Madam, – Patrick Smyth (Opinion, March 26th) hits several nails squarely on the head with his dismissal of anti-interventionist sentiments on Libya. So too with his apt parallels – via Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian – between Benghazi and Srebrenica. There is a déjà vu aspect to current events in and about Libya to veterans of the Bosnian solidarity campaign – now almost 20 years old.
While the sentiments of self-righteous pacifists are depressingly familiar, there is much cause for (qualified) rejoicing at current events. In Bosnia’s case it took 40 months for the international community to face down genocidal warfare; in Libya’s case not much more than a week. That’s some progress! And, yes, even as Nato forces finally lumbered into action in late 1995 there were abundant voices decrying what was – to them – a clearly cynical attempt to rescue Nato’s fading credibility. Only the purest of the pure are qualified to protect the lives of the innocent. But there is also an ironic asymmetry between current events and the legacy from 20 years ago. Even as we applaud the courageous intervention in Libya, we see the governments of the same states – France, Britain and even the US – supporting the EU’s promotion of Serbia’s candidature for EU membership despite its continuing failure to deliver Ratko Mladic to the Hague Tribunal.
The western Balkans has for 20 years now been a litmus for the EU’s parlous state – today reflected in its chronic inability to locate a shared political narrative within which to address its current difficulties.
The political crisis that continues to define the EU is at base one of identity, precipitated above all else by the EU’s collective rejection of its founding principles and its very raison d’être in 1992 as Bosnia was destroyed.
Today the one option that could begin the process of reconciliation both in Bosnia and Serbia – the delivery of Ratko Mladic to justice – is instead being soft-pedalled by the EU in the interests of some notion of short-term expediency. In other words, the EU is by its actions – and congenital inaction – simultaneously exacerbating regional tensions and ensuring that these tensions will continue to fester and grow within the EU itself!
Isn’t there an opportunity here for an “out-of-flavour” Republic to help the EU relocate its mission statement? Until the EU addresses its serial and continuing failures in the Balkans where are we to find reassurance of its own longer-term stability? – Yours, etc,