For Sovereign States, Borders Matter

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

A building that burns to the ground leaves behind smoldering embers that fester and can burst into flames. And so has been the case with the rubble that was Yugoslavia.

In the 1990s two major fires were ignited, in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars. And even now, border disputes remain a source of tension among the seven successor states that emerged out of the ruins of that once united country.

In 1992, the Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia decided that the unmarked boundaries among the newly formed states should become their international borders. But of course that didn’t settle things.

Various other border disputes continue to simmer in the region, mainly involving Croatia, which has border problems with each of its neighbours except Hungary.

The country is defined by its long coastline and lengthy land borders. When it was part of communist Yugoslavia everything was held together by the Belgrade regime. Now Croatia has five separate international borders and numerous boundary squabbles.

Slovenia and Croatia tried to formalize their maritime and land boundaries in bilateral talks, but could not come to an agreement. After Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004, it blocked Croatia’s accession for years.

In 2009, Croatia agreed to let an arbitration court decide the dispute, which allowed Zagreb to become an EU member in 2013.

What is at stake? A 670-kilometre stretch of land of land south of the Dragonja River, in the northern part of the Istrian peninsula, along with 19 square kilometres of maritime territory in the Bay of Piran in the northern Adriatic Sea.

Croatia claims half of the bay, and with the coast of Italy just few miles north, that claim would not give Slovenia a passage wide enough to be in international waters, through which its ships have to pass to reach Koper, its sole Adriatic port.

Slovenia claimed that the land border is south of the Dragonja, while Croatia insisted the border is on the river itself.

The conflict went before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2012, and the tribunal awarded most of the contested waters in the bay to Slovenia last June, granting it direct access to international waters via a 18.5 nautical-kilometre corridor crossing Croatian waters.

Croatia was granted contested areas along the Dragonja and a few smaller rivers.

Slovenia accepted the ruling, but Croatia refused. On Dec. 19 Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar met with Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković in  Zagreb, but neither budged.

Croatia’s most contentious quarrel is with Serbia. The two countries fought a war in the 1990s and remain bitter rivals. Their fight is over a 323-kilometre stretch of land near the Danube River.

Does the border run down the middle of the Danube, as Serbia says, or along an older route of the river, as Croatia claims?

Croatia wants the boundary to reflect the course of the Danube that existed in the 19th century, before engineering works altered its course. The size of the territory in dispute, on the eastern side of the river, is about140 square kilometres, now under Serbian control.

Croatia has threatened to block Serbian accession to the EU until this is settled.

Along its border with Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia disputes two locations: the town of Hrvatska Kostajnica, and the Klek Peninsula, a 20 kilometre-long Bosnian strip of the coast of the Adriatic Sea.

While Zagreb agrees it mainly belongs to its neighbour, it argues that the very tip should belong to Croatia, together with two islands next to it.

Serbia too has a dispute over the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, along the Drina River.

As for Montenegro, the disputed area with Croatia concerns the Adriatic Sea border at the Prevlaka Peninsula, at the very southern tip of Croatia.

The problem with Kosovo, which Serbia does not recognise at all as an independent state, is far greater. While Serbian authorities insist it is not an international border, Kosovo considers it one dividing two sovereign entities.

Kosovo also has an unresolved dispute with Montenegro over the Cakorr and Belluha mountain peaks.

Macedonia is the only former Yugoslav republic to emerge as an independent state without border disputes. But neighbouring Greece refuses to recognize Macedonia’s very name, contending that it indicates that Skopje has territorial claims over Greece’s own northern region of the same name.

Even in our globalized world, in the Balkans borders and territory still matter.