Bosnia’s multiethnic army: New role model for peace?

BY AIDA CERKEZ-ROBINSON THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Posted on Saturday, November 15, 2008

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TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — It took 60, 000 NATO troops to force Bosnians like Edin Ahmetovic, Pero Budimir and Slobodan Misanovic to stop shooting at each other.

Now, the three former antagonists — a Muslim Bosniak, a Roman Catholic Croat and a Christian Orthodox Serb — are training together as they prepare for voluntary duty in other hot spots around the world.

They are unlikely peacekeepers, if only because Bosnia itself is still patrolled by 2, 100 foreign troops determined to keep the peace amid deeply ingrained ethnic tensions that have festered since the Balkan country’s 1992-95 war.

Yet Bosnian soldiers are serving as peacekeepers in Congo, Eritrea, Iraq and possibly Afghanistan, as well.

The willingness of these once bitter enemies to serve together at home and abroad points up an astonishing reality in postwar Bosnia: The military may have done a better job of learning how to live together than any other segment of society.

“The remarkable thing here in Bosnia-Herzegovina is that it is the military — former combatants — who are leading the process of reconciliation,” said Derek Chappell, the NATO spokesman in Bosnia.

Can men who once tried to kill one another now trust each other with their lives ?

“Absolutely,” declared Ahmetovic, the Bosniak, who commands his ethnically mixed unit. “I’m ready to take these men anywhere.”

“I wouldn’t leave any of them behind,” added Misanovic, the Bosnian Serb, using a T-shirt to wipe sweat from his brow after a 5-mile run with his two comrades. “We have become friends.”

More than 100, 000 people died during Bosnia’s three-way war — Europe’s worst bloodshed since World War II.

True peace and prosperity remain distant ideals.

The Dayton peace accord that ended the war in 1995 carved the once-multiethnic nation into ethnic ministates — a Serb republic and a Bosniak-Croat federation.

Both sides keep pursuing their wartime goal to this day, even as they answer to an international supervisor who in turn oversees a multiethnic government whose leaders clash regularly over what the country should look like.

Bosniak and Croat politicians are still trying to erase ethnic divisions, while Serbs threaten to secede, warning of the country’s “final breakup” if they are forced to give up their ministate.

International mediators often broker political agreements designed to take Bosnia forward — then nothing happens because the local institutions that are supposed to implement them get bogged down in ethnic mistrust.

Yet the military merged its ethnic segments into a common army in 2005. That was a major reform, and it has thrust Bosnia to the verge of membership in NATO — a breakthrough that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Once Bosnia’s politicians agreed to a common army, the decision was passed down to generals on all sides who perceived it as an order. From there, it was a simple matter of imposing a little military discipline, and that happened quickly.

For centuries, different ethnic groups lived together in Bosnia. Once the soldiers were ordered to get back together, “I guess they all had the feeling of getting back home,” said Selmo Cikotic, the country’s defense minister.

Cikotic acknowledges that European Union troops remain in Bosnia because the country remains riven by ethnic divisions. But he thinks the day is approaching when Bosnian troops may be able to keep the peace without foreign help.

“Some kind of an outside, impartial presence is still needed more likely for political and not security reasons,” Cikotic said. “But we are very close to the point of kissing them all goodbye and taking full responsibility.”

NATO’s Chappell marveled at the transformation.

Bosnia’s war “involved the horrors of ethnic cleansing, rape camps, concentration camps... but now those same soldiers are brothers together — they would risk their lives for one another,” he said.

Since the U. S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bosnia has sent eight rotations of 36 de-mining experts, and it currently has 49 military personnel — including three women — and a liaison officer in Iraq.

It has nine military observers in Eritrea and five others in Congo, and plans to deploy an undetermined number of troops to Afghanistan as part of the NATO mission there.

Budimir, the Bosnian-Croat soldier, frames it simply: What happened in the 1990 s “is forgotten now.”

And Misanovic, his Bosnia-Serb comrade, embodies the change that optimists insist is possible even if it so far has proved elusive across civil society.

During the war, he served in a unit that laid siege to Sarajevo, the heavily bombarded capital, and lobbed bombs at Bosniaks from the nearby hills.

Today, he’s happily married to a Muslim woman.

And the past ?

“That’s over,” he said. “I think something so stupid will not be repeated. Isn’t it better like this ? Being friends, instead of being in the woods ?”

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