Esad Širbegović – The Liberals Who Betrayed Bosnia: We Deserve Better Friends

Thirty years after the genocide, the diplomats and scholars Bosniaks trusted have revealed what they always believed: that a Muslim democracy in Europe is a problem to be managed, not a right to be defended.

There is a particular kind of wound that comes not from your enemy, but from the person who claimed to be your advocate.

Bosniaks know this wound intimately. Throughout the 1990s, as Serb forces besieged Sarajevo, dismembered the country along ethnic lines, and finally murdered more than 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica, they were told repeatedly to trust the international community. Trust the diplomats. Trust the peace negotiators. Trust the scholars at American universities who had spent their careers studying the region and who presented themselves as Bosnia’s friends in the corridors of power. These were, they were assured, the people who understood.

Now one of the most prominent among them has said, with unusual candor, what many Bosniaks long suspected those people actually thought.

Daniel P. Serwer is not a peripheral figure. A former U.S. diplomat who served as minister-counselor at the U.S. Department of State, he played a direct role in the negotiations surrounding the Dayton Peace Accords. In later years he became a professor of conflict management at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. His career has been built on the claim of expertise, authority, and — at least implicitly — concern for Bosnia’s survival.

His recent statement, then, was not the remark of an outsider:

“We Americans say that we are for a multiethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina, but we also say that we want to avoid the formation of a reduced Islamic Bosnia that could become a platform for terrorism. That remains a legitimate concern. Such a Bosnia would be a threat to both Croatia and Serbia. During the war, the reason why Tuđman agreed to the Federation and confederation with Croatia — which never materialized — was that he did not want to see the formation of that reduced Islamist Bosnia, while Milošević did not take that threat seriously. Tuđman was smart enough not to want an Islamic republic at his doorstep.”

Read it twice. A man who helped design the post-war settlement in Bosnia is explaining that one of its founding rationales was preventing Bosniaks — the people who had just been subjected to genocide — from exercising full democratic sovereignty over their own country, because a majority-Muslim democracy in Europe was considered a security risk. And he calls this logic “smart.”

This is not a fringe position. It is, Serwer says explicitly, what “we Americans” believed. Past tense or present? The ambiguity is the point.

What makes Serwer’s statement so significant is not merely its content, but its source. This is not Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb leader who has spent decades calling Bosniaks a terrorist threat and referring to them as “converts” to delegitimize their ethnic identity. This is not Marine Le Pen, or Viktor Orbán, who has explicitly treated Bosniaks as a “security issue” and whose worldview, as RUSI analysts have noted, converges with Ratko Mladić’s “Great Replacement” logic — the idea that Muslim Bosniaks were waging demographic warfare against Christian Europe.

This is a liberal American diplomat-scholar at one of the world’s most prestigious foreign policy institutions. And his argument is structurally identical to theirs.

Serwer would likely object to that characterization. He would probably note, correctly, that he has criticized Serbian nationalism, opposed genocide denial, and supported Bosnia’s EU path. He would note that he is describing historical reality — that fear of Islamism was genuinely part of the diplomatic calculation in the 1990s — not endorsing it.

But describing a prejudice as “a legitimate concern” while framing Franjo Tuđman — a Croatian president whose forces were convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia of crimes against humanity against Bosniaks and involvement in armed aggression against Bosnia — as “smart” for sharing that prejudice is not neutral historical description. It is validation.

When the international community maintained the UN arms embargo against Bosnian government it had formally recognized as a sovereign state under attack, it was not acting neutrally. As Representative Frank McCloskey warned Warren Christopher that “history will remember that genocide took place during your mandate, and that you and this government could have and should have done more.”

The Bosnian government was left to face a Serbian military that had inherited the entire arsenal of the former Yugoslavia while being denied the means to defend its own citizens. Britain, according to the Daily Sabah’s analysis, actively wrecked initiatives to lift the embargo, arguing that allowing Bosniaks to defend themselves would endanger the peacekeepers who had failed to protect them.

Then came Dayton. The accords that ended the war codified the territorial results of genocide into law. Srebrenica — where more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered in Europe’s first genocide since the Holocaust — remains inside Republika Srpska. The Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo recorded a minimum of 97,207 war dead, of whom 66 percent were Bosniaks. The territorial gains of the genocide were not reversed at Dayton. They were ratified.

And then, in October 2022, High Representative Christian Schmidt imposed sweeping changes to the Federation’s electoral law and constitution — not before the election, when they could have been democratically contested, but minutes after the polls closed, using imperial “Bonn powers” that no democratic mandate had ever sanctioned. Critics immediately described it as an “illiberal putsch”. The changes benefited the HDZ BiH — the Bosnian Croat nationalist party led by Dragan Čović — by deepening ethnic power-sharing mechanisms. As analysts at Verfassungsblog concluded, Schmidt had chosen “ethnic stabilitocracy” over democratic equality, engineering the system from abroad to preserve ethnic equilibrium rather than empower equal citizens.

In each case — the arms embargo, Dayton, Schmidt’s intervention — the pattern is consistent: the international community intervenes to contain Bosniak political consolidation, framing each act of containment as either neutral peacekeeping or pragmatic conflict management.

Serwer’s statement is valuable precisely because it names the logic that the diplomatic language always concealed.

It is worth pausing on the actual empirical record of Bosnian Muslim “terrorism,” since it is offered as the justification for three decades of constrained sovereignty.

Bosnia ranked 93rd on the Global Terrorism Index in 2022, indicating minimal impact. The U.S. State Department’s own 2022 country report described Bosnia as “a cooperative counterterrorism partner.” No terrorist attacks were recorded in the country between 2016 and 2022.

Right-wing extremist groups in Bosnia — such as Serb Chetnik associations and neo-Nazi groups in Prijedor and Mostar — have not been treated as security threats by state agencies. Reportedly, the country’s counter-terrorism strategy focused only on radical Islamist groups.

Bosniaks did not ask for much from the international community. They asked to be allowed to defend themselves. They were refused. They asked for intervention to stop the genocide. It did not come. They asked for a peace settlement that reversed the territorial gains of ethnic cleansing. They were given Dayton. They asked for democratic self-governance. They received apartheid. They asked that the genocide against them be recognized as such. It was not recognized as such — even Srebrenica is now governed by the same forces that carried out the genocide.

When Israel’s ambassador to Serbia denied Srebrenica’s genocide status in 2024, he was not speaking from the margins of international opinion. He was speaking from within a discourse that has long treated Bosniak suffering as a negotiable category.

During all this time, Bosniaks were told to trust the process. To trust the experts. To trust people like Daniel Serwer, who said they supported Bosnia.

But his statement shows that this support had limits. It was for a “multiethnic Bosnia” — only as long as Bosniaks did not gain real political power. When it seemed they might actually lead the country, leaders like Tuđman were called “smart,” their fears were treated as “legitimate,” and decades of limiting Bosniak power were later described as reasonable.

This is not a conservative position. It is not far-right. It is liberal mainstream Islamophobia — the kind that operates not through slurs but through security frameworks, through expertise, through the language of conflict management and democratic transition. It is more durable than the crude variety precisely because it is harder to name.

The people of Bosnia deserve better friends.