Dayton Accords End Bosnian War
The Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian war, negotiated over three weeks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in November 1995 and signed in Paris in December. The war had run since 1992 and killed around 100,000 people, the majority Bosniak civilians, with over two million displaced. It had brought concentration camps, the siege of Sarajevo, systematic rape as an instrument of policy, and the massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, in a UN-declared safe area. Two things changed the military position that summer: the Croatian offensive that retook the Krajina, and NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, a sustained bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb positions after the second Markale market shelling. The talks were run by Richard Holbrooke, who sequestered Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović on an air base and gave them no exit. The settlement kept Bosnia as one state and divided it into two entities — the Federation of Bosniaks and Croats with 51 per cent of the territory, and Republika Srpska with 49. It created a three-member rotating presidency, a weak central government, a Constitutional Court, an international High Representative with power to impose laws, and a NATO force of 60,000. It stopped the killing, which was its purpose, and it froze the ethnic division the war had created into the constitution. Thirty years on, the structure remains in place and the politics remain stalled. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić of genocide for Srebrenica. Milošević died in custody in 2006 before his trial concluded. Republika Srpska's leadership has repeatedly threatened secession and denied the genocide finding. Bosnia's application for EU membership was accepted in 2022 and has advanced slowly.
- Year: 1995 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
