The Dayton Accords and a Peace Signed on a Military Base
Near Dayton, Ohio
In November of nineteen ninety-five, a war that had killed more than one hundred thousand people and displaced millions across the former Yugoslavia was brought to a pause in a conference room at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
The location was chosen deliberately. The negotiators, including American diplomat Richard Holbrooke and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, wanted a venue where the principals could not negotiate through the press. An American military base in inland Ohio fit the purpose. The leaders of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were brought to Dayton and kept, in effect, at the table.
The talks ran from November first to November twenty-first, nineteen ninety-five. Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, and Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia signed an agreement that ended the Bosnian War, the bloodiest conflict on European soil since World War Two. The framework created a single sovereign state of Bosnia and Herzegovina divided into two administrative entities and established international peacekeeping presence on the ground.
The agreement was formally signed in Paris on December fourteenth. It has held, imperfectly. Tensions in the region have continued in the decades since, and the political framework created at Dayton remains contested and fragile. Whether the peace was just, or merely durable, is still argued by scholars and survivors. What is not disputed is that it was negotiated here, in a Midwestern city best known for bicycle mechanics and flood control, and that for twenty-one days in nineteen ninety-five, the fate of southeastern Europe was decided in Ohio.
