Nicole Itano's Notebook:

Karadzic trial begins with a whimper

It was an anti-climatic beginning to a long-awaited trial. After 15 minutes, judges were forced to adjourn because the accused, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, was still sitting in his cell.

Karadzic, who is representing himself, boycotted the first day of the trial, saying he has not had enough time to prepare. 

I wrote last week about how Bosnian Serbs feel the court is biased against them. Today, the frustration of victims of the war, many of them Bosnian Muslims, was on full display in The Hague. 

Bosnian Muslims see Karadzic's boycott of today's trial was little more than another attempt to avoid justice by a man who spent 13 years on the run. When judges announced the court would be adjourned, an anguished cry rose from the gallery packed with the families.

They fear that this trial, like that of former Yugoslav President Slobodon Milosevic, will drag on for years — and perhaps never be completed. Milosevic also represented himself in a trial that lasted four years before being cut short by Milosevic's death from a heart attack in March 2006. That trial was frequently delayed by Milosevic's bad health and by the Serbian leader's long tirades about the injustices faced by Serbs and against the legitimacy of the court.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has promised that Karadzic's trial will be fair, but also quick. Karadzic faces just 11 charges, compared to the 66 filed against Milosevic. And in the final indictment filed a week ago, prosecutors also reduced the number of incidents they would present evidence about, largely in order to keep the trial to a manageable length. Even so, they expect it to take a year to present their case against Karadzic. 

But with Karadzic's boycott, the trial judges are faced with a difficult dilemma. Tribunal officials seem determined to go ahead, but doing so is likely to feed Bosnian Serb resentment against the international body. They can appoint Karadzic with a court-appointed lawyer — which he has said he will refuse — or simply continue without him, piping the proceedings into Karadzic's cell.

Whatever happens tomorrow and in the weeks to come, it is unlikely that any verdict will be reached for several years. And two other men, Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic, a Serb leader in Croatia, remain at large.

But more importantly, perhaps, 14 years after the end of the Bosnian war and 16 years after the United Nations first called for the creation of a tribunal to look into crimes committed as Yugoslavia collapsed, reconciliation still seems a long way off. The justice process, long and far away as it is from the people whose lives it affected, has done little to help Bosnians come to a shared narrative about what happened. 

Crisis in Bosnia

While the Obama administration is plotting an exit strategy in Iraq and debating whether the war in Afghanistan can be won, Europe is trying to figure out how to close the book on its long-running mission in Bosnia.

But with politicians there once again openly talking about the possibility of partition, or even renewed violence, many fear that move may be dangerously premature.

On Oct. 9, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt swooped into Sarajevo for an emergency meeting with Bosnian political leaders. The duo will be back on Oct. 20 — by which time they want Bosnia’s leaders to agree on a package of constitutional reforms that will help the country move beyond the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended the country’s brutal 1992 to 1995 war.

But hammering out an agreement acceptable to all sides will be difficult.

The Dayton Agreement, widely considered one of former President Bill Clinton’s most important foreign policy achievements, created a weak central government and two largely autonomous entities, the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska, and a Muslim-Croat federation.

Under the terms of the agreement, the international community still retains a prominent presence. A High Representative, appointed by the international community in Bosnia, still has wide powers to overturn government decisions and remove officials. About 2,000 European troops are still stationed in the country.

Now, 14-years after the end of the war, the international community — and especially members of the European Union — wants to close the Office of the High Representative (OHR). But political paralysis over the past three years, and a recent rise in nationalist talk, has stalled those efforts.

Bosnia has deep structural problems that most analysts believe will require major constitutional changes to address. But the climate is not ripe for compromise. On a recent trip to the country, many people, politicians and ordinary people alike, told me the current crisis was the worst since the war. For the first time in years, people are openly talking about the possibility of Bosnia breaking up — and the potential conflict that would cause. 

Bosnian Serbs are resisting any strengthening of Bosnia’s central government, saying it will undermine their autonomy, but Bosnian Muslim leaders, and some international diplomats, accuse them of deliberately paralyzing national structures in order to build a case for succession. Officially, Bosnian Serb leaders say they do not want independence — but they have threatened to hold a referendum on the issue. 

On the slide for the past three years, the political atmosphere has worsened dramatically in recent weeks. Last month, the Republika Srpska has challenged the legitimacy of the High Commissioner and threatened to withdraw from Bosnian institutions. A day after meeting with Steinberg and Bildt, the Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik told a Serbian radio station that the current crisis showed Bosnia was “unsustainable."

The current high-level intervention by U.S. and European diplomats is an acknowledgement of the seriousness of the crisis. But there are serious differences between the American and European approach to the situation. Many European countries believe the continued presence of the international community is contributing to the political deadlock by making Bosnia’s political leadership dependent, while the Americans want to see the country functioning better before the international community gives up its oversight powers. 

Election fever? Not in Greece

Greeks may have invented democracy, but at the moment, few here are very happy with the modern version.

According to early exit polls, Greece’s main opposition party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement or PASOK, won an outright majority in Sunday's parliamentary elections. But although voters issued a strong rebuke to the center-right New Democracy party, which has been in power for the last 5 1/2 years, there’s deep cynicism about whether the new government will be any more successful than the old one in tackling country’s growing problems.

When Greeks went to the polls, they were faced with a slate of familiar — and most say uninspiring — choices. With the exception of a few hard-core PASOK supporters who gathered this evening in a central Athens square to cheer the early results, even many who cast their votes for the socialists say they did so with reservations. Many were simply casting a protest vote against New Democracy, which has been battered by a series of corruption scandals and its poor handling of crises like last year's riots and this summer's fires.

This is the third time that the current leaders of Greece’s two main parties, the socialist PASOK and the center-right New Democracy, have faced off. Costas Karamanlis, the country’s outgoing prime minister, won the last two of those battles. 

Both Karamanlis and George Papandreou, the socialist leader, are scions of powerful political families that have dominated Greek politics for much of the past 70 years. Karamanlis is the nephew of a prime minister. Papandreou is the son and grandson of Greek prime ministers.

Papendreou, who was born in the United States, does not have wide popular support. Pre-election polls showed that even when PASOK was leading by a large margin, more voters had faith in Karamanlis as prime minister. 

And difficult times lie ahead. Greece is under enormous pressure from other euro zone countries to rein in government spending, which would require tackling tough and deeply entrenched problems such as the state’s bloated civil service. Reforms are desperately needed in the areas such as the education sector, tax system and environmental policy. And key Greek industries like shipping and tourism have been hit hard by the global economic downturn.

During the election, Papandreou made expensive promises. Now he's going to have to find money to make good on them — or explain to voters why he made promises he couldn't keep.

EU visa-free travel for some Balkan states — but region's Muslims left out

The European Union Commission made good today on a long-awaited promise to offer visa-free travel to citizens of three Balkan states, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro. But some critics fear the EU's failure to include Bosnia, Albania or Kosovo — all countries with large Muslim populations — could raise religious and ethnic tensions in the region.

Bosnia's foreign minister, Sven Aljalaj, charged that the EU was creating a "ghetto" for Bosnian Muslims, according to Reuters. 

Bosnia and Albania started the process toward visa-free travel at the same time as the other Balkan states, but the EU says they aren't yet ready. Kosovo's status remains disputed, as not all EU states have recognized its 2008 declaration of independence. 

The EU says citizens of the three countries should be able to travel to most EU countries without a visa by the beginning of next year. The policy would include members of the border-free Schengen area, which includes all EU countries except for Britain and Ireland, as well as non-EU states Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. 

For Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro — all formerly part of Yugoslavia — visa-free travel to Europe is an important step toward EU membership. But for Serbs, it's also a psychological victory. Their inability to travel freely in Europe has rankled, and many Serbs saw it as proof that they were still a pariah nation that had not been forgiven for its role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

So today, Serbia's government is likely breathing a sigh of relief. The country's pro-European camp, which won a narrow majority last year, campaigned on the promise to bring Serbia into Europe. Freer travel in Europe will be seen as important evidence that progress toward that end is being made.

In Sarajevo, however, many politicians are feeling betrayed. The political system established by the Dayton Agreement, which ended the Bosnian war, is showing signs of stress and many there fear this will worsen an already fragile situation.

Leaving Bosnia out of the agreement will disproportionately affect the country's Muslim population. Many Bosnian Croats already have Croatian passports (and are therefore already eligible for visa-free travel to Europe) and, since last year, Serbia has been issuing passports to residents of the Republika Srpska — the majority Serb part of the Bosnian federation. 

A new museum, and a call for the return of the Parthenon Marbles

Photo by Peter Mauss/Courtesy of The Acropolis Museum

Greece officially opened its majestic new Acropolis Museum Saturday night with pomp and ceremony — and an impassioned call for the reunification of the famous Parthenon Marbles.

About half the surviving marbles, the sculptures that adorned the 5th century B.C. temple, are at the British Museum in London, which has long resisted calls for their return to Athens. The long-awaited Acropolis Museum, a commanding structure of black glass and concrete that was more than 30 years in the making, finally provides a fitting home for the thousands of treasures found during excavations of the Acropolis.

The centerpiece of the museum is the spectacular Parthenon gallery, where Swiss-American architect Bernard Tschumi has designed the perfect showcase for the Parthenon sculptures. The top floor glass gallery is aligned with the famous building, which can be seen through the walls.

For the first time in more than 200 years, since Lord Elgin removed many of the sculptures from the Parthenon and took them to London, the marbles are laid out in sequence. But nearly half of what is on display in the new museum are replicas, given to Greece by the British Museum in the late 19th century.

Greek officials say they hope the new museum will be a catalyst for the marbles eventual return to Athens.

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