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Bosnia,
NATO and the So-Called Dayton 'Peace Accords'
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Bosnia,
NATO and the So-Called Dayton 'Peace Accords'
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As celebration of the fourth anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords nears, evidence mounts that the agreement that made Dayton a household name around the world was not really a peace agreement at all. Rather to those of us who have opposed America's recent involvement in Kosovo the Dayton settlement has been seen as just another chapter in a war to take control of Yugoslavia away from its Serbian majority and hand it to interests in Western countries. The Dayton accords spurred belief that when the U.S. and our NATO allies intervened in Yugoslavia in 1995 and brought its warring parties to Dayton, our purpose had been to bring peace to the region. But if so, why had the U.S. pressured Bosnian Muslim President Izetbegovic to renounce the peace plan that he'd signed in 1992 and declare his portion of Bosnia independent? After all, the agreement reached in Dayton in 1995 was almost identical in content to that earlier plan, and to another agreed to in 1993 among the Bosnian contestants themselves before the U.S. pressured Izetbegovic to withdraw from those negotiations as well. Without American interference, these earlier "accords" could have prevented war between Croatian, Muslim, and Serbian factions from breaking out in the first place. So what was the reason for the delay, that cost many thousands of lives and many hundreds of thousands left homeless? The difference between the first two plans and "Dayton" is that the latter was imposed on Bosnia from abroad, resulting in that province of Yugoslavia being turned into a Western protectorate with NATO in the role of overlord and occupier. For at least a hundred years main international powers including Germans, Italians, Turks, Austrians, and now Americans have eyed the Balkans. The great mineral resources of northern Kosovo, for example, NATO's newest protectorate, have always been coveted as one of the Balkans' prizes, worth seeking militarily if necessary. NATO's is just the latest flag of occupation to fly over the region. Indeed, while the former Yugoslavian provinces of Slovenia and Croatia were encouraged and helped by NATO to declare themselves fully independent states, ever since the Dayton plan established the idea of a NATO-administered partitioning in Bosnia it became acceptable for NATO's powerful member nations such as the U.S., Britain, and Germany to not have to wait for a province to become an independent state but just send their troops into a part of Yugoslavian territory, such as Kosovo, and occupy it. NATO has occupied Bosnia for four long years since Dayton, and no end is in sight. It's hard to define an occupation that's lasted for four years as "peace." Nor could the conditions that Dayton created in Bosnia connote with the word "accord." The Dayton Accord divides Bosnia into two entities, the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croatian Federation. NATO troops have taken away all independence from the Serb part of Bosnia and turned it into a virtual prison camp. In 1997, NATO seized every television and radio station in the Serb Republic, creating a monitoring board to censor all news in Bosnia. On April 14 this year the board ordered closure of Television Kanal S because it did not carry Western news programs and had supported Sarajevo University students in their protest against NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. In each election Western officials have removed candidates they did not like, thus denying voters their full right to vote. Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, who comes to Dayton as a guest of the November Peace Accords celebration, occupies his office not because the accords brought the Bosnians democracy, but just the opposite. The response of the West to the victory of a candidate it opposed in the 1998 Bosnian presidential election, Nikola Poplasen, was to issue a demand that Poplasen appoint Dodik Prime Minister, a post he had held prior to the 1998 election that NATO found so unacceptable. When President Poplasen refused NATO's demand that he break off relations with Yugoslavia, the UN High Commissioner in Bosnia simply removed Poplasen from office. In this way, Mr. Dodik has represented the government of the Serb Republic for eight solid months with no legal basis at all and for no other reason than that the NATO overlords of Bosnia have chosen him as their man. Not content with removing the legally elected president of the Serb Republic, NATO recently demanded the removal of Poplasen from a leadership position in his own party because he had voiced criticism of NATO policy. Failure to do so, Western officials warned, would result in the banning of the party from elections next spring, which is exactly what has happened. The Serbian Radical Party was recently banned from elections. Why are the U.S. and its friends in NATO so determined to maintain dominance over Bosnia? New laws have been enacted by the High Commissioner in Bosnia that ensure free access of Western investment in the country. The Western-imposed Foreign Investment Law of March, 1998 has the advantage, according to U.S. embassy documents, of "promoting foreign investment and protecting foreign investors' rights" - thus opening up opportunities for these investors to "utilize low-cost labor (the lowest in Central and Eastern Europe)" while gaining important new markets. If Dayton truly wants to be known for the idea of peaceful settlement of national and political differences it should start by taking a cold, hard look at the failure of those agreements bearing its name today to come close to achieving this noble goal, and start raising some questions about the whole idea of imposing "peace accords" on economically attractive foreign countries through the barrel of a gun. Greg Elich returned in August from a fact-finding trip to Yugoslavia and has been active in the Committee for Peace in Yugoslavia in Columbus. Geoff Berne has conducted peace activities under the name Butler County Committee of One Against the NATO War. Published
in: Impact Weekly, "The Miami Valley's News & Entertainment
Source," Dayton, Ohio, Nov. 11-17, 1999 |