The road to signing the Dayton Peace Agreement on November 21st, 1995, was arduous. The peace negotiations that were held were under pressure from the crimes carried out by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), and then also the Croatian Defense Council (HVO), along with the often two-faced policy of the International Community toward the legal authorities in Sarajevo.
The first more serious agreement that was supposed to secure peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), even before the start of total war, was the plan of the Portuguese diplomat Jose Cutileiro and Lord Peter Carrington, which was developed from the Peace Conference of the European Commission. This plan was also called the Lisbon Agreement.
Propaganda about Alija Izetbegovic’s “guilt”
In propaganda, the first president of the Republic of BiH (RBiH), Alija Izetbegovic, was often blamed for the failure of this agreement, which was supposed to prevent the war; however, contemporary analyses show that the agreement itself was, from the beginning, based on recognizing the situation based on military strength and fulfilling almost all the demands of the SDS.
The first meetings were held in Sarajevo on February 13th and 14th, 1992, and representatives of all political parties were present, while a week later, only the leaders of the three largest national parties were gathered.
As Josip Glaurdic states in the book Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia, “The provisions of Cutileiro’s draft, presented in Lisbon, were remarkably similar to the SDS platform, and therefore should not have been a great surprise. The draft essentially proposed the (con)federalization of BiH into three constitutive (and not necessarily territorially connected) ethnically defined units, which would have broad political, economic, and administrative powers, and the de facto right of veto over questions of foreign policy, the army, education, and relations with religious communities.”
It was also proposed that the territories of these constitutive units be determined on the basis of the 1971, 1981, and 1991 censuses. As a starting point for territorial negotiations, the ethnic map of BiH based on the 1991 census was used, according to which the three peoples would control those municipalities in which they make up at least a relative majority of the population. Considering that the SDS had since 1990 advocated the “ethnic cantonization” of BiH and had in fact already implemented it through its SAOs and the “Serbian Republic of BiH”, it is not surprising that Radovan Karadzic, according to Ambassador (Zimmermann), was “delighted by the developments in Lisbon”, while Alija Izetbegovic was “taken aback by the EC proposal to create ethnically based regions,” the book states.
In his Memoirs, Alija Izetbegovic wrote that the good thing about the Lisbon negotiations was that the survival of BiH within its current borders was confirmed, and the bad thing was that the possibility of multiple entities was mentioned. Further, he emphasizes that nothing was agreed or signed in Lisbon, but that Radovan Karadzic rushed to proclaim that there would be “three BiHs, Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim”.
According to the “Cutileiro map”, the “Muslim” unit would have 43.7 percent of the territory and 82.4 percent of the Bosniak population, the Serbian unit would have 43.8 percent of the territory and 50.1 percent of the entire Serbian population, while the Croatian unit would have 12.5 percent of the territory and 41 percent of the entire Croatian population. During the negotiations, several other maps also appeared.
In Karadzic’s view, each of these three BiHs would have its own army, currency, and government. The Serbian BiH, he claimed, should receive 66 percent of the territory of the republic and 33 percent of Sarajevo.
However, on March 9th, the “Assembly of the Serbian Republic of BiH”, under the control of the SDS, unanimously rejected the Cutileiro plan. The Serbian representatives agreed that BiH could either remain in a union with Serbia and Montenegro or become a confederation of three separate states.
They also presented a map that finally clarified what the Bosnian Serbs wanted: they demanded almost two-thirds of BiH’s territory and wanted to leave to the Muslims and Croats a broken strip of land that stretched through the center of the republic, with a series of ethnically divided cities and isolated, ghettoized enclaves.
“Cutileiro made certain concessions that were included in the latest version of his draft and once again presented to the three sides at the expanded negotiations between March 16th and 18th in Sarajevo. The new proposal now clearly stated that the three constitutive units would be ‘based on national principles, taking into account economic, geographic and other criteria’. It also allowed the constituent units to ‘establish and maintain relations and connections with other republics and organizations within them’ – a clear concession to the SDS demands. Finally, it envisaged holding a new referendum, this time on constitutional changes and the territorial definition of the constitutive units,” Glaurdic states.
He emphasizes that the most significant aspect of the latest round of negotiations, however, was not the revised draft, but the negotiating approach of Cutileiro and Carrington.
“Karadzic and Boban relatively quickly signaled that they could sign the draft, but President Izetbegovic refused. He had been disappointed by the EC approach from the very beginning and saw it only as a step toward the final partition of his republic. The latest draft only confirmed that the EC was committed to appeasing Bosnia’s predatory neighbors and their intermediaries through ethnic division,” he stated.
The pressure Alija Izetbegovic was under at that moment is illustrated by the fact that Carrington openly told him that he had no chance against the military power of the Serbs.
“Izetbegovic eventually gave in under the pressure of Cutileiro and Carrington, but the signatures that he and the leaders of the SDS and HDZ placed on the latest proposal for the constitutional restructuring of BiH were worth less than the paper they were written on. Although Cutileiro and Carrington years later blamed Izetbegovic, claiming that he was allegedly the only one who withdrew from the agreement of March 18th 1992 (supposedly on the advice of the United States), the fact is that none of the three sides had any intention of respecting the provisions of the agreement, and they clearly showed this only a few days after the meeting in Sarajevo,” Glaurdic emphasized.
On March 25th, Izetbegovic said that he had been under pressure from the EC to sign the agreement and called on all citizens of BiH to reject the ethnic division of the republic.
It is important to point out that both Serbs and Croats essentially rejected the agreement. SDS officials emphasized that they saw the Cutileiro plan as “a good starting point for the confederalization of Bosnia and the annexation of Serbian territories to Yugoslavia”, which was contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the agreement. The Croats, under pressure from the Catholic Church and Croats who were not from Western Herzegovina, rejected not only the map but also the restructuring of BiH along ethnic principles.
The Vance-Owen plan
The new plan was drawn up in January 1993 on behalf of the United Nations (UN) and the European Commission by Cyrus Vance and Lord David Owen. They worked on a plan that would establish a decentralized state composed of seven to twelve provinces. The biggest problem in this plan were the maps. Finally, under the title “Constitutional Framework for BiH”, the plan was presented on January 2nd, 1993, and it included a division into nine provinces and the capital Sarajevo, which would also receive the status of a province.
According to this plan, BiH would be a decentralized state where most government functions would be performed at the provincial level. Problems between the provinces and the central government would be resolved by the Constitutional Court, composed of representatives of the International Community.
Mladen Klemencic, in the article “Territorial proposals for the settlement of the war in BiH”, states that the maps were acceptable to the Croats and that, from their perspective, they were better than those presented by Cutileiro. The Bosniaks were still not ready to accept the division of the state into provinces, while the Serbs hesitated because they had already ethnically cleansed the largest part of the territory under their control, but also avoided giving a direct answer, hoping to find some excuse.
Alija Izetbegovic accepted the Vance-Owen plan on March 25th, 1993, with the request that Sarajevo receive the status of a “Muslim province” and that the map be adjusted. It seemed that the Serbs were becoming isolated.
The International Community reacted by introducing a no-fly zone and new sanctions against Milosevic’s regime in Belgrade.
This plan became acceptable to Slobodan Milosevic and the opposition leader in Serbia, Vuk Draskovic, but the Serbian Orthodox Church opposed it. Under pressure, Radovan Karadzic went to Athens, where he agreed to sign the plan, but said that it also had to be ratified by the “Assembly of the RS”.
At the Assembly held in Pale, Slobodan Milosevic, Momir Bulatovic, Dobrica Cosic, and the Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis also appeared. At one point, the war criminal Ratko Mladic brought out a map showing how much territory the VRS currently controlled, and the map, according to the peace plan. The Assembly rejected the plan, and then a “referendum” was held, apparently rigged, in which it was rejected.
The summer of 1993 would indeed be the hardest for BiH; the Croatian aggression and the conflict between the HVO and the Army of RBiH (ARBiH) made the situation impossible for the legal authorities, and Owen declared the plan officially dead in June.
“Instead of punishing the side that started the war and all those responsible for crimes on all sides, the world decided to wait and see which side would win, and then probably recognize the victory,” Klemencic states.
The Owen-Stoltenberg plan
Cyrus Vance withdrew from the negotiations, and he was replaced by the former foreign minister of Norway, Thorvald Stoltenberg. The new Owen-Stoltenberg plan would, in fact, probably be the worst thing the International Community produced.
Klemencic states that through the earlier Vance-Owen plan, international negotiators had twisted principles, and the new plan essentially amounted to the de facto acceptance of the situation on the ground.
The new plan was presented on July 30th and implied the division of BiH into three states that would be connected in a very weak confederation; for the realization of the plan, territorial exchanges were necessary, but as such, it was unacceptable to the legal authorities in Sarajevo.
The plan envisioned that the Serbs would control 53 percent of the territory, the Bosniaks 30 percent, and the Croats 17 percent. Sarajevo would receive the status of a free city under temporary UN control. On August 20th, the “Union of Republics” plan was presented, and the leaders were given 10 days to discuss the proposal with their communities.
The “Bosniak Republic” would be guaranteed free transport from the ports of Ploce and Rijeka, and Croatia would receive the right of free transit on several roads and railways within BiH. Within BiH, several transport corridors would also be established, and the “Bosniak republic” would have a corridor to the Sava River.
The plan envisioned that none of the “republics” could secede without the consent of the other two, while the final word would be held by the UN Security Council. Jurisdiction and sovereignty would, in principle, lie with the “republics” and not with a weak central government.
The plan rewarded ethnic cleansing, and Radovan Karadzic was very satisfied with the plan.
“The RS will have more rights than any of the former republics in Yugoslavia. It will have internationally recognized borders. The status of the Serbian people will, for the first time, be regulated by international law. The term ‘so-called’ will no longer be used for the RS. We made concessions in Kupres and Donji Vakuf in order to get territories in Posavina. We cannot keep 64 percent of the territory; we can maybe do that for 30 years, but that would be 30 years of war,” Karadzic said.
Despite pressures and tactical concessions so that the authorities in Sarajevo would not be presented before the international public as those responsible for the failure of the peace agreements, it was nevertheless clear that this solution would not work.
“The idea was simple, and as it would turn out, very successful. Before Lord Owen, we behaved as if we were ready to continue negotiations, and maybe even accept his peace plan. We said that under the conditions of the continuation of the Chetnik offensive on Igman, we could not and would not do that. We did not lie about anything; we simply let Lord Owen believe what he wanted to believe. In fact, his plan, which he made together with Stoltenberg, was not acceptable to us at all,” Izetbegović wrote in Memoirs.
Klemencic divides the territorial plans for BiH essentially into two groups. The first group of plans implied the reorganization of BiH through “cantonization”, and the plan was to promote decentralization while preserving international borders. Also, such plans tried not to recognize what had been openly achieved through ethnic cleansing and military conquest.
The second type of maps were partition maps, and they would result in the division of the state. The Owen-Stoltenberg plan belonged to this type.
Peace negotiations during the war required great diplomatic skill. The delegation of the legal government often found itself under pressure from, on the one hand, the difficult war situation, and on the other, various global careerists who wanted to solve problems over the knee at the expense of the militarily weakest side.
The negotiations also showed that international law did not apply to BiH, and that “universal values” were dead letters on paper. In their approach to negotiations, the delegations of the Government of the RBiH had to stall in various ways so that it would not appear that they were responsible for the failure of the negotiations while unacceptable proposals were being placed before them, Klix.ba writes.
