Bosnia 'peace deal' a recipe for conflict

With the agreement signed at Dayton air force base, Ohio, the US has managed to achieve the ethnic division of Bosnia — something that Serbia hadn't managed in three and a half years of bloody fighting, despite the West's policy backing ethnic partition by force and negotiations. What was agreed under duress by the Bosnian government has nothing to do with justice, or a peace that will last. Bosnia has been divided 51%/49% into areas of defacto Serbian and Croatian control. This is to be enforced by the 60,000 NATO troops expected to begin arriving in the next fortnight. The spheres of Serbian and Croatian control, variously described as "entities" or "republics" repudiate the formally agreed integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a single state. A four kilometre-wide, 1000 kilometre-long buffer zone will be patrolled by NATO, reinforcing an ethnic division that has largely been established by the genocidal practices of "ethnic cleansing". While the agreement provides that refugees be allowed to return to their homes, there is no mechanism to enforce this, and all civilian movement is to be conducted through checkpoints. Such an agreement over-rides the aspirations of the 250,000 refugees, and can only exacerbate the ethnic tensions that motivated the conflict. This, however, is not of concern to the Western powers, especially the US, which have portrayed the conflict in the former Yugoslav federation as a product of "ancient hatreds" — centuries-old enmities between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian muslims) — brushing aside the history of multi-ethnic Bosnia. The West's promotion of ethnic divisions has fanned the flames and provided a cover for its own interests in a dismembered Bosnia. The Western powers have helped partition Bosnia, between Croatia and Serbia, to preserve their own strategic and economic interests by dividing potential client states of the region between themselves. Writing in the September 25 Nation, Christopher Hitchens pointed out that history has everything to do with maps; in the case of Bosnia, he mentioned the map of a future Bosnia divided between Croatia and Serbia, drawn by Franjo Tudjman for British MP Paddy Ashdown in July. Hitchens described another map, not so well known, which, with the help of the World Bank just before the 1992 war began, located large deposits of oil and coal in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The exploration documents, which disappeared as the fighting began, are reported to be in Serb and Croat hands. Hitchens says that many of the rich mineral deposits are in areas where there is "hot" military contestation. It is further proof, Hitchens said, of the falsehood of describing the conflict as being between "atavistic" and "medieval" people, without regard to Western interests in the partition of Bosnia. Unfortunately for the people directly involved, there can be no peace based on forced ethnic divisions and the carve-up of land between different Western interests. This type of "peace" is a recipe for further conflict.