30 years after Dayton Agreement: "Everyone in BiH is dissatisfied. Peace is here, but what to do with it?"

Zubak led the team that negotiated on behalf of the Bosnian Croats at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base from November 1 to 21, 1995, about ending the war and the future organization of the country.

In his law office in Sarajevo, Zubak (78) still has a photo with former US President Bill Clinton, whose mandate ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and he also singles out the photo with the late Pope Ivan Paul II. which, as a member of the BiH Presidency at the time, he hosted during his visit to Sarajevo in 1997.

"There was resistance"

After the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was established by the Washington Agreement in 1994 (today one of the two semi-autonomous entities with the ethnic Bosniaks and Croats sharing the power) he was elected the first president, and at the same time he was one of the leaders of the self-proclaimed Croat Republic of Herceg-Bosnia (HZHB).

Nevertheless, a single delegation went to Dayton from Bosnia and Herzegovina for the negotiations, which, in addition to Zubak and Jadranko Prlic from the Croat side, included the then Bosniak leaders and officials Alija Izetbegovic , Haris Silajdzic and Muhamed SSacirbegovic.

"Even though we were one team, we did not have identical points of view, and (Richard) Holbrooke and his team accepted that fact. So, when it comes to the constitution and territorial demarcations, we had separate opinions that we expressed," says Zubak.

Status of RS and the constitutiveness of peoples

The status of Republika Srpska, Bosnia's other entity, dominantly inhabited and ruled by the ethnic Serbs, is perhaps the most controversial element that negotiators came to Dayton with, because that entity was practically already presented there as "recognized" under a disputed name, and it remained unclear how this actually happened.

Zubak says that he also found out about this "confession" indirectly.

Zubak considers his most important personal achievement to be the fact that the determination that Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks are constituent peoples that together with the others govern BiH was included in the new constitution, and from that came the formula of a state consisting of two entities and three constituent peoples.

"The most important thing for me was that the constitution include the fact that we are a constituent people," says Zubak, emphasizing that this has become a permanent guarantee of equality for Croats in BiH through mechanisms that ensure some form of autonomy.

In the first elections after the war in 1996, Zubak will become a Croat member of the BiH Presidency with the support of 330,000 voters, which is unthinkable for any Croat candidate today.

"War that is prolonged by political means"

Today, he claims that things went quite well then, despite all the imperfections of the Dayton Agreement.

"Important decisions were made, progress was evident, and solutions were sought in mutual dialogue, although sometimes with pressure from the Office of the High Representative (OHR), but the problem is that little was done to restore trust," said Zubak, referring to the international envoy's office installed to oversee the implementation of the peace process. It is operating even today, with the High Representative holding the powers to remove officials and change laws.

Zubak considers the international community's post-war actions to be counterproductive, i.e. the constant imposition of solutions, and sees in this the cause of most of today's problems in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

"We live in a time when the war is prolonged by political means. We have three options about the future of BiH and the way it should function, and that is the main problem," said Zubak, concluding that without an internal agreement, BiH cannot get out of constant crises.