Valentin Inzko caps his career with a difficult posting as the UN and EU's representative in Bosnia.
At the Austrian ambassador's residence in Ljubljana there was jubilation. The ambassador to Slovenia had just been appointed the new high representative of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Washington, which would have preferred a “tough Brit”, had capitulated: Valentin Inzko was the man, the seventh and probably last high representative (HR). The champagne flowed, as did the congratulations reaching the ambassador's mobile phone. “Habemus papam” read a text message from the Czech ambassador in Sarajevo; a “mucha suerte” came from Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief.By happy coincidence, news of the decision arrived during a reception in Ljubljana for Michael Spindelegger, the visiting foreign minister of Austria, who made a speech about recognition for Austrian diplomacy, of the country's key role in the Balkans and so on.
But everyone in the room, Inzko most of all, was painfully aware that Bosnia's three ethnic groups – Serb, Croat, and Bosniak (Muslim) – are hopelessly log-jammed, rumoured (probably falsely) to be re-arming and that there is bad blood between the US and the EU over Bosnia. In short, that running the office of the HR, guardian of the cobbled-together 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended a war in which 100,000 died, is difficult going on impossible.
It is, says veteran Balkan-watcher Paul Lendvai, the closest that diplomacy gets to kamikaze aviation.
Inzko said that he accepted the job, which involves doubling up as the EU's special representative, “with great joy, but with the sense of a heavy burden”. One wonders about the joy. Until his appoint-ment, Inzko, who turns 60 this month, was leading a comfortable life in what might easily have been a cushy last post-ing. “He has original ideas for what can be achieved in Bosnia, but he is not pers-onally ambitious,” observes a close friend.
Leaving the Slovene capital will certainly be a wrench. It is pretty, peaceful and for the Slovene-Austrian Inzko, utterly familiar, as it is for his wife, the world-famous opera diva Bernarda Fink, and for their two teenage children.
Any bilateral awkwardness at the embassy between Austria and Slovenia has been slight and predictable, usually to do with Carinthia, the Austrian region bordering Slovenia where Inzko was born into a cultured, conservative Slovene-Austrian family.
This was the fiefdom of the notorious populist Jörg Haider – until his demise in a drunken car-smash last October – who owed much of his success to anti-Slovene campaigns. One was against street-signs in Slovenian as well as German. The rabid ‘Carinthia goes monolingual!' campaign provoked Inzko to withdraw his permission to Haider to address him by the informal ‘du'.
He identifies strongly with Carinthia's Slovenian-speaking, mostly Catholic, minority. They owe much of their cultural autonomy to the liberation of 1945 and the executive decrees of the Allies. Inzko is aware of the parallels with Bosnia and his background has proved useful preparation for a diplomatic career in the region.
He now knows two generations of the political players in the Balkans, and all their languages (he speaks seven in all). When he says his return to Sarajevo is a homecoming, it is more than a diplomatic politesse. In 1996 he was the first Austrian ambassador in the city after the Serb liberation war. The window frames in the apartment block where he first lived had no glass.
Inzko did a lot for the city, which made him an honorary citizen. Some weekends he got away, as he still does now, to hear Bernarda perform in New York or Milan or the Grand Théâtre de Genève, where she first made her name as a mezzo-soprano and which is the city where they met in the 1980s.
Inzko's immediate predecessor as HR, the Slovak Miroslav Lajc?ák, made the mistake of staying on after being fatally undermined (notably by Solana). Lajc?ák openly attacked the international community's capitulation to local leaders, notably Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Republika Srpska, comprising about half the country. Dodik had threatened to “wrestle with NATO tanks” if the HR used its executive powers against him.
Such is everyday politics in Bosnia, where the powerful external actors are the US, Russia and the EU – mostly in that order. The EU's only real leverage over the country is the prospect of EU membership – however unlikely it is any time soon. But even if the aspiration is now a routine item on the country's agenda, membership worries political actors. It would make it harder for the Serbs to break away one day, à la Montenegro, for instance. And Bosniak leaders fear EU membership would simply cement Serbian autonomy in place indefinitely.
The US matters a lot more than Europe. Washington is increasingly impatient with a European approach to Bosnia that it regards as unserious.
One of the causes of delay in deciding on Inzko's appointment was delay in establishing the team of US President Barack Obama. But Washington's reticence hardly strengthens Inzko's hand. Nor does talk of appointing a special US Balkans envoy.
As for the EU, it is busy proving the accuracy of US allegations of its incompetence. There is no consensus among member states about whether Inzko should be allowed to stay on after his contract as EU special representative formally ends next February. Others are already jostling for the EU position, which, it was announced last autumn, would be “reinforced” after the office of the high representative is closed down. So far Solana has failed to explain how it might be strengthened.
Not, evidently, by troops. In 1995 there were 60,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia. There are now 2,000 bored and disaffected Eufor men and women: troop levels are scheduled to shrink further in the next months, down to as few as 200.
Inzko is expected to be, if not a kamikaze, then a test-pilot in a hazardous experiment in soft power. The best he can hope for is a soft landing.
From our side we need to carefully balance between all this players and look for strong open support from Russia and not so open support from US and EU.
