Bosnia: Glad tidings

Date: 20/12/03

Some hopeful news from the Balkans

THE people of Bosnia must be among the gloomiest in Europe. Polls show that two-thirds of the young want to emigrate; three-quarters think that the economy is going downhill; politicians are widely considered to be corrupt; and political apathy is at an all-time high. Some 20% of Bosnians are below the poverty line, and another 30% are only just above. The official unemployment rate is running at almost 40%.

And yet for all the surface gloom, the underlying picture is surprisingly good. Walk around Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, or Banja Luka, capital of the Serb republic, and the streets are bustling. One reason, according to Dirk Reinermann, the World Bank's representative in Sarajevo, is that, by the Bank's reckoning, only 16% of Bosnians have no work at all. Mr Reinermann adds that he knows of no other post-war country where GDP has recovered to 80% of what it was before the war within eight years. Most infrastructure has been rebuilt. And only 400,000 of the 2.2m-odd refugees and displaced people (out of a total population of 4m) are said to be still waiting to go home.

Naturally there is much left to do - not least the capture of such suspected war criminals as Radovan Karadzic, still believed to be at large in the Serb republic. But in November the European Commission accepted that the country had made significant progress towards European Union accession. It set 16 conditions that Bosnia must fulfil by the end of June 2004 before the next step, which is to start negotiations to draw up a “stability and association agreement”.

One of those conditions is more effective government. Under the Dayton accord that ended the war in Bosnia in 1995, the country was given more government than almost anywhere else. It has 14 often competing and overlapping administrations, including a weak central government and a complete administration apiece for the Serb republic and the Croat-Bosniak (as Bosnian Muslims are now known) federation. In the north, the contested town of Brcko is an autonomous district under international “supervison”.

Yet in response to voters' gloom, politicians have come to realise that jobs and money matter more than flags. On this basis, the sooner they streamline the country's government, the faster they can move towards the EU and other western clubs that they want to join, such as NATO. And, largely unnoticed by a world that watched agog as Sarajevo burned and tales emerged of gruesome massacres such as the killing of some 8,000 Bosniak men in Srebrenica in 1995, once unimaginable reforms have begun. This month Bosnians agreed to unify the command structures of their different armies. Next year the central Bosnian state, as opposed to its two main entities, will begin collecting customs duties and preparing to do the same for value-added tax from 2006. More policemen are to move under central control.

According to Senad Slatina, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, nobody is yet talking seriously of doing away with Bosnia's two component parts. This would be politically impossible, especially for the Serbs. But a process has begun that will drain some of their powers towards a stronger centre, making Bosnia a more normal country.

In a debate on defence reform in Banja Luka, Dragan Cavic, president of the Serb republic's parliament, thundered that deputies had better vote in favour as “we don't want to stand as an obstacle on the road to Europe, because otherwise someone might just push us off the road.” On the other side, Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia's wartime foreign (and later prime) minister and still a leading Bosniak politician, says that change is coming, but that it is too slow for his taste. Yet it is better late than never.