What follows is simply what I and – I believe – many other people living in this country would like to hear.
Schmidt: Thank you all for coming to hear our remarks today on this Friday morning, this 30th anniversary of the initialling of the General Framework Agreement for Peace – more commonly referred to as the Dayton Peace Accords. That peace, preserved to date, is precious beyond measure, and has enabled the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina to pursue a future. We can never allow ourselves to forget that peace is the very foundation of the possibility of progress.
Yet the velocity of progress has too long been stifled – in many cases even reversed over the past 15, even 20 years of peace implementation. Addressing this head-on, so that all future anniversaries can reflect the development of this country in all sectors – socio-economic, political, educational, cultural, and so on – will be the focus of our remarks today.
I say “our” because I am pleased to be joined here by my colleague, friend and ally Ambassador Luigi Soreca, Head of the European Union Delegation, just down the road from my office. I’ll precede my opening remarks simply by stating that our points today reflect our individual roles and mandated tasks – but we deliver them together because we want to underscore that we are together on the lot of them. And we’ll back each other up to achieve our common goals.
I also know that what’s said today, while I believe reassuring most people of this country, will deeply irritate, anger, and threaten a host of powerful people. And not just politicians from this country! In neighbouring countries, in nearby capitals, and even among some leaders of our respective stakeholders. Yet we both believe it is essential to arrest the continuing retrograde dynamic here and in the region. This begins with honesty first and foremost to the people who have suffered the consequences of a collective failure on our part: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s citizens, however they identify. There is a reason – a rational one! – why the citizens of this country are the most dissatisfied people in the region, why they feel the least hope for a better future, and why more of them claim that they will not vote in the next elections than any of their neighbours. We can only encourage change and overcome the deficit in popular trust ourselves by demonstrating that we get it. So, we are willing to take that necessary risk to our own positions to finally get out of this feedback loop.
I’ll begin with my own Office. What the Peace Implementation Council discovered the hard way in the first years after Dayton was that the primary concern of the political leaders who signed the Accords, or those for whom they signed as proxies, was ensuring their control of what they grabbed during the war. Their will to meet their black-letter Dayton obligations was low, to say the least. So, 28 years ago, the PIC endowed Carlos Westendorp and all who came after him with the now famous Bonn Powers, to ensure compliance with the Accords by all concerned. And thus began an accelerating wave of progress which all could see and feel. When the door opened to the EU and NATO in 1999, this no longer sounded like a fantasy novel, but a genuine possibility. By 2006, this country had a unified armed forces, to give but one example.
Furthermore, contrary to the sad, shopworn talking points of some veteran critics of this Office, most of these institutions and procedures were not imposed by my predecessors but agreed between the entities and then adopted through Parliament. But this was only feasible because the unity and strength of the EU and NATO, in particular, behind this Office (which was for some of this period double-hatted with the EU Special Representative) was evident. Furthermore, the strategy wiring all these coordinated international and Bosnian elements together was largely assembled here, in this Office. And the chief beneficiaries were you, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is easy to forget that optimism; I was following it from the Bundestag back then. But so many of you lived it and often recount it to me in intimate, animated, wistful detail. The 10th anniversary was probably the peak of this optimism. The assumptions that were made then have since been proven overconfident – even complacent. That the fruits of progress were irreversibly durable. That the only open question was the velocity of progress, not whether it would occur at all. That our ‘partners’ among Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political class would remain so even if the incentives for that progress changed. And that they would be motivated to do the necessary work by the positive inducement of EU and NATO membership. All that has since been demonstrated absolutely wrong. But we’ve never owned up to it or changed our tune. Until today.
While my job is clear and limited – to enforce Dayton’s terms, in concert with the deterrent/peace enforcement mechanism now embodied in EUFOR Althea, commanded by Major General Florin-Marian Barbu (nods to him) – it’s clear that Dayton is an evolutionary dead end for this country’s development as a functioning society, let alone as a potential member of NATO or the EU. Its prime beneficiaries are political leaders, who have no incentive to make things better. They get to keep what they stole, keep stealing, and remain unaccountable – both legally and, sadly, politically too. They’ve demonstrated that they are individually interchangeable in terms of the survival of this initiative destroying machine.
I hate to say it as a career politician, but no wonder you voters puzzle over whom to vote for! You’ve had damn near everything on the menu at least once; you know how bitter the taste and unpleasant the indigestion… You have all for too long lived in a warped Dayton system that has devolved to favour [and enrich] its prime beneficiaries even more than it had at the outset. They now openly advocate optimising it further to make the system even more feudal, leader-centric, and unaccountable. This must be confronted. And that is what we will do.
I’ve already taken up too much airtime. I will pass the floor to Luigi to show the right direction to a real future.