Human Rights A Day

Former Yugoslavia leaders sign Dayton Peace Accord. After Yugoslavia’s communist dictator Marshal Tito died in 1980, ethnic differences generated chaos. Ethnic and religious factions pitted Albanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims against each other, resulting in three and a half years of civil war marked by ethnic cleansing and 200,000 deaths. Eventually, the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia initiated a peace process named after talks that took place in Dayton, Ohio. On December 14, 1995 in Paris, the three leaders signed the Dayton Accord, which pledged thousands of United Nations Peacekeepers to the region to keep Bosnia together, yet with divided federations. The Croat federation held most of the country’s 51 per cent Muslims, while the Serb republic held the remainder of the population. The peace process was paved with conflict and mistrust and complicated by Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, attempting to control as much of the former Yugoslavia as possible;