Dayton Reexamined

”Dayton.” The word has come to signify the end of the seemingly intractable violence in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995. The narrative surrounding it is powerful: after everyone else had tried and failed, an American diplomat took the warring parties off to an isolated air force base in Ohio, where he bent them to his will and ended the war. Richard Holbrooke left no doubt in his book To End a War that the critical moment was when he convinced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept peace with the Federation (Bosniak and Croat) forces arrayed against him and the army of Republika Srpska.