Jackboot Nation Building: The West Brings "Democracy" to Bosnia

With the signing of the Dayton Accords in November 1995, the Western powers committed themselves not only to help bring peace to Bosnia but to help build a viable democratic political system in that country. More than four years later, it is all too apparent that the results bear almost no resemblance to the original intentions. Far from becoming a functioning democratic state, Bosnia is little more than a colony of the West run by increasingly arrogant and autocratic international officials.

A potent symbol of the political reality in Bosnia was conveyed in a recent front-page story in the Washington Post. According to the Post account, the three members of Bosnia's collective presidency were called to the New York home of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke, the principal architect of the Dayton Accords. Once there, they were pressured by Holbrooke to sign a three-page statement affirming an intensified commitment to political cooperation and measures for greater ethnic integration. The three elected presidents responded that the document was far too complex and had far too many political ramifications for them to sign it without careful, extended scrutiny. All three men also told Holbrooke they had social commitments that evening and simply did not have the time to give the document an adequate review. Holbrooke reportedly responded that they could not leave until they accepted the document. Ultimately they did so, and the U.S. government hailed this new accord as another step toward ethnic reconciliation in Bosnia. ¹

The spectacle of a U.S. policy maker holding the top elected officials of another country hostage until they agreed to a diktat from Washington should be a jarring image for anyone who supports democracy. Yet that episode in Holbrooke's apartment is an appropriate symbol of the policy that the West has been pursuing in Bosnia. It is a policy based on disdain for the electoral process, a fondness for ruling by decree, and contempt for even the most basic standards of freedom of the press. It is in every respect a perversion of democratic norms.

Muzzling the Media

One of the most troubling aspects of the international nation-building mission in Bosnia is the lack of respect shown for freedom of expression. From the beginning, officials from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the UN showed an almost casual willingness to harass or suppress media outlets that were critical of the Dayton Accords, the conduct of the NATO peacekeeping force, or the decisions of the special war-crimes tribunal. That trend has only grown worse with the passage of time. The flip side of that policy is a belief that media outlets controlled by the international authorities--or by their political allies among the country's three ethnic groups--are an essential tool in carrying out the provisions of the Dayton Accords. Beyond that goal, there is an implicit assumption that a tame media would be an essential component in the transformation of Bosnia into the cooperative, multiethnic, model society visualized by the nation-building bureaucracy. The result has been a rigged, manipulated, and censored media more typical of those found in dictatorships than in democratic countries.

Western officials portray their actions in a different light, of course, contending that they are endeavoring to introduce greater media diversity and a wider range of viewpoints. The UN high representative, the chief international civilian official in Bosnia, complained in 1997 that the major political parties controlled most media outlets and that those nationalist elements "spoke to one nation only." The population had "the right to hear other opinions, too, and therefore we are trying to establish a principle of pluralism in public life through the opening of the media." ² The OSCE's media branch stressed that outside financial as well as political and moral support would be necessary to bring about...