Like much else in the Bosnian conflict, the question of Sarajevo’s status revolved around numbers, typically viewed through a zero-sum lens.
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.
When Ivo Komsic, one of two Croat members of Bosnia’s seven-member collective presidency, decided to keep a personal journal of his time at Dayton, he had two motives. He suspected, he later wrote, that no one else in the delegation would bother to note down developments in detail. Komsic also felt the weight of history. “I believed that these talks would be the most important event in the contemporary history of our country,” he wrote.
Komsic was part of Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic’s delegation, which along with the three top Bosniak leaders – Izetbegovic, Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, and Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey – included ethnic Serb and Croat officials from both the internationally recognized Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the newly formed Bosniak-Croat Federation, which with Republika Srpska formed the two entities of the new version of Bosnia meant to be finalized at Dayton. In practice, the delegation defended Bosniak interests in the first place just as much as the delegations of Croatia and FR Yugoslavia – the state formed by Serbia and Montenegro after the breakup of Yugoslavia – spoke and decided for the Bosnian Croats and Serbs.
That didn’t mean Komsic and other colleagues were totally voiceless. Izetbegovic, Silajdzic, and Sacirbey sometimes consulted them, even though they didn’t necessarily follow their advice. There was even a point toward the end of the talks when Izetbegovic asked all members of the delegation to declare opinions on the yet-to-be finalized agreement. Komsic was one of two people who voted against. The other was Kresimir Zubak, the Croat president of the Federation entity. (The two men objected to ceding Croat-majority settlements in the northern Posavina region to the Serbs.)
Read the last installment of “A New Bosnia” here:
Obviously, Komsic was right about the significance of Dayton. Even though its main contours had been drawn in the preceding years – Komsic goes so far as to say that the parties arrived at the talks “with goals that had already been achieved” – there is no doubt that the Dayton Agreement is one of those historical moments that, for those affected, divides time into a before and an after.
The U.S. national security adviser, Anthony Lake, described the talks as the “craziest zoo I’ve ever seen,” but as things turned out, they inspired few participants from the region to produce personal accounts. One notable exception is Diplomatic Storm, a memoir by Mate Granic, Croatia’s foreign minister from 1993 to 2000. There are no such exceptions in Bosnia, though. Similar to many other key events from Bosnian history, one will find plenty of strong views as well as mythmaking about Dayton – with a niche cottage industry on supposed great Dayton sellouts thriving on all three sides – but very little discourse concerned with what actually happened. Indeed, Komsic’s diary, originally published in the weekly Slobodna Bosna, remains the only piece of writing from Bosnia that provides an engaging, blow-by-blow account of some of the key moments at the peace talks.
Milosevic’s Choice
One drama Komsic witnessed and described circled around the future status of Sarajevo. Two weeks into the talks, on 14 November 1995, he wrote that the parties had come very close to agreeing on constitutional arrangements, but that “an open battle is already being fought over territory.”
The U.S. side and the other four members of the international Contact Group had earlier proposed transforming the capital into a self-governing district separate from the two entities. Komsic noted in his diary that “even the question of Sarajevo could be solved because the Americans, with the support of the Contact Group, are insisting on the district [model] and this document is already in its final phase.”
For moderate figures like Komsic, Sarajevo held a special place in their thinking of how to restructure Bosnia. Its long history of largely peaceful coexistence of, and often fruitful interaction among, different ethnic and religious groups had been brutally stress-tested in the siege. “The goal was to kill the civic life of the city … The sense of togetherness had to be destroyed. The world had to be shown that such a way of community life was not possible,” Komsic wrote in 2022.
For obvious reasons, moderate figures of different backgrounds very much liked the idea of turning the capital into a separate district apart from the two entities, which they saw as natural playgrounds of nationalists and extremists. Saying he had no specific information yet of how Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs in his delegation viewed the district proposal, Komsic rounded off his entry on Sarajevo for 14 November with a sentence in parentheses, as if to express both hesitation and hope: “(There are indications that Milosevic has made up his mind in favor of this solution.)”
As we have seen, there was a bit more than “indications” to make one think Milosevic would find the idea of a separate district agreeable. He had accepted a similar proposal some 18 months before as part of the Contact Group plan. And why wouldn’t he? Instead of a messy partition of the capital city, which the Bosnian Serb leadership sought, he could enable his fellow Serbs, more than 150,000 of them, to resume sharing the city with other groups, just as they had done before 1992. The real choice, however, was not between a partitioned and an undivided Sarajevo.
Western governments had ruled out partition of the capital for a long time now. It would have also been totally unacceptable to the Bosniaks. “I doubt if we would have gotten a Dayton peace agreement if there was an insistence on partitioning Sarajevo,” Peter Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to Croatia at the time, told the Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
The choice before Milosevic was between two versions of an undivided Sarajevo. One was to create a self-governing administrative district. Territorially it would have, to a significant extent, corresponded with the prewar boundaries of the city, encompassing both central Sarajevo and many outlying areas which the Bosnian Serbs took control of in 1992. The other option was for Milosevic to cede the whole of central Sarajevo to the Bosniaks, make it part of the Bosniak-Croat Federation, and simultaneously try to keep as much territory as possible on the environs of the city as part of Republika Srpska. As described in the previous chapter of this series, Milosevic in the end rejected the district idea and took the second option.
Milosevic’s choice wasn’t something that anyone openly pushed for. It would have clearly been attractive in some ways to the Bosniaks (according to the 1991 census, 260,000 Bosniaks resided in Sarajevo, comprising 49 percent of the population. Bosniaks were also the largest group in all but two of the 10 Sarajevo boroughs.) Yet Izetbegovic, backed by the mediators, stuck with the district proposal. “I insisted on it because I knew they [the Serbs] wouldn’t accept it, and they would be forced to propose something acceptable to us,” he said in an interview for the BBC series The Death of Yugoslavia.
Zero-Sum Logic
Like much else in the Bosnian conflict, the issue of Sarajevo revolved around numbers, typically viewed through a zero-sum lens.As recounted in last week’s installment, we saw how Momcilo Krajisnik, the Bosnian Serb leader who was from one of those Sarajevo settlements Milosevic ceded, reacted when Nebojsa Vujovic, a diplomat at FR Yugoslavia’s embassy in Washington, delivered him the news. “Krajisnik fell like a candle, hit his chin on the floor, and cut himself. I helped him, lifted him up, and gave him a glass of water, and then I left,” Vujovic wrote in his book Last Flight From Dayton, serialized inVecernje novosti.
Shortly after, Vujovic listened to Milosevic explaining why he rejected the district proposal. “He understood where the trap was. In all elections for the government in Sarajevo, the Muslims [Bosniaks] would always be in power, because they would always have the majority. That would mean there would be two entities against one – ours. It would have been a complete defeat. That is why he refused, and [chief U.S. negotiator Richard] Holbrooke had to accept the negative answer,” Vujovic wrote.
This may well be how Milosevic explained his motives, yet it is far from the complete truth of the matter. One key detail is that the district proposal included limited, but meaningful elements of ethnic parity, ensuring that the main groups – Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats – were guaranteed equal representation in some corners of government irrespective of their numbers. This concerned in particular the most visible positions. “The post of chief mayor of the ‘Federal District of Sarajevo’ would rotate among the three ethnic groups,” wrote Holbrooke in his book To End a War.
To understand the “trap” that, according to Vujovic, Milosevic saw through here, we need to recognize just how hung up the Serb nationalists at Yugoslavia’s demise were on the notion of separation from other groups. Whether they were unhinged extremists or politicians restrained somewhat by office, they all worked on the premise that the Serbs must do everything to separate themselves wherever possible from other groups in order to eliminate the possibility of becoming a minority in a given area. (“We will relocate [the Serb people] where necessary; we will not put them in a genocidal position,” Krajisnik told the Bosnian Serb parliament in 1992.) That’s what ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo was about. Milosevic may have belatedly distanced himself from the first two, yet when it came to the imperative of separating the Serbs from others, there was very little that differentiated him from figures such as Krajisnik or Radovan Karadzic, the Republika Srpska political leader. That’s how he could easily see a situation in which 150,000 Serbs would share life with 260,000 Bosniaks and 35,000 Croats as a trap.
To grasp this notion further, we also need to appreciate the difference, and the slight tension that arose, between the Serb nationalists’ fixation on the size of territory that they were pursuing and their obsession with separation from others. When forced to choose between the two, the separation imperative took precedence. As this sounds counterintuitive in light of their territorial ambitions, it’s best perhaps to take it from the horse’s mouth.
When in 1992 Bosnian Serb leaders Karadzic and Krajisnik went rogue, setting up the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (later renamed Republika Srpska), they set up six “strategic aims.” The first one was about separation from “the other two ethnic communities.” This is how Karadzic explained that goal to his parliament at a session in Banja Luka on 12 May 1992, at a time when ethnic cleansing campaigns throughout the country were gathering steam: “Separation from those who are our enemies and who have used every opportunity – especially in this century – to attack us, and who would continue with such a practice if we were to remain together.”
During that marathon session practically all other speakers also advocated separation, some as if they were still trying to absorb the size and novelty of the idea. Toward the end, Krajisnik, who was the speaker of parliament, spoke of separation as a concept. “The first goal is the most important, and it encompasses all the other goals – all the others are sub-points of the first. Have we decided to finally draw a clear line between ourselves and the other two national communities? We can separate from them if Bosnia and Herzegovina is split into three parts,” Krajisnik said. He spoke about various Serb territorial aspirations and expressed his fondness for very ambitious maps. He then, however, cautioned against such ambitions, arguing that the Bosniaks and Croats must be given some space in order for separation to be possible. “If someone were to offer us 80% of the territory, we would not be able to separate ourselves from anyone … There is no way we can separate like that,” he said. “That is why it would be good, dear gentlemen, that we take care to leave enough space so that we can separate [from the other two groups].” To make sure the members took his warnings seriously, he added that he wasn’t sure “whether the part of Sarajevo I live in will remain [in the Serb entity]. And I am not sorry,” he said.
That said, as previously mentioned, Krajisnik was still literally knocked over by the news that Milosevic had given away the Serb-held parts of Sarajevo, including his own neighborhood. He was still fuming on 21 November when Montenegrin President Momir Bulatovic presented the final map to Krajisnik and the other Bosnian Serb leaders at Dayton. As U.S. President Bill Clinton announced the success of the talks on the TV in the room, Krajisnik first denounced Milosevic and Bulatovic with a “torrent of words,” as Bulatovic later wrote, and then asked the Montenegrin president: “Tell me, for God’s sake, how much money did you two take for such a betrayal over Sarajevo?”
Some, like Ivo Komsic, who served as Sarajevo’s mayor between 2013 and 2017, were also disappointed with the outcome regarding the capital city, though for quite different reasons.
“I believe that the Serbian side is pursuing the concept of dividing Bosnia and Herzegovina. Messy involvement in joint government, parity-based government such as that envisaged for the district [of Sarajevo], would create major complications. The district would mean the beginning of the reintegration of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Komsic told a public event upon his return to Sarajevo, according to Oslobodjenje.
He continued, “They preferred to sacrifice the city rather than allow it to lead to the reintegration of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
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.
