Op-Ed: Dayton Accords Working In Balkans

Dayton Accords Working In Balkans

By R. Bruce Hitchner, Dayton Daily News, February 10, 1998

U.S. troops’ presence guarantees progress

The Dayton Peace Accords are beginning to take hold in Bosnia. Indeed, for the first time since the accords were signed more than two years ago at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, diplomats and experts are in general agreement that Bosnia has a real chance to emerge as a unified multiethnic state.

What has happened in Bosnia over the last 12 months to give cause for such optimism? The answers are in the findings of a recent conference in Vienna entitled ‘Bosnia after SFOR?’ and sponsored by the Center for Democracy, the International Crisis Group, and the Austrian Federal Chancellery.

* The international Stabilization Force (SFOR), including U.S. troops, has begun arresting indicted war criminals.

* The International Police Task Force, or IPTF, has been actively breaking up unauthorized police checkpoints and seizing illegal weapons at police stations that are held by extremists.

* The U.N. Office of the High Representative has begun to intervene forcefully in the political impasses over a common currency, national flag and other sovereignty issues.

* The U.S. Train and Equip program has succeeded in unifying the essentially Muslim and Croat armies and, in the process, promoted democratization in the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the two entities created by the Dayton accords.

* Extremist parties have continued to lose public support in the municipal elections. The Serb Democratic Party, in particular, the party of indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, now commands the support of less than 20 percent of the Bosnian Serb electorate.

* The Bosnian Serb parliament recently chose as prime minister Milorad Dodik, an anti-nationalist and successful businessman who supports the Dayton peace process and political, economic and social cooperation between the Republika Srpska and the rest of Bosnia.

* The Bosnian Serb, Croat and Muslim Socialist parties have agreed to combine forces in September’s municipal elections.

* The United States and its European allies have begun to think less about an ‘end date’ for their military presence in Bosnia and more in terms of an ‘end state,’ i.e., the creation of a stable and secure Bosnia that would not require the presence of outside stabilization forces.

* Planning is under way by SFOR and the U.N. High Commission on Refugees to resettle up to 200,000 refugees and displaced persons in 1998.

* Bosnia’s economy has had the highest growth rate in the world over the last two years.

* Reconstruction assistance soon will begin to flow to those towns and cantons in the Republika Srpska that support the Dayton peace process.

These positive developments could not have occurred without an engaged and robust U.S. military presence in Bosnia, and could easily be undone if congressional opponents of current administration policy succeed in the coming months in cutting off funding for American troops in that country.

The international community, led by the United States, must be allowed to ‘finish the job’ in Bosnia. An abrupt end to the U.S. military presence would not only send the wrong signal to our friends and enemies in the region, but it also would raise questions about the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Delaware, reminded us here in Dayton last November, ‘The United States has too much at stake and has invested far too much in resources and prestige to pull out of Bosnia after the expiration of SFOR’s mandate in June 1998.’

Carl Bildt, the recently retired U.N. high representative in Bosnia, emphasized the latter point in his address to the conference. NATO, he asserted, needs to rethink its deployment strategy as the major security issues facing Europe are no longer along the former German frontier with the former Soviet Empire but in southeastern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

The maintenance of troops in Bosnia and elsewhere in the Balkans would, according to Bildt, serve as a deterrent to future conflict throughout the region. In other words, making progress toward peace in Bosnia must increasingly be understood as part of a larger U.S. national-security interest in a stable Eastern Europe.

But ultimately we cannot let Bosnia’s relationship to NATO obscure the more profound moral argument for staying the course in that country after June 1998, when SFOR’s mandate runs out.

Those, like U.S. Rep. John Kasich of Ohio, who oppose a continuation of the U.S. military’s mission in Bosnia, need to be reminded that it is American troops, not British, French or other troops, who have genuine credibility among the people of Bosnia; that it is American troops who have kept the extremist politicians and police at bay and in so doing fostered democracy; that it is the presence of American troops that has kept Croatia and Serbia from achieving their goal of dividing and annexing Bosnia; and that it is not only Bosnians but American troops who want to stay and finish the job.

Bosnia is neither Vietnam nor Somalia, and will not become another Cyprus. It represents a new paradigm for the careful and judicious use of American forces as peacekeepers and democracy builders. I can think of no better example of virtue emerging from necessity.