The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

56 DECEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL IMPLEMENTING DAYTON Ambassador Robert M. Beecroft retired from the State Department in 2006 after 36 years of service. His overseas assignments included Belgium, France, Germany, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Jordan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels. He was a member of the negotiating team at the SALT II nuclear arms talks in Geneva. In Washington, he served in the Bureaus of European and Political-Military Affairs, taught at the National War College, and was a member of the 40th Senior Seminar. From 2009 to 2016, he returned to the State Department as a supervisory senior inspector in the Office of Inspector General, leading inspections of U.S. missions in Kuwait, Syria, Taiwan, Vietnam, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and several bureaus in the department. Reestablishing interreligious and interethnic trust, tolerance and coexistence among Serb, Croat and Bosniak proved a daunting task. BY ROBERT M . BEECROF T A Look Back FEATURE W ith the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, conflict in Europe seemed a remote possibility; but developments in the Balkans determined otherwise. From June 1991, when open warfare broke out between Croats and Serbs, until November 1995, when the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the “Dayton Agreement” or “Dayton Accords” ) was signed, the region was the setting for horrific turmoil and bloodletting—some 100,000 civilian casualties, two million internally displaced persons and international refugees, and the first act of genocide in Europe since World War II. The events led to an unexpected change of assignment for me. While on consultation in Washington, D.C., in June 1996, I paid a courtesy call on Assistant Secretary of State for Euro- pean Affairs John Kornblum, who proceeded to unleash a bolt from the blue: Balkan Special