Another WWIII delineation line.
"Ethnic divisions fester in Bosnia; Analysts fear resurgence of war" by Dan Bilefsky, International Herald Tribune | December 14, 2008
SARAJEVO - Thirteen years after the United States brokered the Dayton peace agreement to end modern Europe's most ferocious ethnic war, fears are mounting that Bosnia, poor and divided, is again teetering toward crisis.
On the surface, this haunted capital, its ancient mosques and Orthodox churches still pocked with holes from mortar fire, appears to be enjoying a renaissance. Young professionals throng to stylish cafes and gleaming new shopping malls while the muezzin heralds the morning prayer.
The ghosts of Srebrenica linger - recalling the worst massacre in Europe since World War II - but Sarajevans prefer to talk about Barack Obama or the global financial crisis rather than genocide.
Yet the aftermath of war is ever present. The Dayton accord divided Bosnia and Herzegovina, a former Yugoslav republic, into a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb republic after a savage war from 1992 to 1995 in which about 100,000 people were killed, the majority of them Muslims. A million more Muslims, Serbs, and Croats were driven from their homes, while much of this rugged country's infrastructure was destroyed.
The peace agreement, brokered among the warring sides by the Clinton administration at an Air Force base in Ohio in November 1995, accomplished its goal of ending the war, but the decentralized political system it engineered has entrenched rather than overcome ethnic divisions. Even in communities where Serbs, Muslims, and Croats live side by side, some send their children to the same school, but in different shifts.
Bosnia, which has received more than $1.29 billion in foreign aid since 1995, remains an adopted orphan of the West, its security guaranteed by 2,000 European Union peacekeepers. Locked in an impasse of mutual recrimination are Haris Silajdzic - the Muslim of the country's three-member presidency, who has called for the Serb republic, Republika Srpska, to be abolished - and the Bosnian Serb prime minister, Milorad Dodik, who is supported by Moscow and who has dangled the threat that it will secede.
"It's time to pay attention to Bosnia again if we don't want things to get nasty very quickly," Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton official who brokered the Dayton accord, and Paddy Ashdown, formerly the West's top diplomat in Bosnia, warned recently in a commentary in The
Sketching a worst-case outcome, Srecko Latal, a Bosnia analyst at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Sarajevo, warned that if the Serb Republic declared independence, Croatia would respond by sending in troops, while the Bosniak Muslims would take up arms. If Banja Luka, the capital of the Serb republic, were to fall, he continued, Belgrade would be provoked into entering the fray, leading to the prospect of a regional war.
"For the first time in years, people are talking about war," Latal said. "They are tired of it and they don't want it. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility."
More like a PROBABILITY, huh?
Leaders across the ethnic divide expressed hope that Obama, the US president-elect, would be more engaged in Bosnia than President Bush, while stressing that Obama's multicultural background made him ideally suited to mediate here....
What, he gonna use "Al-CIA-Duh" in there like Clinton?
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