Ideas - How leaders in the former Yugoslavia forged peace in 1995

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

For almost four years, the Bosnian War in the former Yugoslavia was characterized by ethnic hatreds, atrocities, and a refugee crisis. So when leaders of the warring factions were sequestered in an American air base and forced to come up with the 1995 peace agreement known as the Dayton Accord, the world was relieved. But is a cessation of violence the same as real peace? *This episode is the third in a five-part series called Inventing Peace.

Hugh is a rock climber, a white supremacist, a Jewish neo-Nazi, a spam king, a crypto-billionaire, and then someone killed him. It is truly a mystery. It is truly a case of who done it. Dirtbag Climber, the story of the murder and the many lives of Jesse James. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. And welcome to the third episode in our series, Inventing Peace. These five panels were recorded in the summer of 2025. The focus was on several historic peace agreements of the 1990s, their history, their political.

political and social legacy and their lessons. One common theme is whether achieving negative peace, simply halting violence, is enough in the long run. Episode 3 explores the Dayton Accord. 250,000 people killed, 2 million refugees, atrocities that have appalled people all over the world. The people of Bosnia finally have a chance to turn from the horror of war to the promise of peace. November 1995, an announcement by U.S. President Bill Clinton. History had been made at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia have reached a peace agreement to end the war in Bosnia, to end the worst conflict in Europe since World War II. The Dayton Accord was then formally signed the next month in Paris. It created a new political order for Bosnia-Herzegovina, one nation with two parts divided along ethnic lines, with Sarajevo as an undivided capital. Just a note, we aren't out to relitigate this conflict. Our intent is simply to learn something about what it takes to invent peace.

And with that in mind, three people joined me to talk about the Dayton Accord at the 2025 Stratford Festival. I asked each to describe an experience that shapes the way they think about peace. First, Branca Marion. She's a senior researcher at Project Plowshares. She is also a lecture at the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. And her PhD research involved a comparative analysis of, quote, everyday peace in Northern Ireland and Bosnia. In 2015, I was in New Orleans at the International Studies Association conference. And I was attending a panel.

And it was on Bosnia and other peace processes happening in one of the, professors presented this paper on Bosnia and Dayton in particular as a very successful peace process in fact. And I had some thoughts about that. So I asked a question and I pointed to the entrenchment of ethnic divides post-Daton to the economic challenges to the various sort of issues to the fact that most people had not gone back to live to where they were originally from in Bosnia. So they were living in generally ethnically cleansed sort of parts of the country to use that horrible term. And his answer to me was, well, at least you're not all still killing each other. And I think my response back was, well, that's quite a

low bar. But in fact, that sentiment is not an uncommon one in Bosnia. Indeed, older people in Bosnia have a phrase that they use, which roughly translates to as long as there is no shooting. So if you point to corruption, they'll say yes, but as long as there's no shooting. If you point to any issues of the political system, they'll say yes, but at least there's no shooting. And I think it's an incredible testament to the Bosnian population. In fact, there has been no significant violence. There have not been significant revenge killings or any of the sort.

Given the intensity and the scale of the violence that happened, I think it is something of an achievement. So I have personally struggled with this question of, is negative peace enough? Because at the same time, I look around at younger people and as a Canadian, also thinking through the incredible limitations that Dayton has placed by entrenching ethnic identities at all aspects of daily life. Branca Marion. Next, Isabella Stefflia. She's an author and an associate professor of political science.

at Wilfred Laurier University. She's also the conflict and security lead at the Bal Silly School of International Affairs. So last summer, I was in Sarajevo doing field work, and I was doing field work on a different but related topic and their former underage fighters. Some of us may call them child soldiers, but they were adolescents.

So believe it or not, during the Bosnian conflict, there was a significant number of underage fighters. I was interviewing one of them, and he gave me an explanation of his decision to buy an apartment in a certain area of town, in a certain town that really gave me hope for something that may go beyond negative peace. So because Bosnia is so divided, and for the last 30 years, people have been following these rules living in two different entities, having different education systems, administrative systems, political systems, everything you can imagine. But he told me that he and he himself is a Bosnian Muslims,

who fought on that side in the war, he decided to buy his home in the Republic of Serbska, which is the Serbian entity, because he said, you know what, taxes are lower? It's maybe a better standard of living. Yes, it's difficult because of the schooling and the children may have to go to this problematic school, but he made a decision based on an issue rather than ethnicity.

And that gave me, that's very uncommon in Bosnia today. So that gave me some hope that a person from somebody who has been victimized in more than one way as in somebody underage fighting made that decision 30 years later. Isabella Stefflia. And finally, Payam Akavan. He's an international human rights lawyer who advised the prosecution at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. Payam Akavan has also served with the UN investigating atrocities around the world, including in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I think of a man named Drajan Erdemovich, who was a defendant at the Hague that I prosecuted in 1996, a few months after the Dayton Accord. And Drajan Erdemovic was an ethnic Croat from Bosnia, married to an ethnic Serb. And he found himself in the summer of 1995 in a place called Pilitsa Farm, near Srebrenica, where he was asked to execute.

1,500 unarmed Muslim men and boys together with his unit. At first he refused and he was told by the commander that he himself would be executed. He reluctantly participated in the mass execution. He had a small child at the time. He thought about his family. And then he became our star witness. He confessed to his crime, expressed genuine contrition, says, I can never live with my conscience for what I did to all of these people.

people. And he became the star witness in the prosecution, among others, of Ratko Mladic, the butcher of Bosnia, who of course was the general who was in charge of the genocide in Srebrenica. And I mentioned this because at this same time, people like Samuel Huntington were writing essays on the clash of civilizations, this idea that, well, of course, that all these different communities are going to kill each other because these are the civilizational fault lines, as he called it. And it was astonishing because in Sarajevo every other person you met came from a mixed marriage and I think our colleagues have

testified to how fluid those identities actually were so it made me realize that the war was not a case of spontaneous combustion, that it was the politics of pyromaniacs that created this conflagration by instrumentalizing

ethnic identity so I will stop there but there are many lessons in what happened in Bosnia for what has happening today right here in our own political space. Exactly what you just described, Paiam, is what I'd like to go back to before we get into the immediate history of the Dayton Accords. So Branca, or sorry, Isabella, let's go back in time to when Tito, the former Yugoslav leader in 1980, he died. Can you talk about what drove, or can you explain to us what it was that drove the rise of this nationalism, the ethnic, ethnic

nationalism in the former Yugoslavia? So with Tito's passing, we have this sort of empty space for leadership. But at the same time, I think what we often forget is that there are major economic problems going on at that time for the country, for former Yugoslavia, right? So ethnicity and identity was a very powerful way of distracting. and masking the economic problems. And rather than facing them head on, blaming others. So this form of othering became the best way to gain power and to maintain power.

And Milosevic, Slobodan Milosevic, found that out quite early, about 87, and used it very, very well. And unfortunately, I'd say that that tradition of other. to maintain and gain power, has been useful for a lot of these, I would call them political entrepreneurs. Political entrepreneurs. So there's a lot of coining of terms here, which I love. We've been talking throughout the week about this idea of competing traumas and the role that they play in entrenching these kinds of conflicts. So, Branca, I just wondered if you could speak to what role this narrative of competing traumas played in the pre-acord days.

Absolutely. So I think one of the amazing things that Yugoslavia did was present this alternative kind of identity world for people to live in where you have this mixing of individuals. So you have marriages that happen across the religious or ethnic boundaries. The reality, of course, on the ground in Bosnia was also that you had the rural areas generally being sort of more ethnically segregated. But there was a lot of. cooperation, understanding also in these areas. Sometimes there's this narrative of urban versus rural that's presented. And it's not, to some extent it's true, but it's not also quite accurate because there was a degree of understanding during the Yugoslav times. But what didn't happen was facing or reconciling, you know, dealing with the history and particularly World War II, which was, you know, deeply traumatic for communities in the Balkans, right? Really at its core, there is this existential fear and that's borne out by history, different times when different communities are persecuted. And so as Isabella correctly pointed out, this economic sort of reality and, you know, really the economic struggles start to amplify some of those traumas and those divides.

And of course, there are more than willing leaders and individuals who step into that space, including from diaspora communities, including from Canada, right? nationalists who really have a different political vision for the countries and who step in and amplify those past dramas. So in short, the fact that there was not a dealing with the past, the fact that there was not a reconciliation and understanding of World War II, there was an image that was presented, a narrative that was represented, that did not include a lot of that pain. But those histories were living. People knew where their family members were killed during World War II. They knew who did it, you know, which community. That lived with people, but it had no room and it had no space to be discussed officially and publicly. And that became a real challenge

in the 90s. By necessity, of course, we have to fast forward. And I wonder how you intersected with all of this. You went to Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia as a UN human Rights Officer in 1992, I think you said. Can you explain what the conflict was like? What was the status of that conflict when you arrived there? In 1992 was one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union and it was in the midst of the euphoria of the post-Cold War world when the likes of Francis Fukayama were speaking about the end of history, the triumph of Western liberalism. So I think the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia was a rude awakening amidst this euphoria. And for the most part, the international community failed, failed to intervene in order to stop the ethnic

cleansing and the violence. And initially, some of the geopolitical calculations would remind one of where the world was in the first World War, in fact, never mind the Second World War, in terms of who allied themselves with Serbia as opposed to Croatia and Bosnia and what have you. So for the most part, it was a failure on the part of the international community, and Srebrenica really became the symbol of that gross failure. General Radcom-Mladic entered Srebrenica safe haven, as it was no safe area, under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers. General Radical Madge handed out suites to children in the middle of the television cameras

before rounding them up and slaughtering them. So it was really a moment of a profound reflection, to what it mildly, for the international community. So I think that that's the space in which the Yugoslav War was taking place when I arrived there in 1992. That summer, there was this famous Time magazine cover photo of an emaciated Bosnian prisoner in the Priador region of the country,

behind barbed wire. And there were images that Europeans thought were unthinkable. And I always say that if these atrocities had occurred in Africa or Asia, we would never have had the International Criminal Tribunal. It was because the victims were Europeans that the international community was shocked into doing something. But I would just end by maybe reflecting on what was said earlier by Banca about the uses and misuses of history,

it was in 1989 that Slobodan Milosevic famously made a speech about the Battle of Kosovo-Polier on the 600th anniversary of that battle in 1389. So there was plenty of historical tinder, but pyromaniacs were required to create the conflagration. And you talked about political entrepreneurs, I would call them ethnic entrepreneurs, and the likes of Milosevic, I remember we would refer to him as the ex-communist democratic dictator.

So this was just pure cynical, diabolical opportunism to take those historical memories and systematically exploit and inflame them. And there are a lot of lessons for us to understand when we talk about pieces of the absence of war to really understand that ultimately wars exist in the minds of people. And when you have the political space hijacked by these diabolical leaders, they will drive their people down the road to hell. I want to just talk about some of the first attempts to achieve peace in Bosnia. There was a conference called the Carrington Conference in 91, just before you arrived there.

Hi, I'm just curious why you think those first early attempts did not manage Isabella to end the fighting. So I have to speak about this from the perspective of somebody who is a child watching the media in the state of Serbia at this time. So still former Yugoslavia, but none of these events were covered in the state media in some of the republics, right? So in particular, the state media in Serbia was excellent at strategically showing certain things and not others. So most of us in Serbia weren't even aware that these talks. were going on at the time. And the way that media showed atrocities was, for example, the video that Paya mentioned about Ratko Mladic handing out candy and then committing murder.

So the part that was shown in Serbia was the part about him handing out chocolate bars and then the video stopped, right? So it was presented as if he was saving them by handing them out candy, right? Also, Branca mentioned the atrocities from World War II. Well, we now know that images of skeletons from World War II actual graves were used by the different state media saying that they are their victims. So Serbs would say, oh, those are Serbian victims of Nazi Ustache. And then Korez would say, oh, those are actually Croatian victims of the Serbian Chetniks from World War II. So I think in the country's underground, even Dayton in 1995, was a surprise.

Broca, can you pick up from that and anchor your thoughts in your experiences, your younger memories of this violence that kind of engulfed Bosnia-Herzegovina? Yeah, I think, you know, when I look back of my childhood, you might be surprised. I mostly have happy memories, actually. Like I grew up in a town, the borders Croatia, by the Dynaric Alps. My childhood is being on a childhood swing, looking at these beautiful mountains, you know, fields of flowers. And of course, that changes quite quickly. I realize something is happening before 90, like the early 92, before the war starts, these men in sort of, you know, black uniforms, Nazi kind of fascist uniforms,

they're showing up in my hometown. Very quickly, there's, you know, phone calls like you need to leave. because we were a minority, in generally in that part of Bosnia, but in my hometown as well. So there is this real sort of sense of you being reduced to an identity, right? And that becomes very quickly clear that this is not some passing moment. This isn't a small thing. And shortly after my, you know, we leave from my grandparents' village from our hometown. My uncle is arrested and tortured.

He was let go from a hospital. like he was not able to fight, but nonetheless, you know, gets caught up in this, in this sort of time period that he really doesn't understand, does not have at that time the capacity to understand. So it becomes very real, this sort of violence. And then, you know, and of course, then, you know, there's different sort of projectiles and weapons and things that start getting used around me. And I'm a child at that time. Very quickly, we leave this part of Bosnia. But it becomes so significant that this, this violence is, you know, it's not something that's going to end very quickly. Like my mom made me leave my dolls, which I still think about to this day, you know, in this part, and she locked the house and she said, we'll come back and get them. And we, of course, never went back. The hope was that we would go back, but then, you know, it was very clear that we were not welcome. Even after the Dayton Peace Agreement is signed in my hometown, it is very clear that people

but my ethnicity are not welcome. Can you reflect a bit also on your memories in a different part of the former Yugoslavia? Yes, absolutely. So I was born and living in what today is northern part of Serbia, but it was always this province of Voivodina, and it's very heterogeneous, and there's a large number of minority groups

that are Hungarian, Romanian, German, who have been there for generations since the formation of the country. And so my family is a mix of these minorities in former Yugoslavia. So, you know, we don't identify as Serb, as Bosniak, or as Croat. So it becomes really difficult to be there and at the same time be a part of the Serbian state

where everything is becoming about Serbian. And there's sort of graffiti all over. schools. And I remember that very vividly classrooms and everything is about the four assets, which means a Samasloga Serbina Spashava, which refers to as only unity amongst the Serbs saves the Serbs. So given this picture that you've painted, with personal experience of the region, what is it that finally brought all these leaders together to the negotiating table at Dayton? What's a single element that you think really gave them no choice, but to be there.

Branca? I think there's a lot of exhaustion. I don't think we talk about this enough. People did not want the war to keep going on. It became very violent and it became very clear. It was personal, like Pai Am was saying at the outset, and we were trying to say at the outset, there's a lot of mixing of people.

So you, by now, by that point, a few years into the war, everyone is impacted in some very deeply personal way. We used to joke in Bosnia that the most ardent fighters were the grandmothers, right? because, you know, in the armchair soldiers, right? Because they could sit back and say, people were exhausted. There was a recognition that this was, and it was all very deeply personal. Those were your cousins.

Those were your neighbors, you know, and it became really clear that this was senseless violence. Which was followed by NATO bombing. Was there a role? Do you think that that played in persuading, at least the Bosnian Serbs side, to come to the table? I would say that it persuaded Milosevic in some way, because he was the the one who was invited to the peace talks, and he was supposed to represent the Bosnian Serbs. And I think that part of the problem, the problems that we see today is because the Bosnian Serbs were not actually represented themselves at the table. And it's one thing that I worry about.

Even though they might have been more extreme negotiators, maybe peace would have been more difficult with Radvan Karadjic, who was president of Republic of Serbskka at the time. But at the same time, those extremist units still stay there. Then they seek political power after the agreement. So I think Milosevic, yes. Author and political scientist Isabella Stathlia, you're listening to a public panel exploring the Dayton Accord, the 1995 agreement that formally ended the war in the former Yugoslavia. It's the third discussion in our five-part series called Inventing Peace.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Poetry has the power to connect our inner universe in the outer world. I'm Maggie Smith, poet and host of The Slowdown, a podcast from American Public Media. Each weekday, find time to take a breather from your to-do list or doom-scrolling for that matter and take in a moment of reflection with a hand-picked poem. Listen to the slowdown, wherever you get podcasts.

Everyday sounds of car doors opening and men chatting. But the news video from 1995 shows a scene far less ordinary. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic arriving at a historic meeting on a U.S. Air Force. force base near Dayton, Ohio. The so-called butcher of the Balkans smiles and briefly shakes the hand of Richard Holbrook,

the American diplomat who would broker the Dayton peace process. Continuing our panel, I asked CBC Massey lecturer and international human rights lawyer Paiam Akevan about discordant moments like this one, on the road to inventing peace. So, Pai, I'm in your Masi lectures, which you delivered a few years ago, you recall just how angry you were, seeing the Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadjik, and sorry about my pronunciation, and Ratko Malajic, at an earlier meeting of the peace process in Geneva, you said, quote, the sight of these monstrous men being treated as dignitaries was repugnant. Now, those two men were not involved in Dayton, as you just pointed out.

They were indicted at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, but Milosevic was there speaking on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs and later he was delivered to the Hague to face justice. This is always a fraught question in peace negotiations, of course. How do you think about the inclusion or exclusion of leaders like Milosevic who ultimately, we know, committed atrocities? Well, we go back to how the conflict began, how Yugoslavia, which could just as well have peacefully transformed

if they were responsible leaders, was torn apart by ethnic entrepreneurs on all sides. And I think we need to emphasize that Milosevic did not act alone. There was a political space where playing the ethnic heart was the easiest way to acquire power. So when you need to then achieve a ceasefire and negotiate some sort of peace agreement, you are sitting around the table with the same people who caused the war to begin with. So there's always a balance between ideals and realities. One of the victories that we had in the Dayton Peace Accord

was that the International Criminal Tribunal was incorporated in the agreement. We were afraid that they would all be given amnesties as the price for peace. But it was understood that you need accountability in order to stabilize the political space, not just because of moral ideals, but because of the reality that you cannot achieve long-term peace if the same individuals so instigated the conflict are there. But I want to say one thing, which is not very pleasing to remember,

that the reason why the Dayton Peace Accord occurred is because of the military situation on the ground. That is what forced the leaders in Dayton under American leadership. And back then, I think you had Pax Americana, the ascendancy of the United States in the post-Cold War space, and for the most part the failure of,

the Europeans to get their act together. And it was by force of the Americans and the significant leverage they had over the former Yugoslavia that the peace accord was signed. And one moment in particular was when the joint Croatian-Bosnian forces had pushed the Bosnian Serb forces back to Banyaluka,

and there was a fear that Banyaluka would fall. And to their credit of the United States, they did not allow Banyaluka to fall. And they understood that you cannot have a war in which one defeats the other. You need to have some sort of balance. And it's good for us to remember the positive role that the United States played at that time in engaging in that particular conflict. It's a really good point, Pam, and I'd like to hear both Isabella and Brian Kahn in this,

is that an outside power is sometimes essential, as I think we see in this case, to bring different parties to the table and help broker peace. but outside powers also impose their own ideas about peace, you know, sometimes leading to a backlash. I wonder if you could each explain the dynamic that played out, knowing the big hand of the Americans being involved. What effect that had? Isabella?

So I have really mixed opinions on this, and it's difficult because there are positives and negatives, right? So, and thank you, Pai, for acknowledging that really important. important positives, right? And I think that's also why populations on the grounds were actually surprised about the peace agreement because the leaders in the countries weren't very interested in it. They were forced to be there, right? On the other side, whenever there's an outside force to be blamed, it's much easier to do that than to look internally and to look at your leaders, as well as some that you have elected, supported during the war, right?

Maybe a family member fought for their forces, because that pretty much happened to most families, whether they did it voluntarily or not. It didn't matter at this point, right? So it's just so much easier to blame the powerful outsider. Easy to blame the powerful outsider. Yeah, But I think it was really important to acknowledge that Bosnia was a failure of the international community, right? I think there's a sense that you would like to blame us, Bosnians, you know, to say, okay, you're so violent. These are intractable conflicts, longstanding identities. I think what was important to acknowledge was that a lot of this could have been avoided if the international community had been willing to intervene. and not just in the 90s, but in the 80s, when there is the economic crisis, when the world starts to recognize the economic troubles in the form of Yugoslavia, that there could have been earlier interventions.

And then, of course, in the 90s, there were talks and there were other plans, and Sullivan plans, right? There were plans that were presented that could have avoided this. So I think what became important about the international involvement was, again, I'm sorry, that there was a recognition of we cannot. just kind of let this go on. We have a role to play. And I think if that understanding of we have a role to play here, we could have come earlier, it would have been, of course, I think a lot of a very different situation. Perhaps reflecting the urgency and the knowledge of exactly what you just said, you know, the process was really interesting, kind of sequestering these leaders and 800 of their staff on a U.S. and on an American base, you know, saying you're going to come up with

an agreement before you leave here. Again, it's kind of a unique way of peacemaking, at least in the context of what we're talking about this week. This is the only example of its kind. Branca, talk about, explain what you think was the advantage of saying, you're not leaving here until you get a deal done. And how far that went and actually forcing everybody to come up with a deal? I think this is critical. There was sort of a real exertion of power on this conflict and these leaders that were not seeing in contemporary conflicts. But it was critical because it did force them to think through some of their red lines and also to have external, you know, external sort of use trying to understand where those red lines were and what could be negotiated.

I think sometimes we think of diplomacy as this like happy, clapy thing and it's not. Diplomacy can be a very challenging and a times negative thing as well. I think that was important. There was this realization of forcing them to come together to talk and really to sit down in a space. And I think that's an important lesson. You have to talk to more adversarial nations. You have to talk to those who are maybe characters that we really dislike and were dismayed by their existence. But talking is critical. If we don't mind for the benefit of those who don't know the details, just a list of what was agreed at Dayton. Two three major points.

It's such a dysfunctional agreement. Maybe it's by and I'll jump in. But there was an agreement of two entities, right? The Serb Republic and the Bosnia Karat Federation. The Boschak Karat Federation is a federation in itself. There's shared power amongst the leaders. There's political representation. The constituents, there's constituent peoples who are the Bosnians,

the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Serbs, the Croats. They're all sort of equally represented or two to one representation between the Federation and the Serb Republic. The Serb Republic is about 49% of the territory. So there's a lot of, you know, this causes a lot of grief on the other side because they feel like the Serbs were rewarded for aggression. The Serbs feel like this is central to, again, that existential fear is central to ensuring their safety and their identity in Bosnia. And so in this bizarre labyrinth of multiple, multiple ministers and representatives, Bosnia is about 4 million people.

It should be governed by a city council, you know? I mean, that's the reality. But it's a necessary arrangement at that time. And the hope really with power sharing, conssociationalism is this will wither away, right? You know, peaceful unfold. People will realize that they need to establish. a better system and they'll do it. And 30 years later, here we are. It was supposed to be an interim

idea, wasn't it? Yeah. So we'll talk about how that translated into the reality we have today. But along with the peace process, the political peace process, we saw the establishment of the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. And of course, as we've talked about throughout the week, every peace process, there's this tension between peace and justice. And everyone sees the balance very differently, of course. I'd like to ask each of you what you think this whole process, all of it, the Dayton Peace Agreement, the establishment of the court, how this whole process, what this whole process reveals about that tension between peace and justice. Hiam, starting with you. On the one hand, I would say Dayton was a turning point in international affairs

and understanding the symbiotic relationship between peace and justice. And especially if you look the root causes of the conflict and the so-called ethnic entrepreneurs who fanned the flames of conflict. There was an understanding as well that there must be a reckoning with the past, not as an act of vengeance, but to build a better multi-ethnic democratic future. That was the theory. And I know Isabella is a great scholar and can tell you what the legacy of the tribunal is today. But then you have the ethnic partition of Bosnia, which Branca was speaking, about and someone said once that the International Criminal Tribunal was like holding the Nuremberg trial after having acquiesced in Hitler's annexation of

Poland so that that was the problem that there was justice in the courtroom but at the same time the ethnic cleansing and the territorial divisions that had resulted were entrenched legally entrenched and sanctioned and in retrospect that may have been a mistake as expedient as it was at the time to achieve a ceasefire and perhaps the interim nature of that those boundaries should have been made more explicitly interim because they're not interim today they've become entrenched and they still threaten the renewed fragmentation of the Bosnian state so that the justice we have to understand has to be understood in a much broader sense

then prosecuting this or that person, it's creating equitable relations on the ground. Before I get to the other two, I am curious how much you think, how much justice you think this international tribunal actually delivered in this context? When I arrived in the Hague, we jokingly said that we should put wanted ads in the newspaper to get defendants because there was the idea of arresting anyone was unthinkable. So when I left with Milosevic in the dock and a number of other very security, significant figures from all of the different ethnic groups. I think the tribunals succeeded beyond anything anyone imagined. And that was because the peacekeeping troops in Bosnia began to arrest

people. And that was a remarkable innovation in the idea of post-conflict peace building. But at the same time, back in the day when we thought that prosecutions were the panacea, we now know better. We know that that is only one element of justice. And if the lessons are not learned by the communities that are directly impacted, then we still have a better world having prosecuted these people than not. But the effect will be impaired if the historical lessons are not learned. And that is where we need to remember that the success of Nuremberg, Well, Nuremberg took maybe two generations.

It took two generations before the German public reckoned with the Nazi past. And to the extent that Nuremberg was a success, it was because of the way history was taught in the schools. So as an international lawyer, I'm humbled to understand that how you teach history to children in the school can be just as important in achieving justice as the sensational trial in the Hague. Absolutely.

Back to the original question, Isabella and Branca, in terms of how much this balance between peace and justice between those two processes, how do you think about that in the context of Bosnia? It's a very difficult question and a very difficult thing to achieve, I would say. And I mean, even judging achievement, legal achievement, it's one thing what the trials are able to do and another thing of how they're perceived to be doing justice.

So I'm going to quote a legal scholar from a region who told me at my initial interviews on this was, it's one thing winning cases, is another thing winning cases in the eyes of people. So there's something that I refer to as domestic perceived justice or perceived legitimacy, or in this case, a lot of the time it's illegitimacy. And that's different what legal scholars,

Paiam and us other scholars would think, and there's amazing cases that took place. The accomplishments of ICTY are critical and for the establishment of international law as well. But then when you actually speak to the populations on the ground, it's a very different understanding of what the purpose of that institution was. And what is that understanding? that it's an institution to practice power

and that law is not above politics, it's not apolitical, it's not neutral, but that the tribunal itself is a way of continuing war in peacetime. So fighting battles on the legal stage. And the fact that Dayton established these different constituencies and really entrenched the identities, also made it difficult for them for the ICTI, I think, to be recognized and to be more legitimate in the region because everything was interpreted to the lens of the three groups.

A sociologist in Sarajevo told you that because people tend to interpret everything through an ethnic or national lens, that it's pointless for international institutions like the tribunal to try to find common goals like justice and reconciliation. Is that reflective of the feeling, would you say? I would say among some of the populations definitely, and that was a person who was affiliated with the Republic of Serbska and the understanding in that area of Bosnia was, I would say, a lot more extreme than in Serbia. And I have a lot of problems with his statement, right?

I don't want to believe that. But I do have to recognize that the tribunal was established, in 93, this was already a context that where the ethnic entrepreneurs had done serious damage, right? Those are decades of the narrative that instills fear in people that have been going on. It's difficult for them to now find this international institution and say, okay, yes, we are going to believe and trust that this institution is going to provide justice, that there are no political interests behind this, right, that this is going to be objective

after they have lived their entire lives with these narratives, these threatening narratives. Branca, just what you think, this whole process, both sides, this political agreement and the legal pursuit of some of the criminals, what does that reveal about the tension between peace and justice? It reveals that it takes a lot of hard work

to undo the damage of these wars, that it follows people for generations, that it leaves marks on the landscape, it leaves marks on people's lives. There's not a day of people's lives in Bosn, that in some way, some subtle way, isn't shaped by this conflict, you know? And what, for me personally,

seeing these parallel narratives, and we were talking about competing parallel narratives, of what happened, you know, there's a movie that won the, the Oscar, which performed film, No Man's Land. And, you know, there's a whole scene of who started the war. Like, you started the war, no, you started the war. And that sort of those parallel narratives exist.

And what's perhaps the most heart, you know, like a thing that you really feel for is you talk to children and in their textbooks, they're very different understandings of what happened during that, same war. And some of them attend, we have this phenomenon in Bosnia of two schools under one roof where children of, you know, Bosnia and Croat identity will attend the same school, but maybe at different times or in different parts. And then sometimes there's a wall between the, you know, and seeing that in Bosnia to me is shocking. Like I just don't think that that's where we needed to end up. And I think there was this sense of the tribunal and also by being located in the Hague

that he was serving an international audience and not a Bosnian audience. If had it been closer in some way in distance and perhaps in its communication, I think it had more of an impact on some of what was happening on the ground. I understand analytically, you know, as an analyst, I can understand why you maybe have a tribunal and you have a tribunal in the Hague. But as a Bosnian, I feel like I think that could have been thought about more and what its impact will be. You went to study everyday peace in Bosnia and in Northern Ireland, how peace is kind of negotiated and managed by ordinary people in ordinary contexts day by day. What kinds of

peace or its absence did you find when you went back to Bosnia? I realized the sort of the multitudes of peace that exist, right? There's unpeace, there's profound unpeace between certain communities in certain areas. There's, you know, the landscape. is marked by symbolism, by flags, by phraseology, that if you don't come from that community, you find really, I think, worrying and perhaps scary. At the same time, there's a lot of cooperation. And, you know, so the sort of the experience of peace was mixed. And it wasn't this sense of, like, this is a settled conflict. It was very much the conflict is negotiated in everyday lives, you know, people's existence, where they,

choose to go or how they, you know, where they choose to spend their time, who they choose to spend their time with, and sort of the ethnic identity playing such a more significant role than it had previously. But again, I think we think of peace as one-dimensional, and it's not, it's multi-dimensional. And I was trying to understand this really without judgment, because I could understand where there was deep hurt. Why, you know, expecting people have lost multiple family members, why it would so challenging for them to sort of all of a sudden become these, you know, liberal, peace-loving individuals. They really had a lot of pain still to work through. And I think a part of it is understanding peace is multidimensional. And on the same theme, Isabella, you have written about

this kind of fragile emergence of a second Bosnia and a second Serbia as well, but we'll talk about Bosnia, led by civil society and led by political leaders who wanted an alternative to this ethno-nationalism. What happened to that dream of a second Bosnia? I don't think a second Bosnia ever emerged or was able to emerge. The ethnic leaders, the sort of representing the groups and ethnicity being emphasized over by the leaders, by the elected leaders being emphasized over anything else, like the economy, the education, gender. and actual policy issues that they should run on, right,

the kinds of platforms that they should run on, somehow it always get trumped by ethnic identity. And part of that is also the sort of electoral system that was established during Dayton and that, you know, in one entity, only Serbs can be elected in the Serb entity, right? So what does that happen to representation for anybody who is,

mixed or a minority or who is a Bosnia who lives in that area and wants to run, right? So there are limitations, systematic limitations. And that really, really made it difficult for civil society in Bosnia. And let's remember a lot of money, Western money, was put into Bosnian civil society. And then what would end up happening is that the ones that are internationally funded, and if that is known, they're then considered people who act out of self-interest, who work on Western salaries, who are too progressive, too international, too interested into the international, they're serving somebody else rather than the poor post-conflict population. So they would end up having this reputation. That doesn't mean

those are their actual intentions at all, but just being associated with the international community would kind of stain reputations even of local organizations. That said, I do have to say that last summer when I was there, I, for example, I worked with two groups that were multi-ethnic and were working really hard trying to make their voices heard, and that gave me a lot of hope. One was in the underage fighters' organization that is for peace and they were fighters from different ethnic groups that were trying to advocate peace in high schools all over Bosnia. Another one was an organization that is a non-violence center

and what they do is they ask veterans after they provide them a lot of PTSD training and educational training to just go and attend memorials, just to stand there to show the sort of respect for human life and veterans from different ethnic groups. So there are initiatives, but that is not what gets all the attention. But I think these local small groups are actually the ones that are building peace on the ground. Hi, I'd like to hear what it's like for you knowing what the reality is on the ground there, not just listening here, but from your own observations.

and knowing the amount of effort that went into achieving some kind of justice on the ground for people there. I'm wondering what you think that we should conclude from that in looking forward at other conflicts that require peace processes. What lessons can we draw from how this all unfolded over the last 30 years? I could answer that question in terms of how the Dayton Agreement could have been better structured, some of the policies that could have been pursued in the years after that. And I think Brank and Isabella have already made many of the points that I would make just as well. But I want to maybe speak about the bigger picture here of the nature of these conflicts. And maybe there are psychotherapists in the audience who will be able to better understand the term infantile regression.

And infantile regression is one at the end of a turbulent adolescence. you find it too difficult to accept the responsibilities of mature adulthood so you want to run back into your mother's womb where it is safe but accept that that's not going to happen and I mention this because whether we look at Yugoslavia in the 1980s whether we look at the United States today

the world is in a period of unprecedented upheaval it's not just social economic mass migration climate change all of the global issues that we're talking about but our very identities are under assault and there is nothing more comforting than an insular identity in an imagined past which never existed and this is what every demagogue understands.

So I think that beyond anything we could say about the date and peace accord lessons learned, we should be reassured that the tide of history is not in favor of insular violent identities. the reality today, not the ideal, the reality is one of inextricable interdependence. And if someone had said at the 1930s that France and Germany would be forged

into a permanent union, people would have said you're absolutely insane and naive. And that is exactly what's going to happen in the former Yugoslavia, in the Middle East. The question is, how can we expedite that process so we get there without all the violence and the bloodshed? That's a very hopeful tone. Thank you for that.

need that right now. Dayton showed us the limits of negative peace, but that even feels out of touch in today's conflicts, you know, whether it's Ukraine or Gaza or others. What one lesson do you think we can draw of what not to do? What not to do is entrench the current realities of the conflict into some sort of agreement, which then limits those contexts. And we need to revisit those agreements. We can't just assume that when the difficult job is done and now there is negative peace, that all is going to be smoothly well developed on its own. Peace as a continuing project, part of the reality of the Dayton Accord. This has been the third part of our idea series, Inventing Peace, recorded at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. The

Panelists were author and academic Isabella Stefflia, lawyer, Payam Akevan, and researcher, Branca Marion. Thank you to all of them and to the team at the Stratford Festival. Ideas at Stratford is produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Technical assistance from Will Yarr and Emily Chiarvesio. Editing, Lisa Godfrey. Lisa Ayuso is the idea's web producer. Senior producer Nikola Lakshich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.