US, EU officials give Bosnians advice

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — European and U.S. officials met with Bosnian leaders on Friday to discuss ways of overcoming a stalemate that has kept the nation behind others seeking to join NATO and the 27-nation European Union.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg; Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt; and Olli Rehn, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, said they will return on Oct. 20 to see how much local leaders have coordinated their positions.

“The message has been here that you need to make the decisions necessary for you in order to apply for membership in the European Union. These measures are not particularly dramatic, but they are absolutely essential,” Carl Bildt said.

In a sign Bosnians took the meeting seriously, they dubbed it “Dayton 2″ — a reference to the U.S.-brokered 1995 peace negotiations in Ohio that ended a war involving Muslim Bosniaks, Christian Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats.

The EU and the U.S. have long been worried over ethnic tensions in Bosnia and the slow pace of reforms since then.

No immediate results were expected since Friday’s talks opened a process that could take weeks.

“It’s work in progress,” Bildt said. “We are not going to hold the rest of the region hostage to Bosnia,” adding that the EU and the U.S. would much rather see Bosnia move ahead along with the others.

The specifics of Friday’s meeting were not made public, but EU and U.S. officials said earlier that all sides in Bosnia will have to swallow things they perhaps will not like, if they want the country to move forward.

Friday’s gathering allowed the sides to “understand each other’s positions,” said Steinberg. He added, “We believe there are promising elements to form a basis for the parties to agree and take steps forward.”

The 1995 Dayton negotiations produced a hastily written constitution that has proven good enough to end a war, but not to create a functioning country. It divided the country into a Serb Republic and a Bosniak-Croat Federation, linked by common institutions. It created an enormous administration with three presidents, three parliaments and hundreds of ministers in a country of 3.5 million people. The division of authority between the institutions of the two regions and the state remains unclear, and each side interprets it in different ways.

It has worked so far only because the country has had an international administrator with the authority to ultimately interpret the agreement, fire local officials and impose laws when local politicians cannot agree. This is why Bosnia is viewed as an international protectorate and as such the EU believes it does not fit the profile of a country that deserves membership. Transforming it into a functioning country has proved difficult because its three peoples have opposing views of its future.

Officials in the Serb Republic generally seek as much autonomy as possible. They are trying to keep the ethnic division of the country and get rid of the international administrator who has prevented them from extending their autonomy almost to the level of a separate state.

Bosniaks want to abolish the two mini-states so the country can join the EU as a unified nation, and they believe the international administrator should stay until there is stability. Bosnian Croats in general agree with the unification, but believe if the ethnic division is to be kept, then it would be fair they also get their own region.

Zlatko Lagumdzija, the head of the Social Democrats — a party with members from all three groups — said after the meeting he was not surprised the foreigners left without insisting on an immediate agreement. “They saw that the positions of the main leaders are so far apart that hardly anything other could be agreed than that today is Friday,” Lagumdzija said.

Rehn told reporters that a constitutional reform should improve the functionality of the state institutions and that only a sovereign country with efficient institutions can be a credible candidate for EU membership.