The Bosnia myth.

• Author: Clapp, Alexander
• Position: Essay

One last vestige remains of the post--World War I stipulation that put Southern Slavs of three major faiths--Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam--under a single flag. It is Bosnia and Herzegovina. Twenty years ago it was nearly destroyed by a three-way war between Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks that left some one hundred thousand dead and made refugees out of another two million. Its dissolution has been steadily wrought out since, through what some observers have termed a "war by other means." Its weapons are those deployed by Balkan elites everywhere--corruption, electoral machinations, ethnic strong-arming--but only in Bosnia have they pushed the state to the brink of nonexistence. The virtual disappearance of the word "Bosnian" from public discourse in recent years--citizens of Bosnia identify themselves by religion more today than they did during the war--may indeed prove self-fulfilling: the future of Bosnian statehood has become the focus of the general election, set for October 2018. Its destruction would give the Croats in the southwest, the Serbs in the north and east, and the Bosniaks clustered around Sarajevo their own states. Proponents of federalization are not just political elites, for whom carving up the state would be a boon of power and resources, but citizens of a country whose very premise for existing is rejected by more than half the population.

Surviving a war only to be eviscerated by bureaucratic mismanagement: Bosnia's is one of the more perplexing European crises of late, and among the least discussed. The vast expanse of journalism once fixated on Sarajevo has withered into a thin stable of academic journals and specialist round-tables. Walk around the capital today, and the flagging inertia of NGOS and diplomatic missions is everywhere palpable. Attention has shifted to Kosovo and Ukraine. "Bosnia is the place you send your interns," Leila Bicakcic, the head of the Center for Investigative Reporting, told me. "You do not put your serious people here anymore." Nowhere can the war be easily forgotten. Cities are still speckled with bullet holes. Sheikh-funded refugee towns remain pitched up all across the Dinaric valleys. But perhaps more revealing of what Bosnia means for the world today is the cheap commodification of the killing. In Sarajevo, you can have your hotel arrange a visit to the Tunnel of Hope that funneled the besieged to safety. Slogans from the war have been memorialized as refrigerator magnets. The Genocide Tour takes you out to the mass graves at Srebrenica in a caravan of minibuses.

The "international community" that once relished its self-satisfaction over having salvaged Bosnia has little idea what to do with it today. Any taxonomy of the debacle must begin with the 1995 Dayton Accords--an agreement about which everyday Bosnians were never consulted, and which was never intended to be permanent, but whose exhaust fumes now infiltrate almost every aspect of their lives. Dayton stopped the war by essentially freezing it in place. Two mistakes were apparent from the outset. One, the failure to effect a victor of any sort all but guaranteed the conflict's continuation through the apparatuses of the emergent Bosnian state. This kept not just the war's winner but even its very events subject to wild contestation. Walking in Sarajevo one morning, I met two Bosnian Serbs who were mapping out the old marketplace that was shelled in a pair of attacks that killed 111 in 1994 and 1995. They had been dispatched from Belgrade as part of an investigation attempting to demonstrate that the trajectory of the rockets showed they could only have been fired by Bosniak forces against their own civilians. Twenty years on, revisionism trumps reconciliation in Bosnia.

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Dayton's other mistake stemmed from a misunderstanding of why war had broken out in the first place. Any acute reading of Bosnia's past would have shown that, historically, the problems tended to arise from outside forces that intervened to disturb its fragile ethnic balance. Despite no shortage of such external candidates, Western diplomats overwhelmingly favored the tribalism narrative: Balkan peoples had been fighting one another for a long time. It is only grimly ironic that many of the more obvious culprits behind Yugoslavia's unraveling--the role of the IMF and World Bank in priming the country for social unrest by pitting it through a decade of austerity after Tito's death, for example--are now once again at work in Bosnia.

But if the war did owe to ethnic divisions, it was necessary that they be emphatically bridged in its aftermath. The paradox of addressing religion was that Dayton shackled nearly everything to it. In...