Divided World Powers Meet to Support Unified Bosnia

Representatives of some 50 world powers, including the US, Russia, EU and most EU member countries, convene in Sarajevo on Tuesday and Wednesday for a regular biannual meeting of the Peace Implementation Council, PIC, the ad hoc body overseeing the work of Bosnia and Herzegovina's once-powerful international administrator, the Office of the High Representative, OHR.

At the meeting, international officials will analyse the current security, political and economic situation in the country, with a special focus on freedom of media in the country, Western officials told BIRN.

Although the meeting will bring together a number of senior international diplomats, such as the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, Hoyt Yee, it is mostly being ignored by local public and media, who have long ago lost interest in the event which has mostly become a procedural meeting.

Growing divisions and opposing positions among the West and Russia, as well as other countries such as Turkey or China - which are all represented on the PIC - have effectively blocked any more concrete engagement of the OHR in the Bosnia's deepening political crisis.

For the past several years, the main purpose of this once important event was the preparation of a joint press statement, but even that sometimes proved to be extremely difficult with Western powers, Russia and Turkey having divergent views on the Balkans, and sometimes even using Bosnia for their own global scuffles.

"PIC positions directly relate to the OHR position, and the OHR, for some time, realistically does not have power it once did," analyst and blogger Srdjan Puhalo told BIRN

"A part of the OHR [mission] has been taken over by the EU itself. So the carrots remained, but we...