Aftermath of the Bosnian Civil War

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

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d democratic countries, were written into the Bosnian constitution, and therefore -- in principle -- directly enforceable as "prescriptive" law [Palmer and Posa, 1995, p. 366]. However, the new state was in extremely shaky condition at best. It was and is composed of two constituent entities, the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska -- derived directly from the ethnic enclaves that had been such bitter enemies during the war. It could not be expected that they would at once learn to reside peacefully together under one political roof. Moreover, much of the countryside and population had been devastated by an exceptionally brutal war. Infrastructure was severely damaged or destroyed, and the economy in a complete shambles. Hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced from their homes. Difficulties with Implementation The most serious problem, however, was that the war ended without clear and unambiguous victors who could establish a settlement on their own terms, and without an outright occupation and administration of the territory by the international community. Whatever government was established in Bosnia-Herzegovina, both at the national and local level, would be in the
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Approximate Word count = 9299
Approximate Pages = 37 (250 words per page)