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Bildt: Patience and Persistence Are Keys to Peace in Bosnia
But Bosnia insists that the capture of
By Jovan Kovacic
SARAJEVO, June 10 (Reuters) - The international community needs patience and persistence with the embattled Bosnian peace process if it is to ever succeed, a spokesman for the international mediator Carl Bildt said on Monday. "There is hardly any country in the world as divided as Bosnia (and) that is now gradually moving from war to peace," said the spokesman Colum Murphy.
He said although the physical checkpoints between the ethnic communities have been removed, "invisible barriers of fear continue to divide people from each other." But Murphy insisted that the encouraging lesson from similar experiences in other parts of the world showed "that a peace process does gradually get momentum if it is sustained long enough and with enough patience."
Murphy's appeal for patience comes amid growing international frustration at sluggish progress in achieving key civilian aspects of the Dayton peace accord -- in particular the conditions necessary for free elections due by mid-September. Central conditions include a free and independent media, the freedom of movement for all of Bosnia's civilians, and the departure from power of indicted war criminals, in particular the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
Diplomats say Karadzic's unrelenting support for a separate Serb state has made him the most significant obstacle to
successful elections and the peace process in general. But while the international community has acknowledged that his presence is incompatible with free elections, there are growing signs that elections will proceed as long as the Bosnian Serb leader stays out of public view.
Bildt has warned that although partition of the country is still a prospect, faulty elections were better than none at all and that any delay would widen the rift between the former foes. Murphy said one of the key tasks for the mid-term review of Dayton in Florence this week must be to find ways of overcomming the reluctance of the parties to talk to one another.
But the Bosnian Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic is adamant that Karadzic and other war criminals in positions of power must go to The Hague before the elections. "This is a disaster for further implementation of the
Dayton agreement because there will be neither conditions for elections nor conditions for a stable peace before the problem of the war criminals is resolved," he said. "It means that those that follow them will be elected. It means that all the ideas that Karadzic introduced and all the reasons for the war are still there," he added. |
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Berserkistan, June 2 · Bosnia: Fair Elections, but Not at Any Price
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