Chronic. It was one of the flagships of Western multilateral diplomacy in the post-Cold War era. Signed in Paris on December 14, 1995 after three weeks of difficult talks with the belligerents confined to a military base in Ohio (Midwest), the Dayton accords ended three years of inter-ethnic war in Bosnia, the last of the century on the European continent. They also symbolized the know-how and the power of the United States, whose energetic envoy Richard Holbrooke had led the negotiation, reporting every evening to a “contact group” made up of French, British, German and Russian diplomats. .
If they made it possible to stop the war, these agreements, however, did not build peace. Twenty-six years later, “Dayton” has aged badly. Not only does the conflict threaten to reignite, but Russia, supported from afar by China and closely by some autocrats in the region, seeks to unravel the Balkan order installed by the Western powers on the ruins of Yugoslavia. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, populist nationalism is resurfacing. We are at XXIe century, but the specter of the 1990s lurks, insidious, before the eyes of a European Union (EU) entangled in its own contradictions.
The feverish outbreak is inevitably the strongest in Bosnia. The troublemaker here is Milorad Dodik, Bosnian Serbian nationalist leader, member of the collegiate presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Once considered a moderate, he, a sign of the times, joined the autocratic cohort with, as a bonus, separatist aims. He is furious at the decision taken in July by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, charged with overseeing the civilian implementation of the Dayton Accords, to penalize the denial of the Srebrenica genocide and the glorification of war criminals.
Milorad Dodik no longer wants the construction common to the two entities created by Dayton to allow Serbs, Croats and Bosnians to coexist in peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina – the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and the Bosnian Croat Federation. For months, he has been threatening to leave the joint armed forces to create his own force; he now says he will do so at the end of November and will also remove the Serbian Republic from the Bosnian judiciary and tax system. In ordinary language, this is called secession. The small Serbian republic has already created its own drug agency.
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