11 NOVEMBER 2006, Page 28

Flawed state building

From Michael Shuttleworth Sir: Matthew d’Ancona (‘How to build the peace’, 4 November) lets Paddy Ashdown off very lightly. Five years of non-conflict and raising state structures to the level of those of the states around it is not much of an aspiration or criterion for the success of reconstruction. Judging by the internal stresses within Iraq, a flawed example of enforced state-building by the British, there seems every likelihood that his almost impossible view of Bosnia — merely an administrative area within former Yugoslavia and a state that has never existed in its own right — will follow in the same direction.

There remain three large religious minorities within Bosnia. The Muslims, given their own status as a nation within Yugoslavia by Tito and influenced by the fundamentalist leanings of Alia Izetbegovic, are now being forcibly welded together with Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, with the materialistic objective of a place in Europe. It hardly seems credible that they will unite as one through the external influence of the very institutions which brought about their fracture in the first place.

Michael Shuttleworth

Hathersage, Hope Valley, Derbyshire