Biden's team dangerously messes with Bosnia's politics: FP

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In an analysis entitled "Biden’s Team Is Dangerously Messing in Bosnia’s Politics" published on the Foreign Policy website, political scientist and policy specialist of southeast European and international affairs, Jasmin Mujanović, wrote that "During the 1992-95 Bosnian War, Biden had been the most outspoken of the 'Bosnia hawks' who advocated for greater diplomatic and military aid to the beleaguered Sarajevo government."

Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency in 2020 was met with hopes by Bosnians that as president, he "would show similar concern for the country, especially considering growing threats to Bosnia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by a coalition of Serb and Croat nationalist hard-liners."

However, Sen. Biden and President Biden have sought two totally different policies toward Bosnia. "Rather than aiding in Bosnia’s stabilization, the Biden administration has thrust the country into a major crisis, one concerning the use of the executive 'Bonn powers' of the Office of the High Representative, which oversees the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords, the U.S.-brokered peace deal that ended the Bosnian War," the analysis added.

"These expansive powers," the writer said, permit the high representative to "unilaterally rewrite Bosnia’s laws and even sack publicly elected officials in the name of defending the integrity of the country’s peace," adding that they "were used extensively in the immediate postwar period to promote political integration but had all but fallen out of use for much of the last decade."

"Their sharp reactivation over the last year has raised questions" on whether the White House has given up on Bosnia’s reintegration and democratization project and went instead for working toward "further ethnic partition," Mujanović said.

In the present time, the administration seems to be "cementing the ability of Croat and Serb nationalists to artificially dominate Bosnia’s domestic politics to ensure their agreement to a modicum of “functional” governance," she added.

In exchange, Mujanović said, "the US is abandoning its support for Bosnia’s pro-Western majority — both the country’s majority-Bosniak community but also the significant numbers of pro-Bosnian Croats and Serbs."