Inside the brinkmanship, bargains, and last-minute twists that made the Dayton Peace Agreement possible.
The 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement invites renewed scrutiny of its far-reaching impact on Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider Balkans. In a series of articles published weekly, longtime Transitions contributor Tihomir Loza examines key turning points that led to Dayton, as well as some of the major challenges facing Bosnia today.
Having been postponed for a week at Croatian President Franjo Tudjman’s request because of elections in Croatia, the negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, opened on 1 November 1995. There were many ways in which the talks could have failed. Disagreements often looked insurmountable, at the time and in retrospect. Multiple, overlapping plots unfolded within the confines of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base: diplomatic brinkmanship, fevered calculation, personal rivalries, exhaustion, quite a lot of drink (and even some tennis doubles, with Tudjman and his doctor beating chief U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke and Chris Hill in straight sets in one match). Yet, almost as if scripted for a work of art, each mini-drama reached a point of resolution, the final plot twist unfolding only in the last 12 hours of talks as the U.S. hosts were preparing to send their drained staff home for Thanksgiving and thinking of ways to spin the failure to the media as a partial success.
The final disagreement concerned the fate of the city of Brcko, Bosnia’s only significant port on the Sava River, with 44 percent of the nearly 90,000 residents in 1991 being Bosniak, and 25 percent and 20 percent of the population Croat and Serb, respectively. Brcko sat on a narrow stretch of land that connected the western and eastern parts of Republika Srpska (RS). Serb forces captured it early in the war with a view to securing a corridor between the two chunks of RS. They also committed many terrible crimes against Croats and Bosniaks, expelling most. However, because of what came to be regarded as its strategic importance for the Serbs, Brcko had been seen as a must for Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to retain at Dayton. The U.S. mediators and Croats had long accepted this and it looked very much toward the end of the talks at Dayton that the Bosniaks, specifically Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, had done so, too. But Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic reopened the issue at the 11th hour – the only way he would sign the otherwise completed deal was if he, rather than Milosevic, got Brcko.
Read the last installment of “A New Bosnia” here:
Rescued by Arbitration
This turn came on top of what Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Holbrooke had come to view as Izetbegovic’s general reluctance to strike a deal. When they told Milosevic, he responded: “You are the United States. You can’t let Bosnia push you around that way.” When they told Tudjman, he asked if the mediators would be prepared to blame the Bosniaks publicly for the collapse of the talks.
Milosevic then came to see Tudjman to propose that the two of them sign the deal, leaving Izetbegovic exposed to international condemnation. Tudjman rejected the idea. Even though they were furious with Izetbegovic, the U.S. mediators also ruled it out. “The Secretary saw the move for what it was: a desperate tactic by Milosevic to put pressure on the third party, a party that the U.S. had entered the peace process to protect,” according to the Secret History of Dayton, a 1997 State Department internal study.
Tudjman then suggested to Milosevic that he should instead propose international arbitration for Brcko, an idea floated earlier from Izetbegovic’s camp. Milosevic slept on it and early in the morning of a snowy 21 November was spotted coatless outside, searching for Holbrooke around the air base to offer arbitration. Christopher and Holbrooke then rushed to convey the news to the Bosniak leader, demanding an immediate answer.
After a long pause, Izetbegovic said, “it is an unjust peace.” Then he muttered “but my people need peace.” Recalling the moment, Holbrooke told the BBC series Death of Yugoslavia: “I said to the secretary of state, ‘let’s get out of here fast before it unravels again.’ ” Less than two hours later, President Bill Clinton announced from the Rose Garden what would immediately become known as the Dayton Agreement, with the peace it shaped routinely described as “fragile” ever since.
A number of previous peace initiatives failed, some promising a settlement not dissimilar to the one reached at Dayton. Why did it work this time? Why did all the disparate threads merge into something meaningful and workable now? Just as there were many what-ifs in which the Dayton deal might never have happened, there are many elements that made it possible to happen, some quite random. But first, were critical actors desperate for peace? Did anyone’s political survival hinge on success at Dayton? Was it the case, as it may well appear from this historical distance, that expectations had been hyped up to the point of no return – so that neither the leaders of the three sides, nor the mediators could imagine returning home without a settlement?
Stakes in Peace
That was certainly true of Milosevic. Having failed to win the war, he had now placed all his bets on a scenario in which he came back to Belgrade as a successful peacemaker, with the sanctions lifted and the peace dividend, rather than a “Greater Serbia,” enjoyed by the Serbs everywhere happily ever after. It is indeed very hard to picture how Milosevic would have survived politically for much longer had he failed. He was elated when they told him of Izetbegovic’s acceptance, even hugging a member of Holbrooke’s team in excitement. Later in the day, he spoke to the public at home from Dayton. “It’s certain that all the concessions we made are worth the result – and that was peace,” he said.
U.S. presidential elections are rarely decided on foreign policy issues. In addition, except for the Mogadishu disaster, President Clinton’s foreign policies enjoyed healthy support among voters. Yet, given Bosnia’s disproportionate presence in the news and political debate, could his team be certain that Clinton’s soon-to-begin battle for a second term would always and only be about the economy, stupid (to paraphrase the famous quote from Clinton strategist James Carville)?
Tudjman would have been very disappointed had the Dayton negotiations failed. A peace settlement in Bosnia was to create an enabling environment for a peaceful reintegration of eastern Slavonia, still held by Serb rebels. A deal on a UN transitional administration was in the making, with Milosevic very much on board. Getting back eastern Slavonia was to round off Tudjman’s life’s work. But no, a failure at Dayton wouldn’t have affected his personal standing much or that of his party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). After all, HDZ had won the aforementioned election, called early to capitalize on the military successes earlier in the year, though not by a margin party officials had hoped for.
Having tasted military success earlier in the year and with a number of tangible lifelines, such as the substantial support he had been receiving from some Islamic countries and the shaky, if U.S.-sponsored, alliance with the Croats, Izetbegovic was not as desperate for peace as he once might have been. Yet, he seemed acutely aware he stood to gain very little if he were to continue the war, “without the Croats and condemned by the world,” as he said in Death of Yugoslavia.
Secretary Christopher and other U.S. mediators would often lose their temper with Izetbegovic over what they saw as his lack of enthusiasm for a deal. To Pauline Neville-Jones, the head of the UK delegation, it looked like Izetbegovic upped the ante over Brcko in the expectation that Milosevic would not make any further concessions. In truth, Izetbegovic’s stance was more about his uncertainty over whether a peace he would be happy with could even be available. He still very much agonized over an old dilemma at the heart of Bosniak politics. “We need a unified Bosnia, but also a state that can function. These two requirements appear to be contradictory, and we are faced with the question of how to resolve this knot. Some propose majority decision-making, but then there is a real danger of two parties reaching an agreement against the third – and that third could even be the Bosniak side,” he told his party’s executive committee just before he departed for Dayton, according to Oslobodjenje. His brinkmanship on Brcko was genuine. He would have indeed gone home without a deal had Milosevic failed to meet him half way. He would have faced no immediate challenge to his leadership had he returned without a settlement.
Locked Away
The decision to hold the talks at a place far from Washington and New York, at a venue where the negotiators could in effect be locked in, was key to the ultimate success. When Dayton was announced, neither Milosevic nor the team around Izetbegovic liked it, while Tudjman didn’t really care. Along with obvious logistical advantages, the setup limited delegations’ ability to connect with the media. Unlike the previous peace talks, Dayton was largely free from running commentary by the parties, which would have undoubtedly featured hyperbole, bravado, misinformation, and outright lies that in the past had often been capable of destabilizing diplomatic efforts.
Of course, the talks were mostly about territorial issues. The 51:49 formula was not only absurdly arbitrary, it was also ghastly as it underlined and indirectly legitimized land grabs, complete with its disregard for people who actually lived on, or had connections with those lands. (The five-nation Contact Group – composed of the U.S., Russia, UK, France, and Germany – had proposed a peace plan in 1994 whereby Bosnia be divided nearly in half: 51 percent to the Bosniak-Croat Federation and 49 percent to Republika Srpska.) Yet, in the context in which it was deployed, it proved an effective if slippery device for pushing things toward a deal. In various tradeoffs, percentages would move away from that ratio, so maps needed to be shaved off to get the right numbers back.
The numbers were hugely important to Milosevic who had predicated his entire transformation into a peacemaker of sorts on the premise that he would get the Bosnian Serbs 49 percent of the country’s territory. As we have seen, Bosnian Serb leaders often seemed possessed with the urge to measure the Serb demographic and territorial stake in the country in percentages. Milosevic, already despised if still feared by most RS leaders, couldn’t possibly fail to bring them back even what in their view was a meager 49 percent. According to a number of accounts, in Dayton Milosevic cared less about what than how much he got. Carl Bildt, the EU’s representative at the talks, remembered how at one of those occasions when the percentages slipped the wrong way Milosevic said, “Give me something! Steppes, rocks, or swamps – anything will do.”
While the talks were largely focused on territory, the fact that they were not only about territory may have decisively contributed to their success. The sheer volume of the draft agreement and the effort that had gone into it disinvited failure. The size of the Americans’ ambition, expressed over 11 annexes, complete with a new constitution, also provided space for participation of many other actors, even if nearly all of them played only supporting roles. Around 200 core officials from as many as nine delegations, with a further 600 staff members in various roles, were present in what were likely the most peopled peace talks ever.
The roles that mediators from Europe played were indeed modest. “They were informed but not consulted, and their primary role was to assist so far as needed, witness, and ratify the outcome. But they were not to interfere,” wrote Neville-Jones, a top UK security official present at the talks. (This would not be true of the civilian implementation of the agreement later on, with EU countries playing leading parts.) In the opinion of then-Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey, Holbrooke “monopolized” the talks. “It seems to me there were more disagreements between him and the Europeans than between us and the Serb delegation,” he told journalists in Sarajevo upon return from Dayton. Yet, could the talks have succeeded had they been run by committee?
Tihomir Loza, a former deputy director of Transitions, manages the organization’s projects in the Balkans. Tihomir also coordinates SEENPM, a network of media organizations in Central and Southeast Europe.
