A familar argument heard against the the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords in Sarajevo is that in setting up a two Entity structure for post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina they ‘legitimized genocide’, namely by accepting Republika Srpska as one of the two Entities (the other being called, somewhat confusingly, the ‘Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’).

Hence the arrest and expected conviction of Karadzic are being presented by some Bosniak leaders as a handy step towards ending the results of his actions, namely terminating Republika Srpska itself:

"Justice is not complete until we erase the genocide project that is still alive today. Radovan Karadzic has been arrested, Slobodan Milosevic is dead, but their project Republika Srpska still exists,” said Haris Silajdzic, the Bosniac member of the state’s rotating presidency.

The basic problem with this argument is that the Bosniac leadership themselves played a large part in setting up RS.

In 1994 the Americans were fed up with the spectacle of Muslims/Bosniacs fighting Croats rather than uniting to fight Serbs, so they leant hard on the Muslim/Bosniac and Croat leaderships to join forces. This took the form of the strangely named ‘Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, covering territory the two sides’ forces controlled.

This formation was given constitutional status at the Dayton Peace talks, but it took almost a year to set it up formally thereafter.

The very basic point is that this was a sort of unique diplomatic Category Mistake.

Why?

Simple. Because by setting up the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina on what was effectively an ethnic basis (ie a space controlled by and for Muslims/Bosniacs and Croats), the Americans (egged on by the Germans) basically gave the Serbs the core of what they wanted, ie something not that.

In other words, if the whole point of Bosnian Serb nationalism and Karadzicism was for the Serbs to be ‘separate’, the clumsy creation of the ‘Muslim/Croat Federation’ to solve a short-term military problem achieved precisely that political goal for them!

This ‘ethnic’ nomenclature lives on years later, despite heroic attempts in Bosnia to proclaim each Entity substantively multi-ethnic and to hack away at ‘divisive’ symbols and institutions.

Is it surprising that the Bosnian Serbs in fact quite like this deal imposed on them by the International Community and cling tenaciously to it?

Update: Here is Haris Silajdzic pressing these arguments . He feebly tries to get round the point made above by saying that the Bosniacs were forced to sign Dayton "at gunpoint". This is just not good enough.

Haris has a point when he advocates a ‘Bosnia of the economic regions’, each region defined non-ethnically. The trouble with that is that it of course suits the largest ethnic community, viz the Bosniacs, as they will tend to do best from it. And the Serbs/Croats do not trust them.