January 15, 2006	Sunday	Zilhaj 14, 1426

BANJA LUKA: An army has ceased to exist, another is born, and with it, hope. From the beginning of this year, the army of the Republic of Srpska, the Serb entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ceased to exist. A united military force for Bosnia came into being. Under the Dayton peace accords that helped bring the wars of the 90s in the Balkans to an end, the Republic of Srpska (RS) was allowed to keep its separate armed forces. The other entity within Bosnia, the Muslim-Croat Federation, had its own. The country of some four million will now have a joint armed force of 12,000 that will include Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats. “The decision is in accordance with the reforms undertaken in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole,” outgoing defence minister Milovan Stankovic told local media after the parliamentary session that approved the decision. “This all goes in the direction of synchronising the military with the long-term plan of joining the Partnership for Peace Programme (PfP),” Stankovic added.

Bosnia-Herzegovina and neighbouring Serbia and Montenegro remain the only countries in the Balkans not to have joined the PfP, the umbrella group of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato). Joining the programme practically leads to Nato membership. Bosnia did not join because 10 years after the bloody war between Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats ended, the military remained divided along ethnic lines. The international community had slowly been pushing for a single Bosnian army, but Serbs had opposed the move strongly. They saw military integration as a defeat for what they had fought for — a separate state in Bosnia that RS became. But despite their opposition, a 2006 deadline was set to resolve the issue.

“The decision to dissolve the armed forces of RS is the most shameful decision in the past decade,” ultranationalist Serb politician Milanko Mihajlica told IPS. “It simply annuls whatever Serbs have achieved in the war. It could lead to dissolution of RS as well.” But the controversial Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) is burdened with the grave heritage of the war. Its former commander Gen. Ratko Mladic is responsible for some of the worst atrocities since World War II in Europe. Through the war, the BSA besieged Sarajevo for years, shelling the capital daily for more than three years, and killing more than 10,000 people. The policy of ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs also led to the massacre of some 8,000 Muslims in the eastern town of Srebrenica in 1995.

Gen Mladic, who has been in hiding for years now as one of the most wanted indictees for war crimes, is still regarded as hero by most Bosnian Serbs. They believe that his military tactics helped them forge a separate Serb state in Bosnia. Most of the Bosnian Serb military top brass were retired when the war ended, but some were arrested later and sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes against Bosnian Muslims.

Some believe Bosnia should have no army at all. “Bosnia-Herzegovina should be a demilitarised country,” Milorad Dodik, former RS prime minister and now an MP in the RS parliament, told IPS. “People should forget all about arms and fighting and put the past behind. Having no military would prevent the idea of getting even at some time in the future.” The war in Bosnia left more than 100,000 dead, both military and civilian, according to the latest estimates. Some 70 per cent of the victims were Bosnian Muslims. At the height of the battles in the 1992-95 war, close to half a million men of all ethnic groups were fighting each other. The Sarajevo-based Investigation and Documentation Centre says that 30,173 Muslim soldiers, 21,399 Serbs and 2,619 Croats died in the war. This was in just Bosnia; other casualties came in fighting between Serbs and Croats from the areas that are now Serbia and Croatia, and to an extent Albanians in the southern Serb province Kosovo.

But for many men who fought in the war on the Serb side, practical dissolution of the Serb army does not mean much. Ten years after laying down their arms, they survive doing odd jobs. Unemployment in Bosnia-Herzegovina has officially risen to 40 per cent.

“It’s not only that I think,what did we fight the war for,” Dusan Jevtovic (45) told IPS in Banja Luka, capital of the Republic of Srpska. “We (former soldiers) thought that someone will take care of us once the war ends, or that we’d return to pre-war jobs. But nothing of the kind happened. The state is poor and negligent; the economy was devastated in the war. Little has changed since 1995.”—Dawn/IPS News Service