DAYTON ACCORDS.

The Dayton Accords marked the end of wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia that lasted from 1991 to 1995 and provided a roadmap for Bosnia's postwar development. The Accords were officially called "The General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP)," contained eleven annexes, and were 130 pages long. The negotiations at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, began 1 November 1995 and the Agreement was initialed in Dayton on 21 November. It was formally signed in Paris on 14 December and endorsed by the UN Security Council on 15 December 1995. Implementation of the accords began when the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) deployed into Bosnia and Herzegovina on 20 December and when the first High Representative arrived in Sarajevo on 21 December 1995.

The Accords were a watershed. The Balkan wars shaped a generation of diplomats and soldiers from the United States, Europe, and the United Nations. They spurred efforts to address difficult conditions underlying intrastate conflict after the end of the Cold War. Most directly, the Accords ended a war that had lasted for more than three years.

THE ONSET OF WAR

The war's origins were in the violent unraveling of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which followed elections in 1990 that made regional leaderships ethnically accountable. The leaders of Yugoslavia's six constituent republics did not agree on the constitution for a democratic Yugoslav federation. A brief armed conflict leading to Slovenian independence gave way to a more difficult war in Croatia in the second half of 1991. In this conflict rebel Serbs seized one-third of Croatian territory with support from the Yugoslav National Army (JNA). The UN negotiator, the former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (1917–2002) negotiated a plan that allowed approximately 14,000 UN troops to deploy to oversee the reintegration of this territory back into Croatia. Progress quickly stalled as rebel Serbs called for greater-Serb unification and refused to support implementation of the Vance Plan.

The situation in Bosnia was especially fragile, as the election of November 1990 amounted to an ethnic census in a multiethnic republic that lacked a clear, titular nation. By autumn 1991 a delicately balanced coalition government among Serb, Croat, and Bosnian Muslim parties broke down. The disputes included Bosnia's relationship to the rump Yugoslavia, the departure of the Serb Democratic Party delegation (led by Radovan Karadžić [b. 1945]), and the formation of multiple Serb Autonomous Regions with support from the JNA. By March 1991, the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman (1922–1999), had already discussed the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina with the Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006).

Several Western governments recognized the Bosnian government's declaration of independence on 6 April 1992 following a referendum that was boycotted by most Serbs in Bosnia. Bosnian Serb military forces, which were armed with weapons inherited from the JNA, launched a military campaign that rapidly captured about 70 percent of Bosnia's territory. In an attempt to homogenize Bosnia's ethnically complex social geography, the Serb military engaged in ethnic cleansing and created prisoner camps. The radical Croatian Defense Council (HVO) subsequently launched offensives in Herzegovina and central Bosnia.

FROM DIPLOMATIC FAILURE TO DAYTON

International negotiators were initially ineffective at ending the war. The United Nations Security Council established an arms embargo that favored the well-armed Bosnian Serb Army against the poorly equipped Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, created six poorly defended "safe areas" for civilians, and addressed the provision of humanitarian assistance and protection of civilians. The UN deployed twenty-six thousand lightly armed troops in the UN Protection force (UNPROFOR). These troops were scattered throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina in support of humanitarian efforts. But these troops were neither in position to compel compliance with the UN mandate nor to bring the war to a close.

In the period between 1991 and 1995 diplomats from the European Community, the United Nations, and a Contact Group consisting of the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and Germany drafted a series of peace plans that were based on extensive postwar power-sharing. However the Serb, Croat, and Muslim leaders were unable to reach a consensus on any of them. Only in the summer of 1995 did American diplomats take the initiative to lead the negotiations to end the war. The increasing assertiveness of Serb forces by mid-1995 culminated in the conquest of Srebrenica on 11 July. In the largest single post–World War II European massacre, more than seven thousand Muslim males were separated from their families and executed by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladić (b. 1943). In response to the subsequent NATO air intervention that lasted from 30 August until 21 September, a Bosniak-Croat offensive won back significant territory from the Bosnian Serbs, which set the stage for a cease-fire on 12 October. This also led to negotiations on the basis of "Joint Agreed Principles" that were signed in Geneva, Switzerland, on 8 September by foreign ministers from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Yugoslavia, and Croatia.

The negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, were led by the U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke (b. 1941) and included the secretary of state, Warren Christopher (b. 1925), and diplomats from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the European Union. The negotiations only peripherally involved the principals from the conflict. The three heads of delegations were the Bosnian Muslim president, Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003), the Serbiań, and the Croatian president, Tudjman. The Bosnian Serb leaders Karadžić and president, Milošević did not come because they had already been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the Bosnian Croat leader, Kresimir Zubak (b. 1947), was present, but Presidents Tudjman and Milošević gave assurances that their Bosnian subordinates would sign the agreement.

THE DAYTON ACCORDS

The three weeks of negotiations forced each party to make significant political concessions. The Serbs accepted that Republika Srpska would remain part of Bosnia. Croat hard-liners did not win a specifically Croat entity. The Bosnian Muslims accepted a decentralized state that the party that controlled 49 percent of the territory (Serbs) had gained through an aggressive war. An initial success in the negotiations, on 11 November, over the return of the Serb-controlled territory in Eastern Slavonia to Croatia set the stage for the conclusion of the agreement ten days later under great American pressure.

It was hoped that the Dayton Accords would end the fighting once and for all, facilitate a quick transition to stable rule, and restore Bosnia's multi-ethnicity. They covered all military and civilian aspects of the peace, including a constitution, and provided international military and civilian oversight of the Bosnian government in its implementation of the GFAP. The implementation succeeded in ending the fighting, but more than a decade after the Dayton Accords were signed the Bosnian government continued to prepare itself for accession into the European Union. Serbia's pathway to Europe is longer still, and blocked by the fact that Bosnian Serb leaders accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity continue to evade justice.

See alsoBosnia-Herzegovina; Croatia; Izetbegović, Alija; Karadží, Radovan; Milošević, Slobodan; Mladić, Ratko; Sarajevo; Serbia; Srebrenica; Tudjman, Franjo; Yugoslavia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Annan, Kofi. Report of the Secretary General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35 (1998): The Fall of Srebrenica. United Nations publication A/54/549, 15 November 1999.

Burg, Steven L., and Paul S. Shoup. The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention. Armonk, N.Y., 1999.

Chollet, Derek. The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study in American Statecraft. New York, 2005.

Gow, James. Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War. New York, 1997.

Holbrooke, Richard. To End a War. New York, 1998.

Office of the High Representative. "The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina." Available at http://www.ohr.int/dpa/default.asp?content_id=380.

Ramet, Sabrina P. Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milošević. Boulder, Colo., 2002.

Mark Baskin