Dayton Peace Accords Reached -- November 21, 1995
On November 21, 1995, the Dayton Peace Accords were initialed in Dayton, Ohio; they were formally signed in Paris, France, on December 14, 1995. The agreement was reached between the warring nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. It sought to end one of the worst European conflicts since World War II, a four-year struggle of hardship and atrocities that had claimed the lives of more than 250,000 people, and made refugees of more than two million.
President Bill Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke led the negotiations and worked with the leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia to reach acceptable terms. The details of the accords were cast in seductively simple and hopeful terms. Bosnia would remain a single state and would be granted international recognition. While its capital of Sarajevo avoided partitioning, the nation now consisted of two divided segments: the Bosnian Croat Federation, inhabiting 51 percent of the territory, and the Bosnian Serb Republic, occupying the remaining 49 percent. The accords also sought to create within Bosnia the institutions of a modern liberal democracy, including a central government composed of a constitutional court, a national parliament, and a presidency, with the latter two being filled by internationally supervised free elections. Military forces were to be substantially restrained, with protections for human rights coming from an independent body and an internationally-trained civilian police. President Clinton sent a peacekeeping force of 20,000 American troops (part of a larger NATO deployment) into the region to enforce a cease-fire that was to be followed by free elections.
While few would say that the Dayton Accords were not an important step toward peace in the former Yugoslavia, violence continued to haunt the region, especially in the neighboring province of Kosovo. Domestically, Republicans attacked President Clinton for keeping U.S. peacekeepers-forces that many Republicans labeled derisively as "nation-builders"-in the area long past the initial proposal of one year. Some fellow Democrats also attacked Clinton for failing to act with similar decisiveness and sympathy in the even more deadly conflict in the African nation of Rwanda.
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