Unfinished Business: Dayton and the Balkans Thirty Years On

By David Harland

When wars end we celebrate, but how wars are ended often leaves a lot of unfinished business. Thirty years ago this week, President Clinton announced to the world that an agreement had been reached to end the war in Bosnia. 

More than 100,000 people had been killed over three years of that war; about 2 million people had fled their homes, half of the country’s population. Some of the war’s horrors, including the siege of Sarajevo, had been broadcast live into homes around the world every night for over 1,000 days; the first war of the new 24-hour news cycle. But much of it, like the slaughter at Srebrenica, had taken place far from the world’s attention.

The war reached its bloody climax in 1995, after the massacre at Srebrenica in July of that year. A few weeks later, after much delay, the United Nations and NATO began to use force against the Serbs in earnest. And neighbouring Croatia, fresh from victories over Serbs there, moved ground forces onto the attack in Bosnia. 

The war seemed to be at a tipping point, when the Americans made their move. The Presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia were brought to Dayton, Ohio, and, with a lot of arm twisting by U.S. mediator Richard Holbrooke, made an agreement. President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia beamed as the agreement was announced; Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman did his best to look statesmanlike, and Bosnia’s Alija Izetbegovic looked characteristically glum. 

The new Bosnia would “be made up of two parts,” President Clinton declared, “the Bosnian Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic, with a fair distribution of land between the two … There will be an effective central government.”

The Dayton agreement has a lot of critics. Clinton’s point about ‘a fair distribution of land’ was certainly a stretch. The Serbs, who had waged three years of genocidal war against the country’s non-Serb population, were left in control of about half the country. Most of this land, including Srebrenica, had previously been inhabited mainly by Bosniacs – also known as Bosnian Muslims — and been ‘ethnically cleansed’, as the Serbs put it. 

Nor was it true that Dayton created “an effective central government”. A constitution drafted by the Americans was annexed to the agreement. That constitution was baroque. Everybody could block almost everything; it was made to be almost impossible to change, and the bloated mess of a government system that it brought into being was an unaffordable breeding ground for corruption. 

The Dayton constitution was also unfair. Representation in all of Bosnia’s elected bodies would be reserved for Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs, the three groups represented at Dayton by Milosevic, Tudjman and Izetbegovic. But very large numbers of Bosnians were from mixed backgrounds, or were from other smaller communities, such as Jews and Roma, or simply didn’t want to be represented on the basis of their communal background. Their representatives had not been invited to Dayton. Indeed, there were no representatives of civil society at the talks. Nor were there any representatives of women, from a war zone that had featured the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war.  

Thirty years later, the government of Bosnia remains blocked on almost everything and the country is at constant risk of relapsing back into conflict. Despite having received more aid per capita than any country in history, Bosnia is among the poorest countries in Europe. Young people, if they have half a chance, try to leave.

Could it have been better? How much of the mess that followed, in which Bosnia is still mired, was a failure of mediation, and how much was just the result of the war?

Defenders of the Dayton agreement say that, at very least, the agreement ended the war. They point out that, even after so much killing, that had touched almost every family in Bosnia, the country is still at peace after three decades.

This is misleading. The killing in Bosnia had ended even before the talks at Dayton even began. The last shots of the war had been fired on 10 October 1995, in the towns of Sanski Most and Mrkonjic Grad, several weeks before the start of talks at Dayton. After the final skirmishes, the UN peacekeeping force, UNPROFOR, had ended the Serb siege of Sarajevo, overseen a nationwide ceasefire, completed a demarcation of the front line and managed a full separation of the combatant forces of the three main armies at war. The goal of the Dayton agreement was not to make a long-term ceasefire, which was already in place. The goal was to make a wider peace agreement, and this remains unfinished business.

The Dayton agreement was not the first attempt to make peace in Bosnia. It was the fifth of five major efforts, the first of which had been proposed by the European Community – now the European Union – even before the war began. All of those proposed agreements had features that were better than Dayton. The original European plan would have given the Muslims a bigger share of the land. The next one, known as the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, allocated the territory in ways that would largely have reversed the process of ethnic cleansing. 

From even before the first shots of the war were fired in 1992, the Americans had encouraged the Muslims to hang on for a better deal than the one on offer. This was a disastrous policy, as each proposal offered that community less land and a weaker central government than the one before. Meanwhile, the bodies piled up. From the moment President Izetbegovic withdrew his signature from the deal proposed by the Europeans in 1992 to the Dayton agreement in 1995, more than 60,000 Bosniacs were killed.

The main lesson of Dayton is not that it was a failure – it is that it has been way oversold. The American narrative was that the Europeans and the United Nations had failed in Bosnia. This was wrong: the European peace proposals mainly failed because the Americans wouldn’t support them, and it was thanks to the United Nations that the Bosniacs were able to hold until an agreement could be brokered. Worse, the American narrative became that the United States, as the ‘indispensable nation’, had shown that decisive military intervention could bring about justice and peace. This was at best only partly true, and fed the delusional policy of ‘liberal interventionism’ that contributed to the coming disasters of US military intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. 

War is difficult to end; opportunities to reach an agreement should be seized when they arise; and a bit of modesty from mediators can prevent a lot of folly. All these things are even truer today. David Harland is Executive Director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. He served with the United Nations during the siege of Sarajevo and was a witness in UN trials against Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.