The recent meetings “were just as meaningful and they were just as important,” Turner said.
While Sinclair’s building 12 was not behind security fencing as much of downtown Dayton was during the recent NATO Parliamentary Assembly, it was closed to the public as college officials quietly prepared for the meetings, Sinclair President Steven Johnson said.
Sinclair officials hosted the talks but did not participate in them.
Around 200 international and U.S. officials met and worked within the building over the course of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly spring session, which met in Dayton from Friday through Monday.
The goal was to provide a “safe and secure, calm, private environment for several days so that heads-of-state and diplomats from numerous countries could have diplomatic discussions with each other, with U.S officials,” Johnson said, also at the press conference.
Representatives of France, the United Kingdom and the European Parliament also participated.
Months in the making as the NATO assembly’s Dayton meeting came together in the past year, Turner, U.S. State Department and Sinclair officials united leaders from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Croatia and Serbia separate from the assembly’s regular work in meetings that did not appear on official NATO agendas.
There, they talked trade, migration, youth issues and more in a region that has seen new worries since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and political tensions in Bosnia.
The meetings, like the assembly itself, came together “Dayton-style,” Turner said, with the Schuster Center hosting the main assembly meetings downtown, the University of Dayton agreeing to host public forums at its Roger Glass Center for the Arts and Wright-Patterson’s Hope Hotel welcoming Balkan leaders Sunday evening for another quiet gathering, among many other events.
“There was a lot of discussion among those heads of state as we did both a retrospective and a prospective on what do we need to do to try to address some of the issues that were outstanding, with the tensions in the Balkans and with respect to the Dayton Peace Accords themselves,” Turner said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to exploit simmering tensions the region, news outlets have reported.
“Putin’s interests here are to keep the region destabilized,” Britain Foreign Secretary told Politico this year.
Johnson said Sinclair hopes to hold an educational and development summit centered on the Balkans this coming fall.
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