Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, David Chandler, Pluto Press, £14.99 pbk, £45.00 hbk
'As High Representative, I have to take decisions now and in the future with your best interests in mind, should your leaders fail to take them' (p157). Under the Dayton accords Carlos Westerdorp is the United Nations' own Governor General of Bosnia: 'If you read carefully Annex 10 gives me the possibility to interpret my own authorities and powers' (p52). Westerdorp is a figure of grotesque self-parody like a cross between President Ceaucescu and Groucho Marx's Rufus T Firefly, the American chancer who accidentally becomes first minister of Freedonia.
'You do not have power handed to you on a platter, you just seize it - I have already achieved this' (p65), says the unelected dictator Westerdorp. Elected leaders 'have a wrong perspective. They are not serving the population properly, the real interest of the population which is to co-operate with the international community, because the interest of the international community is that the country is prosperous and democratic' (p162). The Washington Post writes of his 'kingly powers... right down to determining who will live in which house' (p86).
Westerdorp's megalomaniac fantasies are shared by his deputy Hanns Schumacher. Facing opposition to his rule over the Bosnian/Croat half of the country he thcreamed and thrcreamed 'I don't care! I am not interested in who does not want the Federation. This is a concept that we will implement, despite resistance on the field, which undoubtedly exists! ... We dictate what will be done ... we simply do not pay attention to those who obstruct!'
David Chandler's Faking Democracy After Dayton towers over the hundreds of books written about Bosnia, for a simple reason. Where they all wallow in atrocity stories, Chandler addresses the most interesting subject and the one that everyone else shies away from: what happened next. As this fascinating book shows, Bosnia is not independent, but entirely dominated by a growing array of Western institutions. Chandler's examination of the Dayton settlement shows it to be a practical experiment in 'democratisation', and a laboratory for liberal theories of constitutionally enforced pluralism. The experiment is a failure.
The bizarre actions of the High Representative and his minions include banning the mention of Radovan Karadzic's name in the elections, suspending candidates who opposes his policies, appointing a mayor who does not even live in the city, funding a TV station that nobody watches and political parties that nobody votes for. Most eccentric of all, this colonial administration insist at one and the same time on institutionalising the ethnic divisions in the country, and then blaming the Bosnians for being divided. If you want to know what a UN protectorate in Kosovo will be like, read this book. -- Jim heartfield