Will a Bosnia motorway enhance Serbia-Turkey relations?

Turkey's tarmac-and-concrete diplomacy in the Western Balkans is building a motorway that, by connecting Serbia and Bosnia, intends to bring Belgrade and Ankara closer together. The ambitious road-transport project was discussed on Friday in the meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his host in Belgrade, Serbia's President Aleksandar Vučić. The Ankara-financed project to construct a direct high-speed road linking the capitals of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the most important transport infrastructure projects in the former Yugoslavia — especially for the Bosnian capital, notoriously still lacking a motorway connection to the rest of the region and the continent. The agreement signed by Turkey, Serbia, and Bosnia in 2019 plans a circular motorway whose northern half runs from Belgrade to Sarajevo. The part in Serbian territory has been completed, with an additional 23 kilometres-long section in the Republika Srpska (RS) connecting Serbia's Sremska Rača and Bijeljina in Bosnia. The work has not yet started in the rest of Bosnia, and it is also unclear whether there is a final agreement on the highway's path to Sarajevo, partly caused by Bosnia's divisions and continuous political turmoil since the end of the war in 1995. Erdoğan's visit to Belgrade, it seems, was a first step in reminding everyone what needs to be done and who is picking up the tab.

What is happening on the Bosnian side?

The motorway would tie the beating heart of Bosnia to the heart of Serbia, passing through the RS, the Serb-majority entity in Bosnia led by Milorad Dodik, a populist who is the most committed regional political partner of Russia's Vladimir Putin. While Dodik, a separatist known for his obstructionist policies, has been known to block any progress in the country if it suits his ethnonationalist agenda, it seems that this highway is something that is at the top of his to-do. Last August, Dodik obtained a loan of €500 million from a Turkish bank to fund the construction of a further 130km-long section of the road in the RS and another 30km in the Brčko District, a chunk of Bosnia's territory that splits the RS into two and doesn’t formally belong neither to the RS or Bosnia's other entity, the Bosniak-Croat majority Federation of BiH (FBiH).