Prof. Daniel Serwer

TRANSCRIPT:

• Please explain your connection and expertise with the Dayton Peace Accords.

"My name is Daniel Serwer. I'm now a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at its Foreign Policy Institute. But in 1994, I was a State Department official hired by Dick Holbrooke to help consolidate the Bosnian Federation, the Croat-Bosniak Federation, which had been formed in January, February of 1994. And I came on in November of that year, October actually of that year, to strengthen it. Holbrooke was convinced that it was the only good thing we'd done in Bosnia since the beginning of the war, and he wanted to see it stronger."

• Should we observe the Dayton Peace Accords as a continuum, whereby its positive and negative attributes change depending on the context? How do we reconcile this Success-Failure tension when discussing its future and legacy?

"The way I think about it is that it was a success in the short term. It ended the war. It was a failure in the longer term because it didn't deal with the underlying conflicts and because it left in power, it not only left in power, it empowered the warring parties that had been fighting the war. So they continued to fight it, but by political and economic means rather than by military means, which they'd pretty much exhausted. So the post-war period has been plagued by the same dominance of ethno-nationalists that the wartime was dominated by."

• How can we observe the Dayton Negotiations Model: as a legacy of skilful diplomacy that ended a war and kept peace for 29 years or as a blueprint for future conflict resolution?

"We have to be very careful, it seems to me. The first way in which we have to be careful is to recognize the context in which it occurred. It occurred during what in America we think of as the unipolar moment. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Russia was on the ropes. China had not yet emerged. And Europe was not really yet a union and maybe still isn't a union, but it was even weaker as a union in 1995. The Americans could do pretty much anything they really wanted to do any place on earth. And that context doesn't exist today and isn't likely to exist during my lifetime again, or maybe even during your lifetime. So that's the first reservation I have about using the Dayton model, so to speak. The second reservation I have is that we have to understand what the outcome of this negotiation was. The outcome was a division of the country. I won't say partition, but a division of the country, which rewarded the aggression that Belgrade had committed and even rewarded in many respects, Croatia's aggression as well. The arm that was twisted at Dayton wasn't Milošević's. He went to Dayton suing for peace. It was Izetbegović who felt his arm was twisted at Dayton. And he said so very clearly at the signing of the agreement."

• Which elements from the Dayton negotiations process can transcend time and context and apply to mediating future conflicts? What are the most important lessons for the negotiators?

"The prime lesson from my point of view is that at least if you're talking about the Americans as mediators, they're going to find it easier to twist the arm of their friend than of their enemy. So if they drag friends and enemies off to make a peace agreement, the friends had better be very sure they get a good deal. Izetbegović did get a good deal in the sense that he got the arming of the Federation Armed Forces. That was his compensation for a bad deal at the negotiating table with the Serbs that was to be bought off by the Americans. In many respects, the most important part of the negotiation was not between the Serbs and the Sarajevo government. It was between the Serbs and the Americans and between the Americans and the Sarajevo government. I met the Bosnian Serbs at Dayton. They weren't even remotely involved in the negotiation. Milošević had their proxy vote. And he dealt with Holbrooke. He didn't deal much with Izetbegović. He dealt with Holbrooke. And as long as he got his 49%, he was okay. Because what he faced, if there wasn't a peace at Dayton, was the prospect of the Federation forces winning and 600,000 Bosnian Serbs walking out of Republika Srpska. 200,000, they say, 180,000, 200,000 Croatian Serbs had walked out of Croatia just a few months earlier. And they were calling for Milošević's head already. But they were only 180,000 and 600,000 who might have walked out of Bosnia would have been a much bigger problem for Milošević to survive. He was concerned about his own hold on power. And as long as he got 49% and didn't have the Serbs walk out of Bosnia, he felt he could manage the consequences of the agreement to be signed. With Izetbegović, as I mentioned, the key was the equip and train program for the Federation Armed Forces. That's what convinced him to accept an agreement that he thought was entirely unfair."

• If we look at current global affairs, do you think the international consensus to end a war is weaker today than in 1995? Would the Dayton Peace Accords be successfully negotiated and signed today?

"It's hypothetical I find it a bit difficult to address. Let me say this, that we know what happened at Rambouillet. It failed. I think there are lessons from Dayton to inform that failure. One lesson is that Rambouillet was not properly isolated. The isolation was important at Dayton. Another lesson, I think, is that you need to be sure that the right pressures have been brought there on the parties. And at Rambouillet, Belgrade wasn't feeling much pressure. Even the threat of bombing was... The Kosovo Serbs might have walked out of Kosovo too, but there were very few of them. And I don't think Milošević feared that they would bring him down. He was afraid that if he gave up Kosovo, that that would bring him down. So, you know, I think there is some parallel with even with current negotiations in the Balkans, because the so-called Belgrade-Pristina dialogue is really a dialogue between the EU and US with Belgrade, and between the EU and US with Pristina. The interaction between the two is really... The main action is in the mediators dealing separately with the parties. Could something like this be done for Ukraine? I don't think so. I don't think Putin is going to some isolated place in, I don't know where it would be neutral on this subject. to deal with Zelensky. I don't think that's the way this is going to end. This is a geopolitical world. The world of the 1990s was not. I mean, it was geopolitical in the sense that the Americans were hegemonic, but there were no countervailing geopolitical forces or geoeconomic forces, frankly. And so I don't think it's wise to think too much about Dayton as a model. I don't think it would have worked with Saddam Hussein. I don't think it would have worked with Bashar al-Assad. No, we're in a different era."

• Finally, what do you see as the key challenges for the future of conflict mediation?

"Well, the key challenge is just what I said, that the contending forces are much, much stronger today than the contending forces were in the 1990s. I mean, the Bosnian army had exactly one tank, if I remember correctly. It was kept in a tunnel in Sarajevo and rolled out occasionally, go boom, boom, and then roll back into the tunnel. We're talking about a war in Ukraine where the Russians have lost hundreds and hundreds of tanks and other heavy equipment. This is a very different kind of war. There are some similarities in the ethnic cleansing. I mean, the Russians are clearly trying to get rid of everybody who regards himself as Ukrainian and build up Russian institutions inside of Ukraine, the occupied portions of Ukraine. So that is a parallel, but the level of force being used is, you know, a thousand, 10,000 times greater. Same between Israel and Palestine. If war ever breaks out over Taiwan, it's going to be the same thing. This capacity of mediators to bring people to the table and to craft not a win-win outcome, but get from a mutually hurting stalemate to a mutually enticing opportunity is that becomes much, much more difficult after three years of violence at levels that are even greater than the levels used in World War II in some respects. I don't think the future of mediation is going to be like the past of mediation. In the past, I mean, what we did at Dayton was to make it a mutually hurting stalemate. It wasn't a mutually hurting stalemate. The Federation forces were advancing very, very rapidly. The Serbs were about to be defeated, and we saved them from defeat by stopping the Federation forces before they got to Banja Luka. They were within a day or two of Banja Luka. You can picture doing that with Bosnia, but it's very hard to picture doing that with Ukraine or with war over Taiwan or with Israel, Palestine. The ability of the United States, even if President Biden had said no more arms for Israel, which would have been a way of getting to a mutually hurting stalemate, even if he had said that, it might have been months, might have been years before the Israelis ran out of stuff, kit, as they call it. This is war at a very different level. The way to deal with this kind of war is to prevent it."