Bosnien hat in den vergangenen zehn Jahren dramatische Veränderungen erlebt. Jetzt müsse es aber über Dayton hinaus schauen, heißt es in diesem Artikel in Transitions Online.
When Bosnia’s three presidency members – a Serb, a Croat, and a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) – came together on 21 November to commemorate the Dayton peace accords that were signed on that day ten years ago, they did so not in the country’s capital, Sarajevo, but in Washington, DC. It was U.S. leadership that ensured a peace deal was struck – and it is also U.S. leadership that provides much of the momentum behind current initiatives to undo some of Dayton’s less benign legacies. But another development underscores the fact that there now exists a transatlantic consensus on the direction Bosnia needs to take. Also on Monday, EU foreign ministers formally decided to open talks on a Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA), a first step that may lead to eventual membership – one of the few goals Bosnian politicians can agree on. A post-Dayton life is beginning.
Making peace
It was on 21 November 1995 that the leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia finally put their signature under a document that has since become known simply as “Dayton,” after the Ohio town that for three weeks hosted the U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Presidents Izetbegovic, Tudjman, and Milosevic. Three weeks later, the agreement was formally signed at a ceremony in Paris attended by Presidents Clinton and Chirac, as well as Prime Ministers Major and Chernomyrdin and Chancellor Kohl.
The peace process had flirted with disaster. It was literally at the last minute that a deal was reached at Dayton: the U.S. delegation headed by Richard Holbrooke had already prepared a statement admitting failure. Instead, Dayton managed to end a brutal three-way war of three and a half years that had, according to latest research, may have cost the lives of more than 100,000 people and forced roughly half of the country’s 4.3 million population from their homes.
Dayton recognized some of the facts on the ground, including the para-state set up by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic with the help of his military commander, Ratko Mladic, though it did not of course absolve either man of their crimes. Both were already fugitives from international justice after their indictment for war crimes and crimes against humanity earlier in 1995. Both men are still on the run.
The territories claimed by Bosnian Serbs and their sponsors in Belgrade had been cleared of non-Serbs through massacre and expulsion, a practice known as “ethnic cleansing.” While the Dayton peace agreement recognized the Serb Republic (RS) within Bosnia – an ethnic territory created in a state-building drive orchestrated from Belgrade but with much resonance among local Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia – it also gave refugees the explicit right to return to their pre-war homes in a bid to undo some of the effects of “ethnic cleansing” and to restore some measure of multi-ethnic coexistence to the ravaged country.
Dayton is shot through with such ambiguities; by recognizing RS and its Croat-Bosniak counterpart, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the agreement virtually ensured policy paralysis and prevented the more integrative provisions from becoming operational. The agreement’s excessive federalism also created an unwieldy and overbearing system of governance in Bosnia that is now often seen as having been an obstacle to the country’s development since Dayton. The international peace mission that was soon deployed to the country had to draw up a large and complex organization chart so its staff of international diplomats, reconstruction specialists, and legal drafters would not get lost when dealing with local structures. But it was not Dayton that invented this awkward situation. The peace deal merely reflected the political balance of power on the ground after the Croatian and Bosnian armies had retaken large parts of Serb-held areas in Croatia and Bosnia and brought the distribution closer to the 49/51 territorial key that had been agreed during talks in Geneva in early September 1995.
Implementing peace
Dayton provided a fairly detailed blueprint for the immediate post-war period. For Bosnia, it was a lifejacket. Still, though the large-scale violence many observers had predicted failed to materialize, not everything went smoothly.
The 60,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force was hampered early on when its commander, U.S. Admiral Leighton Smith, told a Bosnian Serb TV station that he had no authority to arrest anybody in the country. And the peacekeepers stood by as apartment buildings burned in Serb-held neighborhoods of Sarajevo that were to be handed over to Federation control in early 1996: Serb thugs roamed the streets and forced their own people from their apartments, instructing them to burn them down so they wouldn’t be used by non-Serbs. The Implementation Force (IFOR) refused to protect firefighters trying to put out the fires.
On the civilian side, it was only in 1997 that the ad-hoc body overseeing the peace in Bosnia gave sweeping powers to the Office of the High Representative to break the post-war deadlock. The High Representative could use the so-called Bonn powers to fire public officials of any level and to impose laws against the will of local parliaments. The current High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, has made extensive use of this authority, as did his predecessor Wolfgang Petritsch.
The Bonn powers encapsulate much that is wrong with post-war Bosnia: the inability of its squabbling politicians to set aside their petty differences for the good of the country; a passive electorate that has time and again re-elected the nationalists who were largely responsible for the war; and the dependency on international actors to solve the country’s problems.
To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.