The scars of war are indeed hard to see in Bosnia today. Yet, in some important ways, Dayton is itself a scar that has never entirely healed. One provision of the plan in particular—the establishment of a high representative appointed by the international community—is increasingly viewed as a symbol of the country’s inability to move past the war.

The end of the Bosnian War—which killed 100,000 people; displaced millions; and culminated in Europe’s deadliest atrocity since World War II, the Srebrenica genocide—marks its 30th anniversary this month. The peace accords agreed upon in Dayton have held Bosnia and Herzegovina together for the past three decades, an impressive achievement—one that can serve as a model for peacekeepers elsewhere, including the Trump administration’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza .

The end of the Bosnian War—which killed 100,000 people; displaced millions; and culminated in Europe’s deadliest atrocity since World War II, the Srebrenica genocide—marks its 30th anniversary this month. The peace accords agreed upon in Dayton have held Bosnia and Herzegovina together for the past three decades, an impressive achievement—one that can serve as a model for peacekeepers elsewhere, including the Trump administration’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza.

The scars of war are indeed hard to see in Bosnia today. Yet, in some important ways, Dayton is itself a scar that has never entirely healed. One provision of the plan in particular—the establishment of a high representative appointed by the international community—is increasingly viewed as a symbol of the country’s inability to move past the war.

Christian Schmidt, the international community’s current high representative in Bosnia, has come under increasingly severe scrutiny amid serious doubts about the validity of his appointment—even as the rest of Europe largely fails to acknowledge the problem. Schmidt has become the personification of Bosnia’s extended state of arrested development, abetted by the rest of the continent.

The 1995 peace agreement had many moving parts. Power was to be shared among the country’s three constituent peoples through a byzantine web of quotas, vetoes, and rotating presidenc