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The Dayton Implementation Process Two days after the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed in Paris on 14 December 1995, NATO launched the largest military operation ever undertaken by the alliance, Operation Joint Endeavor. A 60,000 strong NATO-led multinational Implementation Force (IFOR), started its mission on 20 December 1995 with a one-year mandate to end hostilities, separate the Federation and Serbian forces, transfer control over remaining pockets of Federation or Serbian held territory to their respective Entities, and secure heavy weapons. IFOR accomplished these tasks by the end of June 1996, and also opened roads, repaired bridges, freed up Sarajevo airport and key railway lines, and provided security for the September 1996 and subsequent elections.
But IFOR was less successful at the other security tasks under the Dayton Agreement, such as arresting indicted war criminals, establishing conditions for refugee return, and implementing arrangements for arms control and demilitarization. One year into IFOR’s takeover, Bosnia was still an extremely insecure country to live in. Though the numbers of irregular Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian forces had halved by late 1996, there were still approximately 150,000 active soldiers, many of them in irregular Serbian and Croatian paramilitaries. These conditions led to an extension of NATO’s mandate in Bosnia, this time with a 32,000 strong Stabilization Force (SFOR). SFOR had the same robust rules of engagement as IFOR under Chapter VII of the UN Charter (peace enforcement). Its mandate was wider than that of IFOR, and included preventing new threats to peace as well as promoting conditions under which the peace process could move forward. The new mandate was partly to improve security coordination between implementing agencies. Under the Dayton Agreement, security was divided into military and policing functions, with NATO assuming the former and the UN the latter. Annex 4 of the Dayton Agreement tasked the UN with assisting the provision of “a safe and secure environment for all persons by ensuring that civilian law enforcement agencies operate in accordance with internationally recognized standards and with respect for internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms” (Art. III 2 (c)). And Annex 11 tasked the UN with setting up an International Police Task Force (IPTF) to:
Hampered by limited resources, the IPTF was able to place monitors at only 60 locations to supervise the transformation of local wartime police to regular civilian police — and even here they were blocked by local authorities in the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Croatian paramilitary held region of Mostar. It took another two years before the IPTF could begin to reduce the “large numbers of weapons in police possession” (in 1997) and work with SFOR to remove illegal checkpoints. The task of creating a multiethnic federal police remained a distant goal, resisted by Serbian and Croatian paramilitaries and government officials, and also by the Bosnian government. By end 1997 the IPTF had less that 500 policemen. The UN had to negotiate additional powers through the Bonn-Petersberg Agreement on Federation Police Restructuring, and in 1998 had to negotiate a similar agreement separately with the Serbian Republic. Initially, therefore, the lines of partition hardened rather than softened. Though the UNHCR succeeded in arranging the return of 400,000 refugees, 600,000 Bosnian refugees remained abroad and over 800,000 Bosnians remained displaced internally. Instead of tracing missing persons, municipalities engaged in “body for body exchanges.” Refugee returns continued to be hotly opposed, with UNHCR reporting murders of returnees as recently as March 2003. The cantons, entities and federation refused to adopt uniform laws or uniform law enforcement. Mostar was and remained one of the worst offenders. The E.U. administrator for Mostar and the UN-E.U. High Representative for Bosnia periodically dismissed Croatian municipal, cantonal and federation representatives, but the rule of law was elusive. Though there were no less than 55 official implementing agencies and countries involved in post conflict reconstruction and stabilization, an ambiguous mandate and lack of clearly defined mechanisms for inter-agency or government cooperation meant progress was snaillike.
The slow pace of reform was partly because of the dual system of governance set up by the Dayton Agreement and partly because of pressures from across Bosnia’s borders (see Stability Pact). The UN-E.U. High Representative’s mandate was largely to monitor and guide Dayton’s implementation, while the Federation and Serbian entity governments would actually run the country. This division of responsibilities did not work in a country in which most institutions had been destroyed by war and politicians represented a highly polarized society. Nepotism was already entrenched well before the war began and was strengthened rather than weakened in the aftermath of war. The black economy that had established a stranglehold over Bosnia during the war continued into the peace. As late as 2002, the World Bank estimated that 20% of the Bosnian population was below the poverty line, and another 30% close to it. Government and ruling party corruption became endemic. In June 2002 the then High Representative, Wolfgang Petrisch, had to dismiss Federation Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Nikola Grabovac, because KM 1.7 million (approximately $US 800,000) were fraudulently transferred into private hands.
In its first five years the OHR concentrated on organizing elections, of which there have been four to date. The first two elections kept Bosnia’s three nationalist parties in power, the third brought in moderate coalition governments in the two entities, and the fourth returned the nationalists to power in 2003 but with a slightly reduced majority. The return of the nationalists was predictable — in March 2002, under pressure from the U.S. and E.U., the moderates’-led Bosnian government agreed to implement a Constitutional Court decision of 2000 that set minimum quotas for proportional ethnic representation in the legislative assemblies. Slowly, the focus shifted to nation building. In April 2002 the Bosnian legislature passed constitutional amendments that made proportional ethnic representation in public administrative bodies mandatory. In May the Bosnia government agreed to restructure the civil service, and a Civil Service Agency was established under Bosnian leadership. In June the Bosnian legislature agreed to establish a Special Department for Organized Crime, Economic Crime and Corruption in the Office of the Bosnian Prosecutor. In September the government and the Peace Implementation Council agreed to spur the economy through enforcing the rule of law, the “Jobs and Justice” program. The discovery that the Republika Srpska-based company Orao had engaged in illegal trade with the Iraqi military and that the Serbian Entity’s intelligence department (a wing of its armed forces) had been spying on various local and international institutions prompted further change. The Bosnian Serb member of the tripartite presidency, Mirko Sarovic, resigned, and the new High Representative, Lord Ashdown abolished the Serbian Entity’s top military authority, the Supreme Defense Council. In April 2003 Ashdown established a Bosnian Defense Reform Commission under the chairmanship of U.S. defense expert James Locher to prepare Bosnia for entry into NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in late 2004. The task entails disbanding separate ethnic armies to form Bosnia’s first integrated army. The new force will have between 10,000 and 15,000 troops — a reduction from the current numbers of 13,200 Federation Army (9,200 Muslims and 4,000 Croats), and 6,600 RS forces. But the Commission is still debating whether it should comprise three mixed brigades or three ethnic brigades under joint command. 2004 has also been set as the target date for Bosnia’s first joint intelligence agency. Tentatively called the Bosnian Intelligence Service (BOS), the new agency will be headed in its first year by a foreign national from a country that is now joining NATO and the EU. He and his team will screen the staff of the previous Federation and Serbian Republic intelligence agencies to see whom among them can be employed in the new agency, and will retrain them as “professional intelligence officers, capable of serving the entire community, irrespective of their ethnic or religious background.” | |
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Text written by Radha Kumar and David Pacheco. Copyright, Radha Kumar, 2007. |
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