Sarajevo

TEN YEARS AGO, on November 21, 1995, the initialing of the Dayton Peace Agreement brought the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina to an end. The document was formally signed in Paris three weeks later, but the meeting at Dayton was the main act in the drama, and has provided the pretext for its commemoration, with considerable commentary, this week.

The outcome of Dayton was not felicitous for Bosnia’s Muslim plurality, which had made up 45 percent of its prewar population, followed by 35 percent Serbs, 15 percent Croats, and the rest Gypsies, Jews, and “Yugoslavs”–an artificial nationality boosted by the Communist dictatorship of Marshal Tito in a doomed attempt to suppress cultural and religious rivalries. With the destruction of an ethnically-mixed community that had existed for half a millennium, Muslim Bosnia was reduced to 28 percent of the republic’s territory. The conflict featured massacres, concentration camps, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands, waves of rape, and the destruction of many historic mosques and churches.