On Tuesday evening the law school hosted an event marking the anniversary of the conclusion of the agreement, which was the result of the negotiations between Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, the Bosnian presidency's chairman, Alija Izetbegovic, and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic at Wright-Patterson base in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995. The deal, which was signed a month later in Paris, was brokered by U.S. official Richard Holbrooke and General Wesley Clark.
Former South African Supreme Court president and first chief prosecutor of the Un tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Richard Goldstone, said at the lecture that the results of the Dayton peace accords were far from ideal but that they had represented huge and positive developments.
After the brokering of the Dayton agreement, nobody was thinking about taking up arms, Goldstone said.
He said that future decisions must be made by people whom those decisions concern and that the international community can only help.
It is necessary to have a courageous leadership in order to ensure the future of this region, he added.
John Shattuck, the President and Rector of Central European University (CEU), who in 1995 played a leading role in brokering the Dayton accords as the then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under President Bill Clinton, recalled that the Dayton deal was achieved two months after the atrocities committed by Bosnian Serb forces against local Muslims in Srebrenica.
The agreement was the way to stop the war, he said.
He admitted that the war in the former Yugoslavia was the international community's terrible omission.