The Dayton Accords

NOV 21 1995 · 12:00

Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic initial the Dayton Peace Accords at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 21 November 1995. Place: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio (negotiation); Élysée Palace, Paris (signing) Figures: Richard Holbrooke, US chief negotiator · Slobodan Milošević, for the Bosnian Serbs and Serbia · Alija Izetbegović, Bosniak president of Bosnia and Herzegovina · Franjo Tuđman, Croatian president · Warren Christopher, US secretary of state · Carl Bildt, EU co-mediator Three Weeks at a Base in Ohio The Bosnian war (April 1992 to November 1995) has killed approximately 100,000 people, displaced more than two million, and produced the first systematic ethnic cleansing in Europe since the 1940s. The July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces executed approximately 8,000 Muslim men and boys in a UN-declared safe area, has made continued Western non-intervention politically intolerable. NATO airstrikes through August and September, combined with a Croat-Bosniak ground offensive, force the Bosnian Serb leadership to the table. Holbrooke chooses an air force base in Dayton, Ohio, partly for security and partly to keep the delegations physically unable to leave the negotiation. Twenty-one days of proximity talks, with no press access, produce the General Framework Agreement and eleven annexes. The parties initial at Dayton on 21 November; the formal signing takes place at the Élysée Palace in Paris on 14 December. Holbrooke's account, To End a War, will later document the negotiation in detail; the Bosnian Serb delegation, present at Dayton, refuses to sign there, leaving Milošević to sign on their behalf, a clarifying signal about who actually controlled the war. A State and a Protectorate Bosnia and Herzegovina is preserved as a single sovereign state within its 1992 borders, with two constituent entities (the Bosniak-Croat Federation, holding 51 percent of the territory, and Republika Srpska, holding 49 percent) and three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs). Annex 4 of the agreement is the country's constitution, drafted in English, never translated into Bosnian as an official text. Annex 10 establishes the Office of the High Representative, an international official with so-called Bonn Powers to dismiss elected officials and impose laws by decree. NATO's IFOR (later SFOR, then EUFOR) deploys 60,000 troops to enforce the military annexes. The arrangement is a Westphalian sovereign state on the legal surface and a quasi-protectorate beneath it. Two High Representatives have, in practice, governed by decree for stretches of the post-war period. The three-presidency rotating head of state, the ethnic vetoes in parliament, and the entity-level governments produce a polity that functions and a polity that cannot reform itself. Dayton ends the war and freezes its outcome; three decades later, the freeze is still operative, the High Representative is still in of Video: Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke speaks to the PBS NewsHour on the day the Dayton Peace Agreement was initialled at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 21 November 1995, ending the Bosnian war.