Summary
A cornerstone ceremony in Banja Luka May 7 was to inaugurate the reconstruction of the renowned medieval Ferhadija mosque. But with 3,000 Bosnian Serbs in attendance, Serb nationalists, opposed to the rebuilding of Ferhadija, assaulted ethnic Muslims, set fire to diplomatic vehicles, overwhelmed police and trapped international dignitaries inside for several hours. The riots drew condemnations from the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and raised fears that Serb nationalism in Bosnia is unyielding and that the Bosnian-Serb leadership is to blame.
Analysis
U.S. and British ambassadors to Bosnia are accusing the Bosnian-Serb leadership of organizing a protest 7 May where top Western diplomats, including U.N. Ambassador Jacques Klein, were trapped in a building by rioting Serb nationalists. The rioters pelted Muslim refugees and officials with tear gas grenades, stones and eggs to protest the reconstruction of a medieval mosque, Ferhadija, in Banja Luka.
The charge marks the height of Western cynicism toward the Bosnian Serb leadership of the Republika Srpska, led by the Serb Democratic Party, SDS. Moreover, it suggests an end game in Bosnia where donor nations ultimately give up on the multiethnic integration of Bosnia and abandon efforts to cooperate with Bosnian-Serb officials, including moderate Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic.
The assaults against international dignitaries at the Ferhadija ceremony illuminated the problem of Bosnian-Serb nationalism.
U.S Ambassador Thomas Miller quickly fled and British Ambassador Graham Hand took refuge in the Muslim Community Center, joining Klein and Bosnian Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija, along with 300 Muslim visitors and religious and political leaders. Protestors pelted them all with bottles and rocks when bodyguards evacuated them from the building.
Bosnian-Serb officials, including Republika Srpska President Mirko Sarovic from the ruling SDS and Bosnian Serb Presidency chair Zivko Radisic, attempted to disperse the crowd but also came under attack. Bosnian-Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic arrived on the scene late to attempt intervention, but he also failed.
The ceremony, to commemorate reconstruction of the 16th-century mosque destroyed in 1993 during the Bosnian war, was also to celebrate the normalization of post-war relations among Muslims and Bosnian Serbs, but instead the event brought tensions to the fore.
In the aftermath, Ambassadors Miller and Graham, in no uncertain terms, blamed the SDS leaders for the riot.
“The planned ceremony, which should have been a symbol of peace and reconciliation, has been destroyed by actions of a violent and unruly crowd. Such acts cannot and must not go unpunished,'' Miller said in a statement published by Reuters.
OSCE High Commissioner Wolfgang Petritsch resounded similar accusations and called the riot a terrorist attack against the stability of the state. Every other brand of non-ethnic Serb party leader fell in line with Petritsch.
Republika Srpska leaders Sarovic, Radisic and Ivanic apparently have finally lost whatever tenuous support they had in the international community.
This marks the end of a near 18-month-long campaign to put a new face on the SDS, regularly touted abroad as the founding party of war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Prime Minister Ivanic, considered among the most moderate leaning of Bosnian-Serb nationalists, tried in vain to establish himself and the SDS as nationalist in spirit while reform-minded in practice.
Though the international leaders accuse the Bosnian-Serb leadership of organizing the protest, the charge is inflated. Radical activists have operated with impunity in the Republika Srpska, disrupting parliamentary and presidential elections last year and regularly terrorizing Muslim returnees repatriated to their homes by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
In fact, the Sarajevo daily Dnevni Avaz attributed the Ferhadija protest, as well as earlier protests in Trebinje, to expelled politicians loyal to the extremist Nikola Poplasen. Poplasen leads the banned Serb Radical Party and is the champion of the Greater Serbia principle in Republika Srpska.
The strain of nationalism among Bosnian Serbs is tremendous. But it is a momentum that SDS leaders have attempted to resist in an effort to court the favor of donor nations. Whether their commitment to reform was genuine remains uncertain, but the attempt to resist nationalist associations was hard and politically costly.
By abandoning Ivanic, casting him in the same light as a rabid nationalist like Poplasen, U.S., UK and OSCE leaders will lose their capacity to weaken the position of radicals in Republika Srpska.
Ivanic has exhibited a willingness to shed the wartime associations of the SDS as a singular, nationalist party at a time when it has been politically unpopular to do so. The nationalist option is demonstrably the easiest in Bosnia, and the SDS was elected to office last November on the pretense of being a nationalist party. SDS has used its popularity to appeal to donor nations, though to little effect. With declining signals of cooperation from the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, SDS is likely to retract its strategy and return to carry the more staid, nationalist sentiments of the population.
What's more, with no reason to believe support from Western-donor nations is coming, Ivanic will forget his attempt to play moderate before an international public. Miller, Hand and Petritsch have made their intentions clear that Ivanic cannot win their sympathy, and they have withdrawn the carrot. As a result, the experiment by the SDS to turn moderate is over.
Nationalists will seize the momentum shown at the Trebinje and Ferhadija protests in the past week. Prime Minister Ivanic, now without potential partners among key donor nations, is either going to revert to nationalist tendencies or risk becoming politically irrelevant. Moreover, genuinely nationalist officials in the Republika Srpska will jockey to do the same and are likely to succeed.
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