Serbs. Now it was the turn of Serb refugees to
flee eastward. The Bosnian Serbs retaliated. In
July General Ratko Mladic, the ruthless com-
mander of the Bosnian-Serb army, captured the
UN ‘safe area’ of Srebrenika. The Serbs massa-
cred at least 7,000 Muslim men in the bloodiest
single atrocity of the war. The fall of Srebrenika
completed the humiliation of the UN. Further-
more, if NATO did not now respond it too would
be discredited. The Bosnian-Serb military posi-
tion was already deteriorating rapidly. In August
the Croatian army overran the Krajina, causing
400,000 more Serb refugees to flee. ‘Ethnic
cleansing’ in Bosnia achieved by murder, arson
and terror was now, after four years of war, nearly
complete. The UN was pushed aside by NATO,
at last under firm American leadership, and dur-
ing late August and early September 1995 it
unleashed a devastating air attack on Bosnian-
Serb military targets and communications. The
US strategy was effective and revealed the weak-
ness of earlier European policies. In October
1995, following their defeat by Croat-Muslim
forces on the ground and by NATO’s air strikes,
the Bosnian Serbs were forced, after a whirlwind
round of American mediation, to the conference
table at Dayton, Ohio.
Richard Holbrooke, the tough US assistant sec-
retary of state, persuaded Tudjman, Izetbegovic
and Milosˇevic ́ to agree to ‘proximity talks’ which
would seek a compromise solution. They agreed to
end the fighting. Under the Dayton Accord, con-
cluded on 21 November 1995 and reached after
much complicated bargaining, Bosnia was divided
into two ‘entities’: a Bosnian-Serb republic and a
Croat-Muslim federation (51 per cent Muslim and
49 per cent Serb). Under the Dayton Accord
refugees were guaranteed the right to return to
1
THE WARS OF YUGOSLAVIA 923
Zagreb
Belgrade
Vucovar
Brcko
Dayton Agreement
Sarajevo Pale
Mostar
Tuzla
Banja Luka
Knin
Srebrenica
CROATIA
CROATIA
BOSNIA
SERBIA
MONTENEGRO
ALBANIA
HUNGARY
REPUBLIKA SRPSKA
CROAT-MUSLIM
FEDERATION
KR
AJ
IN
A
AD
RI
ATI
C S
EA
KO
SO
VO
KRAJINA
The partition of Bosnia,
1995
