Three German media write about Serbia and express their worry.The texts refer to “Putin’s best friends”, the “failed strategy” of the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU) in the Balkans, and the “dominance of Serbia” which “must be broken”.
“Russia can rely on three allies in Europe,” writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “In the EU member state Hungary, candidate country Serbia and half of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) controlled by Bosnian Serbs – the rulers are staunchly loyal to Putin, albeit with different shades.”
“Milorad Dodik, the president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, directed his policy most decisively towards Moscow,” writes the German newspaper. “Moscow is benefiting from Dodik’s efforts to transform Bosnia into a confederation of states, as a preliminary step to the later secession of his part of the country – because the resulting unrest is significant.”
The author of the article, Michael Martens, points out that Dodik, whom he calls “Putin’s junior partner in Banja Luka”, recently faced obstacles – Germany first froze, and now completely suspended, four infrastructure projects in the Republika Srpska (RS) worth more than one hundred million euros, the U.S. imposed sanctions on four high-ranking officials of the RS at the end of July, and last week the public prosecutor of BiH filed an indictment against Dodik.
“Dangerous course” of American diplomats
The situation in the Balkans is also covered by the Berlin Tageszeitung, whose author, Erich Rathfelder, states that “the EU and the U.S. want to win over Serbian nationalists with a policy of understanding”, which, he believes, is a “dangerous course”.
Reminding that for the U.S., and especially for the Democratic Party, the Dayton Peace Agreement on BiH from 1995 represents the success of American diplomacy, the newspaper writes: “Now the American diplomats working in the Balkans are preparing to gamble that legacy, apparently thinking that Serbia will be drawn into the Western camp to concessions in Kosovo and Bosnia. The American diplomat responsible for the Western Balkans, Gabriel Escobar, is pulling the strings, along with Christopher Hill, the American ambassador in Belgrade, and EU politicians, Joseph Borell and the Union’s special envoy, Miroslav Lajcak.”
“Western diplomats support the idea that you only need to please the nationalists in order to maintain peace. They ignore the fact that once before – namely from 1991 onwards – it was a major failure,” writes the Tageszeitung.
Brcko – the number one strategic point in the Balkans
However, the author points out that there is also resistance to this in the West: “Since Michael Roth, chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign policy committee, and his colleague in the U.S. Senate criticized the current approach to politics, some parliamentarians on both sides of the Atlantic have at least woken up. They demand that the international community learn from the past. They call for the diplomacy of deterrence to prevent further deterioration of the security situation in Kosovo and Bosnia.”
At the same time, the German journalist specifically points out that the focus of the debate is on the Brcko District, which divides the RS into two parts. “The Brcko region is the number one strategic point in the Balkans. That’s why the Serbs want to control Brcko with all their might – and the Western army understood that too”.
“Berlin is not moving. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock, who once opposed nationalist positions, is silent. Does Berlin really want to entrust the EU’s foreign and security policy in the Balkans exclusively to the diplomats of the U.S., the EU, and Viktor Orban”, the author Erich Rathfelder finally asks in an article for the Berlin Tageszeitung, DW reports.
E.Dz.
