During Turner’s term as mayor of Dayton, in 1995, “Dayton fulfilled its role not only as the place where a historic agreement was signed, but as a city that opened its institutions, community, and identity to the idea that peace can be a universal value, not just a diplomatic act,” the Sarajevo Times wrote in late October.
The newspaper called Joseph, who has been a council member since 2004, a “longtime friend of Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He continuously works on institutional cooperation between Dayton and Sarajevo, and the cities are officially sister cities.”
Credit: Tom Gilliam
Credit: Tom Gilliam
Turner was mayor of Dayton in 1995 when U.S. State Department teams brought the leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to hammer out what became the accord that ended the Bosnian War.
Turner was elected to the House of Representatives in November 2002.
Turner is going to Bosnia Monday, something he had planned to do anyway because of the 30th anniversary of the accords, he said in an interview Friday.
“This is an incredible honor,” he said. “It really reflects the 30 years of our community having a meaningful relationship with the city of Sarajevo.”
His first trip to the city was in 1996 as part of an economic mission, representing the city of Dayton as mayor. Dayton became a sister city with Sarajevo in 1999, and there have been a series of cultural and economic exchanges between the cities over the years. Dayton trained police officers, as well as municipal water and transportation workers, in Sarajevo. A symphony from the city performed in Dayton during the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s spring session in May this year.
“The city of Dayton had become in Sarajevo a name that was synonymous with peace,” Turner said.
There is still a role for the United States in assisting the region, he believes. Turner has been an advocate for NATO for years. He was appointed to the Parliamentary Assembly in 2009 and has served as head of the U.S. delegation to the assembly since January 2011. Turner was president of the assembly from November 2014 to November 2016.
Joseph said the honor surprised him a bit. His wife, Irena Joseph, is a Bosnian native who came to the U.S. in 1999 to study at the University of Dayton. They often visit her family in Europe.
“As I look back now, I’ve been working on building the relationship between Dayton and Sarajevo for a long time, and Dayton and Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Joseph said. “I’ve been doing a lot of different things. Frankly, I’m sure there are a lot of people more deserving than I am. All I’ve really done is try to do whatever program is in front of me, whatever I can do to sort of build communication.”
Former U.S. ambassador to China R. Nicholas Burns, a former spokesman for the State Department, received the Dayton Peace Prize Saturday, the first time Burns had been in Dayton since Nov. 21, 1995.
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