http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/20/croatia-serbia-bosnia-balkans-conflicts/print
Sabre-rattling between Croatia and Serbia over Bosnia intensifies
Rise in vitriol between Balkan nations over future of region harks back
to bloody conflicts of the 1990s
Croatian president Stipe Mesic is to stand down after a decade in power.
Croatian president Stipe Mesic is to stand down after a decade in power.
Photograph: Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images
Leaders of the former Yugoslavia traded hostile invective that recalled
the wars of the 1990s today after Croatia's president threatened armed
intervention to halt any Serbian attempts to partition Bosnia.
Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of the Serbian half of Bosnia, accused
the Croatian leader, Stipe Mesic, of warmongering after a blunt warning
from Zagreb.
"If Milorad Dodik scheduled a referendum for secession … I would send
the army," Mesic said, adding that he would "break the Bosnian Serb
region in half". Mesic's threat also triggered a strong response in the
Serbian capital, Belgrade.
The war of words erupted as Bosnia prepares for elections later this
year, which diplomats and analysts expect to be marked by angry and
destabilising nationalism on all sides.
Dodik is determined to keep Bosnia as ethnically divided as possible and
is resisting all international attempts to forge a more functional state
and establish central government authority. He regularly threatens to
stage a direct vote on secession from Bosnia.
Mesic, who is to stand down after a decade as Croatian president next
month, accused the Bosnian Serb leader of seeking to revive the failed
Serbian policies of a decade ago aimed at establishing a "Greater Serbia".
Dodik is fighting a political war of attrition with the international
powers who still control Bosnia and enjoy last-resort powers, nearly 15
years after the end of the war there.
"Dodik believes that the world will tire of Bosnia and that he will
schedule a referendum then … and then the dream of a Greater Serbia will
finally be fulfilled," Mesic told journalists in Zagreb.
The Serbian half of Bosnia is split in two and connected by a narrow
corridor that runs along the River Sava on the border with Croatia.
Mesic said he could send Croat forces to the choke point. A referendum
would result not in a Serbian breakaway, but in the destruction of the
Serbian half of Bosnia, the Croatian president predicted.
A senior government official in Belgrade, Borislav Stefanovic, reacted
angrily, declaring that Mesic's "moral and political authority is at
almost zero".
Dodik said the Croatian leader was "radical and extreme" and accused him
of warmongering after playing a key role in the wars of the 90s. Mesic
was the last president of Yugoslavia before it collapsed in bloodshed in
1991.
"This is a disturbing threat by a man who started his political career
with a war and now wants to end it with a war," Dodik said. "It is a
classic call to war."
Few observers expect Bosnia to slip into a repeat of its 1992-95 war,
but the verbal fisticuffs in recent days is the most aggressive for
years. The country is dysfunctional and its ethnic division entrenched,
generating gloom about its European integration prospects in Brussels.
Lady Ashton, the EU's new foreign policy chief, has singled Bosnia out
as the most unstable corner of Europe.
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