The EU’s first efforts in Bosnia & Herzegovina were to prevent the outbreak of war. This, EU negotiators believed, could be achieved by extending ethnic power sharing at the executive level to all key branches of the administration, and devolving central powers to local ethnic communities.

Bosnia & Herzegovina’s 1991 elections had already yielded a coalition government of Muslim, Serbian and Croatian nationalist parties, which was under strain from the start because of the Slovene and Croatian wars (see Conflict: Bosnia & Herzegovina’s Ethnic Cleansing).

When Slovenia and Croatia seceded, neighboring Bosnia was pushed into considering whether and on what terms the republic could seek independence. Serbian President Milosevic had already turned independence into the only choice: his refusal to decentralize the Yugoslav federation had pushed Slovenia and Croatia to secede.

But independence was a fractious issue. Bosnia & Herzegovina’s mixed demography (43% Muslim, 37% Serb and 17% Croat), that had yielded the coalition of ethnic parties, meant that independence could be tied to partition. Rather than be part of a Muslim-dominated Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbian and Croatian nationalists argued, it would be better to secede to a Greater Serbia and Croatia respectively.

In order to avert the slide of Bosnia’s political crises into an ugly partition war, the EU Peace Conference chair, Lord Carrington, presented a plan for power sharing between Bosnia’s Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

The “Carrington-Cutileiro peace plan,” which Carrington jointly crafted with Portuguese ambassador Jorge Cutileiro, proposed a weak central government with most administrative powers devolved to the district level. Bosnia & Herzegovina’s districts would be classified as Muslim, Serbian or Croatian, even where no ethnic group was in the majority.

Map B.21: Carrington-Cutileiro Peace Plan, 1992 (click to enlarge)

Though the proposal included various provisions for the protection of minority rights within the ethnic districts, it was unpopular in every quarter. Secular and human rights’ groups saw the Carrington-Cutileiro plan as increasing ethnic polarization in Bosnia’s already fragile environment; it would, moreover, leave stranded minorities in dispersed ethnic enclaves.

As far as the nationalist groups were concerned, the plan did not go far enough in ethnic polarization: neither Muslims nor Serbs nor Croats would control contiguous districts, so all three were denied the option of partition.

Bosnia’s Muslim-led government was additionally plagued by the Carrington-Cutileiro plan’s focus on decentralization of powers, which would further weaken Bosnia’s already weak central government. Eventually both the government and the Serbian nationalists rejected the plan.

As a result, Bosnia & Herzegovina went independent without the consensus of Serbs, whose nationalist leaders organized a Serbian boycott of Bosnia’s referendum on independence. In April 1992, the EU recognized Bosnian independence following an overwhelming vote in its favor. Serbian paramilitary groups responded with a brutal offensive from northwestern to eastern Bosnia. The war that Izetbegovic feared had begun.

Croatian nationalist paramilitaries entered the war in 1992. As the war intensified through early 1993, the two mediators who had taken over from Lord Carrington, Cyrus Vance and David Owen, presented a new plan to end the war by creating a loose federation of ten ethnic provinces.

The “Vance-Owen Peace Plan” reworked the Carrington-Cutileiro plan, moving from decentralization at the level of districts to larger provincial units. It was, like its predecessor, intended to forestall partition by scattering the provinces so that Bosnia & Herzegovina could not be divided into three ethnic territories.

But the military arrangements that the Vance-Owen plan envisaged reinforced de facto partition by leaving paramilitary groups in territorial control. The Serbian paramilitary groups would continue to control Serbian held territories; and the Croatian paramilitary groups would continue to control Croatian held territories.

Map B.22: The Vance-Owen Peace Plan, January 1993 (click to enlarge)

Moreover, David Owen himself undermined the plan’s tion intentions by exploring the possibility of a Serbian-Croatian territorial exchange, under which the Serbs would gain a link between their eastern and western holding, and the Croatians would link territory all along the western border.

When the Bosnian government rejected this idea, Owen suggested an alternative territorial exchange with the same aim of consolidating ethnic division. The Bosnian government, which would otherwise have little access to the northern border, would gain control over the enclave of Brcko, which linked Serbian held western and eastern territory.

To offset this Serbian loss, the Croatian paramilitary would give up territory above the Sava River for a Serbian corridor. In return the Bosnian government would cede control over the Bosnian-Croatian border to the Croatian paramilitary.

As far as the Serbian nationalists were concerned, however, the Vance-Owen peace plan demanded large territorial concessions at a time when the only areas that remained an obstacle to Serbian territorial ambitions were the eastern enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde.

Instead, Serbian paramilitary groups moved to acquire eastern Bosnia by force, and Croatian paramilitary groups followed suit to acquire west central Bosnia by force.

In the face of a brutal partition war, the EU negotiators, with U.S. and Russian assistance, tried a third rework of the ethnic power-sharing formula.

In May 1993, the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and Spain put forward a Joint Action Plan for a union of three republics, sealing off Bosnian borders, and extending UNPROFOR’s mandate to include the protection of Bosnia’s three eastern enclaves and the towns of Sarajevo, Bihac and Tuzla.

The Joint Action Plan was widely seen as a harbinger of the next stage of talks, towards a three-way partition. Assuming tacit acceptance of their war aims, Serbian nationalists responded immediately with a map for the Serbian republic, which would comprise over 60% of Bosnia.

While Serbian and Croatian paramilitaries continued their offensives on Muslim held territory, EU negotiators were bargaining over the territory to be allocated to the three proposed republics. By late September, they reached agreement on the boundaries of the three republics, and that Sarajevo and Mostar would be placed under UN and EU administrations respectively.

The Serbian republic would comprise 53 % of Bosnia & Herzegovina, the Croatian republic 17 % and the Muslim republic 30 %. The allocation was not demographically proportionate — Serbs comprised some 37 % of the population of Bosnia while Muslims made up 43 % - but was supposed to conform to prewar landholdings (the mostly peasant Serbs farmed some 51 % of Bosnia).

Map B.23: The Union of Three Republics Plan, September 1993 (click to enlarge)

Serbian and Croatian nationalists saw the Union of Three Republics Plan as tantamount to a three way partition, and their respective nationalist leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Mate Boban, confidently styled themselves the presidents of Herceg-Bosna and Republika Srpska.

As with the previous peace plans, Bosnia’s Muslims were the chief sufferers. The Muslim republic would be fragmented, with Bihac isolated in the northwest and the eastern enclaves connected only by a road. It would also be landlocked and dependent on the Serbian and Croatian republics for access to the sea, as well as access to its erstwhile neighbors, Serbia and Croatia.

The Muslim republic’s viability was questionable. More important still, so was its identity. Thus far the leading Muslim political party that led the Bosnian government had striven for secularism, especially the separation of church from state (in sharp distinction to the leading Serbian and Croatian political parties). Whether this secularism would hold after partition was moot. The Bosnian parliament turned down the proposal and the war dragged on.

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