Europe and US on collision course over next high representative for Bosnia

Diplomats from around world meet in Sarajevo in second attempt to agree on top envoy, as US pushes for its choice

Diplomats from around the world are due to meet in Sarajevo on Tuesday in an attempt to resolve a deep rift between the US and Europe over a top envoy appointment that could have a powerful influence on the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina .

Disagreement has erupted over who should become the next high representative for the international community, a post with significant powers, in an overt test of political wills, with the Trump administration assertively pushing a business-driven agenda, potentially at the expense of Bosnia’s delicate postwar political balance.

Ambassadors from the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy and the EU, as well as envoys from Canada, Japan and Turkey, are scheduled to meet in the Bosnian capital to make a second attempt to agree on a new high representative, after the first try broke up amid acrimony in early June.

In the run-up to that meeting, the Trump administration had rattled European capitals by insisting that the current high representative , the German politician Christian Schmidt, be removed, and then reportedly reneging on an agreement that Schmidt stay on until expected Bosnian elections in October, for reasons of continuity and his personal dignity.

In May, US officials demanded that Schmidt depart immediately, and began campaigning aggressively for a 76-year-old Italian diplomat, Antonio Zanardi Landi, to replace him, much to the bewilderment of most other members of the peace implementation council (PIC), whose steering board is due to convene on Tuesday.

Landi has no significant previous experience or knowledge of Bosnia. In the past, he has expressed fondness for Serbia , where he was once posted as a diplomat, but he has not shown much interest in its neighbour.

There has been no clear explanation from Washington for its abrupt manoeuvring, but European officials in Sarajevo suspect it is closely related to the new US priority in the region: to clear the way for a $1bn gas pipeline contract , the Southern Interconnection. This has been provisionally awarded to AAFS Infrastructure and Energy , a US-based company with minimal infrastructure experience but strong personal connections to Donald Trump .

Last month, the Trump administration unveiled a new policy for the Balkans stating that henceforth US actions in the region would be guided by the need to pursue “direct return” for American companies, in place of what it called “open-ended institution building”.

Jim O’Brien, a former US diplomat, writing on the European Council for Foreign Relations website , said the announcement “reflected what is already happening in the region under the second Trump administration” as “politically connected Americans seek to earn money by weakening … international institutions”.

“This behaviour undermines the peace that has held for 30 years,” O’Brien said.

The pipeline deal was awarded without tender, prompting a warning from the EU that this could jeopardise Bosnia’s long-term European integration, and generating a confrontation that has culminated in the row over Landi and the high representative’s job.

Landi is serving as the ambassador to the Vatican of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Contacted by the Guardian, he said it would be “unwise for me to step into the heated debate”, but argued his “key points and focus” manifesto that has been circulated among PIC steering board members was “perfectly in line with the European positions”.

The Landi manifesto, seen by the Guardian and first published by the Bosnian investigative journalism website Istraga , promises not to overturn the decrees of previous high representatives, to consult the PIC before taking substantial actions, and not to unilaterally close down the office of the high representative.

London, France and Berlin have been unconvinced by the Landi campaign and as of Monday were aligned behind a French candidate, René Troccaz, France’s Balkans envoy.

The tussle among erstwhile allies has underlined how far Bosnia’s current realities are still defined by the 1992-95 war which killed 100,000 people, mostly Muslim Bosniaks slaughtered by much better-armed Serb forces, and, to a much lesser extent, Croats.

The US-brokered Dayton peace deal in late 1995 stopped the bloodshed but enshrined the dominant role of ethnic politics and the division of the country into two halves, a Bosniak-Croat Federation and a Serb-run entity, the Republika Srpska.

The office of the high representative was established with substantial powers to oversee the Dayton agreement and help guide Bosnia towards greater ethnic integration. That latter mission has largely been a failure, with the country as divided as ever and the Republika Srpska under the sway of a Serb separatist, Milorad Dodik.

Successive high representatives, all Europeans, have been reluctant to invoke their powers to shape the Bosnian political system, but Schmidt stepped in last year to annul Dodik’s separatist actions, leading to the Serb leader’s ousting last September.

It momentarily seemed that the hardliner’s 28-year grip on power in Republika Srpska had been broken, but in the following months the Trump administration came to Dodik’s rescue, abruptly lifting sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on Dodik and his associates for corruption and “divisive ethno-nationalistic rhetoric”.

In the months that followed, during which the US president’s son Donald Trump Jr visited Republika Srpska’s main city , Banja Luka, Dodik gave his approval to the Southern Interconnection pipeline. The remaining obstacles to the project going ahead were EU objections and the fact that about a third of the pipeline would be built on state property.

Ownership of Bosnia’s lands, forests and other plentiful resources is one of the thorny issues that was supposed to be resolved after the war. Dodik insists that everything on Serb-controlled property should belong to the Republika Srpska, not the Bosnian state.

One possible scenario, outlined by an official in Sarajevo, was that on taking office, Landi would issue a special law dividing state property between the Republika Srpska and the Federation, which would bring the pipeline a big step closer to reality. Landi’s manifesto did not mention state property, but an AAFS company official has reportedly briefed leading Bosnian parliamentarians that the issue would be resolved if and when Landi took over as high representative.

The US has threatened to reconsider its “role in the current international presence” if Landi was not given the job at Tuesday’s PIC meeting, and it was still unclear on Monday evening if European capitals would give in to the pressure, or coalesce around Troccaz or a third compromise candidate.

The steering board had pledged to reach a decision by the end of June, but one participant said it could be postponed if absolutely necessary. The US state department declined to comment on Monday, on the grounds that negotiations were still under way.

For the Bosniak majority, the collapse of western cohesion is worrying. For decades they have chafed against Dayton’s political straitjacket and the inaction of past high representatives, but most see it at the same time as an essential safety net keeping Bosnia from a return to conflict.

For Ćamil Duraković, a Bosniak survivor of the Srebrenica genocide who now serves as Republika Srpska’s vice-president under the Dayton power-sharing arrangements, the prospect of US abandonment of the agreement is deeply unsettling.

“They’re just giving up on everything, including democratic values, for the sake of business,” Duraković said. “If the United States doesn’t empower democratic institutions in this country or an independent judicial system, then we are really in trouble.”