The Dayton Accords and the Legal Aftermath of the
It might be said, on the face of it, that the failure of the Dayton Peace Accords was demonstrated by the NATO war against Serbia over Kosovo, a war fought three years after the Dayton accords were signed. Only in the aftermath of war and defeat was the control of Slobodan Milosevic over Serbia undermined to the point where his government collapsed, and Milosevic himself ended up imprisoned at The Hague and under indictment for war crimes. Since Milosevic was arguably the primary author of the events in Bosnia which led to the Dayton accords, and he was only dealt with by direct war in 1998, it might seem that a prima facie case could be made that the Dayton Peace Accords failed to meet their objectives.
This interpretation of events has a certain undeniable validity. The fires of political violence were stoked throughout the 1990s. They did not die down with the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, and Milosevic was the principal stoker (though, as will be seen, by no means the only one). However, the Balkan conflict was not a single event, but a multifaceted chain of interrelated events. The Dayton accords never claimed to be the framework for a complete and final resolution of the Balkans turmoil. They were designed and intended only to deal with one component of that turmoil, the civil war in Bosnia between ethnic factions. These factions did indeed have ties to other Balkan states, particularly Serbia on one side and Croatia on the other. Later the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo brought about direct NATO intervention, leading ultimately to the fall of the Milosevic regime. However, this chain of events was never imagined at Dayton.
Nevertheless, the Dayton peace accord was not formulated in a political vacuum. It is not possible to fully evaluate either the objectives of the Accords or their success or failure in meeting those objec...