Bosnia: Man Arrested With Missing Copy Of Dayton Agreement
By Mladen Lakic
The Bosnian Serb police arrested a man in the town of Pale after they searched his apartment and found an original copy of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the Bosnian war.
Officers from the Republika Srpska interior ministry’s Directorate for Organised and Serious Crimes arrested the suspect in Pale on Tuesday in possession of one of the four original copies of the peace agreement that ended the war.
The copy had been missing since at least 2008.
“I can confirm that today there was an arrest, that we found [the document] and that the person was handed over to the Banja Luka prosecutor’s office,” Republika Srpska’s police director, Darko Culum, told N1 TV.
The suspect is believed to be Zeljko Kuntos, an ex-security guard and close associate of Dragan Kalinic, a former president of the National Assembly of Republika Srpska who is now an adviser to Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik, BN TV reported.
In 2008, it was noticed that the copy of the agreement was missing from the archive of the Bosnian presidency, but an investigation showed that the document was never there at all.
Earlier this year, Serbia also said that its original copy of the Dayton Agreement was missing.
Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said in August that no state institution is now in possession of the document.
A few days earlier, Serbian tabloid Srpski Telegraf reported that police in the country had launched an investigation into the missing document.
The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina was reached at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio in the US after a series of difficult negotiations.
It was signed in Paris on December 14, 1995 by Slobodan Milosevic for Serbia, Alija Izetbegovic for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Franjo Tudjman for Croatia, Bill Clinton for the US, Jacques Chirac for France, John Major for Britain, Helmut Kohl for Germany and Viktor Chernomyrdin for Russia.
