Twenty-five years ago this month, the Dayton Agreement was signed in an airforce base in Ohio ending years of bloody fighting in Bosnia.

The agreement nearly didn’t happen. According to George Packer’s excellent biography of the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the day before everyone had given up and agreed to a press release announcing the failure of the negotiations. They were packing their bags. But the process was saved by the unlikely person of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader, who was desperate for an agreement and made a dramatic last-minute concession which the Bosnian Muslims could not refuse. They closed the agreement before anyone could have second thoughts.

There was much celebration, but it was a very imperfect peace. There are no Richard Holbrooke streets or statues in Sarajevo. The Muslims were forced to swallow a bitter pill in letting the Serbs profit from their violence. The conflict moved on to Kosovo. And, most of all, an ungainly system of government was put in place in Bosnia that prevents the country from recovering properly. Forced ethnic power-sharing makes it impossible for the people to ‘throw the rascals out’ in elections and they are condemned to corrupt and ineffective regimes. The separation between Serbs, Croats and Muslims is set in stone. The Mayor of Srebrenica is a Serb, who even today denies that the genocide took place. The international community has moved on and turned its back on the problem. But at least Dayton stopped the killing.

Dayton was an imperfect peace because the international community waited so long to intervene. It was too late to reverse what had happened in the civil war. The Europeans and the Americans had sat on their hands while the different ethnic groups in the Balkans slaughtered each other. It was only the genocide in Srebrenica, and the publicity that accompanied it, that forced their hands. The unspeakable massacre of Muslim men and boys, the rape of the women and the shipping of the rest to Tuzla finally jolted the world awake. Now they had to do something. That led to a serious diplomatic effort backed up by bombing which forced the Serbs to the table. In that sense, Srebrenica led to Dayton. But it shouldn’t have taken genocide to force the international community to act.

When the anniversary of Srebrenica was marked in July we heard the pious invocations of ‘never again’ yet again from politicians and diplomats. Really? If we meant what we said would we have stood by while genocide took place in Rwanda? Would we have shrugged our shoulders while the people of Syria went through hell at the hands of  Assad? Would we watch with pity the suffering of the children of Yemen but do nothing? Would we look on as fighting starts again in Tigray in Ethiopia?

I have spent the greater part of my life working on armed conflicts and the negotiations to end them. I have heard leaders say ‘never again’ too often after appalling acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and state violence. Resolutions have been passed and speeches made, promises given. And yet we see the same things happening again and again and nothing is done to stop it even though the ink on those promises is not yet dry.

If we actually mean what we say about ‘never again’ the memory of the victims of Srebrenica and all the other massacres needs to be seared on our souls so we do not permit its repetition and the creation of new victims and new hatred. Each generation needs to keep the memories alive. If we mean ‘never again’ we would be much more willing to intervene to prevent armed conflicts before they take off and stop them before they start. We don’t have to wait till they are in our living rooms on CNN. We would engage with groups who are regarded as beyond the Pale without worrying about giving them legitimacy in order to stop more deaths. We would put pressure on governments to talk rather than fight. This is not a plea to give in to the demands of the men with violence. On the contrary, we should back up our negotiations with the threat of force to get them to take us seriously.

The debate in the UN about the Right to Protect, an international duty to intervene to prevent humanitarian disasters, in the aftermath of Kosovo war at the beginning of this century fizzled out in the face of Russian and Chinese vetoes. The anniversary of Dayton and the memory of Srebrenica should make us return to it.

Instead of just marking bitter anniversaries, let’s do something to stop there being any more bitter anniversaries like Srebrenica.