II.

Background to the Dayton Accord

War broke out in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s after the Yugoslav federation (comprising Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia) began to dissolve. Ethnic Serbs launched armed struggles in Croatia (June 1991) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (April 1992) after those republics declared their independence from Yugoslavia. The Serbs, who did not want to secede from Serb-controlled Yugoslavia, fought to carve out separate Serb-controlled territories within Croatia and Bosnia. The Serb separatists were given military support by Slobodan Milošević, the leader of the republic of Serbia. Around the same time, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia also began fighting a brutal war over territory. The war in Croatia lasted until January 1992, when an unconditional ceasefire established an uneasy peace between the Croatian government and ethnic Serbs. The war between Croats and Muslims in Bosnia halted with the signing of the Washington agreement in March 1994, which established a Muslim-Croat federation in Bosnia. Fighting between Croat-Muslim forces and the Serbs continued, however, despite international efforts to establish a lasting ceasefire.

In the summer of 1995 the tide began to turn against the Serbs, as Muslim-Croat forces recaptured some of the Serb-held territory in Bosnia. Around that time, the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) initiated aggressive efforts to bring the war to an end. In November, Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović, Serbian president Milošević, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, and representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the European Union (EU) met at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on the outskirts of Dayton. Several weeks later, Izetbegović, Milošević, and Tudjman initialled the comprehensive peace agreement that became known as the Dayton peace accord. The accord was signed formally in Paris on December 1.