The Dayton Daily News columnist was among panelists during a conversation at the Roger Glass Center about coverage of conflict in the Balkans.
The accords were negotiations that led to an agreement on Nov. 21, 1995 that put an end to the war. By the time of the talks, the Bosnian War had lasted for almost four years. It had taken some 250,000 lives and created two million refugees. This was Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.
McCarty said she spent a lot of her time covering the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 near a chain-link fence outside the Hope Hotel.
There were times she and others would see Slobodan Milošević — the former president of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before he was overthrown in 2000 — attending basketball games, dining at local restaurants and shopping at the Fairfield Mall.
“It was quite surreal,” she said. “You’d think, here’s someone who’s probably responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and he’s just taking a walk 10 yards from me.”
Dayton residents embraced the negotiations, McCarty said. She remembers candlelight vigils and billboards calling Dayton the “City of Peace.”
“I think a lot of them really educated themselves,” she said. “To be quite honest, the average American probably knew very little about the conflict until there were some events that broke through.”
McCarty’s front-page story that published the day after the accords were signed detailed the lasting impact of the negotiations on Dayton’s image.
“To this day, people revere the name of Dayton,” she said.
But the mid-’90s were also the dawn of the digital age, and McCarty remembers her editors being “geeked out” over online engagement from around the world.
“It did show us, at that moment, the potential,” she said.
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