Ashdown Urges West to Stop Bosnia Sinking

Paddy Ashdown, the former High Representative of the international community to Bosnia and Herzegovina until 2006, said the country was at a crossroads, and both Washington and Brussels had to act urgently to prevent further deterioration.

He added that in the first ten years after the 1992-95 war, Bosnia had made progress. But in the years since then it had gone backwards and it was time things changed.

“It is in Brussels that we have to change our approach, not in Sarajevo,” Ashdown said. “If the days of ... direct intervention are over, so should the recent politics of non-intervention be, too.”

Addressing the Rose-Roth NATO seminar in Sarajevo on March 18, Ashdown said only international re-engagement with Bosnia would prevent the country from becoming a "black hole" that had no hope of further European integration.

“Bosnian politics must change. Politics and politicians in Bosnia must now start doing what they failed to do so spectacularly,” Ashdown said, stating that the focus needs now to be on the interest of the majority of citizens and not on the political elites.

He said he hoped a new energy would emerge from the recent wave of protests by citizens, and from a renewed approach on the part of US and EU institutions.

Ashdown said that the territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina should not be put in question, and the West has to invest efforts into ensuring that the country does not sink into disfunctionality.

Any new strategy should be based on creating a functional decentralized state, but some internal integration had to be completed before the country can join the EU, he noted.

“Some Bosnian politicians are playing on the Russian card and on the even more...