Alija Izetbegović of Bosnia, Franjo Tuđman of Croatia, and Slobodan Milošević of Serbia put their names on the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ceremony at the Élysée Palace on December 14, 1995, implemented a deal forged after three weeks of secluded talks at a U.S. Air Force base in Ohio. The signing was not a celebration but an exhausted formalization. That same day, the first elements of a 60,000-strong NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) began crossing the Sava River into Bosnia, shifting from airstrikes to ground peacekeeping.
The agreement created a single Bosnian state composed of two entities: the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Republika Srpska. It froze the front lines, which held roughly 51% of territory for the Federation and 49% for the Serbs. It included a constitution, provisions for refugees to return, and a war crimes tribunal. The deal was a brutal compromise. Izetbegović reportedly said while signing, "This is not a just peace, but it is more just than a continuation of war."
Its immediate matter was the cessation of open warfare, which had killed over 100,000 people and displaced millions. The presence of NATO troops with robust rules of engagement enforced the ceasefire where UN peacekeepers had failed. The agreement mattered because it replaced violence with a fragile, complex political architecture. It prioritized stability over justice, accepting ethnic partition as the price for peace.
The common reframe is that Dayton ‘ended’ the war. It did halt large-scale combat, but it institutionalized the ethnic divisions that had fueled the conflict. The power-sharing system it designed proved cumbersome and often paralyzed the central government. The lasting impact is a frozen peace. Bosnia remains a single country recognized internationally, but it is functionally divided, its politics defined by the very ethnic nationalism the war embodied. Dayton stopped the bleeding but never cured the disease.