Thirty years since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, Bosnia-Herzegovina remains dysfunctional. Operating as a consensual confederation, the country has a hybrid system, plagued by widespread corruption, with high rates of poverty and unemployment and continued instances of post-traumatic stress disorder not only among those who lived through the three-and-a-half-year war that ended in late 1995 but also among their children. In addition, the Bosnian Serb leadership has repeatedly threatened to secede from the country and attach the region it controls to the Republic of Serbia, even though such a move would be in blatant violation of the Accords reached in Dayton.
The Dayton Peace Accords, agreed on 21 November 1995 and signed in a formal ceremony in Paris on 14 December, were intended to do two things: to end the conflict on the ground between the Army of the Republic of Srpska, commanded by Ratko Mladić, and the coalition of Croatian and Bosnian armies – a conflict in which about 110,000 persons lost their lives – and, as a by-product, to secure peace ahead of the 1996 U.S. Presidential election so that Bill Clinton could secure a second term in the White House. In terms of these two goals, the Accords can be considered successful.
