If this sounds like a silly question, let me explain. Of course DS9 is strategically extremely important, so of course the Dominion wants to control it. But ... the station was property of Bajor, not of the Federation. And the Dominion had signed an non-agression pact with Bajor. And seemed to intend to honor it for the time being, too. See this snippet: But taking the station (Bajoran property) very much sounds like an aggression against Bajor and therefore a breach of that treaty. So why didn't Weyoun consider it as such? Was it ceded by the Bajoran government during those treaty negotiations?
"The Federation and Bajor always shared equal responsibility for station security. I thought you said that we would have the same arrangement with the Dominion." - Kira to Weyoun.
More likely a Dominion presence on the station was authorized. Dukat was allowed to manage it, but the Dominion kept him on a tight leash.
The Dominion would need a station from which to guard the wormhole. The surface of Bajor would be more intrusive to the Bajorans and invite conflict. So Dukar or Weyoun negotiated for control of the station as part of the price of Bajor remaining neutral and unoccupied.
Well, the non-agression pact with Bajor couln't prevent the Dominion from taking the station. They could always claim that the station was in fact controlled by the Federation. And Bajor had nothing to come up with against the Dominion. It was the same with Hitler's "forgotten invasion" of the Klaipeda territory. After occupying Austria and the Czech lands and making Slovakia a German puppet state, Hitler simply told the Lithuanians that the Klaipeda territory which had been German before WW1 must be handled back to Germany. The Lithuanians had nothing to come up with against Germany and just had to accept it. I think that The Dominion did something similar when it came to the station Deep Space Nine, with the Cardassians claiming that they wanted Terok Nor back.
The Dominion were never going to honor the Non-Aggression Pact in terms of control of the station. Probably they rationalized it as "liberating" the station from "Federation occupation" and then forced a treaty on Bajor to "legitimize" their occupation of the station.
This never made 100% sense to me, but it was a relatively small logical concession to serve the story. Yeah, it doesn't really track that Bajor would just allow the Dominion to have not only a massive military presence on their station, but also be running the station themselves (with Kira still second banana.) Was it a concession on Bajor's part in order to get the Dominion to sign the treaty? I mean, maybe. But it's a pretty massive concession that immediately renders Bajor as a massive junior partner on utterly unequal footing. Not that they would have had a leg to stand on if they decided to make an issue of it. But given how steamed Kira got over the idea of Romulans having weapons on a Bajoran moon, you'd think she similarly would have had issues with the Dominion staging their massive fleet in their space and being in charge of their station.
The Dominion-Bajoran Non-Aggression Pact was already signed. Allowing the Dominion to occupy the station was a concession on Bajor's part to avoid the Dominion deciding to disregard the pact and just invade Bajor while they were at it. No, the fact that the Bajoran Republic is a massive junior partner on utterly unequal footing is what creates that situation. Bajor just does not have the military capacity of the Dominion. They have no capacity to enforce their sovereignty over the station if the Dominion wants it. If their primary goal is to persuade the Dominion that invading and occupying Bajor is not worth the effort, then realistically they have to agree to whatever legal fiction the Dominion concocts to "legitimize" its occupation of the station. Of course she did. But the situation with the Romulans standoff over Derna is different. First off, it's different because the relative willingness of the Romulan Star Empire at the start of 2375 to invade and occupy Bajor is different from that of the Dominion to do the same at the end of 2373. At the start of the war, Dominion forces haven't taken any major losses and they haven't lost major territory. They've already sent a fleet into the Bajor System; diverting some of them to occupy Bajor itself would be not a huge logistical challenge. That they did not do so is a function of the Dominion's day-to-day governing class (presumably Weyoun and his fellow Vorta administrators) deciding that the propaganda benefits of being able to portray themselves as the benevolent good guys and the Federation/Klingon Alliance as the aggressors, outweighed the potential benefits of occupying Bajor directly. So from a Bajoran perspective, the Dominion has almost all the military leverage, and the only way to avoid an invasion is to appeal to the Dominion's interests by submitting to its whims. The Romulans of early 2375, by contrast, have been embroiled in a major war for months that has already cost them significantly. They have to maintain an alliance with the Federation and the Klingon Empire if they hope to win the war with the Dominion, and that means they cannot ultimately afford to take action that will drive the Federation to turn against them. So their attempt to de facto seize Derna looks like it's part of a plan to slowly insinuate their forces into a permanent position within the Bajor System, attempting to essentially seize the moon without Bajor or the Federation feeling like it's worth a confrontation to take the moon back; I think their hope was that after the war, they could slowly grow their presence in the Bajor System, each time stopping just short of a full-out confrontation, until they ended up with too many forces in the system to be resisted -- like the temperature being gradually turned up until it's boiling, without the frog realizing it. Kira and the Bajoran government immediately recognized this long-term gamble for what it was. They also immediately recognized that Derna put Romulan forces in a better position to immediately threaten the surface of Bajor than the Dominion forces occupying the station further out in the B'hava'el Star System. And they recognized that the Federation could be pressured into backing up Bajor if the Bajoran Militia re-asserted Bajoran sovereignty over Derna, and that the Romulans could thereby be pressured to stand down. The bottom line is that in both situations, the Bajorans had to serve the immediate interest of avoiding an attack upon or invasion of their planetary surface. In late 2373, that meant bending the knee to Dominion occupation of the Deep Space 9 station; in early 2375, that meant asserting sovereignty over their moon and pressuring the Federation into backing them up.
When Bajor entered a treaty with the Dominion, the Bajoran government asked the Federation to leave DS9 but the Federation refused. So I can understand why the Dominion would attack it and stay there to remove the minefield.
You mean this piece? Yes, I can see how the Dominion would consider that sufficient cause to occupy the station afterward. I still think though, that in that case, when abiding to the (spirit of the) treaty as much as possible, they should have turned over the station to the Bajorans after removing the minefield. Of course they never got the opportunity to do so as they were chased from the station only minutes or hours after the mines were removed, but I still strongly doubt they would have done so in any other case.
Ok, actual reason: the Jem'Hadar soldiers really had a thing for jumja sticks. (Like Timothy the android, maybe they don't technically have to eat, but they do like to taste things)