As details of the Gaza peace plan emerged in recent days, it was hard not to see similarities to the agreement that ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina 30 years ago.
The Gaza Plan promises to halt attacks, but it also institutionalizes endless external controls. The plan’s architects promise to govern Palestine based on the “highest international standards.” Bosnians have been hearing this phrase for the past 30 years. To this day, we still don’t know what these standards actually are.
What we do know is that after the introduction of a foreign-negotiated peace plan, Bosnia became a semi-protectorate, a territory ruled from outside without democratic sovereignty, with decision-making powers unaccountable and in the name of stability.
The Dayton Agreement, which ended the Bosnian War, was negotiated on a U.S. military base, mediated by foreign diplomats, and agreed to by leaders of the warring parties, including representatives of neighboring countries that supported the war. Ordinary Bosnian citizens were excluded from this process. The same logic underlies the Gaza plan. Peace is negotiated about the people, not with them.
Peace agreements concluded without us legitimized wartime territorial divisions and created the basis for a highly fragmented political system similar to a federation. It is a weak central state with limited powers alongside two organizations (Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and another district (Brucko).
Nominally, power is exercised by a Council of Ministers and a rotating presidential office consisting of three members, each from one of the three main ethnic groups. The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which should be the basis of governance, was not written by the people. The agreement was drafted in English by the same international mediators who brokered the peace and was included as an annex to the agreement. To date, no official translation of this document into local languages exists.
The Council of Ministers and the President have no real power. The international community does. The government controls national decision-making through two institutions: the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the Peace Implementation Council (PIC).
The High Representative must be a European politician by regulation and has the power to enforce or nullify laws and dismiss elected officials without legal recourse. To this day, Bosnians still do not know what qualifications are needed to appoint someone to this position and give them ultimate authority without accountability.
The PIC is made up of 55 representatives from various governments and international organizations, including the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, NATO and the European Union, and is perhaps most similar to the peace committee in the Gaza Strip. The government oversees the work of the high representative, whose appointments are approved through a process with which Bosnians are still unfamiliar. Decisions made by associations are based on the interests of individual members and communicated to the public through media statements. No one has the opportunity to question these decisions and journalists cannot discuss them with PIC members.
The governing bodies being established for Gaza are similarly insulated from accountability. There is a peace commission, chaired by President Donald Trump, whose membership can be purchased by states for $1 billion. And it has two executive committees, one made up of U.S. government officials and businessmen and the other made up of Western and local officials. They are supposed to oversee local governance and operate beyond national authority, claiming neutrality and expertise. And finally, there is a technocratic government made up of “qualified Palestinians and international experts” to govern the Strip.
In Bosnia, the system of foreign control is built not only on the domination of foreign powers, but also on the compliance of local elites. The international community has consistently relied on political actors willing to maintain the status quo in exchange for access to power. This arrangement rewards stagnation and punishes systematic change. It creates a donor-dependent civil society. It is active and visible, but ultimately something that can be managed from the outside.
No wonder criticism of the international community and its organizations in Bosnia is seen as a threat to peace. In the past, OHR has gone so far as to silence certain media outlets that it has openly criticized. For example, in 1997, NATO forces were asked to intervene and shut down public broadcasting in Republika Srpska. Its justification was that OHR wanted to ensure that “international norms of professional media conduct” were observed.
This logic continues today. In a December video address commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Agreement, Germany’s current High Representative Christian Schmidt warned that “Today there are those who criticize the international community and its representatives, but they refuse to remember that without international intervention, Bosnia and Herzegovina would have fallen into chaos and despair sooner or later.”
He described Dayton as “the foundation of the future,” although it was “not the future itself,” and concluded with a vague call for “action” rather than “complaining,” without making clear who should act and how.
But Bosnia has not completely succumbed to complacency. There was some resistance. In 2014, public discontent poured into the streets across the country, starting in Tuzla and spreading to more than 20 cities within days. Workers led the demonstration. Citizens occupied public spaces, organized public meetings, and articulated their political demands. For a brief moment, people experienced democracy outside of a foreign-imposed framework.
The response was repression, silence, and neglect. The international community observed this but did not get involved. Even as the protests collapsed under political pressure and exhaustion, no institutional change occurred.
Although the protests ceased, visible traces remained in the form of graffiti on government buildings. Perhaps the most well-known is the one on the facade of a building in Sarajevo Canton that reads, “He who sows hunger will reap anger.”
What followed was a mass exodus. Nearly half a million people have left the country since 2014. Many others are waiting for the opportunity to leave the country. Meanwhile, nationalism, once a wartime ideology, has now become an instrument of governance, used by local elites, tolerated and even stabilized by the international community.
As Sarajevo-born feminist writers Gorana Mlinabic and Nela Polovic write in their book, There’s No Peace, peace “doesn’t begin or end with the signing of a peace agreement.” They argued that the peace imposed on Bosnia had strained the country’s political, economic and social life for decades. The same burden now looms over Gaza.
If you were to ask whether the Bosnian peace agreement was a success, most people in Bosnia would say that it ended the war. That’s true. But peace that merely ends violence without achieving freedom and dignity is not peace.
Peace imposed from above creates stability without justice and governance without democracy. The semi-protectorate of Bosnia stands as a warning rather than a model. Peace and democracy cannot exist without the participation of the people or if their will is ignored. But this is exactly what the “highest international standards” continue to do.
Bosnia cannot be brought back. Gaza requires a different approach, and it can only be achieved if its residents and other Palestinians are involved in the process and have decision-making power.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
