View from the Street: Thirty years after Dayton – why Bosnia’s peace still feels temporary
Published
Sabina Kadić-Mackenzie
“We can’t leave the children of Bosnia with this burden on their back. We must remember the past, because a person without a past has no future… We buried our sons, but we cannot bury the truth.”
– Munira Subašić, survivor and president of the Mothers of Srebrenica
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I was just a young girl when the war began.
One day, I was playing in the streets with friends. The next, neighbours started to vanish, fear moved in, and life was never the same again.
I survived the Bosnian war, but others were not so lucky.
That war left more than just scars. It left grit and a duty; a duty to remember, to insist on truth and to speak when silence would be infinitely easier.
Today, I carry the grief of lives lost, a childhood stolen, and the determination to ensure that what happened to my country is neither forgotten, nor repeated.
More than 100,000 civilians were killed. Among that number were more than 1,600 children. Upwards of two million people were forcibly displaced. And the world watched it all unfold, in full colour, on their TV screens.
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This year marks three decades since the genocide in Bosnia. It is also the anniversary of the signing of the deal that ended the bloody conflict – the Dayton Peace Agreement.
However, whilst peace was brokered, Bosnia and Dayton remains a cautionary tale. It is a painful lesson in what happens when the international community opts for crisis management over conflict resolution, hurried negotiations for peace, while turning a blind eye to the cracks in the foundations on which it is built.
Friday (11 July) marks the UN International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. It is a date for remembrance but also a reminder – as if one were needed in today’s world – that the words “never again”amount to little more than a platitude unless we act collectively to stop atrocities being committed now and in the future as they were in the past.
It is also a day of shame for the state of Serbia and the United Nations for their roles in allowing genocide to take place once again on European soil.
The pain is still most deeply felt by the Mothers of Srebrenica [warning: graphic descriptions of genocide].
Ordinary women, like Munira Subašić, who lost everything she loved in the unbearable heat of that July, 30 years ago. In a matter of days, far too many like her “lost” their sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers in the androcide.
The youngest was two days old.
The aim was to erase a people.
People like me.
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The Mothers of Srebrenica are a reminder that justice delayed is more than justice denied. It is trauma prolonged.
Some 8,372 mostly Muslim men and boys were murdered in and around the town of Srebrenica in July 1995.
The massacres occurred despite the town in eastern-Bosnia being designated a United Nations “safe area,” under the protection of international peacekeeping forces.
The town, entrusted to the global community’s care, became a killing ground – a symbol of the failed intervention and broken promises that Bosnians would later come to expect.
Thirty years after those horrors, Bosnia is still waiting. Waiting for bones to be unearthed and laid to rest. Waiting for justice. Waiting for a peace that doesn’t feel conditional.
Dayton may have stopped the bullets, but it has prolonged the waiting. Its failure is rooted in a misunderstanding of the complex ethnic divisions which, to this day, hang heavy over the former Yugoslav states.
Instead of addressing them, in 1995 Dayton embedded ethnic division further into the very structure of Bosnia’s political system. What was designed as a short-term fix became permanent – one that actively resists change, keeps communities apart and still holds Bosnia hostage to the past.
On a recent delegation to Bosnia with charity Beyond Srebrenica, of which I am chair, one survivor described it as continuing to tie Bosnia’s hands behind its back.
But what should happen next?
What should, what can, and what will likely happen, are, unsurprisingly, contested.
The limbo is set to continue, not least because Dayton, quite incredibly, has no exit strategy. No sunset clause. No hope for change any time soon.
Change is also unlikely without the attention of the international community, not least those who brokered the deal. In the decades since the genocide, they – including the UK, once a leading voice in the region – have slowly but steadily stepped back.
That should alarm us all, especially in today’s global climate of rising nationalism, conflict, and divisions.
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As conflicts rage around the world, Bosnians are watching carefully, many stating the obvious as we watch leaders grapple with their own duty to keep us safe.
“Mir nije samo odsustvo rata”, as they say. “Peace is not only the absence of war.”
Peace demands reconciliation to truly mean something.
But reconciliation depends on justice, and justice depends on truth.
Perhaps that’s why Bosnia’s justice feels piecemeal, incomplete. It will not – cannot – be served as long as the truth of what happened remains contested, as long as international support remains symbolic, and while there is no sense of urgency.
All the while, the people of Bosnia continue to suffer, on the periphery of meaningful peace and of the European dream.
Without a renewed international commitment to readdressing Dayton, Bosnia’s path forward will remain uncertain.
But action over words could shift the dial. The UK and the wider international community must move beyond symbolic statements and commit to a strategy grounded in justice and accountability, starting with a serious reckoning with Dayton.
It may once have been an oversight, but today the peace agreement barely holding Bosnia together acts to preserve the very structures that protect those who deny or glorify the genocide, and seek to fan the flames of division.
Take Milorad Dodik, for example. He is the leader of Republika Srpska, within Bosnia itself, and boldly and freely denies the genocide at Srebrenica took place, despite the ruling of international courts. And yet, he governs from the highest office from within the very land where that genocide was carried out, among the very people whose loved ones were forcibly removed from their families, held in concentration and rape camps and, in many cases, slaughtered.
To survivors, this is not peace. It is not justice. It is the opposite of these ideals.
Until the truth is upheld, Bosnia will remain trapped in the shadow of its dark past.
Bosnians have carried their duty to truth for three decades now, all the while bearing the physical and mental scars.
We are exhausted.
We want to move forward, and to do so with a meaningful, equitable peace that is worth more than the paper it’s written on.
As Majka Munira Subašić says, we buried our sons, but we cannot bury the truth. Because a person without a past has no future.