Thirty years on from Dayton does not feel like a celebration to me, but rather a quiet reminder as to how long we have been standing halfway. It seems like a state of prolonged breath in which we formally live in peace, yet we have never fully emerged from the war, because the past continuously catches up with us, and the future remains more of a projection than a reality. Every time the anniversary of the signing of the agreement approaches, the same statements, the same rituals, the same images return in the public space. And what is missing is the sense that, between one anniversary and the next, we have truly moved forward.
The EU recently summarised this very clearly: Bosnia and Herzegovina has not yet established a political framework for transitional justice nor a strategy that would link justice, reparations and a culture of remembrance into a single, meaningful whole.[1] In other words, we still lack a shared answer to the question what facing the past actually means for us or what the process should actually look like in real life, and not just on paper. As long as that answer is missing, there is no stable peace; it remains incomplete, fragile and continuously exposed to regression.
In everyday life, this can be seen based on small things: what is (not) taught at schools, how we commemorate certain dates, and what we keep silent about at the family table. Politicians officially try to leave the impression that ”the war is behind us”, but this does not align with the experiences of persons who are still fighting legal battles, searching for the missing, or who, every time they turn on the news, hear how crimes are relativized or those responsible for the crimes are not talked about.
Transitional justice has never been only about court judgments. It implies acknowledging the suffering of victims, the right to reparation, protecting the dignity of survivors of violence, but also the readiness of the whole society to look in the mirror and face its own past. It also implies a clear message that crimes do not pay, that suffering has been acknowledged and that rules cannot be changed on a case-by-case basis. As long as these elements remain disconnected and scattered across entity laws, rulebooks and endless administrative drawers, the process will remain unreliable, slow, and inconsistent, just as the country we live in.
This is the very reason why we face a paradox: formally, we have been in ”transition phases” for years, but for many persons who were directly affected by the war, the transition has never really begun. Their story remains on the margins, while day-to-day political topics lasting as long as a single term are pushed to the forefront.
A strategy that is constantly late
One of the best indicators of this institutional hesitation is the Revised Strategy for the Prosecution of War Crimes. When it was adopted in 2020, it was presented as an attempt to finally accelerate what had dragged on for years – to more precisely allocate responsibilities, strengthen the prosecutor’s offices and courts, and conclude the vast majority of cases.[2] At the time, people were talking about ”realistic deadlines” and ”a new energy for the judiciary”. Many of them, and rightly so, wanted to believe that a decisive break would finally be made.
However, instead of speeding things up, we faced new delays.
The deadline for implementing the strategy was the end of 2023. It was extended to 2025, and now there is already talk about a new extension.[3] Every time, the same reasons are cited: the overburdened public prosecutor’s offices, a lack of personnel, suspects beyond the reach of the judiciary of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and slow regional cooperation. All these issues did not occur yesterday, but they are addressed slowly and without a systemic approach. Instead of being made a priority, they are treated as a chronic issue that we all, it seems, have become somewhat accustomed to.
For the families of victims, this means the same thing they have been hearing for years – ”just a little more patience”. This phrase, which may have sounded like a promise once, has over time become an insult. For witnesses, it means a further postponement in confronting their traumas, returning to courtrooms in their old age, or not receiving a summons to testify during their lifetime. For the society as a whole, this means becoming accustomed to the idea that justice is always put off, that it is normal for ”everything to happen slowly”, and that nothing can be done about it.
There is a strategy, but the implementation system does not seem sufficiently strong or determined to keep pace with what would truly be required to close the war chapter. Instead of pulling the institutions forward, it seems to have been dragged backwards by practice – to the level of another document that is occasionally mentioned in reports, but rarely becomes the subject of a serious public debate.
When rights depend on where you live
The most painful part of transitional justice has always been related to the lives of people that the system is supposed to protect. The European Commission has clearly warned that Bosnia and Herzegovina still lacks harmonised criteria for civil victims of war to access their rights – and that the level of protection largely depends on which part of the country the victims live in.[4]
To this day, the reparations programme recommended to the state back in 2019 has not been implemented – a programme involving real forms of assistance, compensation, but also institutional apologies.[5] Without this, all talk of transitional justice remains empty rhetoric. In practice, victims have been left to ”deal with” what is actually an obligation of the state: to acknowledge, protect, and, as far as possible, remedy the consequences of what they have endured.
In Republika Srpska, victims still have to pay court fees just to be able to initiate proceedings against those responsible – which constitutes a further financial drain and discourages many persons from doing so.[6] In the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Brčko District, laws under which children born as a result of wartime sexual violence would be granted the status of civilian victims of war are still not applied consistently.[7] When one knows all of this, it is difficult to talk about transitional justice without feeling a certain degree of cynicism towards the phrase ”systemic support”.
All this leaves a bitter feeling that justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina depends more on the administrative address than the need for dignity and protection. One and the same case – rape, torture, the loss of loved ones – can be treated completely differently depending on whether the victim lives ”here” or ”there”. And behind this, there is the message that the state has yet to find a way to respond to all these cases with an equally serious approach.
Behind the statistics and the phrases are real people: women that gave up on lawsuits because they could not afford the fees, children who have never been formally recognised as children born as a result of war crime, and elderly persons that no longer have the strength to go from one institution to another. Their reality is not part of reports, but it is precisely in these cases that the true value of the concept of ”transitional justice” is tested.
The European path – more than a technical reform
We often speak about the ”European path”, but we forget that it is precisely in the field of transitional justice that we are measured, as a society, on whether we have taken the idea of the rule of law seriously. The European Commission makes it clear that without an effective prosecution of war crimes and genuine support for victims, there can be no real progress towards membership.
However, beyond this formal language lies a simple question: can a state be functional if it does not know how to deal with its own past? Can it build a future on foundations that have never been fully free from injustice? European integration frequently comes down to discussions about funds, infrastructure projects and deadlines, while the key questions – such as the treatment of victims of war – are relegated to the margins.
Without an answer to this question, the European process remains a political ambition, not a social transformation. We can adopt laws, strategies and action plans, but if they are not translated into the reality for those who continue to live with the consequences of war, then they are just well-worded pieces of paper.
Peacekeepers – those who carry the silence
In an earlier text, ”Peacekeepers in a Time of Crisis”, I wrote about people who work on reconciliation every day, without grand speeches and without institutional support. I could write that text today almost without any changes.
They are the women who organise commemorations when no one is willing to attend them. They are the veterans who speak at schools about the need for peace, rather than victories. They are the young people that try to understand a society that has never undertaken genuine trauma processing through art. They frequently work in small spaces, with modest budgets, but with the conviction that the past must be discussed, that pain must not be silenced, but that it also should not fuel new divisions.
Their work is quiet, but persistent. Without the limelight. Off the stage. Without promises of instant change. They do the exact opposite of what the logic of quick political gains demands – they invest in year-long processes, the results of which are not immediately visible, but are felt in the way in which people sit next to each other, listen to each other, and stay in the same space despite their differences.
And while strategies are extended, they do not extend the deadlines – they simply continue doing what the state is unable to take over: preserve the space for mutual dialogue. If there is a real foundation for peace, then today it is most visible in them.
Where do we stand thirty years later?
The Dayton Peace Agreement stopped the war, but it did not bring justice. Peace without justice remains vulnerable. Transitional justice today is not an academic topic – it is a matter of maturity of a society: are we capable of closing the difficult chapter of the past without sweeping it under the rug, and can we do so in a way that does not leave people behind?
While institutions continue to extend deadlines, citizens remain the true peacekeepers – people who, without any official authority, work on building trust, dialogue and acknowledging suffering. They are the ones that choose every day not to give up on dialogue, although they often have no formal support.
And perhaps that is our greatest truth: peace is not preserved through strategies, but through persons who refuse to forget, but also to hate. Those that persevere in the belief that the past cannot be changed, but that the way we speak about it and how we learn from it, certainly can.
Mirjana Trifković has worked on projects and programmes in the field of facing the past and peacebuilding for more than ten years, focusing on peace education for young people and work with associations of victims of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She worked at the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an associate at the War Crimes Chamber. She holds a degree in law from the Faculty of Law of the University of East Sarajevo. She is a peacebuilding trainer and Gestalt psychotherapy and trauma counselling trainer. She is currently working as a consultant for international organisations in the field of transitional justice, facing the past and peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
[1] The 2025 EU Progress Report on Bosnia and Herzegovina
https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/bosnia-and-herzegovina-report-2025_en
[2] https://detektor.ba/2025/08/26/moguce-produzenje-roka-revidirane-strategije-za-rad-na-predmetima-ratnih-zlocina/
[3] Ibid.
[4] The 2025 EU Progress Report on Bosnia and Herzegovina
https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/bosnia-and-herzegovina-report-2025_en
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
