European Union foreign ministers have discussed ways to ease tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and prevent the possible break-up of the ethnically divided Balkan country as the peace agreement brokered more than 25 years ago continues to unravel. “The nationalist and separatist rhetoric is increasing in Bosnia and Herzegovina and jeopardizing the stability and even the integrity of the country,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Monday in Brussels, where he chaired a meeting of the 27-country bloc’s foreign ministers.
The United States last month announced new sanctions against Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who has for years been advocating that the Serb-run part of Bosnia should leave the rest of the country and unite with neighboring Serbia. The US accused him of “corrupt activities” that threaten to destabilize the region and undermine the US-brokered Dayton Peace Accord. Dodik says he and Bosnian Serbs are being unfairly targeted and wrongly accused of corruption. The agreement in 1995 ended the war in Bosnia, which killed more than 100,000 people and left millions homeless. The accord established two separate governing entities in Bosnia—Republika Srpska run by Bosnia’s Serbs, and the other dominated by Bosniaks, an ethnic group that is primarily Muslim, and Croats. What the EU wants to see, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said, is “a full reform package agreed and implemented in advance of the elections so that we can have elections that then successfully result in the formation of a government that can function.”
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