Bosnia marks 25th anniversary of peace accord

SARAJEVO, BosniaHerzegovina — As their ethnic leaders gathered around a table outside Dayton, Ohio, to initial a U.S.-brokered peace deal a quarter- century ago, Edisa Sehic and Janko Samoukovic still were enemies in a war in Bosnia that killed over 100,000 people.

But the two, one an ethnic Bosniak woman and the other an ethnic Serb man, have often come together in recent years to visit schools and town halls where they talk about the futility of war from their first-hand experiences.

In many ways, Bosnia today is a country at peace, a testament to the success of the Dayton Accords, which ended more than 3½ years of bloodshed when they were endorsed 25 years ago on Saturday.

But more than a generation after the shooting and shelling stopped, full peace still feels elusive in Bosnia, where the April 1992-Dec. 1995 war gave rise to an ethnic cleansing campaign and Europe’s first genocide since World War II.

The country’s three ethnic groups — Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats — live in fear of renewed conflict as their nationalist leaders continue to stoke ethnic animosities for political gain.

Some Bosnians hope the election of Joe Biden as the next U.S. president will bolster change by renewing Western interest in the country, one of Europe’s poorest. Biden visited Bosnia in 2009 as vice president, becoming the last key U.S. leader to do so.

Before the war was over, some 100,000 people had been killed and upward of 2 million, or over a half of the country’s population, were driven from their homes.

While it brought an end to the fighting, the Dayton Accords formalized the ethnic divisions by establishing a complicated and fragmented state structure linked by weak joint institutions.

The deal “was essentially an armistice struck between a collection of warlords who are still present in the country, but had refashioned themselves as political leaders,” said Jasmin Mujanovic, a U.S.-based political scientist of Bosnian origin.

Facing the imminent danger of economic collapse, Bosnia is in dire need of constitutional reform, but the process “cannot even commence” without direct engagement of the United States, Mujanovic believes.

Some in Bosnia, where nearly half of the population lives under or close to the poverty line, hope that U.S. interest will increase under Biden.

“I hope thatwe shall be on the agenda of the Biden administration so thatwe can finally put behind what happened (during the war) and look into the future,” said Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia’swartime foreign minister and a Bosniak member of its government’s delegation in Dayton in 1995.

While agreeing that only the U.S. can help fix Bosnia’s broken constitution, Mujanovic said real change will also require “the will, the pressure and engagement” of the country’s citizens.