Dayton Report Card

1 o n the second anniversary of the Dayton peace agreement, this article assesses western contributions to the peace process in Bosnia. The main argument advanced here is that the western powers’-particularly the United States, Britain, and Francewere negligent in not preventing and then not quickly ending the wars in former Yugoslavia because they refused to use force to support important principles of international law.2In their efforts to negotiate an end to the war, and in the subsequent implementation of the settlement brokered by the United States in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, the western powers have tended to appease the aggressors at the expense of the war‘s victims. Unless this tendency is reversed and the international guarantors of the Dayton accords seek a just peace, the current fragile peace could be shattered-and with it the prospects for a stable pan-European security system based on a more open NATOwith a new mission to stabilizeEuropebeyond its traditional borders. The western governments’condoning of the bombing of the Croatian cities of Dubrovnik and Vukovar in the second half of 1991gave President Slobodan Milogevie a green light to pursue his ambition of creating an ethnically pure Greater Serbia; and by denying Bosnian President Alija IzetbegoviFs many requests for preventive troop deployments in late 1991, the west missed an opportunity to prevent the war from spreading to Bosnia. Then in 1992, by defining a deliberate policy of genocide as ”ethnic cleansing,” and a war of Jane M.O. Sharp directs the Defence and Security Programme at the Institute for Public Policy Research and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College in London. The author thanks the editors of International Security and two anonymous reviewers for useful commentson an earlier draft. This article stems from a project at the Centre for Defence Studies, which monitors the implementation of the Dayton agreement. The author thanks the Swedish Foreign Ministry for its financialsupport. 1. The term “western powers” in this article refers to the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO)and the EuropeanUnion (EU)that makeup the western securitycommunity. The term “donor community”refers to the main aid donors to Bosnia, includingthe United States, the EU, Japan, the World Bank, the Organization of Islamic States, and about three hundred nongovernmentalorganizations. 2. For a similar view, see Michael Steiner, ”Don’t Fool Around with Principles,” Transition, Vol. 4, No. 5 (August 1 9 9 3 , pp. 34-40. Steiner, a senior German diplomat, served on the Contact Group in 1994-95 and was deputy to Carl Bildt in the Office of the High Representative in Sarajevoin 1996-97. 3. h4iloSevitbecame president of the Serb republic in 1987and remained in that office until 1996. He is now president of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, which comprises Serbia and Montenegro . InternationalSecurity, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Winter 1997/98), pp. 101-137 0 1997by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 101 International Security 22:3 I 102 aggression as a humanitarian crisis, the western democracies rationalized the deployment of inappropriate and ill-equipped peacekeeping forces into a war situation. Only after almost four years of war, more than 200,000 dead, and 2 million displaced did the United States exert leadership and, together with France and Britain, take the kind of military action that could have prevented war in the first place. The Dayton peace agreement codified an October 1995 cease-fire and prevented new fighting, but has not yet generated a sustainable peace. Consistent with a general tendency toward western appeasement throughout the war, the agreement rewards the aggressors and leaves the nationalist leaders in power. These leaders obstruct reconciliation and integration, and discourage repatriation of refugees and displaced persons. In addition, the agreement suffersfrom four structural problems. First, it is geared to an unrealistically short-term schedule, especially with respect to the stabilizing presence of NATO implementation forces.Second and third, it embraces two sets of contradictorygoals: partitioning Bosnia into two political entities with separate armies while seeking a singleintegrated state with central institutions;and imposing arms limits on both entitiesdespite arming and training only one. Fourth...