb lines). Most perished in mass executions of up to one thousand at a time. The corpses were then buried and months later, re-buried to hide the evidence, so that even today they are still being found in the hills and forests of eastern Bosnia. All this is being retold these days at the trial of Ratko Mladić, at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.

So I was shocked yesterday to open my Facebook page to a nauseating photograph, posted by a northern Kosovo Serb group, of a man waving a huge flag with Mladić’s photo and announcing “Happy 11 July, day of liberation of Srebrenica”.

FULL POST (The Balkan Regatta)

Photo: Almir Dzanovic