The Serb exodus from Sarajevo that followed the signing of the Dayton accords exposed the fragile, contested peace taking shape on the ground.
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 the last of a nine-part series on the key turning points that led to Dayton, longtime Transitions contributor Tihomir Loza recounts how Serbian leader Milosevic sidelined the Bosnian Serbs to clinch the deal.
Three Bosnian Serb officials at Dayton were part of the delegation headed by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic representing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the state formed by Serbia and Montenegro after the breakup of Yugoslavia). As we have seen, they were largely ignored by the mediators and often ridiculed by Serbia’s president. “Pay no attention to those guys. I’ll make sure they accept the final agreement,” Milosevic said when chief U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke gave him an angry letter he’d received from Momcilo Krajisnik, the most senior of the three Bosnian Serbs, according to Holbrooke’s book To End a War.
At an early plenary session, while a Bosnian Serb member of the delegation was speaking, “Milosevic got up and walked around the hall and afterwards he asked Holbrooke not to allow such ‘pathetic Serb stories,’ ” Ivo Komsic, a member of the collective presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, jotted down in his journal of the talks. Milosevic’s aide Nebojsa Vujovic remembered in his book Last Flight From Dayton how, on their way to breakfast at Packy’s Sports Bar & Grill in the hotel at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on 12 November, he and a number of other delegation members from Serbia met Krajisnik and Nikola Koljevic, a renowned Shakespeare scholar who served as Republika Srpska’s vice president. “Look, we’re coming from breakfast, and you’re going to breakfast. We, Serbs from Bosnia, and you, Serbs from Serbia, are always going in opposite directions,” Koljevic quipped. (Republika Srpska, together with the newly formed Bosniak-Croat Federation, formed the two entities of the new version of Bosnia meant to be finalized at Dayton.)
Read the last installment of “A New Bosnia” here:
In theory, this exclusion of the Bosnian Serb leaders from decision-making did not matter much as they had authorized Milosevic to negotiate on their behalf. Except now that an agreement had been reached, the mediators wanted Krajisnik to initial it to signal Republika Srpska’s commitment to implementing it. Not long before the initialing ceremony in the afternoon of 21 November, however, Milosevic’s foreign minister, Milan Milutinovic, told them that Krajisnik had refused to initial the treaty and that he, Milutinovic, would do so instead. Holbrooke found this unacceptable and demanded that Milosevic intervene. Still in a giddy mood after Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic had accepted the proposal for arbitration over Brcko that morning, Milosevic made light of the situation, saying he would make the Bosnian Serbs initial the agreement within 24 hours upon his return to Belgrade. “Why can’t Krajisnik sign now?” the mediators insisted. “Because he is in a coma after seeing the map [placing all of Sarajevo within the Federation],” replied Milosevic. Mocking the Americans’ concerns, he then agreed to sign a letter addressed to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, pledging to deliver Bosnian Serb signatures within 10 days.
The UN Security Council suspended sanctions against Belgrade on 22 November. Upon his return from Dayton, Milosevic’s propaganda operated at full force, now selling peace. “A just peace has been achieved for all the peoples of this region. It is time for our country and the entire region to turn toward economic recovery, raising living standards, cultural development, opening up, and integration into Europe and the world,” he told the nation. Members of his party from the southern city of Nis proposed that Milosevic be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The state-sponsored euphoria in Belgrade unfolded against a peculiar backdrop on the ground in Bosnia. While there were street celebrations of the peace achieved at Dayton in Banja Luka, the biggest city in Republika Srpska, loud protests took place in the Serb-held parts of Sarajevo that Milosevic had ceded to the Bosniaks at Dayton. Krajisnik gave public statements in which he said the Bosnian Serbs did not accept anything at Dayton; he said he had warned Milosevic that both the map and the constitutional arrangements were unacceptable. Speaking to Bosnian Serb television, he said he did not sign anything, nor would he. Yet, when on 23 November Milosevic summoned him and the rest of the Bosnian Serb leadership to a countryside government retreat, they all agreed to sign a statement in support of the peace treaty.
In the immediate aftermath of their very public acceptance of the Dayton Peace Agreement, the Bosnian Serb leaders appeared dazed, often contradicting the pledge they gave to Milosevic. Radovan Karadzic, the Republika Srpska political leader, often spoke nebulously, even saying at one point he would go to Paris for the signing ceremony. When reminded that he had been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on genocide charges and would likely be arrested abroad, he replied: “That would be stupid because I am the only man who can sign peace in Paris.”
“Let Everything Burn”
The issue that the Bosnian Serb leaders kept coming back to was, of course, central Sarajevo. They were incensed by Milosevic’s decision to cede the Serb-held parts to the Bosniaks, but had few ideas what to do with their frustration. Some said the issue would be renegotiated. Others promised that there would be a special arrangement to protect Sarajevo Serbs, with an international force, instead of the authorities of the Federation entity, governing the place for the first five years. Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic sent a cable to the protesters in Sarajevo pledging his army would never leave the city.
Yet, such noises faded out in a matter of days only to be replaced by a new message from the Bosnian Serb leadership: the population must accept the peace agreement in its entirety; since Sarajevo had been lost, all Serbs from the neighborhoods that were now to be handed over to the Bosniaks must leave. At first, the notion appeared outlandish, inconsequential chatter of a rattled leadership. “If we have to leave Serbian Sarajevo, then nothing else remains for us but to set fire to both the Serb and the Muslim parts of Sarajevo – let everything burn so that no one has anything,” an influential local leader said on a radio show on 28 November. It soon became clear the idea of a mass departure of Serbs from Sarajevo was serious.
Biljana Plavsic, another vice president of Republika Srpska, soon provided more details about the 23 November meeting with Milosevic. In an interview with Studio B TV, she explained that, along with the acceptance of the peace treaty, another document was signed at the meeting. “It says there that the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] … undertakes to participate in the building of a new Serb Sarajevo. I don’t know at which location. It should probably be somewhere nearby. … That document was signed first, and only later did President Karadzic put his signature on the other document accepting the peace agreement.”
The astonishing scenario over Sarajevo unfolded at speed. Driving it was none other than Krajisnik, who by mid-December seemed to have taken over the reins of power from Karadzic completely. “A more strident and powerful lead has been taken by Assembly Chairman Krajisnik, who probably will be a better barometer of Bosnian Serb thinking,” a U.S. intelligence report of 19 December notes. While paying lip service to various initiatives aimed at persuading the Sarajevo Serbs to stay, Krajisnik orchestrated a massive operation to compel them to leave with as many of their belongings as possible. Indeed, by the time the Dayton Peace Agreement was officially signed at a grand ceremony in Paris on 14 December, the exodus was already underway.
Separation at Any Cost
There were lone local voices arguing against departure at a session of the Republika Srpska parliament on 17 December. Parliamentary member Grujo Lalovic, for example, proposed that the leadership call on Sarajevo Serbs to remain. Krajisnik wouldn’t have any of it. “The task of this republic, and its first strategic goal, is for us to separate from the Muslims and the Croats, and no one has the right to base the strategy of Serbian Sarajevo on remaining in a common state. … No one can now create some new solution for us to stay together, nor do the people in Sarajevo want that … nor does the Sarajevo leadership want it. … In the end, the best solution is for Sarajevo to be evacuated and for a location to be found where the people can be settled,” the parliament speaker elaborated.
What ensued between December 1995 and March 1996, when the handover of the Serb-held parts of the capital was completed, was both bizarre and tragic. Krajisnik’s henchmen toured the neighborhoods pressing local Serbs to leave, often using threats and violence. Organized gangs looted everything that could possibly be taken, now often in the presence of the NATO peace implementation force, IFOR, which deployed in Serb-held neighborhoods in January. On numerous occasions, the homes of those Serbs who were reluctant to move were set ablaze. A day before the neighborhood of Grbavica was to be handed over, IFOR detained 12 people suspected of arson and handed them over to the Bosnian Serb police. They were all freed before the end of the day. Faced with enormous pressure, most local Serbs did leave. In some cases, families dug up graves to take the remains of their loved ones with them, as if to underline the definitive nature of the move.
While there can be no doubt that the main driver of the Serb exodus was the coercion coming from the Bosnian Serb authorities, there were also a number of contributing factors. When urged by international actors to send reassuring messages to the Serbs, Bosniak leaders instead came up with ambiguous statements.
“As for the Serbian people in the occupied areas of Sarajevo, our message to them is that we will ensure full security for civilians and, at the same time, efficient and energetic prosecution of the guilty ones. In other words, full security for civilians and absolute insecurity for those who are guilty,” Izetbegovic told BH Press on 27 November.
Izetbegovic was furious when the German and French governments raised the issue of security guarantees for the Serb civilians. A letter on the issue that French President Jacques Chirac sent to U.S. President Bill Clinton on 29 November exercised him in particular. Izetbegovic wrote a protest letter to Chirac two days later: “It would be appropriate to ask the Serbs who are demonstrating these days: where are their Muslim and Croat neighbors who, in those municipalities, made up the majority of the population? Where are those people, and who appropriated their property? Do those who spent 44 months destroying the city and [who] carried out ethnic cleansing with an iron broom, without precedent in the last 1,000 years, really deserve such concern from the world?”
Publicly, the U.S. administration reacted coolly to French and German concerns, even though privately they acknowledged the sensitivity of the Sarajevo handover. Their key priority was to rule out any suggestion that the peace agreement was renegotiable. Concerns about optics and the symbolic failure of multiethnic reintegration were very much discussed among officials in charge of peace implementation – Holbrooke described the flight of the Sarajevo Serbs as a “political and symbolic setback.” The unsayable irony of the Serbs’ departure, however, was that it had a tangible structural consequence for peace implementation as it made security management easier. Fewer mixed-population flashpoints reduced the risk of IFOR and international police being drawn into civilian clashes. Incidents in which Serb civilians who decided to stay were harassed still occurred, though.
Krajisnik, who bitterly protested the ceding of the Serb-held part of Sarajevo, had by then become a firm proponent of the Dayton agreement. At an event in Belgrade a few months later, Montenegrin President Momir Bulatovic reminded Krajisnik of the Dayton episode in which Krajisnik accused him and Milosevic of treachery over Sarajevo. “I asked Momcilo Krajisnik whether he remembered everything he had told me in Dayton regarding that same document, which he now praises and implements. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ve long since forgotten all that, and you should too, my friend, if you’re smart,’ ” Bulatovic wrote. “I went up to him, we kissed each other (the customary three times), and I did as he told me.”
The question of the status of Sarajevo continued to interest many long after the territorial arrangements of the Dayton treaty had been implemented. The Office of the High Representative, which has ever since been the final authority on the interpretation of the civilian aspects of the peace settlement, even revisited the district idea, which again came to nothing.
Fast forward three decades to find a number of outcomes in Sarajevo not universally predicted. Contrary to expectations, Bosnia’s capital has retained a fair bit more than a token measure of its fabled multicultural character, even if it nowadays may often take new forms. One will find less of it in the thunder of everyday political discourse, which like in the rest of the country unfolds in a monotonous nationalist pitch. Yet if capable of looking beyond it, one will find Sarajevo to be a reasonably tolerant and often vibrant place – and indeed find a Serb Sarajevo erected next to it.
This area offers quite agreeable living conditions in properly planned new neighborhoods. As real estate is cheaper and often nicer there, quite a few people from Sarajevo proper, many of them non-Serbs, have moved there. Many Serbs from there work in Sarajevo proper. And even though the place is still often referred to as Serb Sarajevo, following a constitutional court ruling, its official name since 2005 has been East Sarajevo. A fun fact about East Sarajevo is that it is not really in the east. The wider city area of East Sarajevo is indeed largely to the east of Sarajevo; the newly built part, the part that most people really have in mind when they say “East Sarajevo,” is to the southwest from central Sarajevo. Its full official name is East New Sarajevo.
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.
