Bosnia marks 25 years since inking of U.S.-brokered peace deal

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 31 / 2years 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.

When the Dayton peace agreement was reached in 1995, Sehic was a soldier with the Bosnian government army and Samoukovic was fighting with Bosnian Serb troops seeking to dismember the country and unite the territory they claimed for their own with neighboring Serbia.

The war was sparked by the break-up of Yugoslavia, which led Bosnia to declare its independence despite opposition from ethnic Serbs, who made up about one-third of its ethnically and religiously mixed population.

Armed and backed by neighboring Serbia, Bosnian Serbs conquered 60% of Bosnia’s territory in less than two months, committing atrocities against their Bosniak and Croat compatriots. Ethnic Croats and

Bosniaks also fought against each other for a period of 11 months.

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.

Samoukovic, a Bosnian Serb who like Sehic, was 23-years-old in 1992, did not crave war. He chose to not leave his home in Pazaric, a small town on the outskirts of Sarajevo. But he and his father were soon arrested by Bosniaks and taken to a makeshift internment camp where prisoners were beaten, used as forced labor and deprived of food.

Sehic, a Muslim, had taken up arms in the early days of the conflict after her older brother was severely injured while defending Maglaj, their hometown in central Bosnia, from advancing Bosnian Serb forces.

She met her husband on the frontline and mourned his death in battle three months after giving birth to their daughter and six months before the war’s end. Bosniaks were by far the greatest victims in the conflict in terms of numbers, accounting for about 80% of the people killed in the conflict.

The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia, reached at WrightPatterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, was considered a major U.S foreign policy achievement for the administration of President Bill Clinton.

The agreement was formally signed in Paris on December 14, 1995 by the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia - Alija

Izetbegovic, Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic, respectively. Clinton and 50 other world leaders attending the signing ceremony.

Under the accords, nearly 60,000 international troops were deployed to Bosnia in December 1995 as part of a NATO-led mission to maintain peace and demarcate territory awarded to two semiautonomous entities created by the agreement: Serbrun Republika Srpska and a federation shared by Bosniaks and Croats.

“When the (peace) agreement was reached, I was happy that there will be no more blood and death around us, hopeful that together we can start building a better future,” Sehic said. “But as time went by, I realized that the shooting had stopped, but little else had changed.”