November 21, 1995, 30 years ago: The Dayton Agreement is reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, outside Dayton, Ohio, ending the Bosnian Civil War. It was signed there on December 14.
It took the leadership of the President of the United States to stop it. A President who, just hours earlier, was fighting to get his own government reopened.
Taking down Slobodan Milošević and Newt Gingrich in the same week is a very impressive feat, and Bill Clinton simply doesn't get the credit he deserves.
Among the Republican politicians opposing the agreement were Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a bigot who hated anyone who wasn't white and, by his definition, "Christian"; and Representative Robert Dornan of California, a Korean War bomber pilot who so loved war that he was known as "B-1 Bob," but suddenly became a pacifist when it was a liberal Democrat enforcing a peace.
What does it say about Helms and Dornan that they were less reasonable than Slobodan Milošević? A man who killed more people in 5 years than Saddam Hussein killed in 25 years, more than Fidel Castro killed in 50 years?
Just in this war, about 31,000 soldiers died, and an equal number of civilians, many of them in concentration camps, because of their religion -- in this case, Eastern Orthodox Catholic Serbs killing Bosnians for being Muslims. It had been half a century since the Holocaust, and "Never again" had happened again, on the same continent.
Finally, after 3 years of being begged to do something, and remembering how he did nothing to end the Rwandan Genocide in Africa the year before, President Clinton met with his fellow NATO leaders, and united them, and convinced President Boris Yeltsin of Russia to stay out of it. On August 30, Operation Deliberate Force began, with NATO planes bombing "Bosnian Serb" artillery positions. On November 1, Milosevic realized he could beat the Bosnians, but he couldn't beat NATO, and let peace talks begin.
As of November 21, 2025, the peace still holds. The Nobel Committee has given the Nobel Peace Prize to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama -- but not, as yet, Bill Clinton.
No comments:
Post a Comment