28 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Dayton Accords, U.S. Product, and Milosevic’s Urge to End the War By Rudolph V. Perina The Europeans were allowed to be there symbolically because we all knew that in the end we would need the Europeans. NATO would have a post-Dayton role, and a vast amount of reconstruction assistance would be required, and so on. But by and large, Dayton was a U.S. show, and really Holbrooke’s show. I think Holbrooke deserves a lot of credit for what was accomplished in Dayton. Certainly, the agreement did not bring love and everlasting peace to the Balkans, but it did stop the fighting and the bloodshed, and that in and of itself is a very significant accomplishment. Now I also think—and I believe Holbrooke would agree with this—that Milosevic did a lot to make Dayton possible. This does not absolve him of his complicity in starting the whole conflict, but it is a reality that should be understood. Milosevic operated much like Holbrooke in keeping a lot of information to himself and not sharing it. He cut the final deal in Dayton with Holbrooke, making an agreement possible. … [The Dayton Peace Accords] were actually signed twice. There was a signing ceremony at the end of the Dayton Conference in November, and then there was a formal signing ceremony in Paris in December, which the French very much wanted. Holbrooke agreed to this because we needed the Europeans to help implement the agreement, and also because the Paris ceremony was pretty much déjà vu. The really significant event was when the three presidents signed the agreement in Dayton. Many Serbs in the delegation, as I mentioned, were devastated. They saw the agreement as a total sellout. But for Milosevic, it was a real moment of triumph. Here he had moved from being a sanctioned pariah to being a peacemaker on television screens around the world. Congratulations to the three presidents came from everywhere, including from President Clinton at the White House. I really think Milosevic believed at that moment that he had managed to change his image and shed his pariah status. But we had not forgotten about Kosovo, and Kosovo was yet to be his undoing. Rudolph V. Perina, a former ambassador and career member of the U.S. Foreign Service for more than three decades, served as a chargé d’affaires at U.S. Embassy Belgrade between 1993 and 1996. Compromise and Creative Diplomacy at Dayton By Robert William “Bill” Farrand The whole peace agreement that was hammered out in Dayton in three weeks almost fell apart because of Brcko. It almost fell apart. Neither side would budge at all. It was going to become, people were concerned, it would become a casus belli again, a trigger for more fighting from the partisan groups, things of this nature. So, they agreed at Dayton … I think it was [Secretary of State Warren] Christopher who came forward and said, “Look, we can’t resolve this issue. We’re going to have to figure out what LT. STACEY WYZKOWSKI/U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE Buildings and vehicles destroyed in Grbavica, a suburb of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Bosnian conflict.
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