This peace deal ended Europe’s last major war 30 years ago. It provides important lessons for today’s fractured world |
Thirty years ago this week, the Dayton Accords were signed in Paris, bringing an end to the Bosnian war, the most destructive conflict Europe had witnessed since 1945.
Weeks of intensive negotiations at an air base in Dayton, Ohio, finally produced a settlement to a conflict that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia and saw more than 100,000 people killed and millions displaced.
The agreement was imperfect. But today, with war raging in Europe again and international cooperation appearing fragile, the Dayton Accords remind us that determined diplomacy can still prevail over violence.
In the early 1990s, Bosnia and Croatia were the sites of systematic ethnic cleansing and brutal siege warfare. It was a bitter and often confusing triangular conflict that saw Serb forces attacking both Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats for territorial control across both countries. There was also fighting between Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia’s southwest.
Ian Kemish and Jasmina Joldić, the authors of this article, experienced the war from different vantage points.
Kemish served as an Australian diplomat accredited to Bosnia and Croatia, travelling regularly to Sarajevo and other towns during the conflict and its aftermath. He engaged with the rival factions and his international colleagues struggling to protect civilians within severely constrained mandates.
Though not a decisive player in the international deliberations to end the war, Australia was still an engaged participant. It accepted thousands of refugees from the region after the war. And Australians served with UN peacekeeping forces and aid agencies in Bosnia and other regional countries, as well as with the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Joldić was nine years old when the war broke out in her hometown of Bijeljina – this was the first town in Bosnia........