United States Seeks To Update Dayton Peace Accord
10 November 2005
Rice to host talks marking 10th anniversary of end of Bosnian war
By Vince Crawley
Washington File Staff Writer
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to host leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Washington November 21 to mark the 10th anniversary of the historic Dayton Accords peace settlement.
Along with commemorating the peace agreement, U.S. officials are urging Bosnia’s three-member presidency and other senior leaders to update the Dayton Accords to create a stronger, more unified nation, says Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns.
“We have to be very active in trying to find a way to modernize the Dayton Accords in Bosnia-Herzegovina to create a single presidency, a stronger prime minister, and to help those people break down the ‘Berlin Walls’ that have separated them in that country for far too long,” Burns told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee November 8.
Meeting with reporters later that day, Burns said the United States hopes “to complete in Bosnia what we began at Dayton 10 years ago, which is the creation of a modern, single state that can take its place in the [European Union] and NATO in the future.”
The Bosnian war broke out when the multiethnic country declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. Almost 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million were made homeless in 3 1/2 years of fighting that included the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II. The United States and NATO intervened with military air strikes after ethnic Serb forces overran the U.N.-protected enclave at Srebrenica in July 1995. An estimated 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and teenaged boys were murdered by the Serb forces. The region’s three warring parties agreed to meet in the United States in hopes of reaching a peace agreement.
Bosnia’s President Alija Izetbegovic, Yugoslavia’s President Slobodan Milosevic, and Croatia’s President Franjo Tudjman traveled to austere quarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, outside Dayton, Ohio, and spent weeks in intense negotiations brokered by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke. The three presidents refused to talk to each other in person, and the only person authorized to speak for them collectively in public was Nicholas Burns, who was then the State Department’s official spokesman.
On November 21, 1995, the three leaders initialed an agreement that granted independence to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) but divided the country into separate enclaves, with 49 percent of the territory controlled by Bosnian Serbs – Republka Srpska -- and 51 percent controlled by a Muslim-Croat federation – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The agreement formally was signed in Paris on December 14, 1995, and within days NATO began deploying 60,000 troops to enforce the peace accord. The U.S. share of the initial Bosnia peace force was 20,000 troops. In one of the Dayton agreement’s many historic gestures, Russia agreed to allow peacekeeping troops to serve in Bosnia under U.S. command.
The diplomatic meetings in November in Washington will commemorate the Dayton agreement and “look ahead and see how they can modernize the Dayton Accords and create a more unified state,” Burns told reporters November 8. Other events on November 21 will “honor some of our colleagues who died during the Bosnia negotiations,” he said.
BUILDING ON THE DAYTON PROCESS
Paddy Ashdown, the international community’s high representative in Bosnia, said November 7 in Sarajevo that “the Dayton process has served its purpose and can be upgraded to something better suited to the new challenges of European integration.”
The main objectives of the 1995 agreement were to separate warring forces, begin to restore the country’s infrastructure and hold democratic elections, Ashdown said at a roundtable on the 10th anniversary of the Dayton agreement.
“The priority of the international community was to stop the fighting,” Ashdown said. “The priority of the BiH signatories was to accept minimum compromises.”
Ashdown said the Dayton Accords have “two downsides which it is now necessary also to begin to recognize and correct.”
First, he said, the accords focus on protecting the rights of groups rather than individuals. Second, Ashdown said, Bosnia today carries “the burden of a highly dysfunctional structure of governance.”
Bosnia’s tripartite presidency “has, let’s be honest, failed to maintain popular esteem or respect inside BiH or to represent the country effectively in the international arena,” Ashdown said.
For additional information, see related article.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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