"A final report card on Dayton is not yet possible," Richard Holbrooke wrote in his book To End A War, published in 1998. He passed away before he could see the peace agreement of which he was so proud being misused to keep the ghosts of war alive in Bosnia.
The political system enshrined by Dayton encourages each group, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats, to choose its representatives based on ethnicity, thus perpetuating wartime divisions. Moreover, nationalist party leaders exploit the fear of a new conflict to further cement their hold on power in both entities of Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat federation. Politicians in Bosnia are not judged on the basis of their economic or social policies. Demonizing the other ethnic group(s) is the simplest and surest way of winning elections. Ethnic populism reigns unchallenged in Bosnia.
Yet Dayton's reification of ethnic division as the foundation of politics was not always put into practice. The president of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, started his career as an enthusiastic supporter of the peace agreement and of a unified Bosnia. Holbrooke was full of praise for Dodik in his book:
"In all three ethnic groups, the men who started the war in 1991-92 were still in power as late as spring 1998. They have to disappear to make way for a new generation of leaders willing to reach out to one another as prime minister Dodik of Republika Srpska has begun to do. If more leaders like Dodik appeared, and survived, then the original Dayton design could work."
Holbrooke was right at the time -- during the war Dodik led a group of independent legislators in the parliament of what was then the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska. He was an opponent of Radovan Karadzic, the chief instigator of the conflict. During his visit to the United States in 2007, Madeline Albright described him as a "breath of fresh air." He was the EU's darling as well. The late British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, praised Dodik in front of the Republika Srpska's National Assembly. He said that Dodik's government had done more in its first two weeks to improve the lives of the people than its predecessor had done in two years.
How has Dodik the peacemaker become the biggest threat to peace in Bosnia?
The winds blowing from Sarajevo in the aftermath of the war were not always favorable to reconciliation. Many at the top, including Haris Silajdzic, a close associate of the late Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, were calling for the abolition of Republika Srpska. Silajdzic referred to it as "the genocidal entity." Some of this was understandable resentment over the fact that Dayton had effectively legitimized the reality created on the ground by ethnic cleansing. Yet the frosty attitude did nothing to discourage Banja Luka from looking to Belgrade.
Closer relations between Serbia and Republika Srpska followed. In May 2008, Dodik and former Serbian President Boris Tadic opened a Republika Srpska Park in Belgrade. Dodik then used police reform to create a nationalist profile for himself. Belgrade Television became the major platform for his political speeches. He welcomed back former Republika Srpska President Biljana Plavsic after her release from prison, having served her sentence for war crimes, and even sent an official jet to pick her up.
A year ago he went to Srebrenica, seemingly to pay tribute to the victims of genocide. Yet the very next day he called it "a massacre," and promised to establish "an international commission" to find out "what really happened in Srebrenica." He thus sought to overwrite The Hague tribunal and EU declarations on the Srebrenica genocide.
In 2011, Dodik proposed a referendum on whether to reject Bosnia's state war crimes court and the special prosecutor's office established in 2005 by international decree. It was seen as a highly risky move, and after a series of failed diplomatic efforts to stop the referendum, Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign-policy chief at the time, rushed to see Dodik in Banja Luka and promised a reform of the Bosnian judiciary. Dodik already saw himself as the head of a mini-state, a feeling further encouraged when a high-ranking EU official went directly to his Banja Luka headquarters, bypassing the capital, Sarajevo -- although he ultimately relented on his proposed referendum. Yet the course was set. In his regular reports to the UN Security Council, Valentin Inzko, the high representative in Bosnia, frequently mentioned Dodik as the most persistent -- albeit not the only -- proponent of Bosnian state dissolution.
Although he did back down in 2011, after having his ego boosted by EU officials, Dodik was not done with referendums. A new one planned for September 25 has raised tensions in Bosnia to a fever pitch, and threatens to split the country. It is ostensibly a plebiscite on Republika Srpska's Statehood Day, but is seen by many as the thin edge of the wedge. It seeks to officially celebrate the birth not of post-Dayton Republika Srpska, but rather Karadzic's prewar creation that helped bring about the Bosnian conflict.
Dodik currently seems prepared to use all means that he considers legitimate to achieve Serbia's wartime goals. If Holbrooke were still around, he would probably ask for an urgent conference on Bosnia and a revision of Dayton. Even in 1998 he expressed some regrets. One of them was keeping the name Republika Srpska. "It was wrong to permit Karadzic to keep the name he had invented," he wrote in his book.
Commenting on Dodik's new referendum, former Croatian President Stipe Mesic called Dodik the new Slobodan Milosevic.
Mesic is right. Like Milosevic, Dodik is probably not as ideologically committed to Serbian nationalism as he is trying to appear. He may be more of an opportunist. When the international community was more closely involved in Bosnia -- in the years immediately after the war -- Dodik determined that it was profitable to support a unified state. As the world has gradually disengaged from Bosnia, nationalist rhetoric became key to political survival once again. This is partly the legacy of Dayton, the establishment of a country in which people exercise their rights, and their political will, as members of one of three ethnic groups, rather than as Bosnian citizens.
Bosnia deserves better than a flawed peace treaty as its constitution, and it deserves to move on. It is not possible without EU and U.S. assistance.