US threatens to reconsider role in Bosnia and Herzegovina amid rift with Europe | Bosnia and Herzegovina
The deepening US-European divide over the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina has opened up with a dispute over top executive authority, leading to threats to “reconsider” the US’s role in international peacekeeping.
The American embassy in Sarajevo issued the threat after European states refused to support the US’s preferred candidate to become the new High Representative of the international community. At this week’s meeting in Sarajevo of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), a multinational group charged with overseeing implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, Washington backed Italian diplomat Antonio Zanardi Landi, while Britain, France, Germany and most European countries backed France’s envoy to the Western Balkans, René Troccaz.
The Trump administration has also advocated weakening the High Representative’s authority to implement the Dayton principles, which ended a war that cost 100,000 lives but did little to heal Bosnia’s ethnic division.
The US embassy in Sarajevo wrote in a post on [Bosnia and Herzegovina]”It forces the United States to reconsider our role in the current international presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
The United States no longer has a significant military presence in Bosnia, where there is a small EU peacekeeping force, but it has continued to play an influential role through the PIC and bilateral relations.
The PIC will try to reach consensus again on the High Representative role towards the end of the month, when compromise candidates may emerge.
The region could benefit if the United States reduces its role, a European official has suggested, at a time when doubts are growing about the Trump administration’s motives. Last year, it lifted sanctions against Moscow-backed Serbian separatist leader Milorad Dodik, who reportedly had a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort in Washington.
The US also pressured High Representative Christian Schmidt, who imposed criminal sanctions on Dodik for undermining the Dayton agreement, to resign.
At the same time, Trump’s relatives and associates are pursuing his business interests in Bosnia, including a visit by the US president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., to the Bosnian Serbs’ main city, Banja Luka, in April as the guest of Dodik’s son.
Jasmin Mujanović, a Balkans political analyst and author of two books on Bosnia, said it turned out that the Trump administration miscalculated its influence over Europeans in the PIC.
“The Americans thought it was kind of irrelevant what the Europeans were thinking and assuming they would fall in line, and I think that was a misreading of the moment,” Mujanović said. “The United States does not appear to have consulted particularly broadly with its allies on the selection of Mr. Landi.
“It begs the question why they insist so much on Mr. Landi. We don’t know what kind of agreements there are between Landi and the Americans that have them so excited.”
Reports from the PIC meeting in Sarajevo on Wednesday and Thursday were that the US supported Landi more enthusiastically than Italy.
Kurt Bassuener, co-founder of the Berlin-based Democratization Policy Council think tank, said: “This is not just a personnel decision. It is a strategic decision and needs to be integrated into a regional strategy. It seems that America’s position is not just ideologically driven, it is also a commercial move. This seems to be job number one: getting concessions, getting contracts and getting out, getting out, getting out.”
