Bosnia’s government. Political stalemate

Trouble over police reform - and over receding European Union membership

RAIN or shine, nothing deters old men in Bosnia from playing chess with giant pieces in the park. The same could be said of Bosnia's politicians, except that they have a country to play with. Right now it is in stalemate. The government is in turmoil after the parliament of Bosnia's Serbian republic, in Banja Luka, rejected plans to reform the police.

This reform is a key EU demand before it can open membership talks with Bosnia. Worse, the French and Dutch noes to the EU constitution have sent shock waves through the Balkans, since they put in question all countries' hopes of membership. And a video shown at the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague has revived bitter wartime memories of Serbs executing Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks) after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995.

Under the Dayton peace agreement that ended the war ten years ago, Bosnia is divided into two main parts. Alongside the Serbian republic is a Bosniak-Croat federation. Yet this divided country, with a population of only 4m, has no fewer than 16 police forces. In November 2003 the EU set Bosnia a list of 16 conditions, almost all of which have been fulfilled - except for police reform. The Serbs are objecting because the new rules would strip their republic of control of its own police. Dragan Cavic, president of the Serb republic, says that for him to try to sell this to his people would be to “commit suicide”.

Many Serbs think that Paddy Ashdown, the international high representative for Bosnia, wants to strip their republic of all its real powers before his mandate expires at the end of the year. Not so, he says. The reform is needed because, all over Bosnia, the police are under the control of old-style political cliques; and it is vital to break what he calls the “nexus of politics, crime and the police.” Yet if the Serbian no holds, Bosnia is stuck, unable even to begin talks with the EU. Lord Ashdown says, ruefully, “I have been saying for three years to my Balkan colleagues that the mood of Europe is changing and the door may not be open for so long, so don't wait, don't delay.”

This week Bosnia tipped even further into crisis. Mladen Ivanic, Bosnia's foreign minister, was sacked by the prime minister, but refused to go. Only a day earlier, Mr Ivanic had indicated that he was not so worried by the French and Dutch referendums, because, even if enlargement slips a bit, “we are not so close.” If Bosnia's negotiations took as long as Bulgaria's, it might not join until 2020.

Mr Ivanic is, however, alarmed by the video, which was shown first in The Hague and then on television in Bosnia and Serbia. It featured paramilitaries from Serbia executing six young Bosniaks from Srebrenica. He says that, if Bosniak politicians “misuse” this to argue that the Serbian republic was born out of genocide and should be scrapped, much of the progress made in the past ten years could be at risk. In Serbia, the video led to arrests of the alleged perpetrators.

A compromise could yet emerge on policing. Dragan Jerinic, editor of Nezavisne Novine, a Banja Luka paper, says the argument is not really about police but about the desire for revenge on the part of Serb politicians who were sacked by Lord Ashdown last year for protecting war-crimes suspects. If these politicians were rehabilitated, he suggests, police reform would be accepted, just as other difficult centralising measures in defence and taxation have been.

Osman Topcagic, who is in charge of European policy in the central government in Sarajevo, says it is vital to change the way the EU sees Bosnia. Ten years after the war, he notes that Bosnia is still seen largely as a security problem. Thus money is available to finance 7,000 EU troops in Bosnia, while he argues that it now needs fewer peacekeepers and more development funds. What bothers Mr Topcagic still more is that his compatriots spend too much time “talking a lot about the past and not enough about the future.” In Banja Luka, Tanja Subotic, a local journalist, agrees, noting that “in people's heads the war is not over.”