Paddy Ashdown: BiH could fall apart, former envoys warn

23.10.2008 by Lupo.

BiH could fall apart, former envoys warn
23/10/2008

The international community must renew its commitment to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s survival as a state to prevent the country’s possible collapse and a new Balkan crisis, Richard Holbrooke and Paddy Ashdown warned on Wednesday.
(Euobserver - 23/10/08; Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, B92 - 22/10/08)

“It’s time to pay attention to Bosnia again, if we don’t want things to get very nasty quickly. By now, we should all know the price of that,” former international administrator in BiH Paddy Ashdown said. [Getty Images]

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) could fall apart, former senior US and British diplomats Richard Holbrooke and Paddy Ashdown warned on Wednesday (October 22nd). They urged the West to take immediate action to prevent a new Balkan crisis.

“Today the country is in real danger of collapse,” they wrote in a joint article appearing in London’s Guardian and Sarajevo’s Dnevni Avaz. “Resolve and trans-atlantic unity are needed if we are not to sleepwalk into another crisis.”

A former US assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, Holbrooke was the chief architect of the Dayton Peace Accord, which ended the 1992-1995 conflict in BiH. Ashdown served as the international community’s high representative in BiH from 2002 to 2006.

The Dayton Accord created BiH as a sovereign state made up of two largely autonomous entities — the Federation of BiH, shared by the country’s Bosniaks and Croats, and the Serb-run Republika Srpska (RS) — bound by a weak central government.

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Setimes

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