Peace, but no reconciliation

April 05, 2020 / By mobanmarket

Peace, but no reconciliation

Fifteen years after the Dayton accords were signed to end hostilities in Bosnia, the international community still lives with its errors.

Fifteen years ago this month, one of the most unusual diplomatic events in recent history came to an end when Alija Izetbegovic, Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Miloševic – the presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia – put their initials on an agreement to bring peace to war-torn Bosnia. 

They had been locked up for three weeks on the sprawling Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, and subjected to relentless cajoling by US diplomats – principally Richard Holbrooke, with European Union envoy Carl Bildt watching from the sidelines. In the end, the high-wire act – which included the demonstrative packing of bags by the US delegation hours before the deal was reached – delivered an agreement that ended three and a half years of slaughter and mayhem in Bosnia, a conflict which had claimed 100,000 lives and humiliated the “international community”. Fifteen years on, the agreement and the way it has been implemented continue to hold Bosnia back as it seeks to join the EU.

The original sin of Dayton, Holbrooke wrote in “To end a war”, his account of the negotiations, was to recognise Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb statelet run by Radovan Karadžic, as a part of Bosnia’s postwar constitutional order. And the Republika Srpska has systematically exploited the powers it gained under the Dayton accords to prevent the further strengthening of Bosnia’s central government, which is a de facto precondition for progress on the road to eventual EU membership. The Balkan presidents who signed Dayton are all dead. But their legacy lives on. Despite fifteen years of peace, punctured only by occasional incidents, reconciliation has barely begun.

The Bosnian Serbs today staunchly defend the Dayton accords, because they have used it to preserve their autonomy. By the time Bildt arrived as the first “high representative” in Sarajevo in January 1996, with a suitcase stuffed with dollar bills, a timorous “international community” had already decided to disregard the agreement’s clauses that might have been used to undermine the power of the obstructionists.

“There was a failing at Dayton because we didn’t address the control the parties had over their constituencies,” Jim O’Brien, at the time a US State Department lawyer who drafted parts of the Dayton agreement, told European Voice last week. “The only time that the political activists in each delegation became exercised was when their parties’ power was under threat,” he said.

The tone was set early on, when the commander of the 60,000 NATO peacekeepers declared before their deployment that they would “absolutely not” go after indicted war criminals. It was left to Bildt and his successors to define a more robust international approach – frequently against the will of the leading Balkans policy-makers in Brussels (since 2002, the high representative has also served as EU special representative, accountable to the member states). “The high representatives have in fact been trying to correct the in-built deficiencies of Dayton,” Wolfgang Petritsch, the high representative in 1999-2002, told European Voice. “There was a basic intellectual fallacy in that Dayton accepted the ethnic logic that had driven the war.”

Zlatko Lagumdžija, the leader of Bosnia’s largest party, the non-sectarian Social Democrats, says that the high representative is an integral part of the Dayton settlement. “We need an institutional guarantor of the peace agreement until the day we enter the EU,” he told European Voice. “We have to have a functional country as a precondition for closing the Office of the High Representative,” he said – not the other way around.

In geopolitical terms, the main failure of Dayton was that it did not address the plight of Kosovo’s majority Albanians, who were chafing under brutal repression by Miloševic’s security forces. That was a time-bomb that did not take long to explode, primed, unwittingly, by the international community’s elevation of Miloševic to the role of peacemaker-in-chief in the region. When asked about the Bosnian Serbs’ rejection of the agreement at a press conference following the initialling, Warren Christopher, the US secretary of state at the time, said that the allies would “look to [Miloševic] to assure the assent of the Bosnian Serbs to this agreement”. Just two years later, in 1998, patience ran out among many Kosovars with the peaceful resistance espoused by their leadership as a response to rule by the “peacemaker” Serb strongman. A shadowy rebel group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, defied Miloševic´, provoking a brutal Serbian counterinsurgency campaign that cost 10,000 lives and prompted a NATO air-war against Serbia.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the Bosnia experiences of the Americans and Europeans. One of them is that the “international community” has been effective in Bosnia only when it has united behind a single policy. Today, many of the governments that supervise the work of the high representative are eager to declare ‘mission accomplished’ and move on, leaving an EU envoy with no real powers in place. Their vision is that the prospect of EU membership will generate momentum for political reform in Bosnia. The European Commission’s progress report published on Tuesday (9 November) suggests that this is wishful thinking. Undeterred, this group – which includes France and, following a recent U-turn, Germany – is seeking to wriggle its way out of the conditions it had set for the phase-out of the high representative. Surely that is the wrong way to end Bosnia’s ‘Dayton phase’ and begin its ‘Brussels phase’.

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