Dealing With Identity in the Dayton Accords

By Keith Swartzendruber

April 2002

 

            It was described as the “problem from hell” (Daalder 2000).  Officials in the Clinton administration and other western governments spent many a sleepless night trying to decide how to respond to the war that was raging in Bosnia during the early 1990s.  They saw no easy way out of a conflict that many believed was born of ancient ethnic hatreds extending back in history for centuries (Daalder 2000).  Violence in the Balkans in the past had started World War I, and the west was not eager to entangle itself there again militarily.  But the creeping horror of ethnic cleansing demanded a response.  Pictures of mass graves and bodies of slaughtered civilians began making their way to twenty-four hour news channels, putting increased public pressure to do something on the western political leaders.

            Finally it was decided to intervene militarily with the dual purpose of protecting civilians targeted by Serbs in Bosnia and pushing all sides to the bargaining table.  After one month of bombing, all sides finally agreed to a ceasefire and eventually to meet for proximity talks in Dayton, OH.  The product of those negotiations, the Dayton Accords, was seen as the best possible result considering the circumstances.  The most immediate goal was to end the fighting in Bosnia.  That was definitely accomplished.  But there is some difference of opinion as to whether the Dayton Accords represented the best possible model for long-term, sustainable peace in Bosnia.

Essential to building peace in Bosnia is effectively dealing with issues of identity that permeate the conflict.  In reading the Dayton Accords, it is obvious that identity was an important issue in the negotiations.  One entire annex to the agreement detailed the creation of a committee to detail the designation of national historical sites and another created a human rights commission (General Framework 1995).  Analyzing how identity was addressed is a good way to evaluate the potential effectiveness of the Dayton Accords.  Using Rothman’s ARIA model as a basis, I will attempt to show both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Dayton Accords with respect to resolving issues of identity and offer suggestions both for how the Dayton Accords could have been improved and what the next steps in Bosnia should be to reconcile clashing identities.

 

The War in Bosnia

            Ethnic violence has been a part of Balkan history for millennia.  Bosnia itself can be described as a kind of ethnic crossroads.  Countless invading hoards and armies, from the Byzantines and the Franks to the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary to Germany and Italy, have fought for control of the territory now known as Bosnia.  Milosevic used the defeat of the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as a rallying cry in his rise to power following the collapse of communism and the beginning of the collapse of Yugoslavia.  In its history, Bosnia had more often than not been a part of a larger country or empire.  As these rulers passed away and new ones moved in, war had always raged in Bosnia (Burg and Shoup 1999).  Perhaps then it should not have been surprising when the Soviet empire fell away that war once again broke out.

            During the time that Tito and communism ruled Yugoslavia, open ethnic warfare was kept in check.  This was done from the outset in 1945 through mass killings of opponents to the government, estimated at 250,000 (Malcolm 1994).  The Catholic Church and Islam were both essentially banned while the Orthodox Church survived only because of its support for Tito.  Despite this it was apparent that Yugoslavia was made up of at least two nations, Serbs and Croats.  Muslims were considered to be either Serb or Croat, not a third nationality.  By the 1960s, the republics were gradually gaining more autonomy within the Yugoslav federation.  With this autonomy national competition was also increasing at many levels.  Corruption and familial competition harkened back to the middle ages and resulted in a stagnation of the Yugoslav economy.  In 1988, factory workers demonstrated against government austerity measures.  More mass demonstrations led eventually to the replacement of Politburos in Vojvodina and Montenegro.  Behind the scenes orchestrating the popular discontent was the new leader of the Serbian Communist party, Slobodan Milosevic.

            With the structure of communism falling away, Yugoslavs struggled to find a new definition of themselves.  Nationalism became the answer.  Nationalism in the Balkans was used to declare that a new nation was being born out of the rubble of the old (Scheibe 1983).  Milosevic skillfully used the discontentment of Serbs to build his own power.  In the vacuum created by economic hardship under communist rule, Serb nationalism found a fertile ground to grow rapidly and reemerge as the basis for politics in Yugoslavia.  The first sign of the storm clouds of war came in March 1989 when Milosevic had the Serbian assembly revoke the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina.  Workers struck in protest, but these demonstrations were harshly put down by Serb security forces (Malcolm 1994).  This gave further catalyst to the reorganization of Yugoslav politics along nationalist lines.  Independent parties, which had been legalized in 1988, were now being formed throughout all of the republics in advance of the first multiparty elections in 1990.  Voters elected candidates from many of the most radical nationalist parties often not out of support for the candidate but for fear of what others might do if they won office (Burg and Shoup 1999).

It was during this election that the cast of characters was set for Dayton.  Milosevic had come to power in the old communist structure and was now consolidating power throughout the old Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  By appealing to history and nationalism, Milosevic was able to win over Serbs not only in Serbia but Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia.  His goal was to carve a new Serbian entity out of the republics that remained after the dissolution of Yugoslavia (Malcolm 215).  This was accomplished by Serbs in other republics declaring certain territory a “Serb Autonomous Republic.”  This was first done in Croatia and later in Bosnia to create the Republika Srpska.  Serbs would do this after a sustained propaganda and misinformation campaign calling on history to warn Serbs that the Croatian Nazi sympathizers, Ustasa, would persecute them again as they had done during World War II (Malcolm 1994).  For Serbs, the war in Bosnia was an attempt by Milosevic to consolidate his own power behind a cloak of fear that termed the war as one of self-defense against Croatia. 

            In Croatia, the elections in 1990 brought to power Franjo Tudjman.  Tudjman had similar aspirations for Croatia that Milosevic had for Serbia.  To strengthen his claim, Tudjman argued that Bosnians were actually originally ethnically Croatian, and so Bosnia should of course fall to the jurisdiction of Croatia (Malcolm 1994).  Despite this, Croatia found itself on the same side of the conflict as the rest of Bosnia.  Strong Serbian nationalist rhetoric in the media and elsewhere had created fear and brought Bosnian Muslim and Croats into a somewhat unsteady alliance.  Despite their common enemy, Croatia territorial desires still made Muslims wary of their partners.  Bosnia had always historically been a battleground for the Serbs and Croats, so Bosnia worried a war could merely result in redividing Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia yet again.  Croatia, like Serbia, was interested in protecting its newly independent state and gaining as much territory in Bosnia as it could.

            Bosnia’s first President, Alija Izetbegovic, was caught between a rock and a hard place beginning with his election in 1990.  He was a devout Muslim both religiously and nationally, but also had an interesting mix of secularism and toleration as well.  Of the three leaders, Izetbegovic was the most authentically Bosnian, in that he recognized the multicultural character of Bosnia and the impossibility of creating a state dominated by one or another ethnicity.  To balance the tapestry of nationalities within Bosnia, Izetbegovic favored a strong central government and was against the devolution of power to ethnic republics (Burg and Shoup 1999).  This put him at odds with both Croatia and Serbia and created a three-sided conflict, despite attempts to form a federation with the Croatians to concentrate their efforts against the Serbs.

            The international community could also be described as a party to this conflict as well.  In Dayton they served an ostensibly third party role.  But the willingness of the international community to act militarily against Serbia during the war also makes them a part to the conflict as well.  They viewed the war in Bosnia as a civil war between nations that hate each other and have hated each other for centuries (Burg and Shoup 1999).  It was this history that convinced the internationals early on not to get involved.  To do so would only lead to a Vietnam or Somalia style conflict in which many would be killed without attaining the goal set out at the onset of the intervention.  Given this point of view, the only goal of the international community was to stop the fighting and prevent Serbia and Milosevic from slaughtering more innocent civilians.  This was accomplished through limited strategic bombing that eventually, along with the threat of the deployment of ground troops in Bosnia, pushed Milosevic to accept talks and lead to the conclusion of the Dayton General Framework Agreement.

            Bosnia can be described as a conflict between political ambitions that grew into a conflict based on identity.  Nationalism was not a substantive issue in the war.  Territorial desires were what started the war and compromise on those desires is what ended the war.  Ethnicity was used as a weapon to garner public support for a war of ambition rather than protection or self-preservation.  Within Bosnia, Serbs, Croats and Muslims had lived among each other in some areas without any problems.  One of the defining characteristics of Sarajevo, for example, was its diversity.  So alongside a history of division and violence, there is also a tradition of coexistence and tolerance within Bosnia.  Some therefore see the war not as an inevitable product of history, but rather a strategic plan to produce political domination (Campbell 1998).  But even if the war at its root was only about political ambition, the use of demonization and misinformation to rally popular and international support for the war quickly changed it into a conflict in which identity was heavily involved if not inextricably linked.

 

The ARIA Framework

            Before dealing with the Dayton negotiations themselves, I want to set out the framework that I will be using to examine the agreement.  This is the ARIA model created by Jay Rothman (1992, 1997, 2001).  ARIA stands for antagonism, resonance, invention, and action-the four steps of this conflict resolution model.  It is inspired by the human needs theory of John Burton that identity is one of the basic needs (Burton 1990).  This model was also born out of Rothman’s personal experience as an American Jew fully assimilated into that culture in traveling to Israel and feeling the strength of his Jewish identity.  This prompted him to ask how this strong sense of identity could be felt and expressed at the same time allow space for the expression of Palestinian identity as well.  From that question and further study of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Martin Buber, Rothman arrived at ARIA (Rothman 1997).

The goal of the first stage of ARIA, antagonism, is to get the parties to begin to frame the problem.  The adversaries frame their conflict in order to surface the antagonism.  Rothman identifies four key processes in this first step:  blaming the other side, polarization, attributing negative character to the other side, and projecting unacceptable traits from one’s own side to the other.  This overall framing process allows both sides to let out their anger in a controlled manner, gives a starting point for comparison for the process, and provides motivation to look at new approaches to the conflict (Rothman 1997).  This step lays bare the emotions and frustrations of both parties and allows them space to express these emotions in such a way that the stage can be state to move past antagonism toward resolution.

            The second stage, resonance, strives to find areas of commonality between the two parties.  At this point, the parties reframe the conflict from its original frame in the antagonism stage.  This involves reflexivity and internal exploration to examine one’s own role in the conflict.  Often when the parties shed the baggage of surface substantive demands and delve into the deeper issues of identity that underlie those demands, they discover that their concerns are held in common (Rothman 1997).  This point of intersection begins to encourage the parties that they may not be so different and even may be able to work as partners in resolving conflict.  The resonance encourages both sides to explore their common humanity and needs and sets up positive momentum to begin dealing with the conflict at hand together.

            The third stage, invention, begins the problem solving process.  At this point both parties have gone through a period and process of reflection and reframing that has allowed them to begin to work together.  The goal in the invention stage is working together creatively to find a solution that satisfies both sides needs.  Some of the techniques used during this stage include differentiation, expansion, and compensation (Rothman 1997).  This process leaves behind the original substantive demands to explore the motivations for those demands and create accommodations that allow needs to be met.

            The final stage in the ARIA model is action.  This is the point where any agreements that have been reached are implemented.  This is when the two parties go home and begin to live with each other.  Rothman lists three approaches to implementation.  First, the parties can begin by planning individual projects together.  This enables them to tackle some of the less contentious issues and begin to build confidence that they can work together in this stage.  A second approach is institution building.  This involves setting up a joint body that is responsible for working on several projects simultaneously.  Third, the sides can engage in negotiation and problem solving.  This more formal process would build upon work done in previous sessions to try and create a comprehensive political agreement that addresses all areas of the conflict (Rothman 1997).  Conflicts may see all three of these approaches at some point during their implementation.  It may begin with specific projects and, as confidence builds, work its way up to a larger comprehensive political agreement.  Through the four stages of ARIA, adversaries can progressively transform their conflict and their relationship from antagonism to partnership.

 

Critiquing Dayton

            By 1995, Bosnia was a country crying out for some sort of solution to the war that had raged for nearly five years.  Sarajevo, once a cosmopolitan city that had entered the world stage by hosting the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, was now showing the effects of years of shelling and had become a sniper’s paradise.  Pressure mounted in the West for the international community to do something as the public responded to images of mass graves on television every night.  Later that year, the process of stopping the war began.  In a matter of months, a ceasefire and a permanent peace agreement was reached, short time compared to other conflicts.  But the peace in Bosnia has been a tenuous one, only maintained for the past seven years by the presence of tens of thousands of NATO troops.  So did Dayton create peace, or merely create an international protectorate with a permanent international military presence?

 

Dancing Toward Peace:  The Process

The road to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the proximity talks that resulted in the Dayton General Framework Agreement began long before the actual negotiations started in November of 1995.  Over the previous three years the international community had tried to create some kind of diplomatic solution to the war but all of their attempts failed.  In August of 1995, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke embarked on a set of negotiations that he hoped would set the stage for a more comprehensive gathering at a later date.  For two and a half months, Holbrooke shuttled all over Europe in this opening phase of pre-negotiation.  This followed a trip by a team including National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, then Lieutenant-General Wesley Clark, as well as additional people from the State and Defense Departments.  Their task was to prepare the European allies for what the U.S. had in mind and present a plan of action that had been lacking in the past.  The Europeans agreed quickly to such a concrete plan (Daalder 2000).

With the agenda for the international community was set, focus was shifted to getting the parties to the table.   This was accomplished through a months long shuttle diplomacy effort by Holbrooke.  The pre-negotiation phase was like many in other negotiations in that the primary purpose was to convince the parties to stop fighting and come to the table.  But in the case of Bosnia, there was a bit more encouragement.  The U.S. chose its side and engaged in a bombing campaign against the Serbs.  This action follows the logic that when one of the negotiators can threaten the use of overwhelming force, it can help the conclusion of an agreement (Louche1982).  It was believed, rightly or wrongly, that the U.S. was the only country that could force all the parties to a solution (Holbrooke 1999).  With a combination of threat, bombing, and tireless diplomacy, they did just that.

            Dayton began in a very adversarial atmosphere.  It has been described as a kind of Big Bang approach to negotiation, by locking everyone up in one place until an agreement is reached (Holbrooke 1999).  In advance of the opening negotiations, all three sides hardened their positions.  Serbia’s main goal was to get sanctions lifted.  Croatia wanted eastern Slavonia.  Bosnia was only interested in ending the war.  Given these varied goals, it is not surprising that not much happened in the opening days of negotiations.  Indeed the negotiations did not move out of this frame at all.  At the outset of the negotiations, copies of draft agreements on the constitution, elections, and the Implementation Force (IFOR) were handed out to all of the Presidents (Holbrooke 1999).  Some issues may have remained outstanding, but the peace was going to come on the terms of the Contact Group, especially if they were the ones who were going to guarantee any agreement.

            What ensued over the following three weeks can be best termed as a bargaining process punctuated with threats from the U.S.  Sprinkled within this however were efforts to break down the distrust and hatred that existed on all sides.  One example of this was a dinner that was held on the third day of negotiations.  In the one casual conversation between Izetbegovic and Milosevic during the whole negotiations, both expressed the common view that when the fighting began, they did not think it would last so long (Holbrooke 1999).  Despite this glimmer, the negotiations at Dayton did not deal at all with issues of identity but rather concentrated on divvying up Bosnia in such a way that the fighting would end.

            Ultimately, negotiations hinged on threats of closing down the conference and resuming military action against Serbia.  Power politics ruled the day in Dayton, and an agreement was imposed on all sides with various threats to each.  This scene would be replayed again in 1999 in Rambouillet as the U.S. bombed Serbia into submission again to force them to sign an agreement with Kosovo.  Dayton had numerous flaws, some of which even Holbrooke has acknowledged.  These including allowing two separate armies in Bosnia (one Serb, one Croat/Muslim), not coordinating the military implementation with the civilian, and allowing the Serb entity to remain named “Republika Srpska” (Holbrooke 1999).  These weaknesses call into question whether the peace created by Dayton will last long or if NATO forces will ever be able to leave.

           

 

Dayton:  ARIA Style

            After three weeks of hard bargaining, an agreement was finally reached November 21, 1995.  The agreement essentially divided Bosnia into two republics, one Serb and one Croat and Bosnian Muslim, with a weak federal structure meant to create a single state.  While the absence of war is definitely better than shelling and killing, some have also criticized the Dayton agreement.  They argue that while those such as Holbrooke argued that the agreement helped to maintain a single, multiethnic, Bosnian state, in reality the agreement enshrined partition (Campbell 1998).  In fact since 1992 with the Vance Owen Plan that gave 49% of Bosnia to Serbs and 51% to the Croatians and Bosnians, the international community has signaled its willingness to allow ethnic cleansing and create two new entities.   Following Kelman’s logic, since the entities created are defined ethnically, especially the Republika Srpska, and are ethnically pure states, they lack legitimacy (Kelman 1997).  What might Dayton have looked like had the ethnic differences been discussed in an ARIA framework and would it have worked in this instance to create a better, multiethnic settlement?

The first stage may have looked similar to the entire negotiation in Dayton, with both sides laying out their respective positions and not giving any ground.  But the resonance stage would have been unlike anything seen in diplomacy.  All sides would be asked to share some of their personal stories and experiences with the war outside of their official capacities.  The emphasis would shift from positional arguments to expressing and sharing emotions connected to particular events in the war.  From this, they could then move on to discover the motivations for fighting the war in Bosnia.  All sides would ask one another questions over a period of perhaps several days to begin to move toward one another and truly hear what the other saying.  Gradually common ground will begin to emerge and their intertwined futures will become apparent.

Stage three, invention, is where practical solutions are created.  This stage emphasis brainstorming and creating a number of different alternatives, as opposed to the essentially one alternative that existed at Dayton.  What other options could have been discovered?  There are surely countless formulas to divide authority within Bosnia.  One option perhaps would be to create a single state with a rotating presidency, not unlike Yugoslavia during the 1980s, and have a strong, multinational central government.  On the other end, they could have decided just to give certain territories to Serbia and Croatia and let the remainder fall under the authority of a Bosnian government.  Whatever the formula, it would be created by the participants and not imposed by the outside.

Stage four, action, is where the rubber meets the road.  This stage would require political will on the part of the parties as well as the international community to ensure that any agreement could be implemented.  In the case of Bosnia, there may still be a need for a transitional peacekeeping force as well as many of the functions being carried out by IFOR today.  Creating a new police force, human rights training, and new government institutions would all be necessary components of any plan of action.  Money from outside the region as well would be greatly needed to help rebuild areas devastated by years of war.

Does this scenario sound likely?  In a word, no.  Does it sound possible?  In the case of Bosnia, probably not.  The ARIA model is well constructed for enabling dialogue and exploring the roots of conflict.  But in the case of Bosnia, it seems doubtful that ARIA would have served a complete role in ending the war.  The connection between what seems to be a sound theory and the reality of a world dominated by power politics is lacking.  This is not to say that ARIA would not be useful.  Rothman admits that ARIA does not replace other methods, but adds to the tools available (Rothman and Olson 2001).  In fact, ARIA is exactly what is needed now in post-Dayton Bosnia to begin to rebuild trust between the ethnic groups that was destroyed by nationalist propaganda during the war.  But it does not present itself as an alternative to war in the face of power politics.

Bosnia was not so much a war about ethnicity as it was one about the use of identity for personal gain and misinformation.  By describing the war as one based on ancient ethnic hatred, the U.S. had not only created a reluctance to get involved.  It further legitimated the propaganda that was being used by Milosevic and Tudjman to whip their supporters into a frenzy.  Before the war came to Bosnia, few considered ethnicity as a part of daily life (Campbell 1998).  It became an issue when it was used by Milosevic to provide justification for his desire to protect Serbs in Bosnia.  In the end, Bosnia was about one thing, power.  It has turned into a far more complicated situation with the manipulation of the population and use of history to create division.  Ethnic hatred was a result of the war, not the other way around.  Now, it is an unavoidable reality that must be confronted to help create long-term peace for Bosnia.

 

 

 

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