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American University Professor Ulas Doga Uralp
asked last night whether I had written anything about the Bosnian
Serb referendum, which passed Sunday with over 99% voting “yes.”
Turnout was modest: somewhere around 55%. The issue on the ballot
was whether Republika Srpska’s national day should be celebrated
January 9. I won’t bother to explain why that is important to some
people. Nor do I regret not having written something about it,
though I believe I wasted a few breaths on it in an
interview.
The substance of the referendum deserves to be
ignored. The significant thing was that it was held at all, after
the Bosnian constitutional court ruled it unconstitutional, rightly
or wrongly. If the referendum is allowed to stand, Dodik intends to
move ahead with an independence referendum in 2018. For some in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, that would be a casus belli, just as it was
in 1992.
I don’t really expect real war to ensue, though
the risk of violence needs to be taken seriously. Many approved
independence referendums don’t result in widely recognized
sovereignty, most notably Russian-inspired referendums in
Transnistria, South Ossetia, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea. Don’t
know all those places? That’s because they are under normal
circumstances obscure provinces, now converted into poor, backwater
satellites of Moscow with no prospect of wide international
recognition. Their main function is to destabilize and retard the
countries that continue to claim them, in service to Moscow’s
anti-Western, anti-NATO and anti-EU ambitions.
That’s the best Republika Srpska can hope for if
it proceeds with its current course: to become a poor, unrecognized,
backwater satellite of a country whose GDP is now less than that of
Spain and still decreasing. Russia is a declining regional power
with little to offer even a strategically important place like
Crimea. Republika Srpska as a self-declared independent state will
get little recognition and even less money, since it doesn’t happen
to sit on significant real estate. Dodik will no doubt have
increased opportunities to line his pockets if RS declares
independence, but the population is guaranteed to lose access to
World Bank funds as well as American and European assistance.
I don’t expect it to come to that. It would be far
better if Bosnia’s courts would handle the issue, declaring the
referendum null and void and doing what it can to hold Dodik
accountable for conducting it in spite of a constitutional court
decision. This is Bosnia’s Marbury v Madison moment, when the
court’s authority to review legislation and executive decisions
requires affirmation. If the Americans and Europeans have any
interest left in Bosnia, they need to make sure that happens.
Of course they might have just used the “Bonn
powers” of the High Representative, who has said the referendum
violates the Dayton agreements. They can no longer readily do that
because they have somehow allowed Moscow to acquire a de facto veto
over their use, and they fear they have no way of implementing the
HiRep’s decisions. Putin’s Russia is happy to use the veto and
ostentatiously provided support to Dodik with a visit to Moscow just
before the referendum.
But none of that changes reality: Republika Srpska
won’t become a widely recognized independent state but may well join
half a dozen other Moscow-sponsored backwaters in serving Moscow’s
commitment to destabilization. The EU and NATO may not be perfect,
but they offer a lot better future than Russia does. That’s Dodik’s
folly.
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