The lessons the Dayton Accords taught the world 30 years after the Bosnian War

"The Clinton administration's envoy to the Balkans, the renowned Richard Holbrooke, was a hardliner. Exactly 30 years ago, the world watched helplessly as the bloodiest war in the former Yugoslavia raged: 100,000 dead in a conflict that pitted Bosniaks, Croats, and Bosnian Serbs against each other from 1992 to 1995. Holbrooke brought three leaders delegates from the three warring communities to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio."

"The location was not chosen at random: it was far from the media and political pressures, over 400 miles from Washington and some 5,000 miles from Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. Holbrooke used to say he needed a place from which no one could escape. And that's where, on November 1, 1995, Alija Izetbegovic, president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia representing the interests of the Bosnian Serbs and Franjo Tudjman, president of Croatia, entered the equation."

"The negotiations were simultaneously intellectual and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing, Holbrooke recounted in his book, To End a War. The three leaders left the military base on November 21 with the agreement in hand, a pact that was solemnly signed on December 14 in Paris. And it left no one satisfied."

Intense negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio brought Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic (representing Bosnian Serb interests), and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman together under U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke's direction. The talks aimed to end the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian war that killed about 100,000 people. The leaders reached an agreement on November 21, 1995; the pact was formally signed on December 14 in Paris. The resulting Dayton Constitution established a peace framework that stabilized the state but produced a complex and imperfect political arrangement that left many actors dissatisfied.

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