Few stories I read in the press install in me fear, but this in the New York Times did.

Fears of New Ethnic Conflict in Bosnia

Civil war broke out in Bosnia when Christian Serbs declared war against Bosniak Muslims in the early 1990s in an effort to increase Serb controlled areas in Bosnia. The three-and-a-half year war resulted in about 100,000 deaths, mostly Muslim. And in April of 1995 the worst massacre in Europe since WW2 took place when the Serb army killed over 8,000 Muslim men in four days. The Srebrenica Massacre is documented in this very sad BBC special. The war was brought to an end with the U.S. negotiated Dayton Peace Accord in November 1995.

Now tensions are rising again.

The Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik has revived the idea of the Serbian populated part of Bosnia succeeding from the nation. The effort is supported by Russia and buttressed by oil revenue. He has worked to reverse all the progress that Bosnia has made since the through his efforts to undermine the institutions of the Bosnian state in order to better place his Serb Republic on a path to succession.

Further, his Bosniak rival Haris Silajdzic has called for an end to the federal structure of Bosnia to create one centralized state. Both principles, of Silajdzic and Dodik, are in conflict with the principle of the Dayton Accord which established a bi-national federal state.

IF Dodik calls for succession, war will surely break out. The Bosniaks and the Croats would take up arms against the Serbs, Serbia could join the fight as well. Russia is trying to push for such an effort in order to create trouble for the U.S. and the E.U. after their recognition of Kosovo. The U.S. is distracted and the E.U. lacks a coherent policy. But the West must re-engage the country in order to stop another outbreak of violence.

Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. who also negotiated the Dayton agreement, and Paddy Ashdown, the West’s highest level official in the country, have recently written an op-ed calling on the world to once again concentrate on Bosnia: Sleeping in the Balkans.

“It’s time to pay attention to Bosnia again, if we don’t want things to get nasty very quickly. By now, the entire world knows the price of that,” they stated.

We do, and we must.