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Helsinki Commission: Dayton ended the war but its constitutional design constrains Bosnia’s future
Summary
At a Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe hearing marking the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Accords, experts said Dayton secured peace but enshrined ethnic divisions, leaving Bosnia mired in corruption, political paralysis and vulnerable to outside influence; witnesses urged EU-led reform and targeted U.S. support.
The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe convened a hearing marking the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, where lawmakers and three outside experts agreed the 1995 agreement ended large-scale violence but left Bosnia and Herzegovina with institutional constraints that now hinder democratic development.
"Thirty years without a significant breakdown in security is a remarkable accomplishment," the commission chair said, opening the session with a summary of Dayton’s achievements and its worst atrocities, including the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995, when roughly 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed. The chair and witnesses placed the accord’s success in ending the war alongside warnings that its constitutional arrangements have calcified ethnic political divisions.
Dr. Christopher Chivvis of the Carnegie Endowment argued that Dayton was an extraordinary diplomatic achievement that bought peace, but that the United States now…
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