THE WEST MAY FINALLY have found part of its exit strategy in Bosnia. He is six feet, three inches tall, plainspoken, and the new prime minister of the Republika Srpska, one of two Bosnian entities recognized by the Dayton Accords. His name is Milorad Dodik, and he was elected to his post in January with a little help from some Western friends. His emergence signals that the peace process in Bosnia, stagnant for so long, has reached a new and more productive phase.
A businessman and opposition figure during the war, Dodik was selected only after an earlier candidate had tried and failed to gain a majority in the newly elected, and badly divided, Serb parliament. Dodik's election came late at night when most of the hardline Serb deputies had left. The vote that put him over the top was cast by a parliamentarian escorted back to the meeting by a contingent of NATO troops. (Dodik also received important political support from the fiend-turned-fixer, Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic. )
The new Serb government has taken steps that its predecessors had obstructed for months. One of the more important reforms it has agreed to is the creation of Bosnia-wide license plates that do not betray the origin of the car. Common plates will curtail the sinister games that local police in Bosnia often play with travelers of other ethnicities. Most important, Dodik has promised to begin in earnest the process of returning people to their homes. Breaking down Bosnia's still-formidable demographic division is essential to a self-sustaining peace process. Serb territory has, until now, been almost totally closed to its former Muslim and Croat inhabitants.
Dodik has spent many of his early days on junkets in foreign capitals, lobbying for the dispersal of funds to his new and improved Republika Srpska. The fragility of his regime is a principal selling point. In Washington last month, he warned a standing-roomonly crowd, "If financial help doesn't arrive soon, I may be forced to leave." Determined to avoid such an eventuality, both the United States and the European Union have thawed previously frozen funds. Now, with the financial crisis easing and Serb civil servants receiving salaries for the first time in months, the challenge for Dodik will be facing down the obdurate and often corrupt local officials who retain much power in Serb areas.
The appearance of a pro-Dayton figure like Dodik, and his recent friendly tour of Western Europe and America, has set the Sarajevo government back on its heels. Accustomed to the moral high ground, Sarajevo is now scrambling to catch up. Dodik has given the Bosnian political pot a much-needed stir. In late March, two moderate politicians, one Muslim and the other Serb, hinted that they may run together in 1998 for the country's joint presidency.
As a senior European diplomat here told me recently, "We are now starting to see the difference between those who talk a good Bosnia and those who work to create it."
Dodik's dramatic election has been the most important result of a new Western stance in Bosnia. Content for more than a year after the Dayton Accords to keep the rival armies in Bosnia apart, the West finally realized the latent power of the NATO force for pushing Bosnia toward a sustainable peace rather than just a cease-fire. Beginning last summer, NATO took sides in a Bosnian Serb internal political dispute. Troops seized several police stations and handed them over to the more moderate forces, those of Serb president Biljana Plavsic. Much of Radovan Karadzic's gangland empire quickly withered.
NATO also used its muscle to crack down on war criminals and extremist media. In July, British troops seized one war criminal and shot dead another. Dutch troops followed suit a few months later. In January, even the often timid Americans got into the action, seizing an indictee who styled himself "the Serb Adolf." The effect has been dramatic. Indictees are now turning themselves in at NATO checkpoints, something difficult to imagine only a year ago. The big fish, it is true, remain free. But the air in Bosnia is becoming difficult to breathe for the war criminals who were once its lords. It is even rumored that Karadzic, underground and out of power, has begun negotiations on surrender.
The irony is that the recent success in the Bosnian mission has come from blatant defiance of the conventional wisdom about peacekeeping. It was long an article of faith in peacekeeping circles that impartiality and the non-use of force must be maintained at all costs. To be sure, these were rules constructed for the lightly armed U.N. peacekeepers of yesteryear. Yet the insidious effects of this doctrine took some time to overcome. When NATO first deployed troops in Bosnia, it stuck to a rigid definition of its mandate. In perhaps the most notorious instance of what some have called "mission shrivel," NATO stood by as Serb extremists hounded the Serb population out of Sarajevo's suburbs, which were being transferred to the Muslim and Croat-dominated federation. In its interpretation of "peacekeeping," NATO has made quantum leaps since 1995.
More fundamentally, the progress in Bosnia has come because American decision-makers largely ignored those on Capitol Hill (and within their own ranks, such as Secretary of Defense William Cohen) who issued shrill warnings about "mission creep." Thinking on foreign policy at the congressional level is still plagued by the notion that interventions abroad can be quick, painless, and stamped, like so many cartons of milk, with expiration dates (an illusion Charles Krauthammer has dubbed "immaculate intervention").
Sens. James Inhofe and Kay Bailey Hutchison have been the chief alarmists. To them, nation-building is the ultimate of evils. Views like theirs have made the phrase verboten, and the Clinton administration thus lacks the vocabulary to explain the mission. For there is no better term for what is being attempted in Bosnia than nation-building, or, more precisely, state- building. The concept is not, as the conventional wisdom would have it, inherently flawed. State-building in Sorealia was ill considered because the United States lacked knowledge of local politics and the commitment to pull it off.
Bosnia is no Somalia. Western commitment is deep; Bosnia's European neighbors are well aware that renewed fighting would send another wave of refugees across their borders. The international civilian officials here have become increasingly proficient at moving aside the roadblocks laid down by extremists. And the arguments of armchair partitionists aside, Bosnia is historically more natural together than apart. Steadfastness and the imaginative use of military force have moved Bosnia closer to a lasting peace.
Little of this progress would have been possible had U.S. policy been straitjacketed by the skeptics. What is denounced as "mission creep" on the Hill looks a lot like mission accomplishment on the ground in Bosnia.
David L. Bosco is a journalist based in Sarajevo.