When rumors first began to swirl in January about the possible appointment of Christian Schmidt as Europe’s High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina, I published a text under the headline ‘Has Germany lost its NATO compass?’.
In the story, I announced that Schmidt was appointed to help Dragan Covic, the leader of Croatia’s conservative HDZ party, to disrupt the constitutional structure of Bosnia and create the preconditions for the Serb and Croat dominated territories of Bosnia to secede, which would ultimately spark the final dissolution of the country.
I can hardly add anything new to this discussion other than to say that Schmidt’s recent statements at the recent German Atlantic Conference fully confirmed my claims that his role in Bosnia is to act as Covic’s ally in the latter’s attempts to shred the Bosnian Constitution.
Schmidt is a person with a heavy burden as someone who has continuously promoted Croatia’s national interests. He’s been recognized by The Croatian government has even decorated him with the Order of Ante Starcevic, a medal that is granted to Croats and foreigners for their contributions to the development of the Croatian state. Schmidt has said that he “proudly wears and shares” the award, which has over the years been given to several Croatians that were convicted of war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia. Schmidt obviously perceives these individuals as his ideological brethren. The question, then, is ‘why has Germany appointed him as the High Representative in Bosnia?”
Germany’s policy towards Bosnia, exercised mostly through the institutions of the European Union, has continuously been based on the concept of the country’s ethnic partition. The phrases that we occasionally hear from the EU about the inviolability of state boundaries in the Balkans is just rhetoric adapted to the demands by the United States to keep these boundaries intact. These borders, as we know them today, have so far only remained viable and stable due to the Americans’ staunch effort to preserve them. In stark contrast, the European Union has since the notorious Lisbon Conference of February 1992 steadfastly taken the position that Bosnia and Herzegovina should be partitioned along ethnic lines.
At that conference, Lord Carrington and Jose Cutileiro, the official representatives of the then-European Community, which later became the European Union, drew up new territorial borders based on the ethnoreligious partitioning of Bosnia after countless genocidal and ethnic cleansing crimes had already been committed.
When one takes into consideration that more than 100,000 people had been killed and at least 1,000,000 were expelled during the war, the end result was that the situation on the ground was roughly identical to the boundaries on their maps.
Neither Germany nor the European Union has ever distanced themselves from a policy that they promoted for Bosnia nearly 30 years ago, despite the grave consequences that followed.
Remarkably, this same idea has never stopped being a cornerstone for the foreign policy establishment in both Berlin and Brussels. Clear evidence of this recently emerged after the public release of the so-called Jansa non-paper, which envisages a final partition and dissolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina along ethnic lines.
This is most likely the byproduct of powerful neo-conservative circles within the European institutions, including Schmidt’s Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), rather than from Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, whose own party is a minor player in Eastern Europe’s wave of anti-establishment center-right politics.
Germany was not the first to propose the partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As mentioned earlier in this article, Britain’s Lord Carrington was the first to float the idea of breaking Bosnia up along ethnic lines, For its part, successive German governments have never shown a will to distance themselves from this plan. The European Union has also stuck with a partition policy for Bosnia.
As a member of political circles that promote ethnoreligious partition as the only solution for multiethnic countries, Schmidt’s appointment is a testament to the fact that Germany has decided to act as Europe’s chief promoter of this policy
Serbia and Croatia, with their own extremist nationalist policies, can only act as proxies of the EU, as they will ultimately be charged with carrying out the physical implemenation of Bosnia’s destruction as a state. This is nothing new. All of the crimes that ethnic Serbs and Croats committed during the war in the early 1990s have always had a certain degree of implicit approval from leading European countries.
Both during and after the war, the UK and France led initiatives to impose ethnic partition on the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Germany has now taken up their role. The increasing aggressiveness of Serbia and Croatia can only be interpreted as a consequence of the EU’s intention to finish off Bosnia for good. With Schmidt’s now being handed the portfolio of Brussels’ man in Bosnia, the process of permanently breaking up the country has moved into a new, and far more critical, phase
It is high time for the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina to abandon any illusions about the true intentions of the European Union and reject its newest Trojan Horse.
