After several years of war, thousands of people have died. Cities and suburbs are the scenes of brutal fighting. The conflict has a sectarian cast, with different ethnic and religious groups taking sides and fighting one other. And while the fighting continues, the outside world appears unwilling to act.
This is Bosnia, 1995. Sound familiar? Many people believe that the conflicts in Syria and the war in Bosnia are parallels, and Bosnia has been raised as the counterexample to those who see an American intervention in Syria as doomed to fail. From brutal sieges of cities—whether they be Sarajevo or Damascus—to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Serbian or Syrian bombs, the faces of the two conflicts do seem quite similar at first. But while similar threads between the two exist, the circumstances in Bosnia permitted policymakers to see a route to peace, while in Syria every arrow points to continuous war. Unfortunately, 2013 is not 1995, and the prescriptions for Bosnia are misapplied in Syria.
The Balkan Problem
In 1995, fighting had consumed Bosnia for three years. Bosnian Serbs had overrun large parts of the country and were using “ethnic cleansing” to exile or murder Bosnian Muslims and Croats. Serbs had also besieged the capital, Sarajevo, which was under continuous attack from shellfire and snipers. The United Nations mission to Bosnia was largely ineffective, as it was forced to fire on attackers only if fired upon. In the summer of 1995, Serb forces executed over 8,000 Muslim men and boys around the town of Srebrenica. This massacre, carried out in a location that was supposedly a UN-protected safe haven, shocked many in the international community. Faced with these horrors and with the ineffectiveness of their own response, nations began to formulate a new, more active approach to the conflict.
In Operation Deliberate Force, NATO jets bombed various Serbian targets around Bosnia. After sustained bombing against the Serbs from August 30 to September 20, the Serb commanders agreed to remove their artillery from Sarajevo. Combined with battlefield setbacks, the bombings forced the Serbs to begin negotiations with representatives of the Bosnian Muslims and the Croatians. After a series of long negotiations at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, facilitated by renowned diplomat Richard Holbrooke, an uneasy agreement, the Dayton Peace Accords, emerged. With support from international and NATO peacekeepers, the agreement helped bring an end to war.
Rhyming History
Mark Twain once noted that “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” At some level, this axiom does seem to be playing itself out in the comparison of Bosnia and Syria. For example, in Bosnia, the final peace agreement revolved around delineating separate areas for the different ethnic groups to control. In an email to the Harvard Political Review, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution Michael O’Hanlon noted that in Syria the new “’ethnic cleansing’ may in its own tragic way ultimately make a solution more workable by separating populations from each other,” suggesting that Balkanization may be a way to seek peace in Syria. Member of the British Parliament Rory Stewart, a former diplomat and professor on human rights and intervention wrote in The Guardian, “In Syria, as in Bosnia, the best situation is a negotiated peace, in which all sides are included.” Many diplomats and world leaders, from Kofi Annan to Vladimir Putin, have been attempting to find such a solution.
However, there is no clear lesson from Bosnia that indicates a feasible course of action. In the same piece Stewart warned, “…The real lesson of Bosnia does not lie in the tactics. Those depend entirely on the culture of Syria, its neighbors, and the conditions on the ground, and may have to change.”
False Flag
However alike at the surface, the underlying dynamics of Bosnia and Serbia don’t line up, and many do not agree with the oft-made comparison between the two.
“In Syria we are not talking about a war resulting from a state breakup, we’re not talking about Yeltsin’s Russia, we’re not talking about neighbors wanting to carve up the nation,” explained Dr. Daniel Serwer, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Many people have argued that the need to protect civilians is a parallel, as is the need to prevent atrocities, and to have no fly zones and safe havens. But in Bosnia, no fly zones and safe havens failed to stop the Serbs.”
Thinking in Washington around Syria policy is drastically different from the time of the Bosnian War. In the 1990s, foreign policy making regarding Bosnia was strongly influenced by Richard Holbrooke, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs. Unlike policymakers on Syria, Holbrooke had visited Bosnia and stayed in Sarajevo during the siege. He was also strongly motivated to work to end the conflict, as was the administration, by the deaths of four members of an American negotiating team while trying to traverse the conflict. Unlike Bosnia, there is no single individual that we are aware of in the administration who is most closely tied to Syria policy. “Holbrooke’s talent was getting all of the levers of American power, the State Department, the National Security Council, the DoD, and the other relevant agencies all pointed in the same direction,” Dr. Serwer stated. “Could Robert Ford [the American Ambassador to Syria] do this? It’s possible, but it requires the Administration to have a clear compelling policy to rebalance the battlefield and to pursue a negotiated solution.”
Neither conflict occurs in a vacuum, and the past twenty years have seen drastic shifts in the global geopolitical scene. Specifically, Russia is playing a very different role in the international community than it was during the Bosnian conflict. During the era of the Bosnian War, the collapse of the Soviet Union had left Russia geopolitically weakened. This helped result in a greater willingness on the part of President Yeltsin to work with the international community to find an end to the conflict, despite the fact that this occasionally meant withholding support for the Serbian dictator and Russian ally Slobodan Milosevic.
“Putin is not willing to be cooperative, and his op-ed in the New York Times was very clear in his defiance. Putin wants Russia to be counted among the Great Powers again, and his route to doing that is through defiance of the United States,” concluded Serwer. More recent events have also impacted the calculus of international leaders. Regime change in Libya, to name one instance of many, has not resulted in a stable government forming, leaving many skeptical about the efficacy of acting against Syria.
Sticky Wicket
Virtually all statements from diplomats and policymakers in Washington have indicated that Syria has no easy solutions. They also agree that the conflict is destabilizing the region, providing a haven for al-Qaeda, and threatening Israel. So are there any parallels that might be applicable?
For one, American hard power still is effective as leverage. Just as American military strength helped force the Serbs to negotiate in 1995, the threat of American force in Syria helped facilitate dialogue on its chemical weapons program. It is also interesting to note that the focus of the mission in Bosnia was not on capturing war criminals or on bring about regime change. This point was elucidated by Stewart, who wrote, “We were not committed to toppling Milosevic, and were prepared to talk to everyone, including war criminals.” This kind of limited action, while not guaranteed success, may be more effective than a government overthrow.
As the debate continues, so will the deaths. While it is tempting to look for obvious solutions learned from Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, or the many other examples of intervention, but policymakers beware. No solution from one conflict can be flawlessly applied, and it is dangerous to rely on any one example to base policy.
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