Last week, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite presidency approved the participation of Bosnian troops in the international stabilisation mission in Gaza. The decision was a rare instance of interethnic consensus, which has been ostensibly missing since the end of the Bosnian War in the 1990s.
The mission was authorised by a United Nations Security Council resolution adopted on November 17, based on United States President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to end the genocidal war in Gaza. The resolution allows for the deployment of international forces to oversee demilitarisation and the destruction of military infrastructure, and to help legitimise a transitional governance arrangement for the enclave.
It is clear that the plan favours Israel and is meant to assist it in further consolidating its occupation of Palestinian territory. The question is, why would a country that itself has experienced a genocide and has seen regular protests condemning the one in Gaza decide to participate in such a mission?
Popular solidarity with Gaza
Few societies in Europe identify with Palestinian suffering as viscerally as the Bosnian society does. In a December 2023 survey, 61 percent of respondents said Bosnia should support Palestine. Among Bosniaks, the percentage of those who felt solidarity with the Palestinian cause was even higher; Croats and Serbs were split between backing Israel, Palestine and neutrality.
In Sarajevo, support for Gaza is more than evident. For the past two years, thousands have taken to the streets of the capital in regular protests condemning Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. International brands such as Zara and US fast-food chains like KFC, Burger King, and Coca-Cola have been boycotted.
Every week, people gather near Sarajevo’s Eternal Flame memorial to read aloud the names of Palestinian children killed in Gaza — a quiet, devastating ritual of remembrance.
In October, nearly 6,000 people marched through Sarajevo under the banner “Bosnia and Herzegovina for a Free Palestine”, beginning at the Monument to the Murdered Children of Besieged Sarajevo and ending near the National Museum. Demonstrators held Palestinian flags and banners reading “Stop the Genocide” and “Stop Killing Children”. The message was clear: a society that survived siege and genocide believes it has a moral obligation to stand with Gaza.
The most striking aspect of this display of solidarity is who has joined it. The most sustained and visible support for Gaza has come not from Bosnia’s Islamic religious institutions or mainstream political parties, but from civic-minded, often left-leaning intellectuals, artists, students and grassroots activists.
In fact, the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina has not organised mass marches or nationwide mobilisations, nor have Bosniak Muslim political parties. Instead, the streets have been filled with ordinary citizens — many secular, many young — driven less by formal religious affiliation than by an ethical reflex shaped by the lived experience of siege, displacement and mass violence.
Equally revealing has been the absence of groups that explicitly frame their identity around religious solidarity. Salafi communities in Bosnia, who are frequently vocal on questions of ritual observance and doctrinal purity, remained largely outside public mobilisation on Gaza. Their engagement has rarely extended beyond sermons, online statements, or symbolic gestures.
In Bosnia’s case, solidarity with Gaza emerged not as an expression of organised religiosity, but as a bottom-up, civic response rooted in memory, empathy, and a broadly shared sense of justice.
So what prompted the tripartite presidency to agree on participation in a mission meant to support Israel when Bosnian citizens overwhelmingly show solidarity with the Palestinians?
Dysfunction and dependence
To understand Bosnian politics, it is important to highlight the source of its dysfunction: the overly complicated governance system based on ethnic identity, which the Dayton Accords established in 1995.
Bosnia has a tripartite presidency, which rotates every eight months between one Bosniak, one Serb, and one Croat member. Each member is elected by plurality, not majority, from within their ethnic group, which reinforces zero-sum ethnic politics rather than consensus. The Bosnian Parliament also has ethnic quotas.
Decisions are supposed to be made by consensus, which is absent most of the time, leading to gridlock. As a result, this overly complex system often cannot take decisions as simple as approving the state budget. So how is it that it reached consensus on a peacekeeping deployment in Gaza?
It is also important to point out that Bosnia has participated in international peacekeeping missions before. Since the mid-2000s, the country has regularly contributed troops, military police, medical personnel and staff officers to NATO-, UN- and European Union-led missions abroad, most notably in Afghanistan, but also in Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, South Sudan and Cyprus.
These deployments have functioned as symbolic gestures, promoted by influential international organisations based in Sarajevo – the UN, EU, and NATO – to signal Bosnia’s supposed transition from a net consumer to a net provider of security. At the same time, they served as a convenient vehicle for these organisations to showcase an ostensibly successful state-building narrative to their international donors.
In the case of the Gaza peace mission, the leaders of Bosnia’s ethnic elites may see participation as a way to curry favour with Washington for their own ends. Bosniak leaders still view the US as the ultimate guarantor of Bosnia’s territorial integrity, while Croat elites see US backing as leverage in dealings with the EU. Serb leaders, despite their anti-Western rhetoric, have invested heavily in US lobbying firms to court Trump’s attention and seek the removal of top Serb figures from US sanctions lists.
This dependence underscores Bosnia’s constrained sovereignty, where foreign policy often signals loyalty abroad rather than a coherent national strategy at home.
But for many Bosnians, Gaza is not an abstract security problem; it is a moral mirror — one that reflects their own unresolved trauma.
While public sentiment is driven by empathy and solidarity, leaders across all three camps approach Gaza primarily through the prism of political convenience. The result is a familiar pattern in Bosnian politics: policy reflects narrow elite interests rather than popular will.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
