Dayton Agreement

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Signing of the Dayton Accords.

Bosnia and Herzegovina
This article is part of the series: Politics and government of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Dayton Agreement High Representative Christian Schwarz-Schilling Presidency (Chairman) Haris Silajdžić (SBiH) Željko Komšić (SDP) Nebojša Radmanović (SNSD) Council of Ministers Acting Chair: Adnan Terzić Parliamentary Assembly House of Peoples House of Representatives Political parties Elections (2006 general elections) Political divisions Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Republika Srpska National Assembly President: Milan Jelić Prime Minister: Milorad Dodik Brčko District Foreign relations
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The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as the Dayton Agreement, Dayton Accords, or Dayton-Paris Agreement, is the peace agreement reached at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio in November 1995, and formally signed in Paris on December 14, 1995. These accords put an end to the three and a half year long war in Bosnia, one of the armed conflicts in the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia.

The negotiations were initiated following the unsuccessful previous peace efforts and arrangements, the August 1995 Croatian military Operation Storm and its aftermath, the Bosniak-Croat military offensive against the Republika Srpska, in concert with NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, i.e the bombardment of the Bosnian Serb military. It was also held in the shadow of the massacre in the Srebrenica safe zone, and the indictments against the main military and government leaders of Bosnian Serbs before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). During September and October 1995 the international community (especially the USA and Russia), gathered in the Contact Group, applied intense pressure to the leaders of the three sides to attend the negotiations in Dayton, Ohio.

The conference took place from November 1 to November 21, 1995. The main participants from the region were Serbian President Slobodan Milošević (representing the Bosnian Serb interests due to absence of Karadzic), Croatian President Franjo Tuđman, and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović with Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed "Mo" Sacirbey. The peace conference was chaired by American negotiator Richard Holbrooke with two Co-Chairmen in the form of EU Special Representative Carl Bildt and the First Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Igor Ivanov. A key participant in the US delegation was General Wesley Clark (later to become NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) in 1997). The UK military representative was Col Arundell David Leakey (later to become Commander of EUFOR in 2005).

The secure site was chosen in a bid to curb the participants' ability to negotiate in the media rather than at the bargaining table. In a far-from-subtle hint of the consequences should agreement not be reached, early in the talks a dinner for the participants was held in a hangar at the nearby U.S. Air Force Museum.

After having been initialed in Dayton, Ohio on November 21, 1995 the full and formal agreement was signed in Paris, France, on December 14, 1995 ^[1] also by French President Jacques Chirac, U.S. President Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister John Major, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. It should be noted that the official name of the Dayton Agreement is therefore the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (GFAP) or the Paris Protocol.

The present political divisions of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its structure of government were agreed upon as part the constitution that makes up Annex 4 of the General Framework Agreement concluded at Dayton. A key component of this was the delineation of the Inter-Entity Boundary Line, to which many of the tasks listed in the Annexes referred.

The agreement mandated a wide range of international organizations to monitor, oversee, and implement components of the agreement. The NATO-led IFOR (Implementation Force) was responsible for implementing military aspects of the agreement and deployed on the 20th December 1995, taking over the forces of the UNPROFOR.